Margaret Thatcher, speaking to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland on 21 May 1988, praised ‘the basic ties of the family which are at the heart of our society and are the very nursery of civic virtue. And it is on the family that we in government build our own policies for welfare, education and care.’ Family was the basic building block, as she saw it, of modern society. This argument has returned again and again to political discourse, since it was used by Aristotle, and has most recently appeared in the same narrative of fragile social bonds under pressure in speeches by the then leader of the opposition, David Cameron, talking about the failure of the family as the central problem of broken Britain. His solution was to operate through taxation reform to privilege propertied families by reducing the tax on those who had children while legally married. But Thatcher's speech also demonstrates another intellectual problem in a narrative of the family as building block. The state is to build on it but, in order to do so, needs to intervene in it. State policy has historically attempted to preserve an ideal of an integrally private domain in which social and psychological health can be left to flourish. The family raises difficult questions for politicians and officials about the inequality of power and resources between ages and sexes in the family and hence can be seen not as an entity or unit but as a site in which different people share a location but have different tasks within it.

Introduction

On 8 December 2005, the European Commission published its Green Paper on obesity, the health condition more commonly known as ‘overweight’. The Green Paper outlined the prevalence and underlying causes of obesity within the European Union, identified possible EU actions to reduce obesity, and invited member state governments and stakeholders to submit comments. Earlier that year, the Commission had already launched the European Platform for Action on Diet, Physical Activity and Health, which brought together representatives from industry, consumer organizations and health NGOs in order to arrive at mutual commitments to reduce overweight. On the basis of the responses to the Green Paper, the Commission released a White Paper with more concrete proposals in May 2007, which was embraced by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament and formed the basis for further initiatives in this field.

The sudden attention for the issue of obesity at the EU level was not self-evident. To begin with, why the EU? Overweight would not seem to be the most logical issue to be taken up by the EU. Cross-border aspects, the self-proclaimed rationale for EU initiatives, are not immediately clear in this case. Moreover, health (care) issues are firmly under the member state governments' remit. The EU Treaty even explicitly prohibits harmonization of legislation on health grounds. In addition, why 2005? The problem of overweight, and the health conditions associated with it, was apparent long before that time.

Introduction

In the spring of 2007 the Italian city of Naples experienced an acute breakdown of its rubbish collection system. Because waste landfills were full, rubbish collection became impossible and piles of trash quickly built up in the streets of Naples. Although the region of Campania had been struggling with its waste management system for years, the situation proved to be especially urgent this time. Residents started burning the rubbish in order to alleviate the smell of rotting material, transforming the city's streets into a grim scene with dark clouds of smoke and pedestrians covering their faces to avoid the smell. The crisis not only made headlines in the world news but also incited action on the part of the European Commission, which accused Italy of not living up to the terms of the Waste Framework Directive. A month later the Commission sent a formal warning to Italy because it had ‘failed to fulfil its obligations under the directive by not putting in place an appropriate network of disposal facilities ensuring a high level of protection for the environment and public health in the Campania region’.

Although the Italian government succeeded in addressing the most urgent problems – for example by sending its waste by train to waste incineration facilities in the German city of Hamburg – the Commission later that year still considered Italy to be in violation of the terms of the Directive.

Introduction

In the first week of June 2009 the citizens of the 27 EU member states headed to the polls to elect their representatives for the European Parliament. Although the BBC heralded the event as the ‘biggest transnational election in history’, the majority of the almost 400 million eligible voters stayed home. With only 43% of them going to the polls the election continued a trend of declining turnout ever since members for the EP were directly elected for the first time in 1979.

According to the Financial Times, those who did go to the polls ‘clearly opted for the safety of the right, because of the global economic downturn’. Many of the centre-right parties won seats or lost only a little, whilst many of Europe's social democratic parties suffered heavy losses. In the UK the Labour Party came in only third with a mere 15%. In Hungary the MSZP – the Hungarian socialist party – was almost halved and only gained 17% of the votes, a vote share similar to that of the Dutch labour party (the PvdA). The elections showed a strong performance of nationalistic, Eurosceptic parties, like the Dutch Freedom Party, the Hungarian Jobbik Party and UK's Independence Party, each of them gaining more than 10% of the votes.

Introduction

In the early hours of 17 December 2005, after long and complex negotiations, the European Council agreed to the EU's Financial Perspectives for the period 2007–13. The Financial Perspectives lay down the size of the EU budget for each year as well as the contribution of each member state and the distribution across major spending categories. This forms the framework within which annual budgets are adopted.

Finding a compromise had been a difficult process because the Financial Perspectives had to reconcile a number of highly diverging interests. To begin with, the EU faced the financial consequences of the 2004 enlargement with ten new member states, which put increasing pressure on the EU budget. Moreover, following the ambition set out in the Lisbon Strategy that the EU should become the most competitive economy in the world, the European Commission wanted to step up spending on research and development and other policies that stimulated economic growth.

At the same time, the room for manoeuvre in devising a budgetary deal was extremely limited. To begin with, the six largest net contributors to the EU budget (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK) demanded that the EU budget should be capped at 1% of European Gross National Income (GNI), which implied a reduction from spending in the period 2000–6. Moreover, during negotiations in 2002, spending on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) had been fixed for the period until 2013.

The Nordic countries stand out as a region defined by the common history of its five constituents. While Finland was an integral part of Sweden for several hundred years, Norway and Iceland (together with some other north Atlantic islands) were crucial components of the early modern Danish composite state. The five countries were affected differently by twentieth-century warfare, but there still remains a tangible Nordic culture and Nordic cooperation is facilitated by the linguistic proximity of the three Scandinavian languages, even if English is increasingly used in inter-Nordic exchanges. Other defining characteristics of the Nordic countries are high degrees of secularisation, strong civil societies, gender equality and a political culture of consensus rather than confrontation. Finally, and perhaps most recognised amongst outsiders, the Nordic countries display strong and well-developed welfare states. One of the leading scholars in welfare state research, the Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen, has identified the social democratic welfare state found in Scandinavia as one of three ideal type welfare regimes.

At the heart of the welfare state discussion is the relationship between the state and its citizens. What sort of responsibility does the state have for the well-being of its citizens, and when should the state refrain from ‘interfering’ in the private sphere? Who are the citizens upon whom the state bestows welfare and rights: everybody, or just the grown-ups, or just adult men as heads of families?

The family is one of the social structures more resistant to abrupt changes, but in the second half of the twentieth century the European family underwent many important transformations. It is not difficult to identify common trends across many countries in relation to family changes: an increase in the divorce rate, an increase in the number of unipersonal households, the decreasing weight of the polynuclear family and the appearance of new forms of cohabitation. Spain is not alien to these shifts, but the metamorphosis of the Spanish family happened, in comparison to other European countries, very late and very quickly, in parallel with a delayed but accelerated period of industrialisation and economic growth.

The centrality of the family in Spanish life has shown tremendous resilience. The definition of what constitutes a family has evolved, and in the last decade we have witnessed the emergence of two conflicting family models. One, ideologically emanating from the Catholic church or even the standard definitions provided by the United Nations, would consider the family as a unit structured around a married heterosexual couple. The other model, a more liberal approach, departs from an egalitarian view of relationships in the private sphere, and accepts same-sex relationships and less conventional household structures. There is still, in spite of these different approaches, a common view of what essentially constitutes a family: a study of different family associations, of both traditional and liberal views, has identified a common definition of a family as a unit that shares a life project, involves relationships of reciprocity and mutual help and is oriented towards happiness.

In March 2008, the government of Romano Prodi, which for two years had been dependent upon a fragile coalition of centre-left parties, fell from power. New national elections in the spring resulted in Silvio Berlusconi's third term in office, this time with a very comfortable parliamentary majority. The crisis of Prodi's government was thus an important turning point in Italian politics and its dynamics are of considerable relevance to the themes of this chapter. The politician principally responsible for the crisis was a local power broker and Catholic politician, Clemente Mastella, a corpulent but energetic figure with darting eyes and a certain natural cunning. Mastella can with safety be called an archetypical figure of the European south. His party, strongly rooted in one southern region only, Campania, had polled just 1.4 per cent of the national vote. However, this had been sufficient, thanks to the system of proportional representation in operation at the time, to give him power of veto over Prodi's unwieldy coalition government. Indeed, so important was Mastella to Prodi that he was nothing less than minister of justice.

The crisis had broken in January 2008, when various of Mastella's closest political collaborators were arrested and accused of distorting normal administrative practice by means of corruption, extortion and intimidation. His wife, Sandra Lonardo Mastella, whose political career Mastella had assiduously cultivated, was placed under house arrest. The details of the accusations evoke long-standing practices in the Italian state.