Funding limitations weaken the foundations of welfare state

Dominique Schnapper, Project Syndicate

Tensions have existed between liberty and equality ever since modern democracy placed citizenship at the root of political legitimacy. In every democratic society, freedom for all has been at odds with equality for all, and vice versa. But no matter how frequently we proclaim that all "are born free and equal in dignity and rights," this clash of principles has not diminished. Indeed, it has simply taken new forms, partly owing to economic and technical progress -- and with it an increase in available wealth -- and partly owing to efforts aimed at allaying it.

The tension between civil, legal, and political equality and the reality of economic and social inequality was noted as far back as the French Revolution. Today, citizens inevitably use their civil, legal, and political rights to demand economic and social equality -- or at least reduction of inequality. Equal rights, according to this logic -- as socialist thought has emphasized -- imply public policies aimed at narrowing inequalities in the actual living conditions of all citizens.

Indeed, contemporary democracies are distinguished precisely by their ambition to combine respect for liberty and formal equality of rights with public policies that, as the Preamble of the 1946 French Constitution puts it, provide all citizens with "adequate living conditions." Contemporary democracies base their legitimacy on ensuring both political and social rights.

But intervention by modern democratic states goes beyond the boundaries of the post-1945 welfare state, which sought to protect individuals against risks linked to old age, family responsibilities, accidents, illness, and the labor market. Intervention has now been broadened to include education, culture, sport, and ethnicity, in the belief that only citizens who receive equal education and training, and have their historical and cultural specificity recognized, can enjoy genuine equality.

As a result, the number of participants in educational institutions, as well as the absolute and relative costs of these institutions, is increasing. State-funded cultural programs strengthen "welfare democracy" even more, while the economic and symbolic importance of sporting events has led to state intervention that increasingly organizes athletic training along the lines of the public school system. Thanks to the welfare state, organized sports, which first appeared among the leisured upper classes, are now practiced by everyone.

Moreover, communal rights have progressively been accorded to the various groups that compose a nation. Can there be real equality for citizens whose language, history, and collective identity are marginalized by the dominance of the majority's language, history, and collective identity? Even in France, where universal republican principles theoretically contradict such policies, public action is being 'ethnicized' under the mask of geographical or social criteria.

Greater equality reinforces the ambition for still more equality. "When inequality is the common law, the strongest inequalities are not conspicuous," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his classic Democracy in America, but "when everything is more or less leveled, the slightest inequality hurts." Because no society can ensure complete equality, "welfare democracy" feeds dissatisfaction and frustration -- and hence demands for more welfare democracy, not less.

As a result, the welfare state becomes unavoidably particularizing, as it constantly adds and refines categories and groups entitled to formal recognition and resources. With the surge in unemployment in the 1970s, for example, several new categories of beneficiaries were created and subsequently modified to adapt to funding limitations. All European countries then established a minimum income policy to help those whose benefits had run out. It is the source of the inflation in legislation in the European countries.

So the birth and development of the welfare state reflects an inescapable fact: Freedom and equality are both in tension and intimately linked, because both values are part and parcel of the democratic project. Democratic principles call for organizing society in such a way that both values can be realized to the greatest possible extent. But the path for particularistic action that does not undermine the liberty and equality of all citizens is narrow. This is a paradox intrinsic to democracy, and it is the duty of politicians to deal with the tensions to which it gives rise.

Yet it is also the duty of citizens to preserve the formal, political meaning of citizenship as state intervention broadens to ensure the well being of all. This might restrict political freedom in the name of greater equality. Still more probably, it might confine politics to the day-to-day management of redistributing wealth among groups that coexist in the same society but do not necessarily share much else.

Such an outcome, however, would quickly render all efforts to ensure material equality unsustainable. For without a common political identity on which to base social solidarity, redistribution of wealth by the welfare state loses its legitimacy.

The writer, Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and a member of France's Conseil Constitutionnel, is the author of La France de l'intigration (2001), La communauti des citoyens (2004), La relation ` l'autre (1998), Qu'est-ce que la citoyenneti? (2000), La dimocratie providentielle (2002).