Introduction

How did Continental European welfare systems change over the last 30 years? What have they become? Were they eventually able to address the main challenges that they have been confronted with since the mid-1970s? The central research questions of this book are based on a striking puzzle. It was an accepted wisdom of the comparative welfare state literature published on the threshold of the 21st Century that the Continental European welfare systems were the least adaptable. In the mid-1990s, when he compared the capacity of different welfare regimes to face the new economic challenges, Gosta Esping-Andersen emphasized the rigidity of the Continental welfare state arrangements, speaking of a ‘frozen Continental landscape’ (Esping-Andersen 1996a). Since ‘Conservative corporatist ‘ welfare systems were ‘the most consensual of all modern welfare states’, their edifice would remain ‘immune to change’ (ibid.: 66-67). Esping-Andersen concluded that in Continental Europe ‘the cards are very much stacked in favor of the welfare state “status quo “’ (ibid.: 267). Fritz Scharpf and Vivien Schmidt (2000) similarly argued that even though all welfare states are in various ways vulnerable to increasingly open economies ‘Christian Democratic ‘ welfare systems based on social insurance not only face the greatest difficulties of all, but are also the most difficult to reform. Paul Pierson (2001a) also observed that significant welfare state reform has been rarest and most problematic in Continental Europe.

Since the advent of the new millennium, however, major changes have become highly visible in the welfare arrangements of Continental European countries. During the 2000s, as a comparison of reforms in different social insurance fields (old-age , unemployment , health insurance ) has shown, all Continental European countries have implemented important structural reforms of their welfare systems. Employment policies and unemployment insurance systems have changed, shifting away from a ‘labor shedding ‘ strategy and towards the development of activation policies (Clegg 2007). Austria , France , Germany , Italy and Spain have each gone through several waves of pension reform, the last introducing innovations such as voluntary private pension funds and emphasizing increasing employment rates among the elderly (Bonoli and Palier 2007).