Over their life course, most European citizens benefit from public health care and education, inclusive social safety nets and pension provision, labour market (re)integration services and childcare support for their offspring. Precisely because they smooth and facilitate life course transitions, such welfare provisions are often taken for granted. Yet the welfare state's survival requires closer scrutiny, as it has been under sustained attack during the (neo)liberal epoch of inflation targeting, public finance austerity and labour market liberalization since the 1980s, combined with the exemplary role it played during the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

In the first section of this chapter, we first venture to set straight empirically important misconceptions about the inescapable equity– efficiency trade-off and employment– redistribution– fiscal prudence trilemma in the academic literature and practical policy-making, which have cast dark shadows over the staying power of inclusive European welfare states in recent decades (modelled after and updated from Hemerijck 2013 and Hemerijck & Huguenot-Noel 2019). Next, the second section draws attention to the importance in timing of national welfare state expansion, pre-dating the widening and deepening of EU economic integration from the mid-1980s. In the third section, we correlate general welfare performance with social spending efforts to corroborate macro-evidence, underlining the achievements of European welfare states. Then, the fourth section summons a wider set of indicators from the OECD and Eurostat to trace and assess the evolution of welfare performance in the European Union between 2000 and 2019 by focusing on employment performance in terms of gender and age. The fifth section turns to social-investmentspecific indicators, such as “robust” families, training and education. Based on the previous information, the following section moves on to selective portrayals of country-specific welfare reform trajectories. In conclusion, the final section draws key lessons for welfare resilience across the European Union from the experience of the Great Recession.

Beyond inescapable trade-offs and trilemmas

Across the board, the modern welfare state centres around an integrated portfolio of policy provisions rooted in the adverse experience of the Great Depression, strongly associated with the rise of Keynesian economics and Beveridgean social security.