WELFARE STATES AS EVOLUTIONARY SYSTEMS

The striking intensity and the comprehensive character of welfare reform across the majority of the Member State of the European Union since the 1990s, is very much at odds with the prevalent image of a ‘frozen welfare landscape ’ in the academic literature. Most important, the substantive extent of welfare redirection across a large number of Member States of the European Union (EU) adds up to a momentum of system change which goes far beyond the popular concepts of “retrenchment”, “roll-back”, “retreat ” and “demise”. To say that European welfare states are far from sclerotic is not to say that they are in good shape. With 20 million citizens out of work and 90 million people otherwise inactive, there certainly is no room for complacency. Welfare reform is surely not a smooth process. Corrective measures are difficult, but in the face of protracted policy failures they are enacted and implemented through the competitive political process. While reform experience over the past two decades was primarily built on processes of domestic (crisis induced) lesson drawing, more recently, cross-national social learning in the context of the European Union is taken up. In short, welfare reform is a highly reflexive and knowledge-intensive political process. From this perspective, it follows, that the welfare state i