Globalization and the Liberal Welfare States

Abstract

This chapter discusses the role of globalization in social policy developments in Britain and Ireland over the past two decades. In both countries, governments in the 1980s pursued macroeconomic and industrial policies explicitly designed to expose their economies to the forces of global economic competition. In so doing, however, they adopted contrasting approaches to social policy. In Britain the dominant neo-liberal discourse led to a restrictive restructuring of the welfare state, based on the view that social expenditure undermines the competitiveness of both the individual and the firm. In Ireland some neo-corporatist agreements and policies, embracing the European social model, were developed to compensate to some extent for the increasing social risks associated with global competitiveness. This illustrates very clearly how national social policy responses to economic globalization can vary enormously even within one regime type.