The Decline of the Welfare State as a Challenge to Social Order

After a brief excursion to Helsinki for a workshop and a guest lecture, I have made my way to Ljubljana for the great biennial European communication conference, ECREA 2024. After the opening ceremony and a pipe organ performance (!) of Laibach’s “The Whistleblowers”, we start now with a keynote by Vesna Leskošek, addressing the conference theme of ‘communication and social (dis)order’.

She begins by introducing the idea of the welfare state, as a concept that may be in decline in the present time. But the welfare state maintains social order, social structures, and social institutions; it was one of the great developments in post-war Europe, and critical to the maintenance of peace. It built on precedents such as social insurance policies in early twentieth-century Germany, and developed in divergent ways under the differing regimes of in western and eastern Europe during the second half of that century.

Critically, the welfare state also regulates markets, reflecting a commitment to principles of social justice and equality; this also means that it assumes responsibility for those who are unable to achieve such social justice and equality by themselves. It builds on insurance, solidarity, and direct and indirect services, and provides these through the redistribution of taxes. In spite of common American misunderstandings of the welfare state as a socialist project, it is a critical component of capitalist systems.

The welfare state ensures social peace: it is a compromise between employers and the labour force. Its opponents are typically both liberal and conservative forces who see this as placing restrictions on the free market, and thereby holding back economic development as well as eroding individual responsibility. These arguments deny the morality of welfare recipients.

Modern followers of these arguments included politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, who saw those relying on the welfare state as abusing state support; these arguments gradually led to the erosion of broad public support for the welfare state, and the establishment of mainstream political efforts to dismantle welfare state regulations. This reduction of welfare state frameworks has led to an increase in the exploitation of labour forces and a reduction of protection for vulnerable groups.

This has been accompanied by a growth in rhetoric and enforcement initiatives against supposed ‘welfare cheats’ and ‘welfare fraud’; this is prevalent in political discourse, and has also led to the emergence of an industry aimed at detecting welfare fraud and the establishment of problematic tiplines encouraging people to alert the authorities to welfare fraud cases. And all of this is happening even though data on actual levels of welfare fraud are very limited and unreliable.

Campaigns against welfare fraud are often highly confrontational, and Vesna now shows some examples especially from the UK; they make such fraud appear more widespread than it is likely to be, and place welfare fraud in the vicinity of serious crime and even terrorism. So what do such campaigns actually achieve? Mostly, they seem to be designed to change public attitudes towards people on welfare, and indeed towards social welfare itself; in doing so, they undermine the welfare state itself.

This is not only ideologically problematic, but also prepares the ground for further welfare reform. The ‘welfare cheat’ idiom inherently connects cheating with welfare. By reducing public trust in the welfare state, such social stigmatisation builds an argument that the welfare state itself is a fraud, and ought to be dismantled. It paints states as naïve and as wasting taxpayers’ money; as an alternative it establishes a populist discourse that seeks to reduce the role of the state in society, undermine social solidarity, and challenge the existing social order.

This results in greater uncertainty for ordinary people: a decline of the social order means that they will look for other anchors to shore up their existence, and populist, illiberal, and authoritarian actors are able to exploit this disorder. This decline in social order is similar to the decline in environmental conditions: it is not too late yet to arrest and reverse this decline, but time is running out.