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Children and family policy in Europe
Children andYouth Sewices Review, Vol. 21, Nos. 11/12, pp. 905-914, 1999 Copyrigbt Q 1999 Ekwitr Science Ltd Printed in tbe USA. All tights mcrvtd 0190-7409/99/S-see froot matter
PI1 SOMJ-7409(99)00060-2
Children and Family Policy in Europe Robert Dingwall Jane Lewis
University of Nottingham This special issue of Children and Youth Services Review provides readers with an up-to-date review of European approaches to a range of policy issues affecting children and young people. Despite the editors’ efforts to break through the language barriers that often exclude the contributions of those whose first language is not English, the contributions come, predictably, from North America and the United Kingdom. However, three of the four come from the mediating margins of those communities, from Canada, with its historic and contemporary ties with France, and from Scotland, whose culture and society have traditionally been more closely linked to mainland Europe than has been the case in England. The result is at least a sideways glance at the Anglo-American model of social policy with a consciousness of the existence and viability of alternatives to the limited, neo-liberal approach that England and the United States have increasingly shared over the last twenty years or so. Perhaps the first point to make is that there is no single European model of welfare for children and young people. One need not accept every detail of the Esping-Andersen (1990) typology-and Gauthier’s (1999) paper brings out some important empirical objections-to acknowledge the extent of national variation within the established democracies of Western Europe, let alone the emerging democracies of Eastern and Central Europe. The European Union has not sought to extend its competence in these areas, although some of them have been affected by decisions of the European Court of Justice, which interprets the treaties of the European Union much as the Supreme Court interprets the US Constitution, and by the European Court of Human Rights, which applies the European Convention on Human Rights, an agreement separate from and wider than the structures of the European Union, much as the Canadian Supreme Court applies the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Request for reprints should be sent to Robert Dingwall, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NC7 2RD United Kingdom [[email protected]].
905
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Classically, the welfare of children and young people is a sphere of subsidiarity, an important concept in EU policy thinking which defines those matters where European intervention should be positively avoided on the principle that they are better determined at a national or sub-national level reflecting local circumstances and cultures. As both Ackers and Stalford (1999) and McGhee and Waterhouse (1999) show, however, this may be overridden because of the higher European priorities of the creation of an effective Single Market or of human rights jurisprudence. National discretion is not unlimited. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental agreement, which is captured in Gauthier’s paper and which distinguishes Europe from the USA, on the extent to which the welfare of children and young people is a legitimate object of government policy and state intervention. This has united socialist, social democratic and Christian Democratic conservative governments across Europe over the whole post-war period. The specific measures adopted have varied, reflecting differences in culture, social organization and economic performance but no European country has been without a more or less explicit policy for children and young people. As Gauthier (1999) shows, these social provisions have been substantially protected throughout the difficult economic conditions in Western Europe during the 1970s and the political criticism of the 1980s. The transition economies of East and Central Europe have come under considerable economic pressure since 1989 and many of the services which sustained the ‘double shift’ of women as mothers and workers have closed, but the protection of social benefits for children has been maintained to a considerable extent, despite the rapid inflation experienced by those countries. Even in the United Kingdom, which has adopted US rhetoric and models of welfare most selfconsciously since the mid- 1970s the neo-liberal Conservative government found itself increasing expenditure on welfare benefits and on many public services, other than housing and some aspects of education (Hills 1996). Its Labour successor has, since 1997, continued to press welfare reform but excempted poverty among children and young people and sought to increase benefits and services targeted at this group to the extent that resources permit without raising taxes. Gauthier’s (1999) case would be strengthened even further if it were extended to include the substantial benefit that children and young people derive from the collective provision of health care throughout most of Europe.
Children and Family Policy in Europe
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Although, as Gauthier stresses, there are no simple relationships between political cultures or ideologies, on the one hand, and the levels or modalities of welfare provision for children and young people on the other, her paper usefully illustrates the range of justifications on which European policies may be founded. In France and other, mainly Catholic-dominated. countries, these provisions have formed an explicit part of pro-natalist family policies. By sharing the economic and opportunity costs of children, the community as a whole created an incentive for those who could bear children to do so, both as a social good in their own right and as a resource from which those without children might expect to derive future benefits. In Northern Europe, particularly the Scandinavian countries and Finland, the justifications were often more closely related to the promotion of equal opportunities for women to choose to participate in the labour market. In Eastern and Central Europe under state socialism, the main agenda was the maximization of labour market participation. This led to a particular investment in substitute care services rather than transfer payments, reflecting a low-wage system with a high dependency on state distribution of services or benefits in kind (see Hrynkiewicz 1998). The British, by contrast, gave relatively little attention to any of these justitications: the loss of an Empire to populate more or less killed off pro-natalism and much of the post-war welfare system was based on breadwinner models of the family, where women were not expected to work. The welldocumented problems of dealing with lone parents in such a system underline the strength of the core model (Duncan & Edwards 1997; Lewis 1997). In practice, the dominant concern in Britain was with child poverty, both in absolute terms and in attempting to smooth out the fluctuations in household income over the economic life-cycle of domestic groups. None of these justifications has ever achieved a sufficient measure of influence in the United States to sustain a consistent attention to provision for children and young people in the face of the pervasive belief that childbearing is essentially a private economic decision to acquire a kind of durable consumer good rather than the foundation of collective societal reproduction, where all members of the community might have some interest in the quality and/or quantity of the output. Gauthier’s (I 999) work also challenges the pessimistic US assumption that an ageing population is necessarily unable or unwilling to sustain benefits for children and young people because of the greater ability of the elderly to mobilize politically and usurp their share of welfare expenditures. Clearly there is a potential issue of inter-generational distribution but the outcome seems more likely
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to reflect the political cultures, structures and leadership of particular states rather than to have a general and uniform outcome. Gauthier (1999) argues for an approach to comparative welfare studies which moves on from a narrow focus on cash support to consider the total package of benefits and services for families, children and young people, accepting that this will greatly complicated many of the cross-national issues of costing and valuation. The papers by Dey and Morris (1999) and McGhee and Waterhouse (1999) represent case studies in service development and provision, although both sets of authors are less interested in economic comparisons than is Gauthier. However, these particular studies, of state support in the transition of young people to independent living and of approaches to juvenile crime, help to illuminate some of the differences within Europe and the particular dimensions of contrast between Europe and the United States. Dey and Morris (1999) examine the relationship between parents, state and young adults, defined here as 18-25 year olds. The transition to economic and social independence has attracted rather more explicit attention in Europe than in the UK and the authors perform an important service by exploring the de facto creation of a British policy by the coincidence of a number of discrete policy measures. They note that the problem of establishing independence has been defined by US investigators as a concern for parents: how can they get rid of these cuckoos in the nest? In Europe, however, the attention has focused more on independence as a problem for children and young adults. How can they navigate the numerous barriers which contemporary social and economic organization seems to be putting in their path and avoid exclusion and marginalization? An important contribution, which Dey and Morris (1999) do not specifically mention, comes, for example, from the foyer movement to provide sheltered housing for single young people in low-wage employment, offering support and advice in budgeting, home management and life skills as a replacement for parental involvement. These resources have been slow to develop in the United Kingdom and seem partly responsible for the significant failure of public child care to manage transitions to adulthood for children accommodated as in need of protection from abuse or maltreatment. Public child care services have effectively dumped a high proportion of the young people for whom they are responsible at the age of 16, when their legal duties expire, to end up in prison, on the streets or in psychiatric facilities. The permissive powers to continue support under the Children Act 1989 have been little used and the government is now considering imposing
Children and Family Policy in Europe
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positive duties on child care services to secure a successful transition to independent living for those supposed to be under their protection. This is an apparent acknowledgement of the extent to which the British state has forced young adults who have not experienced intervention into dependency on their families for much longer than has traditionally been the case. Dey and Morris (1999) describe the various measures that have withdrawn or restricted state benefits to young people under 25, on the assumption that parents will take up the responsibility. This approach has extended to minimum wage legislation and financial support for students. Critics have pointed to the way in which these policies have either ignored or positively contributed to family breakdown and the extent to which families, particularly those on benefits, have been unable or unwilling to finance an extended period of dependency. The result is said to be an increase in homelessness and vagrancy as young adults either leave home to avoid imposing costs on their parents or careers, or are expelled as economic burdens. There is a real insensitivity to the circumstances of different social classes in much of this legislation: the middle class may have a tradition of funding its offspring over a much longer period of dependency but it has also had the resources to do so. It has been argued, for example, that the result of the changed funding for students has been to increase rather than to decrease the barriers to access by working-class students, who may also be more likely to come from minority backgrounds or female-headed households. Dey and Morris (1999) also question the implications of this further extension of dependency for the young people themselves. It is worth remembering that entry to the labour market would have occurred around the age of 14 only a couple of generations ago and that for many young people this would have been accompanied by a move away from home into domestic or agricultural service. Numerous commentators have remarked on the apparently ineluctable trend of industrial societies to defer entry to social and economic independence for longer and longer periods. Those of us who experienced the revolt against the in loco parentis assumptions of university administrations in the 1960s may frequently be disturbed by the creeping reinstatement of the moral regulation of student life that an earlier generation fought against, Is the result to leave young adults less equipped for independent living and more reliant on support, advice and guidance from paternalist others than the robust assumptions of neo-liberal market societies allow? Is this a generation profoundly ill-equipped to deal with
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the choice-making active citizenship or consumerism that is increasingly forced upon them by other changes? If Dey and Morris (1999) discuss the implicit social control or disciplining of the young and their parents, McGhee and Waterhouse (1999) examine their explicit social control. In the early 197Os, there was a high degree of convergence between Scotland and the State of Massachusetts in their juvenile justice systems. McGhee and Waterhouse have returned to this topic twenty years later to ask what has happened in each system in the meantime. They note the growth of retributivist and crime control movements in the US and their echoes in the criminal justice policies of England and Wales. Scotland, however, has remained closer to the mainland European concern to avoid the criminalization of juveniles, a concern which has been strongly reflected in the reconstruction of Eastern European systems since 1989 (see Mosciskier 1998). The divergence of social policies within the nations of the United Kingdom is often underestimated: however, it is important to recognize that Scotland and Northern Ireland retained separate legal and administrative systems within the Union and that areas like health care, education and criminal justice have shown considerable variation within a general framework of entitlements, although the benefits system, for example was homogenous. It is likely that these divergences will increase with the creation of a devolved government in Scotland from 1999 and extend to Wales, which was accorded a lesser measure of devolved legislative power at the same time. One of the striking features of the Scottish system is the degree of public confidence that it has retained over a period when other jurisdictions have yielded to pressures for retribution. As McGhee and Waterhouse (1999) note, Massachusetts has become a good deal more punitive, reflecting the general US trends in penological practice. Although they do not seek to explain the difference, we may speculate that it is partly bound up with questions of national identity. The movement towards devolution was at least partly inspired by the antipathy of the Scats to being used as a testbed for many of the neo-liberal social policies of the 1979- 1997 Conservative administrations when that party had consistently held a minority of seats in Scotland. There remain tensions under the new Labour administration, where the Scottish party is distinctly to the Left of the government in London and committed to a more traditional social democratic programme of investment in public services and interventionist economic management. The protection of public services and the commitment to an active state involvement in the reduction of poverty were frequent points of con-
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flict between London and Scotland under the previous administration. Crime, drug abuse and other social problems were widely blamed on poverty caused by the ethnic arrogance and neo-liberal economic policies of the Conservatives. In this sense, juvenile crime did not offer itself as a basis for popular mobilization in the way that it did in England or the USA. If juvenile crime resulted from poverty and deprivation caused by the neglect of a colonial government, then a justice system premised on the assumption that most offending was the result of poverty became an arm of resistance to that administration. It was something that could be owned by the Scottish people as a symbol of their rejection of the alien values being foisted upon them from England. There are some similarities, for example, with the way in which the liberalization of criminal justice systems generally has been seen in Eastern Europe as a symbol of the departure of authoritarian state socialism and their reintegration with an imagined rule of law and acknowledgement of human rights in Western Europe. One of the ways in which Poland, for instance, could show that it was a ‘proper European nation’, despite the accident of forty years of communism, was by adopting what it took to be a European approach to penality with a much larger role for community punishments and rehabilitation than for confinement and retribution (Mosciskier 1998). Despite its general protection of a welfare orientation, McGhee and Waterhouse (1999) note that the Scottish juvenile justice system has come under some pressure from international human rights conventions to take greater account of juveniles’ rights. The final paper in this issue looks more deeply at the impact of European legislation on the circumstances of children and young adults. The intervention of the European Court of Human Rights is mentioned by McGhee and Waterhouse but Ackers and Stalford focus on the less well-recognized impact of the European Court of Justice. The European Union treaties have, to date, left most areas of domestic social policy, particularly family policy, untouched, under the principle of subsidiarity, although the Amsterdam Treaty’s provisions on health policy may mark a shift of direction. As Ackers and Stalford (1999) show, however, the creation of a Single Market and, in particular, the desire to encourage labour mobility and the development of a common European citizenship has inevitably trespassed on social policy issues. People cannot move around Europe in the manner envisaged by the treaties unless they can rely on an appropriate level of entitlements. The case law explored by Ackers and Stalford (1999) explores the implications of this for the behaviour of member governments and for the emerging conceptuali-
Dingwall and Lewis
zation of citizenship. The latter seems likely to be a crucial point of tension within the European Union over the next few years as the agenda of economic integration is substantially completed with the achievement of economic and monetary union and the introduction of a single currency across most, if not all, of the community. As usual, the British, or perhaps more exactly the English, seem likely to find themselves on one side of the argument and the mainland states on the other. The UK government has identified itself with flexible labour markets and a low-wage economy where most of Western Europe has sought to retain the post-war social market model with a high degree of collective protection, most evident perhaps in France, with its aggressive enforcement of restrictions on working time without loss of pay in order to distribute available employment as widely as possible. The UK, in contrast, has seen a rapid growth of social inequality during and since the 1980s with the number of children living in households receiving less than 50 per cent of average income trebling to 3.9 million between 1979 and 1991 (Hills 1996). Although the 1997 Labour government has made the elimination of child poverty within twenty years into a major policy goal, it is far from clear how this can be achieved simultaneously with the same government’s commitments to an economic order modeled on that of the USA unless the mirage of full employment and non-inflationary economic growth really can be given substance over a long period. Looking back over the last twenty or thirty years, one of the most striking features of the economic and political environment of European societies has been the creeping construction of a state-like entity at the European level. This has not always been an acknowledged process but, despite the recent troubles over the quality of governance exercised by the European Commission, seems substantially irreversible. At the same time, the nation states themselves have begun to look more fragile, at least in their classic centralized form. Germany, of course, was reconstructed after the Second World War as a federal state and Spain introduced a substantial measure of devolution in its post-Franc0 settlement. Belgium has virtually dissolved into two separate states sharing one territory. The United Kingdom has now introduced devolved government in Scotland and Wales and is actively striving to re-establish it in Northern Ireland, without finding an appropriate institutional model for England. The French, with their deep tradition of authoritarian central government may be fmding this movement most threatening, as the European Union is requiring them to respect
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indigenous minority languages and cultures which have long been repressed. It is far too simplistic to treat the European Union as some kind of embryonic United States of Europe, as some Americans often do. At the same time, there is no doubt that it is likely to play an increasing role in defining social policy agendas, although possibly more in concert with formations below the level of the traditional nation-states. This tendency will certainly be reinforced by the growing jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights and its willingness to extend the European Convention on Human Rights into wider and wider areas of domestic social policy. As we noted at the outset, it may not be possible to generalize about the social policies of European states today. There are some processes that are reinforcing this diversity in the weakening of the traditional nation-states: within Belgium, for example, French and Flemish communities effectively operate separate social security systems and it would not be surprising to see the existing differences between England and Scotland magnified. At the same time, the new political entities may find that their scope for variation has much clearer limits than currently exist at a national level as the jurisprudence of the European Courts expands. The definition and comprehension of these movements will be a major challenge for analysts of social policy over the coming decades.
References Ackers, L., & Stalford, H. (1999). Children, migration and citizenship in the European Union: Intra-community mobility and the status of children in EC law. Children and Youth Services Review, 2 I, 987- 10 10. Dey, I., & Morris, S. (1999). Parental support for young adults in Europe. Children and Youth Services Review, 21,915935.
Duncan, S., & Edwards, R. (Eds.). (1997). Sin gl e mothers in an international context. London: UCL Press.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalis., Cambridge: Polity. Hills, J. (1996). New inequalities:Tthe changing distribution of income and wealth in the United Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gauthier, A. (1999). Historical trends in state support for families in europe since 1945. Children and Youth Services Review, 21,937-965. Hrynkiewicz, J. (1998). From socialist to liberal utopia: Changes in Poland’s social policy since 1989. In A Kwak, & R. Dingwall (Eds.), Social change, social policy and social work in the new Europe (pp. 9-28). Ashgate: Aldershot.
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Lewis, J, Ed. (1997). Lone mothers in European werfare regimes. London: Jessica Kingsley. McGhee, J., & Waterhouse, L. (1999). Comparative juvenile justice policy: The alliance between Scotland and the state of Massachusetts revisited. Children and Youth Services Review, 21,967-985. Mosciskier, A. (1998). Changes in prison policy as a part of political and economic transformation in Poland. In A Kwak, & R. Dingwall (Ed%), Social change, social policy and social work in the new Europe (pp. 85-96). Ashgate: Aldershot.
PI1 SOMJ-7409(99)00060-2
Children and Family Policy in Europe Robert Dingwall Jane Lewis
University of Nottingham This special issue of Children and Youth Services Review provides readers with an up-to-date review of European approaches to a range of policy issues affecting children and young people. Despite the editors’ efforts to break through the language barriers that often exclude the contributions of those whose first language is not English, the contributions come, predictably, from North America and the United Kingdom. However, three of the four come from the mediating margins of those communities, from Canada, with its historic and contemporary ties with France, and from Scotland, whose culture and society have traditionally been more closely linked to mainland Europe than has been the case in England. The result is at least a sideways glance at the Anglo-American model of social policy with a consciousness of the existence and viability of alternatives to the limited, neo-liberal approach that England and the United States have increasingly shared over the last twenty years or so. Perhaps the first point to make is that there is no single European model of welfare for children and young people. One need not accept every detail of the Esping-Andersen (1990) typology-and Gauthier’s (1999) paper brings out some important empirical objections-to acknowledge the extent of national variation within the established democracies of Western Europe, let alone the emerging democracies of Eastern and Central Europe. The European Union has not sought to extend its competence in these areas, although some of them have been affected by decisions of the European Court of Justice, which interprets the treaties of the European Union much as the Supreme Court interprets the US Constitution, and by the European Court of Human Rights, which applies the European Convention on Human Rights, an agreement separate from and wider than the structures of the European Union, much as the Canadian Supreme Court applies the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Request for reprints should be sent to Robert Dingwall, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NC7 2RD United Kingdom [[email protected]].
905
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Dingwall and Lewis
Classically, the welfare of children and young people is a sphere of subsidiarity, an important concept in EU policy thinking which defines those matters where European intervention should be positively avoided on the principle that they are better determined at a national or sub-national level reflecting local circumstances and cultures. As both Ackers and Stalford (1999) and McGhee and Waterhouse (1999) show, however, this may be overridden because of the higher European priorities of the creation of an effective Single Market or of human rights jurisprudence. National discretion is not unlimited. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental agreement, which is captured in Gauthier’s paper and which distinguishes Europe from the USA, on the extent to which the welfare of children and young people is a legitimate object of government policy and state intervention. This has united socialist, social democratic and Christian Democratic conservative governments across Europe over the whole post-war period. The specific measures adopted have varied, reflecting differences in culture, social organization and economic performance but no European country has been without a more or less explicit policy for children and young people. As Gauthier (1999) shows, these social provisions have been substantially protected throughout the difficult economic conditions in Western Europe during the 1970s and the political criticism of the 1980s. The transition economies of East and Central Europe have come under considerable economic pressure since 1989 and many of the services which sustained the ‘double shift’ of women as mothers and workers have closed, but the protection of social benefits for children has been maintained to a considerable extent, despite the rapid inflation experienced by those countries. Even in the United Kingdom, which has adopted US rhetoric and models of welfare most selfconsciously since the mid- 1970s the neo-liberal Conservative government found itself increasing expenditure on welfare benefits and on many public services, other than housing and some aspects of education (Hills 1996). Its Labour successor has, since 1997, continued to press welfare reform but excempted poverty among children and young people and sought to increase benefits and services targeted at this group to the extent that resources permit without raising taxes. Gauthier’s (1999) case would be strengthened even further if it were extended to include the substantial benefit that children and young people derive from the collective provision of health care throughout most of Europe.
Children and Family Policy in Europe
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Although, as Gauthier stresses, there are no simple relationships between political cultures or ideologies, on the one hand, and the levels or modalities of welfare provision for children and young people on the other, her paper usefully illustrates the range of justifications on which European policies may be founded. In France and other, mainly Catholic-dominated. countries, these provisions have formed an explicit part of pro-natalist family policies. By sharing the economic and opportunity costs of children, the community as a whole created an incentive for those who could bear children to do so, both as a social good in their own right and as a resource from which those without children might expect to derive future benefits. In Northern Europe, particularly the Scandinavian countries and Finland, the justifications were often more closely related to the promotion of equal opportunities for women to choose to participate in the labour market. In Eastern and Central Europe under state socialism, the main agenda was the maximization of labour market participation. This led to a particular investment in substitute care services rather than transfer payments, reflecting a low-wage system with a high dependency on state distribution of services or benefits in kind (see Hrynkiewicz 1998). The British, by contrast, gave relatively little attention to any of these justitications: the loss of an Empire to populate more or less killed off pro-natalism and much of the post-war welfare system was based on breadwinner models of the family, where women were not expected to work. The welldocumented problems of dealing with lone parents in such a system underline the strength of the core model (Duncan & Edwards 1997; Lewis 1997). In practice, the dominant concern in Britain was with child poverty, both in absolute terms and in attempting to smooth out the fluctuations in household income over the economic life-cycle of domestic groups. None of these justifications has ever achieved a sufficient measure of influence in the United States to sustain a consistent attention to provision for children and young people in the face of the pervasive belief that childbearing is essentially a private economic decision to acquire a kind of durable consumer good rather than the foundation of collective societal reproduction, where all members of the community might have some interest in the quality and/or quantity of the output. Gauthier’s (I 999) work also challenges the pessimistic US assumption that an ageing population is necessarily unable or unwilling to sustain benefits for children and young people because of the greater ability of the elderly to mobilize politically and usurp their share of welfare expenditures. Clearly there is a potential issue of inter-generational distribution but the outcome seems more likely
908
Dingwall and Lewis
to reflect the political cultures, structures and leadership of particular states rather than to have a general and uniform outcome. Gauthier (1999) argues for an approach to comparative welfare studies which moves on from a narrow focus on cash support to consider the total package of benefits and services for families, children and young people, accepting that this will greatly complicated many of the cross-national issues of costing and valuation. The papers by Dey and Morris (1999) and McGhee and Waterhouse (1999) represent case studies in service development and provision, although both sets of authors are less interested in economic comparisons than is Gauthier. However, these particular studies, of state support in the transition of young people to independent living and of approaches to juvenile crime, help to illuminate some of the differences within Europe and the particular dimensions of contrast between Europe and the United States. Dey and Morris (1999) examine the relationship between parents, state and young adults, defined here as 18-25 year olds. The transition to economic and social independence has attracted rather more explicit attention in Europe than in the UK and the authors perform an important service by exploring the de facto creation of a British policy by the coincidence of a number of discrete policy measures. They note that the problem of establishing independence has been defined by US investigators as a concern for parents: how can they get rid of these cuckoos in the nest? In Europe, however, the attention has focused more on independence as a problem for children and young adults. How can they navigate the numerous barriers which contemporary social and economic organization seems to be putting in their path and avoid exclusion and marginalization? An important contribution, which Dey and Morris (1999) do not specifically mention, comes, for example, from the foyer movement to provide sheltered housing for single young people in low-wage employment, offering support and advice in budgeting, home management and life skills as a replacement for parental involvement. These resources have been slow to develop in the United Kingdom and seem partly responsible for the significant failure of public child care to manage transitions to adulthood for children accommodated as in need of protection from abuse or maltreatment. Public child care services have effectively dumped a high proportion of the young people for whom they are responsible at the age of 16, when their legal duties expire, to end up in prison, on the streets or in psychiatric facilities. The permissive powers to continue support under the Children Act 1989 have been little used and the government is now considering imposing
Children and Family Policy in Europe
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positive duties on child care services to secure a successful transition to independent living for those supposed to be under their protection. This is an apparent acknowledgement of the extent to which the British state has forced young adults who have not experienced intervention into dependency on their families for much longer than has traditionally been the case. Dey and Morris (1999) describe the various measures that have withdrawn or restricted state benefits to young people under 25, on the assumption that parents will take up the responsibility. This approach has extended to minimum wage legislation and financial support for students. Critics have pointed to the way in which these policies have either ignored or positively contributed to family breakdown and the extent to which families, particularly those on benefits, have been unable or unwilling to finance an extended period of dependency. The result is said to be an increase in homelessness and vagrancy as young adults either leave home to avoid imposing costs on their parents or careers, or are expelled as economic burdens. There is a real insensitivity to the circumstances of different social classes in much of this legislation: the middle class may have a tradition of funding its offspring over a much longer period of dependency but it has also had the resources to do so. It has been argued, for example, that the result of the changed funding for students has been to increase rather than to decrease the barriers to access by working-class students, who may also be more likely to come from minority backgrounds or female-headed households. Dey and Morris (1999) also question the implications of this further extension of dependency for the young people themselves. It is worth remembering that entry to the labour market would have occurred around the age of 14 only a couple of generations ago and that for many young people this would have been accompanied by a move away from home into domestic or agricultural service. Numerous commentators have remarked on the apparently ineluctable trend of industrial societies to defer entry to social and economic independence for longer and longer periods. Those of us who experienced the revolt against the in loco parentis assumptions of university administrations in the 1960s may frequently be disturbed by the creeping reinstatement of the moral regulation of student life that an earlier generation fought against, Is the result to leave young adults less equipped for independent living and more reliant on support, advice and guidance from paternalist others than the robust assumptions of neo-liberal market societies allow? Is this a generation profoundly ill-equipped to deal with
910
Dingwall and Lewis
the choice-making active citizenship or consumerism that is increasingly forced upon them by other changes? If Dey and Morris (1999) discuss the implicit social control or disciplining of the young and their parents, McGhee and Waterhouse (1999) examine their explicit social control. In the early 197Os, there was a high degree of convergence between Scotland and the State of Massachusetts in their juvenile justice systems. McGhee and Waterhouse have returned to this topic twenty years later to ask what has happened in each system in the meantime. They note the growth of retributivist and crime control movements in the US and their echoes in the criminal justice policies of England and Wales. Scotland, however, has remained closer to the mainland European concern to avoid the criminalization of juveniles, a concern which has been strongly reflected in the reconstruction of Eastern European systems since 1989 (see Mosciskier 1998). The divergence of social policies within the nations of the United Kingdom is often underestimated: however, it is important to recognize that Scotland and Northern Ireland retained separate legal and administrative systems within the Union and that areas like health care, education and criminal justice have shown considerable variation within a general framework of entitlements, although the benefits system, for example was homogenous. It is likely that these divergences will increase with the creation of a devolved government in Scotland from 1999 and extend to Wales, which was accorded a lesser measure of devolved legislative power at the same time. One of the striking features of the Scottish system is the degree of public confidence that it has retained over a period when other jurisdictions have yielded to pressures for retribution. As McGhee and Waterhouse (1999) note, Massachusetts has become a good deal more punitive, reflecting the general US trends in penological practice. Although they do not seek to explain the difference, we may speculate that it is partly bound up with questions of national identity. The movement towards devolution was at least partly inspired by the antipathy of the Scats to being used as a testbed for many of the neo-liberal social policies of the 1979- 1997 Conservative administrations when that party had consistently held a minority of seats in Scotland. There remain tensions under the new Labour administration, where the Scottish party is distinctly to the Left of the government in London and committed to a more traditional social democratic programme of investment in public services and interventionist economic management. The protection of public services and the commitment to an active state involvement in the reduction of poverty were frequent points of con-
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flict between London and Scotland under the previous administration. Crime, drug abuse and other social problems were widely blamed on poverty caused by the ethnic arrogance and neo-liberal economic policies of the Conservatives. In this sense, juvenile crime did not offer itself as a basis for popular mobilization in the way that it did in England or the USA. If juvenile crime resulted from poverty and deprivation caused by the neglect of a colonial government, then a justice system premised on the assumption that most offending was the result of poverty became an arm of resistance to that administration. It was something that could be owned by the Scottish people as a symbol of their rejection of the alien values being foisted upon them from England. There are some similarities, for example, with the way in which the liberalization of criminal justice systems generally has been seen in Eastern Europe as a symbol of the departure of authoritarian state socialism and their reintegration with an imagined rule of law and acknowledgement of human rights in Western Europe. One of the ways in which Poland, for instance, could show that it was a ‘proper European nation’, despite the accident of forty years of communism, was by adopting what it took to be a European approach to penality with a much larger role for community punishments and rehabilitation than for confinement and retribution (Mosciskier 1998). Despite its general protection of a welfare orientation, McGhee and Waterhouse (1999) note that the Scottish juvenile justice system has come under some pressure from international human rights conventions to take greater account of juveniles’ rights. The final paper in this issue looks more deeply at the impact of European legislation on the circumstances of children and young adults. The intervention of the European Court of Human Rights is mentioned by McGhee and Waterhouse but Ackers and Stalford focus on the less well-recognized impact of the European Court of Justice. The European Union treaties have, to date, left most areas of domestic social policy, particularly family policy, untouched, under the principle of subsidiarity, although the Amsterdam Treaty’s provisions on health policy may mark a shift of direction. As Ackers and Stalford (1999) show, however, the creation of a Single Market and, in particular, the desire to encourage labour mobility and the development of a common European citizenship has inevitably trespassed on social policy issues. People cannot move around Europe in the manner envisaged by the treaties unless they can rely on an appropriate level of entitlements. The case law explored by Ackers and Stalford (1999) explores the implications of this for the behaviour of member governments and for the emerging conceptuali-
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zation of citizenship. The latter seems likely to be a crucial point of tension within the European Union over the next few years as the agenda of economic integration is substantially completed with the achievement of economic and monetary union and the introduction of a single currency across most, if not all, of the community. As usual, the British, or perhaps more exactly the English, seem likely to find themselves on one side of the argument and the mainland states on the other. The UK government has identified itself with flexible labour markets and a low-wage economy where most of Western Europe has sought to retain the post-war social market model with a high degree of collective protection, most evident perhaps in France, with its aggressive enforcement of restrictions on working time without loss of pay in order to distribute available employment as widely as possible. The UK, in contrast, has seen a rapid growth of social inequality during and since the 1980s with the number of children living in households receiving less than 50 per cent of average income trebling to 3.9 million between 1979 and 1991 (Hills 1996). Although the 1997 Labour government has made the elimination of child poverty within twenty years into a major policy goal, it is far from clear how this can be achieved simultaneously with the same government’s commitments to an economic order modeled on that of the USA unless the mirage of full employment and non-inflationary economic growth really can be given substance over a long period. Looking back over the last twenty or thirty years, one of the most striking features of the economic and political environment of European societies has been the creeping construction of a state-like entity at the European level. This has not always been an acknowledged process but, despite the recent troubles over the quality of governance exercised by the European Commission, seems substantially irreversible. At the same time, the nation states themselves have begun to look more fragile, at least in their classic centralized form. Germany, of course, was reconstructed after the Second World War as a federal state and Spain introduced a substantial measure of devolution in its post-Franc0 settlement. Belgium has virtually dissolved into two separate states sharing one territory. The United Kingdom has now introduced devolved government in Scotland and Wales and is actively striving to re-establish it in Northern Ireland, without finding an appropriate institutional model for England. The French, with their deep tradition of authoritarian central government may be fmding this movement most threatening, as the European Union is requiring them to respect
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indigenous minority languages and cultures which have long been repressed. It is far too simplistic to treat the European Union as some kind of embryonic United States of Europe, as some Americans often do. At the same time, there is no doubt that it is likely to play an increasing role in defining social policy agendas, although possibly more in concert with formations below the level of the traditional nation-states. This tendency will certainly be reinforced by the growing jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights and its willingness to extend the European Convention on Human Rights into wider and wider areas of domestic social policy. As we noted at the outset, it may not be possible to generalize about the social policies of European states today. There are some processes that are reinforcing this diversity in the weakening of the traditional nation-states: within Belgium, for example, French and Flemish communities effectively operate separate social security systems and it would not be surprising to see the existing differences between England and Scotland magnified. At the same time, the new political entities may find that their scope for variation has much clearer limits than currently exist at a national level as the jurisprudence of the European Courts expands. The definition and comprehension of these movements will be a major challenge for analysts of social policy over the coming decades.
References Ackers, L., & Stalford, H. (1999). Children, migration and citizenship in the European Union: Intra-community mobility and the status of children in EC law. Children and Youth Services Review, 2 I, 987- 10 10. Dey, I., & Morris, S. (1999). Parental support for young adults in Europe. Children and Youth Services Review, 21,915935.
Duncan, S., & Edwards, R. (Eds.). (1997). Sin gl e mothers in an international context. London: UCL Press.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalis., Cambridge: Polity. Hills, J. (1996). New inequalities:Tthe changing distribution of income and wealth in the United Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gauthier, A. (1999). Historical trends in state support for families in europe since 1945. Children and Youth Services Review, 21,937-965. Hrynkiewicz, J. (1998). From socialist to liberal utopia: Changes in Poland’s social policy since 1989. In A Kwak, & R. Dingwall (Eds.), Social change, social policy and social work in the new Europe (pp. 9-28). Ashgate: Aldershot.
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Lewis, J, Ed. (1997). Lone mothers in European werfare regimes. London: Jessica Kingsley. McGhee, J., & Waterhouse, L. (1999). Comparative juvenile justice policy: The alliance between Scotland and the state of Massachusetts revisited. Children and Youth Services Review, 21,967-985. Mosciskier, A. (1998). Changes in prison policy as a part of political and economic transformation in Poland. In A Kwak, & R. Dingwall (Ed%), Social change, social policy and social work in the new Europe (pp. 85-96). Ashgate: Aldershot.