ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with some basic features of Europe in relation to the rest of the world: its geopolitical location, its wealth accompanied by slow economic growth, its apparent demographic crisis, and the European Union (EU) itself. Europe is an area of the world that, within the framework of parliamentary democracy and on the basis of a market economy, has relative social equality, economic citizenship and a strong public sphere maintained by its national states. One peculiarity of contemporary Europe is the extent to which national identity has in the last half century become interwoven with the welfare state. For Europeans, part of their Swedishness or Frenchness or Germanness is their involvement in the institutions of their welfare state. At one extreme the Swedish conception of the welfare state makes the nation state into the folkhem: to be a member of the nation state is to receive and contribute to collective welfare.
