ABSTRACT
West European national welfare states have been built over a 100-year period. Institutions have survived world wars. The welfare state has great importance for European citizens today, who in between intermittent complaints about bureaucracy, inefficiency and other shortcomings also seem to value its achievements and ambitions (see Chapter 2, and Ferrera 1993). Large majorities of European votersacross the ‘four social Europes’ distinguished between in this volume-are generally far more favourable of governmental (‘state’) responsibility for basic income for all, for reducing income differences, and for creating jobs for all, compared with, for example, voters in the USA (Flora 1993). Among the achievements of the European welfare state(s) are on average relatively high standard of living, universal health services, rights to old-age and disability pensions, and income when sick, unemployed or poor. The welfare state has in all likelihood been conducive to a relatively high degree of social and political stability-also in periods of economic recession and high unemployment. The welfare state appears to be a significant societal ‘stabiliser’. The welfare state has undoubtedly consolidated democratic development, and democratic institutions have consolidated welfare state growth and adjustments. Welfare state growth, democratic consolidation and economic growth have gone hand in hand through most of the period after the Second World War. The welfare state has not fallen apart in times of economic backlashes. In fact it may, for example, be argued that thanks to a well-developed welfare state in place Finland recuperated swiftly and without social upheavals and social misery when hit by a sudden and severe economic downturn at the beginning of the 1990s (see Chapters 3 and 4).
