Abstract
Globalizing Welfare aims to provide an overview of developments in the welfare states in Asia and Europe (or rather ‘North-East Asia’ and ‘North-Western Europe’), and to develop a dialogue between the systems of these two regions. As the editors set out in Chapter 1, the book aims to increase knowledge concerning developments in the two regions, to inspire more attention to policy learning perspectives, and to highlight important cross-cutting, critical global issues for the future developments of welfare states.
The manuscript certainly succeeds in providing up-to-date knowledge. Part I of the book provides an overview of developments in Korea (Chapter 2), China (Chapters 3-5) and Japan (Chapters 6-8). Kwon’s summary and updating of previous work on Korea is an excellent short summary of the present state of knowledge. Similarly, Kamikubo provides an exceptional overview of the Japanese case. It would have been useful to see more work engaging with the contrasts between the Asian countries, as do Otsuka and Chen in relation to caregivers.
Part II provides a similar overview of some European countries, with a particular focus on the Nordic countries (with the exception of one chapter on Germany). These chapters are in themselves interesting. Kettunen (Chapter 9), for example, discusses how the concept of society was constructed and how this impacted on the development of the Nordic welfare state. Nevertheless, most chapters do not greatly engage in any comparative way with Asia, or even globalisation (with the obvious exception of Chapter 10 on globalisation and the Nordic welfare states).
While the content is interesting, the almost exclusive focus on the Nordic countries is perhaps unfortunate from a comparative perspective. While Part I explores only three Asian countries, this region does do have a combined population of over 1.5 billion people. The total Nordic population is about that of a first-tier Chinese city, such as Chongqing. More importantly, despite the volume of material on the Nordic model, it is not clear that it has been diffused greatly within Europe while its direct relevance to many Asian countries is arguably even more peripheral. Ren (Chapter 3) suggests that the Nordic welfare model has had a ‘positive influence’ on Chinese welfare reforms. As someone who has worked in China on social protection for over 10 years, this, however, is not something that I have noticed.
Part III is entitled ‘global issues and perspectives’. This includes a short overview of feminist scholarship on the welfare state, a chapter on the Belarussian welfare state, one by Claus Offe on how social scientists and policy-makers frame social inequality and how responses are shaped by this framing, and a final chapter which discusses the relationship between populism and the welfare state (albeit at a very high level of abstraction). There is no conclusion by the authors to the questions they raised in Chapter 1.
One issue with the book is that the editors and many of the manuscript's contributors appear to take the view that progress to a ‘universal’ welfare state is both desirable and somehow inevitable. But as Kwon points out for Korea, it is not clear what exactly a universal welfare state might look like. And to describe the Chinese system as ‘moderate universalism’ (see Chapter 4) risks removing any meaning from the term ‘universal’.
More fundamentally, the book suffers from the usual problem of these type of books in that, while it includes much interesting material, the ‘dialogue’ of the title is not always (or indeed often) followed through into the contents. Thus, it may, for example, be very interesting to have an overview of the Belarusian welfare system (certainly an under-researched topic), but how is this subject germane to the stated aims of the book? Arguably, the book aims to cover too many bases, and a volume more narrowly focussed on the Nordic countries would have been much more focussed and ultimately successful.