Introduction

Abstract

The modern welfare state — an indispensable but highly contested aspect of our societies — has been considered a national phenomenon for a long time. The European integration process calls this fact into question. Only five years after Abram de Swaan (1992: 33) claimed that ‘[w]elfare states are national states’, he conceded that the European Union (EU) constitutes an effective supranational agency that is able to implement and regulate transnational social policies (de Swaan 1997). Suddenly, alternative designs and scales of social policy were conceivable and the national welfare state lost its naturalness. This entirely new dimension is puzzling to political scientists, historians and sociologists alike and poses new questions in regard to the scaling and rescaling of social politics. Why did and still does the nation state represent the dominant scale of social security for such a long time? What triggers social policy expansion to a wider scale? Will there ever be a European welfare state? These are some of the questions being asked here.