The Territorial Politics of Welfare Nicola McEwen and Luis Moreno (eds.) Contents Chapter 1 Luis Moreno and Nicola McEwen: Exploring the Territorial Politics of Welfare Chapter 2 Nicola McEwen and Richard Parry: Devolution and the Preservation of the British Welfare State Chapter 3 Jörg Mathias: Welfare Management in the German Federal System: the Emergence of Welfare Regions? Chapter 4 Alistair Cole: Territorial Politics and Welfare Development in France Chapter 5 Raquel Gallego, Ricard Gomà and Joan Subirats: Spain, From State Welfare to Regional Welfare? Chapter 6 Valeria Fargion: From the Southern to the Northern Question. Territorial and Social Politics in Italy Chapter 7 Pierre Baudewyns and Régis Dandoy: The Preservation of Social Security as a National Function in the Belgian Federal State Chapter 8 Kaisa Lähteenmäki-Smith: Changing Political Contexts in the Nordic Welfare States. The central-local relationship in the 1990s and beyond Chapter 9 Daniel Béland and André Lecours: Nationalism and Social Policy in Canada and Quebec Chapter 10 Steffen Mau: European Social Policies and National Welfare Constituencies: Issues of Legitimacy and Public Support Chapter 11 Maurizio Ferrera: European Integration and Social Citizenship. Changing Boundaries, New Structuring? PREFACE Writing in 1979, Robert Pinker expressed dismay at the lack of analysis within the social sciences literature of the ‘...positive links between social policy and the recovery of a sense of national purpose’ (1979: 29). It is only now, over two decades later, that literature is beginning to emerge to explore the ways in which the welfare state informs, and is informed by, territorial identity and the politics of regionalism. This collection aspires to be a worthy contribution to this debate, situating the expansion and ongoing development of the welfare state within the framework of territorial politics. The collection began life at the ECPR Joint Sessions 2003 in Edinburgh in a workshop, directed by the editors, entitled The Welfare State and Territorial Politics: an under- explored relationship. The workshop was initiated in recognition of a gap in both the territorial politics and social policy literature. Existing work on the politics of sub-state regionalism and nationalism has tended to focus upon examinations of culture and identity, political economy and institutional change. Spatial cleavages and the quest for political decentralisation have often been examined as responses to sub-state claims for autonomy, recognition and democratic accountability. The significance of social policy and social welfare has hitherto been rather neglected. Likewise, welfare state scholars have tended to neglect the territorial dimension in welfare development. Much of the literature on the welfare state implicitly examines welfare development within the framework of the nation-state, assuming an all- embracing state national identity rooted in both cultural and civic axes. The nation-state, in other words, is taken for granted. However, many advanced welfare states are territorially heterogeneous, with citizens often holding multiple territorial identities, and these identities have been given political significance in recent years with establishment and reinforcement of sub-state political institutions. The restructuring of the welfare state in recent years has thus coincided with a reconfiguration of the core-periphery relationship, yet explicit analytical linkage between these two processes has been largely missing. The relation ship between the welfare state and territorial politics is explored theoretically and examined empirically in the chapters in this volume. Three themes emerge. Firstly, consideration is given to the extent to which welfare development has played a part in the politics of nation-building. Scholars of state formation have regarded the welfare state as ‘crystallising’ the nation-state in the latter phase of modernity in the twentieth century. Indeed, within heterogeneous or multinational states, the welfare state may have played an important nation-building function by institutionalising shared solidarity and shared risks. In providing for the basic needs of ‘the people’, through the provision of income security, health care, housing, and education, the welfare state may also have strengthened the ties that bind citizens to the state, reinforcing identification with, belonging to and consent for the state as a national community. The weakening of the welfare state since the mid-1970s - as a result of political, financial and demographic pressures - has curtailed the state’s capacity to generate social solidarity across internal territorial boundaries and has in some cases led to a decline of the centralising ‘command-and-control’ planning model. Such a loss of internal power and core hegemony may have contributed to the destabilising existing territorial settlements, fuelling demands for political autonomy among national and regional minorities. The emergence of sub-state nationalism in many advanced western democracies has been reflected in the establishment or strengthening of regional legislatures. In 2002, about half of the EU-15 regions, in almost half of the member states, were ‘partner regions’, or regions with legislative powers. The process of political decentralisation in recent years has usually entailed the decentralisation of some areas of social policy. We consider the extent to which decentralisation has given rise to the establishment of distinctive sub- state welfare regimes, and the impact this decentralisation process has had for inter- regional solidarity. On the one hand, stateless nations, like small nation-states, often share a strong sense of national identity that may sustain a higher degree of internal solidarity and cohesion, and recreate 'lost' social citizenship rights at the sub-state level. On the other hand, sub-state governments are subject to similar welfare pressures as their state counterparts, and critics of decentralisation have argued that the need to maintain competitiveness in today's market economy is more likely to provoke a 'race to the bottom' in welfare provision. Finally, consideration is given to the supranational dimension of welfare and its consequence for territorial politics and national solidarity. In Europe, the reassertion of territorial identities and the corresponding process of political decentralisation have taken place within the context of Europeanisation. As a multi-level political framework, the European Union shapes the context in which national, regional and local policies are formulated, and we consider the manner in which this new context informs welfare development across the Union. In particular, European law and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is generating a degree of harmony between welfare rights and provision across the Union, to secure labour mobility objectives. In addition, the EU is slowly carving out a role for itself in social policy, evident in measures such as the Social Chapter of the Treaty on European Union, and the Working Time Directive limiting the maximum weekly hours EU citizens may be expected to work. Such initiatives are reflections of new social rights granted in recognition of EU citizenship. In this respect, we consider the extent to which the Europeanisation of welfare policy can contribute to generating cross-national solidarity in Europe, and to further building the European Union as a ‘community of trust’ to which EU citizens feel they belong. These themes are explored theoretically in the opening chapter. The case studies which follow conduct empirical examinations of the territorial politics of welfare, focusing in particular on the first two themes. The third theme is taken up in the final two chapters. In selecting the case studies, we have placed particular emphasis upon states which encompass within their boundaries local, regional or national communities making political claims on the basis of shared identities. One non-EU case, Canada, has been included in the volume for two reasons. Firstly, the welfare state in Canada shares many of the features of European systems of welfare, which distinguish it from the North American model. Secondly, whereas the relationship between the welfare state and territorial politics has been neglected among scholars of European politics and social policy, this cannot be said of the Canadian scholarly community. Issues of national unity are rarely far from the political agenda in Canada, and the Canadian welfare state emerged with the explicit aim of generating inter-regional solidarity across the Canadian provinces. As Béland and Lecours discuss in their chapter, the Canadian welfare state was at times promoted and hampered by the federal state structure, and social policy development continues to generate tension in federal-provincial inter-governmental relations, particularly vis-à-vis Québec (see also Banting, 1987; McEwen, 2001). Most of the contributors to this book were involved in the original ECPR workshop, and we are enormously grateful to them for their contributions to this collection, as well as for their patience and good will in the editing process. We would like to also take the opportunity to thank those participants at the workshop who do not appear in this volume, but whose contributions helped make the workshop a success, and undoubtedly informed the development of the chapters which do appear here. We are grateful to the ECPR for facilitating the workshop