Introduction: Stepping back or stepping back in?
New or positive welfare presents an ambiguous image of a state which simultaneously steps back from and into society. In the face of social risks and harms in areas like public health, crime and youth behaviour, governments across Western Europe are developing new governing mechanisms complementary to existing ones, such as judicial punishment (following crime) and risk compensation (following disease or unemployment). The prevention of social harms and risks − whether it is recidivism by habitual offenders, early school leaving by at risk adolescents or an unhealthy lifestyle among the lower socio-economic strata − is always related to the way citizens behave. It is believed that society cannot be governed by traditional institutions such as the legal system or welfare state services, but requires interventions in actual civic processes. The specific type of governance associated with this ‘social risk management’ (Schmid, Reference Schmid2006) has been labelled as ‘positive welfare’ (Giddens, Reference Giddens1998), ‘enabling welfare’ (Gilbert, Reference Gilbert2002), ‘new welfare’ (Taylor-Gooby, Reference Taylor-Gooby2008) or ‘social investment state’ (Engelen et al., Reference Engelen, Hemerijck and Trommel2007), and is also related to issues of crime prevention and security policy (for example, Garland, Reference Garland2001; Boutellier, Reference Boutellier2005, Reference Boutellier2011; Peeters, Reference Peeters2013). Characteristic of all these approaches is what Rose calls ‘the problem of control in a “free society”’ (Rose, Reference Rose2000: 337).
Central to this form of governance is the view that citizens have their own responsibility in preventing social harms. This notion, however, does not necessarily imply a retreating state. On the contrary, another characteristic of ‘new welfare’ is the state's role in enabling, persuading, enticing or nudging citizens to ‘take responsibility’ for their lives and their communities. The resulting state–society interactions highlight a tension between the autonomy of the citizen to make choices about his or her ‘private’ life and state efforts to shape the ways in which citizens understand and exercise their autonomy.
How do politicians and governments publicly justify and sketch out a new realm of state intervention dedicated to make citizens ‘take responsibility’ for the public cause? In this article, we presume that a fundamental transformation is underway in the role of Western European states with regard to social risks, and that this transformation finds its origins in the way new roles of both ‘state’ and ‘society’ are constructed in political discourse. We analyse the discourse of public officials, attempting to develop new conceptualisations of ‘responsibility’ and ‘solidarity’, and present policy interventions in youth policy, where such new practices of ‘behavioural governance’ are introduced. These empirical accounts serve the exploratory aim of this article to describe the ways through which contemporary Western European governments practice new welfare. In the concluding paragraph of this article, it is suggested that this emerging form of governance might have significant consequences for the boundaries between the political, public and private spheres.
Two images of governance
The term ‘governance’ commonly evokes an image of a modest state. It refers to a shift in the management of the welfare state through privatised provisions, and describes practices of governing in which the state is merely one of many relevant actors for realising public value. Societal organisations, citizen participation and self-regulation, as well as free market arrangements, are examples of alternatives to centralised and hierarchical state regulation. According to Kjær (Reference Kjaer2004: 22), ‘[t]he various conceptions of “governance” . . . point out that government in the classical liberal sense is less and less a reality, and that new methods of control and regulation are required that do not assume the state or the public sector has a monopoly of such practices’ (cf. Pierre, Reference Pierre2006: 4).
The shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ (for example, Rhodes, Reference Rhodes1996; Hajer and Wagenaar, Reference Hajer and Wagenaar2003) refers to ‘the recognition of the limits of government and governmental steering and the shift towards central government's reliance upon other actors, sectors, and levels of government’ (Bekkers et al., Reference Bekkers, Dijkstra, Edwards and Fenger2007: 3). Governments are not able to impose top-down regulations and policies (or do not have the financial means to do so), but negotiate and cooperate with societal and other governmental actors in networks which are characterised by interdependence, continuous interaction, self-organisation and a certain degree of autonomy from the state (for example, Sørensen and Torfing, Reference Sørensen and Torfing2007; Rhodes, Reference Rhodes2011). Co-steering, co-production, co-regulation and co-operation characterise the repertoire of governance (for example, Kooiman, Reference Kooiman2003; Alford, Reference Alford2009).
These and other authors look at governance from a managerial perspective. They emphasise the horizontal and cooperative relations between public and private actors, talk in terms of partnerships and contracts and assume a retreating state and a decline in the conventional top-down steering capacity of the state.
Contrary to the managerial perspective, a political perspective on governance casts the spotlight on the role of conflict, interests and power in public policy. This perspective sees governance as merely a different technique by which the state governs and tries to influence societal actors and citizens (for example, Pierson, Reference Pierson2004; Bell and Hindmoor, Reference Bell and Hindmoor2009; Davies, Reference Davies2011). It acknowledges the political aspects in everything the state does, even if this comes in the subtle guise of ‘soft power’ (Nye, Reference Nye2004) or ‘libertarian paternalism’ (Sunstein and Thaler, Reference Sunstein and Thaler2003): ‘Governance . . . marks the space of a liberal game of assimilation. Where many political discourses seek to articulate a field of antagonistic forces as agents of political transformation, governance seeks to implicate them as ‘partners’ in a game of collective self-management and modulated social adjustment’ (Walters, Reference Walters2004: 35).
Consequently, the political perspective on governance does not portray a retreating state, but an interventionist, even ‘greedy’ (Trommel, Reference Trommel2009) state, expanding and ‘smartening’ its toolkit. A political perspective on governance not only sees the limited steering possibilities, whether it concerns efforts to prevent public health problems as a result of citizens’ unhealthy lifestyles, to realise a secure and well-maintained public domain, or to ensure that children grow up safely, but also makes it possible to identify new techniques through which the state intervenes in society to actively involve citizens in the realisation of policy ambitions. Thus understood, governance is not only a form of ‘stepping back’ but also a subtle way of ‘stepping into’ society and managing citizen behaviour.
This political perspective on governance can be linked with Foucault's understanding of ‘governmentality’ (Reference Foucault2007: 108), which he coined to point out the broad repertoire of techniques a state has for the ‘general management of society’ (Foucault, Reference Foucault2007: 105): ‘[I]t is not a matter of imposing a law on men, but of the disposition of things, that is to say, employing tactics rather than laws, or, of as far as possible employing laws as tactics; arranging things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means’ (Foucault, Reference Foucault2007: 99). Foucault's understanding of ‘governmentality’ encompasses in many aspects what we nowadays call strategies of ‘governance’. Desirable behaviour is not enforced, but a web of incentives and disincentives is spun around society to extract voluntary obedience and to ‘mould conduct’ (Rose, Reference Rose2000: 323). Seen from a political or Foucauldian perspective, new welfare governance implies a form of working upon ‘the ways in which individuals regulate their own behaviour to ensure this is consonant with the interests of the state’ (Pierson, Reference Pierson2004: 75). Whereas the traditional welfare state took over social issues through state organised compensation mechanisms for harms such as poverty, the new or positive welfare state seeks to work upon the ways in which citizens themselves can contribute to the realisation of policy ambitions.
Research question and outline
In the following section we will build upon the political image of governance to enable an understanding of contemporary transformations in the way many western European governments deal with social issues such as crime, welfare, youth and integration. It is presumed that political choices and strategies form a core explanation for the way techniques of governance are introduced and implemented. The central research question is: how do politicians and governments publicly frame and legitimise a new realm of state intervention dedicated to enticing, persuading and nudging citizens to ‘take responsibility’ for the public cause?
Two case illustrationsFootnote 1 are presented here to show where asking this question might take us when analysing contemporary welfare governance practices. The case of the Netherlands is taken as point of departure for a broader discussion of transformations in the governance of western European societies. First is an analysis of Dutch political discourse in the first decade of the twenty-first century, which aims to shed light on the government's justification strategy. The political perspective on governance draws attention to the motives and mechanisms which trigger state interventions and serve as a guideline for their implementation. A total of seventy-four relevant speeches by Dutch public officials who are presumed to influence political discourse (cabinet ministers and mayors of the major Dutch cities), the government's declarations of policy on taking office and the annual Queen's speeches from the period 2001 to 2010 form the empirical basis for the analysis of political discourse. The speeches were selected from national databases following a search for terms such as ‘responsibility’, ‘social cohesion’, ‘security’, ‘public health’ and ‘citizenship’. In the analysis of the various documents, special attention was paid to references in the text to (politically normative) notions concerning state, society and individual citizens. These references formed the core argument in the selected speeches, not a marginal subtopic. The analysis was conducted following an interpretative approach (for example, Yanow, Reference Yanow2000) and is constructed from the empirical data by reconstructing the similarities in the argument patterns of the selected documents (cf. Eisenhardt, Reference Eisenhardt1989; Charmaz, Reference Charmaz2006; Kelle, Reference Kelle, Bryant and Charmaz2007).
The second empirical account is an analysis of Dutch youth policy, which serves as an exemplary case for the actual transformations in the state's intervention repertoire. The account of Dutch youth policy supports the findings in the discourse analysis since it shows how, in this case, the level of political talk is closely related to the level of actual policymaking and intervention. Based on an extensive analysis of twenty-first century Dutch security policy and public health policy (Peeters, Reference Peeters2013), the main characteristics of new welfare governance practice were reconstructed. More specifically, the analysis focused on the selection and proposed effect of policy instruments and objects of intervention. Youth policy is especially relevant here since the prevention of social risks by identifying children and adolescents as target groups is a key element of new welfare. To capture the broad range of youth-related policies, a more discipline-oriented domain (crime policy) and a more care-oriented domain (public health policy) were selected. Moreover, both these policy domains offer many opportunities for behavioural incentives and disincentives, which enable the identification of new modes of governance.
The transformation of responsibility and solidarity in Dutch political discourse
The following is an account of an analysis of Dutch political discourse in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The government's justification strategy for a new mode of welfare governance consists of three steps. The argument is reconstructed in the following with the help of relevant quotes from the analysed texts.
The limitations of government
Typical of the issues of new welfare is that they cannot be faced by government alone. Contrary to traditional modes of dealing with, for instance, crime and illness, new welfare shifts attention to the role citizens themselves can play. Instead of a reactive judicial system or curative health care system, a focus on the actual societal sources of crime and disease is required. The first step in government's justification strategy is constructing the limitations of its own ability to tackle societal problems. For instance, a more secure public domain requires efforts from a broad range of actors:
Security is not a ready-made product, coming from the drawing boards of ministries in The Hague. Security requires more. The citizen and societal organisations are indispensable for the construction of security in daily practice. They can realise a lot when it comes to keeping neighbourhoods liveable.Footnote 2
And in the realm of public health, realising a healthy lifestyle requires the cooperation of citizens:
As a minister I can think up plans, give information and propose incentives, but in order to be successful an adolescent's entire social environment should cooperate.Footnote 3
Constructing a shared responsibility
‘Government as usual’ does not work to actually prevent social issues of crime and welfare. Hence, government stresses the role citizens themselves play as both part of the problem and part of the solution: ‘Security is a mutual concern for state and citizen.’Footnote 4 The second step in government's justification strategy is the construction of shared interests between government and society. In the realm of security policy, a more secure public domain is understood by government as in the best interests of all citizens. And in the realm of public health, leading a healthy life is presumed as every citizen's most rational course of action. A construction of shared responsibilities follows from this premise of shared interests. If a secure public domain, a proper upbringing of children, a healthy lifestyle and an adequate level of social cohesion is in everyone's own interest, and if government only has a limited ability to solve these problems by itself, it is only a small step to calling citizens to account for their contribution to new welfare issues: ‘society as a whole cannot do without responsible citizens’.Footnote 5
Thus, a specific ideal of citizenship emerges:
Citizenship is: the ability and willingness to participate in society . . . In neighbourhoods and districts, where people fight insecurity and degradation together. At schools, which pay intensive attention to conflict management and a ‘normal’ contact with each other . . . In public transport, where rules of conduct are enforced more strictly and where aggression is being suppressed.Footnote 6
In other words, government does not make citizens ‘responsible’, in the sense that the state steps back and lets citizens deal with societal problems themselves, but rather aims to obligate citizens: to make them ‘responsible’ in the sense that they are expected to contribute to the ‘res publica’.
The construction of citizen responsibility walks a thin line between freedom and restraint. It is a matter of finding ‘new arrangements between individual freedom and societal ties’.Footnote 7 The notion of ‘responsibility’ appeals to individual autonomy, but is mainly used here to address citizens on their capacity to assess the consequences of their actions. This conceptual leap transforms ‘individual responsibility’ from its traditional liberal understanding as ex post accountability for one's own actions (for example, Hart, Reference Hart1968; Ewald, Reference Ewald, Baker and Simon2002) into an ex ante virtue, which emphasises acting in the present and preventing undesirable situations and events (Bovens, Reference Bovens1990: 35). The appeal to individual responsibility becomes an ethical self-steering mechanism (Rose, Reference Rose2000: 321) and part of a republican-communitarian instead of a liberal agenda: ‘people are much more than merely a citizen in the legal sense of the word or a consumer’.Footnote 8
In the wake of the transformation of responsibility, the notion of ‘solidarity’ undergoes a similar change. Whereas the traditional welfare state called for solidarity with the victim, new welfare governance calls for solidarity with the community: ‘All parties involved should take into account the risks involved with their own actions for themselves and for others.’Footnote 9 For example, whereas disease was associated with a form of victimhood in the welfare state, it is, as a consequence of the preventive attitude towards non-communicable diseases, now understood as a lack of solidarity from the unhealthy citizen with the taxpayer. Collective health care expenditures as a result of an unhealthy lifestyle are portrayed as ‘avoidable costs’ by individual citizens.
Managing responsibility and solidarity
The third and final step in government's new welfare justification strategy is not just to obligate but also to incentivise: to ensure that citizens behave according to politically defined norms. New welfare governance aims at ‘responsibilisation’ (for example, Rose, Reference Rose2000). However, ‘responsibility’ does not imply that citizens are left completely free to decide their private course of action. Instead, it is a matter of responsibilisation on government's terms. The ideal is to ‘nudge’ people into behaving according to (the state's view of) the public interest of their own accord, for instance by connecting policy ambitions to presumed individual interests, by organising the opportunity structure in such a way that people are seemingly spontaneously directed towards desirable behaviour (Thaler and Sunstein, Reference Thaler and Sunstein2008), or by proactively ‘reaching out’ to citizens who are at risk of showing undesirable behaviour. Take, for instance, public health policy, in which government works upon the choices citizens make with regard to their lifestyle:
Forcing people does not work. One should not put down lifestyle in laws and regulations. This harms the freedom of choice and consequently a strong society. For good reason our prevention programme is called ‘Choosing a healthy life’. This choice however requires that people are well informed. That they know what is harmful . . . That there is a diverse offer of products and that there is an insight into the consequences of a choice.Footnote 10
On the one hand, the responsibility of citizens for their own health is left untouched: they are, at least formally, free to choose for an unhealthy lifestyle. On the other hand, government presumes a healthy lifestyle to be the rational choice and the social norm, and only a lack of willpower in the face of unhealthy temptations is presumed to keep citizens from behaving healthier. As a consequence, government describes its responsibility towards the general public as ‘making the healthy choice the easy choice’.Footnote 11
Similarly, government also develops measures to support parents with children who are at risk of developing a criminal lifestyle:
Street coaches are visible on the streets 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They actively approach groups of adolescents and correct where necessary . . . Family coaches visit parents of troublesome adolescents unannounced in their homes. In almost every instance, they are allowed in. They confront parents in their own language with the behaviour of their son(s) . . . After the first visit, they return a second time to close an intention agreement with parents and son(s). And then they return regularly to check upon this agreement. The street coaches see to the compliance to this agreement on the streets.Footnote 12
This line of argument is also used to justify state interventions towards adolescents who are at risk of developing an unhealthy lifestyle:
Reducing – or better still, preventing – excessive alcohol abuse by adolescents is the primary responsibility of parents and tutors. They should do all they can to stop their children from drinking alcohol before the age of sixteen . . . But parents are not alone in this. This cabinet supports them with information and legal measures. For instance, we have raised the tax on wine and tobacco and will do so on beer in the following year. In any case, the control on the prohibition on the sale of alcohol and tobacco to children under the age of sixteen will be strengthened.Footnote 13
The common pattern in these and other policy proposals is the construction of shared responsibilities between state and society and the subsequent governing of these mutual responsibilities by behavioural interventions. Instead of relying on traditional government strategies such as penalisation of behaviour (in the classic administration of justice), compensation of harm and offering objective information (in the classic welfare state), a broad set of governance strategies is developed to regulate the way citizens deal with their responsibilities, for instance by making agreements with food vendors on offering healthier nutrition, by offering parenting support to families with risk adolescents, by redesigning the public domain to reduce the opportunities for criminal behaviour, by increasing surveillance to deter and identify at-risk citizens or by raising excises as a disincentive for alcohol and tobacco use. This new intervention repertoire transforms the interactions between state and society. Most importantly, it politicises behaviour which was previously a matter of individual freedom and it implicates citizens as co-operators of political will formation. We will return to the implications of this in the concluding paragraphs.
New welfare governance in Dutch youth policy
Government's aforementioned justification strategy deals with transformations in the state's ‘definition power’. Here, early twenty-first century Dutch youth policy is analysed to penetrate new welfare governance at the level of a state's ‘intervention power’. Youth policy is especially relevant for new welfare governance, since the prevention of social risks is an important objective of the various policy proposals. Children and adolescents are seen as the pre-eminent target groups for prevention. Effectiveness of preventive measures is said to increase if they are timed so that harms can still be avoided: ‘Youth policy is based on the notion that prevention pays off.’Footnote 14
Children are also believed to often be more susceptible to behavioural interventions than adults. And youth policy is a paradigmatic illustration of the shared responsibilities between state and citizens. The role of the state is presented as being complementary to the responsibility of parents for raising their children:
We are beyond a non-committal attitude. If parents and children do not want to cooperate, we will make use of forceful or even coercive measures . . . We do not take these measures to invade people's privacy, nor to punish someone for faulty behaviour. We want to offer help to those who really need it. Whether they ask for it or not. This is because as a society we have the responsibility for the well-being of all childrenFootnote 15
Youth policy involves a broad range of programmes. Our focus here is on youth behaviour issues in crime policy and public health policy. For each, we will discuss interventions at the collective level and interventions at the level of individual children, adolescents and families.
Crime policy: pedagogical strategies for at-risk adolescents
On a collective level, crime prevention interventions generally apply equally to both adolescents and adults, such as the redesign of the public domain to reduce the opportunities for criminal or annoying behaviour (street lighting, closed off arcades, clear sightlines), the widespread use of CCTV-surveillance at ‘hot spots’ in the city to deter criminals, and the introduction of new administrative competences for maintaining public order (such as stop and search of citizens without a prior suspicion, area bans and administrative confinement).
However, the majority of youth crime prevention measures are specifically directed at individual children and adolescents. First, children and adolescents are made a primary target of police surveillance, especially when young children under the age of twelve are concerned. These children are not liable to legal prosecution, but can be approached in various other ways. They can, for instance, be addressed by police officers on their behaviour in the public domain. If police officers come across children under the age of twelve in risky circumstances, they will bring them home to their parents and a notification will be made in the national index of at-risk adolescents. Youth care providers may then take further action.Footnote 16
Secondly, intensified monitoring of all Dutch children on risk factors is introduced to enable early identification of at-risk adolescents: ‘This cabinet emphasises early detection of risks, with the broadest reach possible. From (before) birth to adulthood.’Footnote 17 Standardised ‘risk profiles’ enable professionals to detect risks and make a provisional diagnosis of the physical, mental, social and cognitive development of children. Also, a ‘referral index risk adolescents’ (an electronic application for a national registration of interactions between an organisation and an adolescent) and an ‘electronic youth dossier’ making the youth care files of every Dutch child available nation-wide to all relevant organisations have been introduced. The prevention of school drop outs is a key priority, as they are four times as likely as school leavers with a diploma to become involved in criminal activities.
Early detection of at-risk adolescents is a crucial precondition for early intervention on the level of individual children, adolescents and families: ‘Early detection of problematic behaviour . . . is of great importance. Many scientific studies show that the chance of behavioural change is the largest when interventions take place in an early stage.’Footnote 18 Therefore organisations involved do not wait for parents to report concerns about their children or for the police to arrest an adolescent, but engage in several forms of monitoring and outreach based on concerns about a child's development. An initial house call to assess a family situation can lead to an offer of family support, and, if parents prove uncooperative, eventually to a Family Supervision Order.
If, despite outreaching approaches, children and young adolescents do go off the rails, sanction regimes are designed to contribute to the prevention of recidivism. For example, first offenders are eligible for a non-judicial pedagogical routing, which may include community service, courses on the dangers of alcohol and drugs, personal apologies to the victim and discussion sessions with the parents. And in case of more serious offences by juveniles, compulsory reintegration programmes are commonly part of the court verdict.
Public health policy: making the healthy choice the easy choice
Contrary to crime policy, collective interventions tend to prevail over individualised interventions in public health policy. Government's approach revolves around the notion of ‘choice’, which appeals to citizens’ free will on the one hand and to the possibility of making specific (healthy) choices on the other hand. A Health Department policy memorandum sums up the view:
People do not have to smoke or drink too much, but many of them do. People can get enough physical exercise, but (only) less than half the population wants to exercise half an hour a day. Physical exercise can prolong your life by three years. Healthy food such as vegetables and fruit is at sale in abundance, but many people prefer fat, sweet or too salty products. In short, citizens can choose for a healthy life. Adults should realise this. And they should also realise the choices they can make for themselves and in their role as an example to adolescents.Footnote 19
Children form an important target group, since the ‘foundation for a bad lifestyle is often laid at an early age’.Footnote 20 Early interventions towards young children can prevent the development of non-communicable or welfare diseases. Parents should therefore be involved in youths acquiring a healthy lifestyle. Ideally, this begins with awareness raising when people consider having children: ‘A healthy life begins before conception.’Footnote 21 Complementary to this parental responsibility, government sees its task in ‘supporting the citizen to make the healthy choice’Footnote 22 and in ‘enticing people to make healthier choices’.Footnote 23
Since motives such as money, pleasure, comfort and habits determine the lifestyle choices people make as much as objective knowledge does, mere information campaigns are insufficient. In order to make the healthy choice the easy choice, several techniques are used:
• Choice architecture (cf. Thaler and Sunstein, Reference Thaler and Sunstein2008): making healthy products more easily available in shops, canteens, school cafeterias and vending machines.
• Regulation: introducing stricter age limits for the sale of alcohol, raising excises for alcoholic beverages popular among adolescents, banning television commercials for alcoholic beverages during the daytime and introducing smoking bans in schools and public buildings.
• Communication: using social marketing techniques to show how easy and fun a healthy lifestyle can be, health education at schools (where all children can be reached), and deliberately normative information campaigns to get the message across that smoking or drinking at an early age is ‘not done’.
• Facilitation: increasing the number of sporting grounds and cycling lanes in the city, closing covenants with food producers to make the composition of prepared meals healthier and the portions smaller, organising sporting activities in and around schools, and creating a national network of low-threshold parenting support centres.
However, in some cases and for some children, collective prevention will not be enough to stop the development of an unhealthy lifestyle. As in crime policy, early detection aims to identify individual at risk citizens among the population and make interventions possible when an undesirable future can still be averted. With regard to obesity, children are regularly weighed at primary schools to check their physical development. If necessary, overweight and obese children can be referred to youth health care services or a paediatrician for personal support programmes on a voluntary basis. The objective is not only weight loss but also a structural change in an unhealthy lifestyle. This requires an effort by a child's entire social environment, and most importantly by its parents (for example, Vos, Reference Vos2011).
The youth policy case shows how the transformation of responsibility and, to a lesser extent, solidarity in the state's definition power forms the trigger and justification for the development of a specific type of measures in the state's intervention power. First, parents are presented as often incapable and sometimes unwilling to tackle their children's problems on their own. Second, the role of the state is presented as complementary to the role of parents for raising their children. And, third, government develops an intervention repertoire directed at helping parents to ‘take their parental responsibility’. The analysis of Dutch youth policy shows how new welfare governance brings about a politicisation of citizen behaviour and a blurring of the boundaries between the political, public and private sphere. Parents are implicated as co-operators of political will formation.
Conclusion
A political, instead of managerial, perspective on governance enables the identification of the political motives and strategies to influence societal processes and citizen behaviour. New welfare governance moves beyond traditional government techniques, such as the penalisation of criminal behaviour or the compensation for welfare risks. In the face of new social issues such as crime and insecurity, problems in the upbringing of children, immigration and integration and unhealthy lifestyles, Western European governments look for ways to influence and steer citizen behaviour before actual problems occur or become unavoidable. In recent years, government has reinvented itself in social policy domains and has thereby also restated the relation between state and society.
The new welfare state is, despite its emphasis on governance and forms of ‘soft power’ (Nye, Reference Nye2004), not a modest state, but a state which has found new techniques to work upon ‘the ways in which individuals regulate their own behaviour to ensure this is consonant with the interests of the state’ (Pierson, Reference Pierson2004: 75). More specifically, government focuses on working upon the ways in which citizens understand and practice ‘responsibility’ and ‘solidarity’. Both notions are echoes of, respectively, the modern liberal state and welfare state, where they formed the justification for state intervention after a certain phenomenon had occurred: individuals are held responsible for the acts they have committed in the administration of justice, and individuals can rely on solidarity if they fall victim to externalities such as unemployment and illness.
In the new welfare state, these very same concepts are transformed into arguments for citizens to assess the consequences of their behaviour ex ante, before they make a certain choice and before they act. Responsibility and solidarity appeal to the liberal values of individual autonomy, but are also used to justify a specific type of state intervention designed to incentivise, entice, persuade and nudge citizens to choose for a specific course of action. The temporal shift from ex post to ex ante responsibility and solidarity forms the logic behind the governance strategies of the new welfare state.
The rise of new welfare governance brings about a blurring of the division between the private, public and political sphere. This division is central to a liberal understanding of the state (for example, Arendt, Reference Arendt1958; Habermas, Reference Habermas1962; Berlin, Reference Berlin2007: 171). This move beyond the conceptual antagonism between state and society, which is in a sense inherent to the notion of ‘governance’, leads to a further politicisation of behaviour in the public and private sphere. Through the rhetorical transformation of ‘responsibility’ and ‘solidarity’, government has opened up a new realm of state interventions directed at managing the choices we make and the contexts in which we make them. Government implicates citizens as co-operators of political will formation. Therefore, what we may gain in the effective approach to social problems through new welfare governance, we may lose in shielding our private lives from political concern and state interference.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr Gerard Drosterij for his invaluable contributions to the research and analysis presented in this article. The author would also like to thank Professor Paul ‘t Hart for his critical comments on an earlier version of this article.
