INTRODUCTION

In 1949 new China emerged from the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937–45) and the subsequent Civil War (1945 to 1949) as almost the poorest country in the world. In 1950 the violation of Chinese territorial sovereignty and the need to deter a new invasion saw China respond to a North Korean request and enter the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, a struggle it also won but at considerable cost in terms of human life and the dedication of resources to strategic military and related industries. From 1949 through the 1960s China was subjected to a sustained economic embargo imposed by the United States, which was expanded to cover medicines, tractors and fertilizers (Zhang, cited in Losurdo 2008: 287– 92).

And yet, in these extraordinarily difficult circumstances, the new China saw life expectancy increase from 35 years in 1949 to 57 in 1957 and 68 in 1981 (Xinhuanet 2019), while its population increased from 554.4 million to 1,014 million. According to the World Bank (1981: 101), 1979's life expectancy of 64 years was higher than the average of 51 for low-income countries and 61 for middle-income countries; adult literacy stood at 66 per cent, compared with 39 per cent in low-income countries and 72 per cent in middle-income countries; while net primary school enrolment (93 per cent) was just short of that for industrialized countries (94 per cent).

In 1978 per capita rural income stood at ¥134 (81 PPP$) while the per capita income of urban residents was ¥343.4 (208 PPP$), yet the latter increased to ¥454.2 if the value of welfare, medical and other in-kind provision is included (Zhang 1994). In 1978, although there were many status and regional differences, China was egalitarian, with small income inequalities within communes and cities. In the words of the World Bank, “China's most remarkable achievement during the past three decades” was to have made “low-income groups far better off in terms of basic needs than their counterparts in most other poor countries”, thanks to the priority attached to food, education and health (World Bank 1983: 11).

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.

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” This proverbial phrase is emblem-atic of the CRAs’ relationship with criticism and financial crises. Whether it be the global financial crisis of 2008, the subsequent European sovereign debt crisis, the earlier Enron, Parmalat and WorldCom scandals or the Asian financial crisis of 1997– 99, CRAs have demonstrated a puzzling resilience and crisis resistance. Their authority has proved to be immune to the public outrage generated by rating failures and to the harsh criticism of policy makers, practitioners and scholars of different ideological traditions and camps. Undoubtedly, their survival can be explained by the CRAs’ structural power and constitutive role in the financial system. But it has to be acknowledged that, in retrospect, the CRAs weathered the storm of criticism they faced extremely well. They were able to channel the accusations made against them productively, using them to their own advantage.

In the case of the Enron debacle, ratings were deemed to be insufficiently timely. CRAs responded by speeding up their information processing. In the wake of the GFC, CRAs indulged in a PR campaign after putting transparency measures in place to alleviate concerns about there being a fundamental transparency deficit in the industry – a view widely shared among practitioners, regulators, policy-makers and scholars. Embracing transparency, one of the much heralded values in financial market discourses, enabled the CRAs to signal that their epistemic authority was still intact. Conservative ratings in the wake of the Asian financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis have also been interpreted as the CRAs’ efforts to compensate for prior rating failures and to demonstrate their learning capacity. As a result of all these presumably strategic reactions to crises, CRAs succeeded in restoring their reputation and credibility.

The role of the CRAs in the GFC revived criticism, and the extent to which CRAs came under fire between 2008 and 2012 was unique. CRAs were scrutinized as never before – a fact demonstrated by the quantity of litera-ture about CRAs that emerged in the aftermath of the crisis. The criticism was multifaceted and related to different characteristics of the rating business, and it surfaced at different moments during the crisis.

The great unsung hero of the global economic and financial crisis was the welfare state. This is the premise for Anton Hemerijck and Robin Huguenot-Noel's book. Using a wealth of data for macroeconomic performance and labour market participation, they underline how important social programmes were in underpinning economic resilience. This positive contribution of the welfare state explains not only why many northern European countries did better than their southern neighbours but also why parts of Europe – despite the travails of that continent's sovereign debt crisis – outperformed the United States. And, if the welfare state underpinned economic resilience during the economic and financial crisis, it played an even more important role in stabilizing economic performance during the Covid-19 pandemic. The conclusion to draw from this experience is not that everyone should embrace a European-style welfare state but that they should at least give fresh consideration to what the welfare state represents.

This premise is only the start of the argument. What follows is a subtle enquiry into the enduring significance of traditional claims about the trade-offs politicians must face between equity and efficiency, the longer-term financial viability of social safety nets, the rigidity of welfare state institutions and the interaction between different “worlds of welfare” – as Gosta Esping-Andersen famously characterized them – and the macroeconomic paradigms in which they are embedded. Along the way, Hemerijck and Huguenot-Noel make three fundamental observations.

Their first is that the rules of thumb that politicians use when talking about welfare states have remained much the same over the past three to four decades but the institutions themselves have changed in important ways – and so have the societies in which they operate. The potential for cognitive dissonance in this context is manifest.

The second observation is that the family resemblances between different countries that Esping-Andersen captured so effectively in the early 1990s have not survived this recalibration; some similarities remain between some countries – such as Italy and France, for example – but many have faded away. Here, again, it is hard to see how the old rules of thumb make sense.

We have seen that there was a sense on all sides of the post-referendum conflict that immigration control was intrinsic to Brexit, and rejection of freedom of movement was common ground across the Conservative Party and much of Labour. The Labour and Tory MPs who continued to pursue the Norway option highlighted its economic benefits rather than movement rights, and freedom of movement was explicitly defended only by the European movement, for whom it was the core of European citizenship. Immigration declined rapidly in polling salience after 2016; while this was sometimes attributed to the reduced numbers of new European immigrants, it was much more likely to have been because of the fact that Brexiters – having won the principle of ending freedom of movement and being focused instead on blocking May's deal – no longer felt the need to campaign on these numbers, while many of their supporters believed that they were actually being controlled. Even Farage, when he launched his Brexit Party for the 2019 European elections, did not campaign on immigration. Followers who had attended one of his rallies boasted to me on Twitter that he had not mentioned it in his speech; it was so central to Farage's brand that he did not need to emphasize it at every twist and turn, since when he talked of the “betrayal” of Brexit his supporters would have understood that immigration control was part of what he was complaining about. The position of Conservative leaders, in contrast, was more ambiguous, and whenever they appealed to the public or their party membership over the heads of parliament, political racism came into the open. When May wrote an “open letter” to the public on 25 November 2018 in an attempt to get support for her agreement, her first point was: “It will honour the result of the referendum. We will take back control of our borders, by putting an end to the free movement of people once and for all” (BBC News 2018a), and official advertisements reinforced this message.

The extreme right, Farage and Johnson in the crisis

By this point, May's project was in deep crisis and this represented Johnson's opportunity.

The referendum campaign had been “the UK's most divisive, hostile, negative and fear-provoking of the 21st century” (Moore & Ramsay 2017: 164) and indeed in living memory. The narrow result, perceived by many on the losing side as achieved through extensive dishonesty and abuse, provoked deep divisions both within parties and across society. These sharpened the cleavage between “open” or “liberal” and “closed” or “authoritarian” groups in parliament and the electorate, which now became known as “Leavers” and “Remainers”. This would almost certainly have been the case whatever the 2016 outcome, since a narrow Remain win would have antagonized the emboldened Leave movement and electorate – and especially the more aggressive Leavers – probably leading to new conflict. Indeed, it is highly possible, given the climate which developed in the late stages of the referendum and its immediate aftermath, that with the Brexit press having paved the way for viewing a Remain win as illegitimate and almost half of Leavers believing that the vote would be rigged, this could have led to the kind of protest and violence which followed Trump's defeat in 2020. There would have been a temptation for the Brexit tabloids, Farage and some Tory Leavers to stoke this situation; extreme right groups, some of which leaned towards violence, would also have brought themselves to the fore. However, the Leave victory meant that open intimidation and violence, after initially surging, slowly dissipated and the climate which they created instead reshaped the political project as it passed into the hands of the Conservative government.

The intensity of racial politics around the 2016 referendum shocked those observers who had accepted the narrative of positive change in British society. Yet, while some forms of liberalization were real, overall the country was far from being “post-racial”, and many sources of continuing racism were embedded in social relations, institutions, beliefs and attitudes. However, the constant renewal of a tradition of political racism had also played a crucial role in perpetuating the general level of racism and blocking fuller liberalization. This tradition, originating in the nineteenth century, was revived in the context of non-white immigration in the second half of the twentieth, most notoriously through Powell's speeches in 1968. As we have seen, race is a “floating signifier”, and it tends to be constantly filled with new meanings, especially by political actors who need to adapt to changing circumstances and the challenges which these pose for the achievement of their goals. It was possible for Brexit to catalyse racist tendencies in society because political racism had been regularly reproduced by sections of the political right and the press, and fed by the immigration policies of both Labour and Conservative governments. Although this tradition was “Powellite” in the sense that his example was seminal for most of the actors, contemporary racemongers are not simply Powell tribute acts, even if that is how some present themselves at times. While they attempt to emulate his considerable success in popularizing racism, they have also learned from the problems which he encountered and the political dead ends in which the extreme right – who followed him in overt racism – also found themselves.

As the Vote Leave slogan, “Take Back Control”, suggested, the overt meaning of the project for British exit from the EU, developed by the British right-wing over a quarter of a century, was a nationalist attempt to recover autonomous sovereign power for the UK state from its enmeshment in the shared sovereignty of EU legal and state institutions. “Regaining” sovereignty was also the most widely acknowledged motivation for voting Leave in 2016 (Centre for Social Investigation 2018), but since restricting immigration – long described as immigration “control” – was not only the second most popular reason for voting Leave but also (as we shall see in Chapter 4) the dominant way in which regaining sovereignty was justified by the Leave campaigns and the Brexit press, the majority for Brexit was both widely informed and in its narrow margin (51.9 versus 48.1 per cent) probably also decided by anti-immigration politics. While racism and hostility to immigration did not define Brexit as a project or process, they are central to understanding it, and no serious appraisal can avoid comprehensively examining their relationships to its overtly dominant nationalist theme. This I do over three chapters: this chapter discusses the ideas behind Brexit and the Eurosceptic/Europhobic campaign in the decades up to 2016; Chapter 4 analyses the referendum itself; and Chapter 5 examines the Brexit process and conflict following the referendum, between 2016 and the UK's formal exit in 2020.

British nationalism, Atlanticism and Europe

The movement for Brexit is part of a wider tendency towards economic and political nationalism in powerful states in the twenty-first century, which has increasingly threatened international cooperation. In this sense, Brexit can be compared to other policies, especially but by no means only of authoritarian regimes; but as the only secession from the unique international state entity which is the European Union, it is also very distinctive. Likewise, Euroscepticism is a major European political current and exists in most member states, but nowhere else has a Europhobic movement become dominant or come close to producing withdrawal from the EU; indeed, so far the British experience has acted as a deterrent rather than an incentive to others. Geopolitical repositioning linked to changes in ruling parties and regimes can also be found elsewhere, but Brexit is unique in its simultaneous transformation of international and domestic constitutional arrangements.

At the end of the twentieth century, the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union was a fringe idea, even on the political right, and the name “Brexit” had not been invented. Yet by the 2020s, it was the new reality of British economics, society and politics, both domestic and internationally. This dramatic change is the result of the referendum of 23 June 2016, in which 51.9 per cent, out of the 72.2 per cent of the electorate who voted, supported leaving the EU. Although legally the vote was only advisory – and arguably a supermajority should have been required for such a fundamental constitutional change – this narrow result quickly had a decisive, structural character. Half a decade afterwards, therefore, important connections between Britain and continental Europe which had expanded over more than half a century were contracting. In particular, flows of people between the two which had grown throughout this period were being reversed to a significant degree. Brexit also led to a wide-ranging upheaval in the UK. The country's politics were transformed in the three and a half years after the referendum, with deep new conflicts and electoral realignments, leading in the general election of 12 December 2019 to a substantial majority in parliament for the Conservatives, who had changed from a largely Eurosceptic party which nevertheless favoured EU membership into a party which was fundamentally hostile to European integration, which we can describe as Europhobic (following the approach of Kopecky & Mudde 2002). This election led in turn to the implementation of a “hard” Brexit, which excluded the UK from the European Economic Area (EEA, or the “single market”) as well as the EU itself, ending freedom of movement between Britain and the EU. Moreover, these changes did not stop with the UK's formal exits from the EU on 31 January 2020 and the single market on 31 December 2020. Brexit also radicalized the national conflicts in Scotland and Northern Ireland, threatening the very coherence of the UK state. The new administration (which itself emphasized its differences from its Conservative-led predecessors) operated in an authoritarian nationalist mode, and was widely seen as a hard-edged and ambitious (if somewhat inchoate) power formation, unusually prepared to dispense, so far as the balance of forces allowed it to, with certain democratic and international conventions.

In arguing that racism was a major driver of Brexit and the transformation of British politics in the 2010s, this book proposes an interpretation of racism in general which may be new to some readers, as well as a distinctive concept of political racism. Racism is an obviously contested idea, in the double sense that there is no clear consensus on its meaning and application and that the differences about it matter in social and political conflict. It is also a relatively recent idea: Mark Mazower (1998: 103) dates racisme in French to the early 1930s, but its English equivalent only took over from the now quaint-sounding “racialism” around 1970. The use of the harder-sounding “racism” to describe racial hostility emerged in the Western world, therefore, long after “race” became a prominent feature of social relations and power in the world empires of European states, and only at the tail end of what Dirk Moses (2002) calls the “racial century” between 1850 and 1950 during which racial hierarchies achieved their most rigid forms. Indeed, it was only after racist political ideologies achieved extreme impacts in Europe itself during the Second World War, rather than in the colonized world where these had been obvious for centuries, that the modern critical idea of racism truly came into its own. Only then were the ideas of race which developed in the previous period – distinctions between human groups through biological and cultural differences and the discrimination and cruelty which accompanied them – deeply and widely contested within Western societies. Priyamvada Gopal (2019: 209ff.) shows that in Britain, it was between the world wars that anti-imperial insurgency in the colonized world combined with widespread dissidence in the metropolis to challenge the foundations of the racialized empire.

When, in the preparations for the referendum, Brexit moved from the ideological to the strategic level, the global elements of its ideas were too loose, thin and politically untested to win widespread popular consent for the project. Withdrawal from the EU had not been a priority for most voters; even during the 2015 general election, only a year beforehand, less than 10 per cent “identified the EU as among the two most important issues facing Britain, and the issue of the EU played a minimal role in the election campaign” (Hobolt, Leeper & Tilley 2020: 3). As we have seen, the referendum had only become possible because it had been linked with racist anti-immigration politics, and the 2016 campaign would underline the centrality of this connection. After the vote, the Brexit-supporting journalist Brendan O’Neill (2017) denied “the narrative [which] says the referendum was a swirl of racial fears”. It was not, he argued:

In this chapter we shall see that there was a great deal more racist propaganda than “one poster”, while the fact that a third of voters volunteered immigration as their main reason for exit – compared to fewer than half who gave Leave's manifest main theme of sovereignty – was actually strong evidence for the salience of the issue.

Political Racism has shown how distinctive forms of right-wing agency to which political racism was central helped to produce, in the UK between 2016 and 2021, fundamental – but regressive – constitutional, economic, political and social change. As the Introduction made clear, there is no suggestion that these forces provide a complete explanation of Brexit and its aftermath, but the book has demonstrated that they made important contributions to the emergence of new structures in the UK's relations with the EU, with major effects on its economy, society and wider international relations as well as its party system and electoral patterns. The study's core idea has been used to simultaneously highlight political action as a distinctive component of contemporary racism and distinctive new forms of racism as a key element in the stronger nationalist trend in mainstream right-wing politics. In these ways the book has contributed, the author hopes, to studies of both racism and right-wing politics, as well as to the analysis of Brexit and its aftermath, in ways which I summarize below.

Political racism in global and comparative perspective

This book has shown that in an age where open racism is frowned upon, political actors are more central than ever to its persistence, and that they are more than ever innovative in actively stirring and renewing racist ideas. While ruthlessly exploiting its potentials for immediate goals, they covertly rekindle old hatreds, construct new racialized targets and help to resediment racial sentiments in society. The political actors who mobilize racism are not only organized parties and their leaders (which I have broadly categorized as mainstream, radical and extreme right, while stressing the networking between them and the tendency for mainstream right parties to be transformed in a far-right direction), ad hoc campaigns (like the Leave organizations), networks and movements but also mass media, social media actors (“ordinary” users as well as public figures) and street-level actors (both organized and unorganized). The study has focused on campaigning around electoral contests, in which established actors and media tend to be dominant, but it has also shown how the loci of racist action are transformed as mainstreaming develops, and how political campaigning interacts with popular and policy racism, which also independently affect social relations and especially the lives and experiences of minorities.