ABSTRACT
The European welfare states owe a substantial part of their welfare to their external economic links and their international political cooperation. What is presently being discussed as globalization is, in fact, a persistent process, an integral part of the modern world’s development. The present crisis of the European welfare state, which is ascribed to globalization, underlines that the process has now reached a stage that calls collectively shared welfare based on national solidarity into question. The cross-border division of labour involves a differentiation of solidarity into global, supranational, national, regional and local solidarity relationships. These further-reaching and more differentiated relationships can no longer be integrated by means of an in-depth policy of approaching equal living standards within the national collective only, but rather by formal and abstract principles of justice reaching beyond national borders. To the same extent as solidarity becomes more differentiated, the value system is changing away from the principle of a far-reaching equality of results as well as away from the principle of remunerating status groups according to their attributed functional importance within an organic whole and towards an emphasis on the principles of achievement, equal opportunity, fairness and minimum help in need. Both the collectivistic and the organic models of the European welfare states are forcibly being pushed some way towards the individualistic model of an open and liberal society. The driving force behind this development is the growing global division of labour. The driving force behind the advancing global division of labour is not the resulting quantitative growth in the supply of disposable goods and services, especially as this also includes social, cultural and ecological losses, but the increasing competition for scarce and non-renewable resources which goes hand in hand with the diminishing distance between people due to the extension of ways and means of transport and communication. Competition necessitates specialization. The global division of labour transforms the lethal struggle for survival into a peaceful competition for consumers. Therefore, established life-worlds have to be converted out of necessity into excessive commodity worlds geared towards an ever more short-lived enjoyment by means of permanent “creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1983, 2004).
