Social Justice in a Global Age

Olaf Cramme, Patrick Diamond

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745658711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the relationship between the principles of social justice and global justice? How can we best reconcile the quest for greater social justice 'at home' with greater social justice in the world? Are the social justice pressures our societies currently face the result of globalisation or are they domestically generated? How can we advance social justice in the light of the new social realities? In this volume, leading international experts offer compelling answers to these questions.

The aim of this volume is to articulate a modern conception of social justice that remains relevant for an era of rapid globalisation. The authors have developed a robust theoretical account of the relationship between globalisation and social justice complemented by an underpinning policy framework that aims to sustain new forms of equity and solidarity.

IV

POLICY FRAMEWORK

10

Solidarity Beyond the Nation-State? Reflections on the European Experience

Maurizio Ferrera

Are social justice and solidarity possible beyond the nation-state? This question has been and continues to be at the centre of a long philosophical debate, which has highlighted the multi-faceted tension involved in opposing the universal and ‘open’ vocation of social justice on the one hand, and the particular and ‘closed’ vocation of the state on the other.¹ While primarily and fundamentally interested in issues of what is desirable, this debate has often touched upon the question of what is actually feasible. From a normative standpoint it is hard to justify the idea that the principles of justice should stop – as they typically tend to do in the real world – at the frontiers of the state. But even if it were highly desirable that they didn’t, feasibility considerations allow us to modify our expectations, aware that the nation-state performs a host of other desirable functions.

The link between social justice, solidarity and state boundaries has been explored not only by philosophers but also by political scientists. Their prevailing focus has been on the political and institutional preconditions of ‘sharing’ practices such as forms of interpersonal and inter-group transfers of resources based on predetermined equity criteria. Also, the political science perspective has highlighted the strong nexus between state-national boundaries, on the one hand, and redistributive arrangements on the other. Whichever the specific content of the equity criteria, in the real world a just social order requires institutions for the pooling of resources and their selective redistribution over time. Such institutions can only exist within a space of interaction characterised by mutual trust and expectations of reciprocity. National boundaries are the most effective instrument for creating and stabilising such arrangements, ensuring that insiders cannot escape – except for lawful reasons – and that ‘undeserving’ outsiders cannot intrude.²

Positing a strong link between political and institutional phenomena does not rule out the possibility that they may well stand alone and be de-coupled under certain circumstances. We may thus legitimately raise the question: can we imagine forms of post-national solidarity, i.e. ‘sharing’ spaces that stretch beyond the boundaries of the nation-state? This chapter will explore that question in three subsequent steps. First, it will elaborate from a theoretical and historical perspective the link between boundaries and social solidarity. Next, it will offer a brief sketch of the process of ‘nationalisation’ of solidarity in Europe during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Then it will show how the process of European integration has indeed opened a window of opportunity for the ‘un-bounding’ of solidarity and the experimentation with novel forms of open social citizenship. In conclusion, the chapter offers some speculative ideas on the relevance of the European experience for the development and promotion of what is described as a ‘global sharing space’.

Solidarity as a form of social closure

Situated as it is at the crossroads between ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’, between ‘self-interest’ and ‘altruism’, solidarity is a somewhat elusive concept and a complex social good. On the one hand, it connotes a trait of whole social aggregates, that is, a high degree of ‘fusion’ or internal union, cohesion and commonality of purpose within a given group (the noun ‘solidarity’ comes from the Latin solidus, a firm and compact body). On the other hand, it connotes a particular set of ties among the members of such group: sharing ties, that is, transactions aimed at pooling (a part of) each member’s resources for some common purpose. As is well known, modern welfare-state programmes pool resources (primarily financial) with the aim of countering the typical risks and adversities of the life cycle: from sickness to old age, from work accidents to unemployment. Such risks are combated by redistributing pooled resources both horizontally (from the non-damaged to the damaged) and vertically (from the better-off to the worse-off). Looked at from this perspective, the welfare state can be considered as a highly articulated and specialised form of institutionalised solidarity, serving both efficiency and social justice objectives.³

Solidarity became slowly institutionalised during the last two centuries in the wider context of state- and nation-building. The establishment of redistributive arrangements based on ‘social rights’ played a crucial role in stabilising the new form of political organisation (the nation-state) that gradually emerged in modern Europe. This stabilisation occurred through the anchoring of people’s life chances to state-national organisations uniquely dedicated to social protection, reinforcing on the one hand those feelings of ‘we-ness’ that are a crucial underpinning of the nation-state construct, while on the other offering national elites new tools for acquiring and maintaining legitimacy and internal order.

People’s life chances were ‘anchored’ by weaving social rights into the fabric of citizenship. As masterfully argued by T.H. Marshall, the evolution of modern citizenship involved a double process: of fusion and of separation.⁴ The fusion was geographical and entailed the dismantling of local privileges and immunities, the harmonisation of rights and obligations throughout the national territory, and the establishment of a level playing field (the equal status of citizens) within state borders. The separation was functional and entailed the creation of new sources of nationwide authority and jurisdiction as well as new specialised institutions for the implementation of that authority and that jurisdiction at a decentralised level. In most European countries this double process of fusion and separation started with the establishment of civil and political rights that offered the new ‘citizens’ precious instruments for taking advantage of the opportunities available within state borders. But in a context of unfettered markets (and in particular of a purely ‘self-regulating’ labour market – the destructive utopia described by Polanyi),⁵ civil and political rights were insufficient. Only the bestowal of certain material entitlements ‘not proportionate to the market value of the claimant’⁶ could keep ordinary citizens from falling into conditions of acute need, often jeopardising their very survival.

The incorporation of social rights into the space of citizenship was no easy task. In the economic sphere, the expansion of market capitalism produced a class society inherently built on inequalities, differential rewards and the ‘commodification’ of workers.⁷ Classes and nations rose together: and even though the virtuous reconciliation between the meritocratic logic of the capitalist market and the egalitarian logic of national citizenship has been one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century Europe, the path towards this destination was punctuated by marked social and systemic strains and clashes.⁸

Social rights had an enormous impact on social stratification and life chances. Marshall was certainly right when he pitted ‘citizenship vs. social class’, while the ‘Swedish School’ is equally correct in interpreting these rights as salient ‘power resources’ for wage-earners and labour movements.⁹ But ‘de-commodification’ was not the only issue that shaped the forms and content of social rights in the various countries. Another important front, more pertinent for our line of reasoning, was the issue of closure: how far-reaching ought the new redistributive schemes to be? For which collectivities ought the new sharing ties to be defined and introduced? Such ‘who’ questions were as important as the ‘what’ questions emphasised by traditional debates about welfare-state formation.

Social rights are more demanding political products than civil and political rights. All rights have costs: enablement costs, to create the conditions for their actual exercise (such as free legal counsel for those people who cannot afford it), and enforcement costs. But, resting as they do on material transfers and services, social rights give rise to ‘substance’ costs as well. They require the availability of significant quantities of material resources that are not easy to extract from society, and of moral commitments to ‘sharing with others’ that are not easy to activate at the individual and primary group levels.¹⁰ The definition of boundaries plays a critical role in the production of these rights. In the first place, boundaries are essential for constructing new ‘special purpose communities’ ready to pool certain risks. For welfarestate builders, boundary setting was a delicate balancing act between indulgence vis-à-vis the particularistic inclinations of pre-existing social categories and the self-defeating ambitions of redistributive ‘stretching’, that is, pushing the scope of solidarity beyond the limits which could be sustained by available material and moral resources. In the second place, boundaries are essential for enforcing affiliation to a sharing community. Now, compulsion is a prime component of citizenship in all its aspects, a fundamental instrument for assuring a correspondence between rights and duties. But in the sphere of social rights, which have precise, quantifiable costs, the matching of rights (entitlements) and duties (obligations to pay taxes and contributions) must be particularly accurate and stringent if fiscal bankruptcy is to be avoided. At least some civil and political rights can survive even without the full and constant exercise of the corresponding duties (contemporary democracy often functions with voting turnouts closer to 50 per cent than to 100 per cent). But social rights must be sustained by unrelenting sharing acts. This is why they rest on a specialised organisational form: that of compulsory social insurance. In most countries, the establishment of social rights meant the establishment of compulsory insurance schemes: against old age and disability, work injuries and sickness, maternity and unemployment. And, especially in the field of old age, the first implication for the members of such schemes was the payment of contributions (that is, the exercise of the duty), with benefits arriving only after long ‘vesting’ periods.

Defining and enforcing closure (in the form of obligatory affiliation and compulsory payments) remained a balancing act politically, but it conferred several economic advantages: less costly protection per insured person (thanks to the large, predictable, and reliable size of the sharing pool), the possibility of charging ‘contributions’ (flat-rate or proportional payments) rather than premiums (payments differentiated according to individual risk profiles, as in private insurance schemes) and the possibility of granting special treatment (such as lower or credited contributions, or minimum benefits) to categories of disadvantaged members. In contrast to private or voluntary insurance, compulsory (and public) social insurance could thus cover ‘difficult’ risks such as unemployment or family breakdown, and also produce not only horizontal redistributions (from the healthy to the sick, from the employed to the unemployed, and so on) but also vertical ones (from rich to poor). In this way, social citizenship could bring that ‘general enrichment of the concrete substance of civilized life’ through ‘equalisation between the more and the less fortunate at all levels’ that Marshall saw as its fundamental mission.¹¹

Closure matters, then, for social rights (and thus for solidarity), and probably in a more direct and intense way than for the other rights of citizenship: ‘bonding’ can only build on firm ‘bounding’. If observed from the angle of social citizenship, the European landscape appears today as a dense forest of compulsory spaces of ‘social sharing’, covering virtually 100 per cent of national populations, with very limite...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About Policy Network
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I: Principles
• II: Analysis
• III: Political Economy
• IV: Policy Framework
• Index