Five—
Welfare States and Moral Regulation

A Scandinavian Success

Success stories in twentieth-century politics have been all too few, but the Scandinavian welfare states certainly count among them. It is difficult to think of societies where principles of solidarity and a recognition of obligations to strangers have been more embedded than in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. (Iceland, although part of an entity called Norden, and Finland, although geographically, if not linguistically, tied to the rest of Scandinavia, will not be considered here.) At a time when other countries use the state to wage wars or even exterminate whole races, the Scandinavians use it to encourage a sense of moral obligation. That is something to be proud of, and most Scandinavians are.

An increasing reliance on government to express the rules by which people are obligated to one another is an undeniable fact of recent Scandinavian experience. In 1960, public expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) were 25 percent in Denmark, 31 percent in Sweden, and 30 percent in Norway. Two decades later they were close to or had exceeded 50 percent; only Holland was in the same class as Sweden and Denmark in terms of total amount of public spending, and no other country in the world saw government grow at such a rate during those years as those two. (Norway's increase in public outlays, although smaller, was still quite high comparatively speaking.) Compared to the United States, where public expenditure as a percentage of GDP in 1982 was 10 percent higher than in 1960, in Sweden and Denmark it was 36 percent higher.^[1]

Also unlike the United States, the great bulk of this money was used not for defense or interest on the public debt, but for welfare state activities that, in one way or another, express a sense of obligation to others. In Norway, where the welfare state is less developed than in Sweden and Denmark, an effort to break down the spending increase since 1950 into its component parts revealed that welfare expenditures rose, while all other categories (except the miscellaneous category) decreased.^[2] Most welfare state programs have, as a result, become more generous; real social security expenditures, one of the largest items in the budget, increased by 124 percent in Norway, III percent in Sweden, and 88 percent in Denmark between 1970 and 1980.^[3] The welfare state has grown to a size, and at a rate, never imagined by its founders.^[4]

For these reasons, the Scandinavian welfare states are the best places to turn to examine empirically the consequences for civil society of a greater reliance on the political approach to moral obligation. (Important differences distinguish the Scandinavian countries; these will be discussed as we go along. My point here is that, especially in comparison with the United States, there is a "Scandinavian" approach to moral obligation that overrides local differences.) The strength of the welfare state—indeed, the accomplishment that makes the welfare state the great success story of modern liberal democracy—is its recognition that the living conditions of people who are strangers to us are nonetheless our business. The problem is whether this success comes at the cost of weakening social and moral ties in civil society, especially in families and communities. If it is true that people are more likely to learn a sense of obligation to others through the social practices they develop in the intimate sphere of society, and in that way also learn of their personal responsibility to distant and hypothetical others, the welfare state can bring in its wake an unanticipated problem: when government assumes moral responsibility for others, people are less likely to do so themselves.

Public Families

A major task of the welfare state has always been to provide for people who could not provide for themselves. Since most people live in families, the aid they received from government—in the form of old-age pensions, welfare benefits, or medical care—created a connection between the family and the state that has existed for some time. In its early formulation the welfare state borrowed the language of the family; it was, according to the

Swedish leader Per Albin Hansson in the 1920s, a folkhem, or people's home. "In a good home," Hansson noted, "equality, consideration, cooperation, and helpfulness are the guiding rules."^[5]

Considered in a material sense, the consequences of the welfare state for the family have been extremely positive. By removing families from the vagaries of the market, by protecting workers against arbitrary firings, by contributing to economic growth, by creating equality in society as a whole and thereby reducing stress, and by (in later years) making it easier for women to work in order to add to family income, the welfare state in Scandinavia raised a large number of families out of the realm of need and into the middle class.^[6] Given the success of various programs of social support in scandinavia, it is self-evident to argue that "the family supports the welfare state, and the welfare state needs the family."^[7] Yet recent changes, both in the family and in the state, raise the question of whether these realms are not really distinct, with implications for how people balance their obligations in the intimate sphere with those in the distant.

In the early days of the welfare state, government programs primarily emphasized transfer payments: shifts in income from one part of the population to another. With respect to families, child allowances—cash payments paid to parents on the birth of each child—are the most representative type of transfer payment. Particulars vary from country to country, but Scandinavian child-support systems tend to be divided into ordinary payments on the one hand, available to all families until the child reaches the age of sixteen, and special supplements to single women or handicapped children on the other.^[8] (The Swedish system also includes support for educational study, which can last until the age of twenty.) During the 1970s, child allowances in general decreased in all the Scandinavian countries. To some extent this was because of a falling birthrate, but it was also because of public policies that broke the principle of universalism—such as means testing in Denmark in 1977 and 1981 or the 1982 Norwegian decision to stop support in the month the child reaches sixteen rather than continuing the entire calendar year. (The latter decision was due in part to the fact that expenditures on child allowances in Norway, which had increased 300 percent at the end of the 1960s, began to increase again in 1979–80.)^[9]

Yet if direct payments to families in the form of child allowances decreased, overall government expenditures for the family increased during this period. At their highest point, expenditures on family programs represented only 3 to 5 percent of the gross national product (GNP)—small in comparison to large-expenditure items such as social security, but

Figure 5.
Family Welfare Expenditures, Scandinavia, 1959–84 (as percentage of GDP)
Source: Yearbook of Nordic Statistics,  1959-85.

still representing a substantial increase (in Sweden, a doubling) over a twenty-year period (see figure 5). Much of the explanation for why general family expenditures increased while child allowances decreased lies in a greater reliance on newer kinds of programs that changed the character of the relationship between the family and the welfare state. Instead of being based on the principle that the obligation of government was to transfer money from those who needed it less to those who needed it more, these programs emphasized the principle that government could build the institutions and carry out the services that the family itself had once provided.

Of course, government has always provided services for families, the most important of which is education. Unlike in the United States, where the market has become far more involved in the business of schooling, education remains an overwhelming public priority in Scandinavia. Sweden actively discourages private schools in any form; Norway, while it also relies extensively on public schools, does recognize some areas—such as religion or training in specific trades—where private schools are appropriate.^[10] Of the three countries, Denmark is the only one that actually encourages private

schools: 10 percent of school-age children attended private schools there in the late 1980s, up from 5.2 percent a decade before.^[11] Yet even in Denmark the state plays a role, because the government pays up to 85 percent of costs of sending a child to private school.

What has changed in the past two decades with respect to schooling is not the public commitment to education itself, but rather an increasing reliance on government to provide after-school programs—in marked contrast to the United States with its latchkey children. An extensive range of institutions exists for watching children in the late afternoon, and demand for such programs is growing: a 1980 use study showed that approximately 16 percent of Swedish and Danish children relied on such after-school centers, and by 1984 that figure had risen to 30 percent.^[12] Besides the wide range of activities offered by after-school programs, many organizations that once had a more private character, such as sports clubs, are now increasingly supported by public funds.^[13] Youth in Scandinavia, in short, have a good deal of contact with the state, not only when they are in school but even after school is over. As a Norwegian writer puts it, youth has become more "organized" in this part of the world.^[14]

A second indication of an increasing reliance on government in the family sphere in Scandinavia is the greater use of foster homes, institutions, and other methods for coping with problem children. A strong ideological component of the Scandinavian welfare state involves the idea that social problems can be passed on from parents to children and that government intervention is required to break the vicious cycle of inheritance.^[15] When there is a problem in the child's immediate environment—such as alcohol or drug abuse, poverty, violence, or a mother unable to cope—it is expected that the state will play an interventionist role. In general, that role has grown. The number of children under preventive care in Norway increased from about 2,000 in 1965 to over 5,200 in 1984, while in Denmark between 1970 and 1980 the number of children placed in foster homes increased by 400 percent.^[16] In 1974, 16,884 Swedish children were voluntarily placed in foster homes, and 9,960 involuntarily; by 1981, the proportions had shifted dramatically, as 12,378 children were involuntarily placed and 9,483 voluntarily.^[17] Sweden, as a result, developed a world reputation as the home of a "child Gulag." In 1983, for example, the German magazine Der Spiegel ran a story on Sweden saying that "nowhere else has the state become so totalitarian as in this country."^[18] A 1982 change in the law, however, helped bring the rate down;^[19] now, on a per capita basis, Denmark has more children "outside the home"—both voluntarily and involuntarily—than Sweden.^[20]

No one doubts that it is better for children in extremely problematic circumstances to be moved. The problem is who makes the decisions and how. In the Scandinavian countries, social workers and other therapeutic professionals have developed a preventive approach to these matters; for example, the expert testimony of psychologists is generally relied on to decide whether children should go to foster homes (or, in divorce cases, which parent should get custody) to an unusually high degree.^[21] Often basing their decisions on statistical tendencies and the hypotheses generated from these tendencies, social-welfare professionals feel that by knowing which kinds of families are likely to have the most problems, authorities can step in before the trouble starts. Thus, according to three Swedish social workers, circumstances such as alcoholism can have "a destructive influence on the child even when specific acts of abuse [do] not occur ."^[22] Scandinavian societies in this sense resemble what Jürgen Habermas has called a therapeutocracy , in which professional expertise comes increasingly to substitute for family autonomy.^[23]

Far and away the biggest component of the increase in government's role in providing services once assigned to the family, however, is the decision to finance and build a nationwide system for the provision of public day care, especially in Denmark and Sweden. The figures compiled in table 5 indicate that in all three Scandinavian countries, the number of children in public day care has doubled, or in some cases tripled, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. (The gap between Denmark and Sweden on the one hand and Denmark and Norway on the other is even greater than these figures indicate, since in Norway more older children are in public day care part time than full time.)^[24] Yet in spite of these increases, public day care is far from universal, since only in Denmark, and then only for older children, does the utilization rate account for more than 50 percent of all children.

Various efforts to examine reliance on public day-care institutions indicate that demand for them exceeds supply and that if more were to be built, more would be used. Danes lead Scandinavia in this respect. In 1985, only 5 percent of Danish children under the age of six were being raised full time by their mothers at home, while 55 percent were in public day care, 21 percent were in private day care, and between 3 and 5 percent were being watched by working parents on shifts, mothers on pregnancy leave, unemployed members of the labor force, or parents who worked at home.^[25] (The first figure is somewhat deceptive, since women can be in the labor market and still be home full time with their children, what with maternity leaves, shift work, and work at home.)^[26] In Sweden, by comparison, a 1980

study showed that 43 percent of children up to six years of age remained at home with one parent, while 30 percent went to public institutions, 14 percent went to private day care, and the rest were provided for with other solutions; 19 percent of children who qualified for public day care could not obtain it.^[27]

In the area of family welfare, especially with the commitment to public day care, we can see the emergence of what can be called a "new" welfare state, which, unlike the older one with its reliance on transfer payments, is much more directly involved in the regulation of moral obligations in civil society. Some sense of this shift in the character of the welfare state is provided by figure 6. In the mid-1960s, day-care facilities absorbed approximately 2 percent of all welfare state expenditures for families in Norway and Denmark, while child-care allowances constituted approximately half. By the 1980s, the balance had shifted considerably. Now (with Norway again the exception) day-care expenditures absorb close to half the family welfare expenditures, while the family allowance proportion has fallen to less than 20 percent. The new welfare state represents an important change in the relationship between government and the moral order as the state

Figure 6.
Family Welfare Expenditures, Scandinavia, 1960–84
Source: Nordisk statistisk årbog , selected years.

has come to play a far more direct role as a surrogate parent, making important and difficult decisions such as how children should be raised or which children ought no longer to live with their parents.

At the same time that changes in the welfare state have had a more direct effect on families, changes in the family have had a more direct effect on the welfare state. Statistically speaking, the Scandinavian countries have among the world's lowest rates of family stability, with Sweden as the extreme case.

Sweden is a society where the traditional family does not have a strong position. By international comparison, the marriage rate is low, the frequency of informal cohabitation high, and average household size small. The rate of family break-ups, the average age of mothers at first birth, the rate of children born outside of wedlock, the rate of single-parent families, and the rate of gainful employment are all high.^[28]

All these trends have been increasing in Scandinavia. A study of the Danish family and how it changed between 1975 and 1985 indicated that young people, especially boys, were twice as likely to leave home at a young age; that there were fewer families with young children; and that the percentage of children born out of marriage increased (although more children had two people raising them).^[29] As this last point indicates, high divorce rates (the divorce rate doubled in all three countries between the 1960s and 1980)^[30] do not necessarily mean more single parents: the percentage of "paperless" marriages, as they are called here, doubled in Norway between 1977 and 1984; in Denmark, 23 percent of cohabitating couples in 1986 were unmarried, compared to 9.6 percent in 1974; and in Sweden, 46 percent of the children born in 1984 were to parents who were not legally married.^[31] Yet because cohabitation is so extensive, the divorce rate actually understates family instability, since the breakup of many relatively long-term relationships is not included in the figure.

The consequences of divorce, especially for women, are not as severe in Scandinavia as in the United States. A Danish study found that women were often better off in new partnerships than in their former relationship. Moreover, their social contacts with kin and neighbors did not decrease after divorce, although in around 10 percent of cases there were problems with loneliness and isolation.^[32] Still, divorce does weaken relations in civil society: people who were once intimate, of course, have less contact with each other, and when they do, they experience difficult emotional problems; serious consequences for health and longevity are associated with di-

vorce; and the children of divorced parents find themselves in awkward, and often lonely, situations.^[33] While such trends are similar, if somewhat more extreme, to trends throughout the West and in that sense cannot be attributed to the growth of the welfare state per se, it also seems clear that the welfare state makes divorce somewhat easier to obtain and weather (by providing day care for the children, for example) and then seems the most appropriate mechanism for resolving the problems created by divorce (such as providing extra funds for newly divorced women).

As the state grows and families weaken, it becomes more difficult to remain hopeful that state intervention will not significantly alter the character of the institutions in civil society. Certainly the "traditional" family, in which the wife stays home and raises the children while the husband works (a tradition that is, in fact, the historical exception), has been changed significantly by the welfare state. The results from studies of low-income maintenance experiments in Seattle and Denver—where greater financial help to women increased the rate of family breakup—are applicable to women at all income levels in Scandinavia.^[34] The important question is not whether the nuclear family has declined, but what is in the process of replacing it.

In Scandinavia something is emerging that can be called a public family, in contrast to the emergence of a private family in the United States. A dramatic increase in the percentage of women entering the labor force has occurred in Scandinavia, as elsewhere; in Norway, whereas in 1965 14 percent of women with small children were in the work force (full and part time), by 1986 that figure stood at 69 percent.^[35] The great bulk of this new work involves civil service jobs that carry out the functions once performed by private families. In Norway, 66 percent of social workers, 93 percent of nurses, and 98 percent of home helpers are women.^[36] Of the growth in the labor force that took place in Denmark between 1960 and 1981 owing to the entrance of women, 25 percent was in day-care institutions and old-age homes, 12 percent in hospitals, and 27 percent in schools.^[37]

Socializing the young and caring for the sick, viewed traditionally as women's work, are still women's work, but now they are carried out for a government wage rather than within a family setting. Within a twenty-five-year period, women have jumped from the family sector over the market sector to a direct, and often difficult, relationship with the state sector—as dramatic, if not more dramatic, a development as the transformation of men from peasants to workers two hundred years ago.^[38] It is in this sense that we can speak of the public family in Scandinavia. The distri-

bution of sex roles has not greatly changed in Scandinavia (gender-defined work has probably been more thoroughly transformed in the United States), but their character has changed greatly: they have become "nationalized," in the sense that the Scandinavian welfare states organize through taxation and public services activities for all of society that were once undertaken more intimately and privately.

Many positive things can be said about the public family, especially that it has incorporated into T. H. Marshall's concept of social citizenship the rights of wives and mothers.^[39] But because the family symbolizes to such a great extent the moral relations of civil society, its character is inevitably too intimate and emotional to be well regulated by government. The notion of a "people's home"—with which the welfare state began and to which a great deal of attention is once again being paid—seems increasingly problematic.^[40] A people's home suggests that the caring which characterizes the intimate sector ought also to characterize the public sector; as Hansson put it in 1928, the rules of the home, when extended to society as a whole, "will mean the dispersal of the social barriers that now divide the citizens."^[41] But the term raises as well the opposite possibility: if commitments in the home weaken, so will commitments to the people (I will explore this subject in Chapter 6). Home, in short, is where "the people" ought not to be, at least not on a permanent basis; it is rather the place where specific people seek to strengthen their moral ties to other specific people. This is not to say that the penetration of the welfare state into civil society is a mistake; there are many cases when state intervention in the home is justified. But it is to say that the moral issues involved in the new welfare state are more serious than at first was realized. The Scandinavian welfare states, which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties. The irony of this development may be that as intimate ties weaken, so will distant ones, thus undermining the very moral strengths the welfare state has shown.

Social Networks and the Welfare State

Johan Borgen, a Norwegian novelist, wrote of his childhood: "Good people lived in our street, people who knew one another and greeted one another—in a way it was each person's security in a society that was already facing hidden threats from outside."^[42] In Scandinavia, the experience of farm life, village sociability, and regular church attendance is only a generation removed; older residents of the dense housing complexes in

Oslo and Stockholm were born into an entirely different world. Few wish to return to that world (although Borgen, when he read his memoir on Norwegian radio, did attract a huge audience). The point is, rather, that social changes which may have taken a century to take hold in other places occurred within one lifetime here.

Of modernity's trinity—urbanization, industrialization, and bureaucratization—the first two came late to Scandinavia. Sweden, the most industrially advanced of the three Scandinavian countries, was still primarily agrarian as late as 1900, and even its early industry was decentralized throughout the country in milltowns. Forty years later, as Gösta Esping-Andersen puts it, "Sweden had become the epitome of the Marxist polarized class society."^[43] Although the changes that have taken place in Denmark and Norway are not as dramatic as in Sweden, there they are even more recent. "Between 1960 and 1980," Natalie Rogoff Ramsøy notes, "two-thirds of all the smallholdings in Norway (that is, farms with no more than 12.5 acres under cultivation) went out of production"; moreover, from 1930 to 1980 the number of self-employed persons decreased 45 percent, while the number of people employed for a wage increased 122 percent.^[44] In Denmark it was not until 1958 that as many people were employed in industry as in farming, and by 1970 agricultural employment had decreased until it accounted for only 10.8 percent of all jobs; twice as many people worked in the professions as on farms.^[45]

The "great transformation" was not only more rapid and more recent in Scandinavia than in Great Britain or the United States, but it was also, and to a much greater degree, led by the state rather than the market. Fundamental moral questions, such as where and how people ought to live, were answered by relying on government. From 1931 to 1960, the urban population of Sweden increased from 38 percent of the total to 73 percent, in part because of public policies designed to reshape the map of Sweden.^[46] The question of where to house these new urban residents faced Social Democratic governments, which developed what they called the miljonprogamm: a plan to build one and a half million new apartments between 1960 and 1975.^[47] Such plans succeeded: by 1980, well over half the housing in Sweden had been built in the previous thirty years.^[48] (Only war-devastated West Germany built more housing in this period.) In Norway, as Rogoff Ramsøy has pointed out, housing and similar social services were also developed by administrative logic:

The trend toward practicing economies of scale extended far beyond the limits of the productive economy. . . . The same principle was applied to local administration and to the transformation of the primary school system. A considerable

amount of Norway's postwar urban housing was built in the form of large projects following principles of industrial organization.^[49]

(Denmark, by contrast, encourages more private housing than, especially, Sweden, and its cities are characterized more by suburban patterns familiar to Americans than by large-scale apartment complexes.)^[50]

The situation in Scandinavia is both similar to and different from that in the United States. In America, as I argued in Chapter 2, a strong reliance on voluntary associations, traditions of local autonomy, kinship networks, tax subsidies, and other practices delayed the entry of marketplace principles into real-estate transactions for a surprisingly long time. In Scandinavia, changes in the moral dynamics of local communities are just as recent. Some sense of how dramatic these changes in the character of civil society have been can be gained from table 6, showing information based on a sample of five thousand Danes interviewed in both 1976 and 1986. The intimate world of a Dane born in 1910 is radically different from that of one born in 1950: the former was likely to have been raised in a rural area with a tight-knit and large family, presumably (although we have no direct data on this) in frequent contact with other similar families in the same locality, whereas the latter was likely raised in a smaller, more unstable family in a more urban area. The difference with the United States, of course, is that in Scandinavia it is not the relatively late arrival of the market that has changed the character of civil society, but the relatively late arrival of government.

The major question posed by changes of this magnitude is whether they cause a weakening of social ties and informal networks similar to that caused by the growth of the market as a moral code in the United States. Bent Rold Andersen argues that they have:

Weakened social networks, a phenomenon widespread in the Western world, cause fewer conflicts in the welfare state, where the public sector readily takes over. Like a vicious circle, this itself tends to speed up the dissolution of networks and thereby extends the public sector ever more. This flexibility, this ease of response, has become a threat to the welfare state itself.^[51]

Andersen's view has been strongly challenged, especially by Stein Ringen and Gösta Rehn, both of whom argue that the welfare state has in fact strengthened informal networks and social ties.^[52] All three, however, may be correct.

Ringen and Rehn rely on a series of studies undertaken by the Institute for Social Research of the University of Stockholm. Surveys of the Swed-

ish population in three separate years—1968, 1974, and 1981–were conducted to discover, among other things, the amount of contact people had with friends and relatives. These data show, almost without exception, increases in the number of social contacts over this thirteen-year period. For example, the number of people who visited relatives regularly increased from 28.1 to 31.0 percent of the total sample, and the number that visited friends increased from 29.8 to 39.9 percent. Measuring the same phenomenon in the reverse way, the Swedish studies showed that isolation has decreased: the number of people who had very few contacts with relatives dropped from 15.8 to 11.9 percent of the total, while the figures involving friends decreased from 9.8 to 5.8 percent.^[53] Material published after Ringen's book appeared confirms his point. Although the number of Swedes living alone has grown, social contacts showed little significant difference between 1981 and 1986, and in some cases even increased.^[54] The appropriate conclusion to be drawn from this material is that, especially in comparison to societies that rely on the market, there is no reason why reliance on the state has to be accompanied by isolation and alienation for the majority of citizens.

Yet the number of contacts people have says little about what they expect from one another. That question is better answered through community studies, which explore the nature of the social contacts between people at the local level. One such study, based on the social-network analysis techniques developed by North American sociologists such as Claude

Fischer and Barry Wellman, had results in Sweden quite similar to those discovered in the United States. Working-class people had fewer ties to others than middle-class people, but the ties they did have were much stronger and involved relying on others for help. Among middle-class civil servants, by contrast, ties between individuals were more geographically spread out and specialized, characteristic of "weak ties" that, according to Mark Granovetter, have their own kind of strength.^[55] A similar study, conducted in a medium-sized Danish city in Jutland and a Copenhagen suburb, revealed that while large numbers of people would ask others for help in the form of advice or to "give a hand" with moving, very few were willing to ask people from their networks for more ongoing assistance, such as picking up or watching children, shopping, or cooking. Moreover, significant numbers of people had no real desire for greater help from their social contacts.^[56]

One possible conclusion to be drawn from all this research is that the social trends associated with the welfare state both strengthen and weaken community ties simultaneously. (Whether the welfare state actually causes these trends is beyond the ability of this observer, and most likely any observer, to determine.) By contributing to social prosperity, these trends, as Ringen and Rehn emphasize, increase leisure time and expand the social horizons of the beneficiaries. At the same time, by raising working-class families into the middle class, they contribute to the geographic and social mobility that undermines solidaristic neighborhood patterns; help to create networks of civil servants that can provide necessary services more efficiently, but also more impersonally, than friends; and cause new housing to be built, the very practicality of which improves the material conditions of many families but also contributes to a certain anonymity. Ties between neighbors and friends, in short, expand and contract at one and the same time.

The trends associated with the welfare state do not abolish community, but, as with the family, they do alter its character. Obviously the family still exists: people still get married, have children, and experience daily life through their families. In turning some of the functions of the family over to government, Scandinavian societies have strengthened some of its aspects, especially its level of economic support, but weakened others, especially its ability to serve as a source of moral rules. In a similar way, the rapid urban development and extensive social programs of the welfare state do not eliminate the frequency of contacts with others; informal networks, for example, can still be relied on to solve some of the social problems

handled by the welfare state.^[57] In general, however, such contacts express a sense more of sociability than of moral obligation.

That moral ties in civil society may have weakened in Scandinavia, even while social ties have been strengthened, is indicated by rates of crime, alcohol consumption, and, to a lesser degree, suicide, all of which tend to garner a good deal of attention when these societies are discussed. One should interpret these statistics with some care. Sweden, for example, does not have—as most people believe it to—the world's highest suicide rate: that honor belongs to Hungary. Nor is a dramatic increase in alcoholism all that uncommon: every Western society has experienced an increase since World War II, and in Sweden the rise in alcohol consumption follows almost exactly the rise in disposable income. Yet one cannot ignore such trends, for ever since Durkheim, the notion that the strength of civil society can be measured indirectly through behavior patterns indicating weak social networks has become something of a commonplace.

What should concern us most is not the number of suicides in Scandinavia relative to other countries—a difference that might be explained by, for example, the weather—but instead the increase in suicides in this part of the world when the weather is held drearily constant. (Actually, in all the Scandinavian countries suicides are less frequent in December and February and more frequent in May and August.)^[58] Such an increase—ironically, given its reputation—is not true of Sweden, where the suicide rate declined from 22.3 per 100,000 people in 1970 to 18.2 in 1985.^[59] The other two countries, however, experienced a significant increase. In Norway the suicide rate, though it remained at roughly the same level from 1951 to 1970, began to increase substantially after 1970.^[60] A similar pattern holds for Denmark, where the total number of suicides increased from 931 in 1960 to 1,484 in 1983 before leveling off in the past few years.^[61] If Durkheim was correct that suicide is symptomatic of declining social solidarity, then the increase that has taken place over the past twenty years is at least partial cause for believing that the moral ties of civil society are less strong than they once were.

A similarly dramatic rise can be detected in yet another indirect measure of the strength of civil society: the rate of consumption of dangerous substances. As with suicide, Scandinavians are known as hard drinkers, but again, what is of importance is the increase that can be measured over time. All three Scandinavian countries have relatively similar patterns. In general, the consumption of hard liquor has decreased, in part because of stricter regulation, whereas the consumption of wine and beer increased

sixfold between the 1950s and the 1980s.^[62] These trends have been accompanied, again as elsewhere in the West, with increases in tobacco consumption and narcotics use.^[63] There is, of course, much debate about what this increase in alcohol consumption means, since even with recent increases it is at about the same level it was in the nineteenth century. Yet the visible rise in the number of derelicts on the streets of Stockholm, Oslo, and Copenhagen says something about the weakness of ties in civil society, even if exactly what it says is open to dispute.

Finally, a sharp rise in crime has taken place in all three Scandinavian countries over the past twenty years. In 1970, 47 murders were reported in Denmark, 6 in Norway, and 218 in Sweden; ten years later the numbers were 236, 31, and 394, respectively. Assaults also increased, if not at quite the same rate.^[64] But perhaps the most illustrative statistics in this context are those for breaking and entering, for it is relatively petty crimes of this sort that most break down the kinds of trust and mutual help networks of civil society. As figure 7 indicates, these rates have nearly quadrupled in Denmark and Sweden. Behind such figures lies a change in the nature of the civil society: less trust, greater fear of involvement, and a dramatic increase in the use of bicycle locks.

What is perhaps most important to emphasize about all these figures is not that each, by itself, represents a weakening of the social fabric; in comparative terms, Scandinavia is certainly not characterized by normlessness. (Indeed, the opposite charge—excessive conformity—is the one most often leveled against these countries.) Rather, each category is related to the others, suggesting that all together they measure the extent to which a group exists, whose size is difficult to determine, that is not part of the welfare state's success story. People who commit suicide, for example, are far more likely than people in the general population to suffer from problems of alcoholism; and excessive use of alcohol in turn contributes to violence against others.^[65] They are also likely to be, in classic Durkheimian fashion, unmarried, residents of large cities, and without siblings or friends, as one Norwegian study concluded.^[66] (Similarly, Danes who attempted suicide were three times more likely to live alone than members of the general population, and those who succeeded were four times more likely to.)^[67] These interrelationships suggest that while social contacts and networks are still healthy among those who benefit from the welfare state, they are weaker than ever among those who, for whatever reason, are alienated from its way of functioning.^[68]

Such a conclusion is reinforced by an examination of the relationship

Figure 7.
Breaking and Entering, Scandinavia, 1950–80 (from reporting to sanctioning, per 100,000 population 15–67 years of age)
Source: Hans von Hofer,  Nordisk kriminalstatistik 1950-1980  (Copenhagen: Nordic Statistical Secretariat, 1982), 142.
^a Figures for guilty verdicts and resolved verdicts are combined for Denmark.

between income level and social isolation under the welfare state. Social research in Scandinavia has long emphasized a concern with reducing the effects of inequality. Consequently, the populations of these societies are routinely divided into various "social groups" measuring such characteristics as income, political resources, and other indicators of unequal social status. In a recent Danish study of the quality of life, all five social groups reported less isolation over time; the number of people who felt that there was no one they could-talk to or that they were too often alone even though they did not want to be decreased between 1976 and 1986, thereby confirming the point that the welfare state does not lead to isolation and weak networks. But the most interesting fact that has emerged from this breakdown of social contacts by social class was not that working-class people have fewer contacts than middle-class people, although they do; it was that the only group in the entire population whose degree of loneliness and social alienation has increased, and often at significant rates, was that which could not be categorized as a distinct social group at all.^[69]

There is, in conclusion, one way in which higher suicide or alcohol consumption rates, if interpreted with caution, seem to indicate a weakening of moral obligations in civil society in Scandinavia. Strong moral ties in civil society can help to soften the fall of those unable to function in a modern political and economic system. When these ties weaken, they add to the isolation and marginalization of those already isolated and marginalized. The welfare state, because it relies on government to strengthen the social bond, places a premium on the mobilization of political resources. For that reason, its primary moral commitment is to those who share a political definition as citizens, not those who share a social definition as generalized brothers or sisters. Scandinavian societies have broadened the concept of citizenship to an unusually wide, but still not all-inclusive, degree. Hence, for all those who are brought in to the functions of the welfare state, there will always be some who are left out. Reliance on government instead of the moral ties of civil society to express obligations between people improves the social conditions of most but worsens the lot of those who, already worse off, lack the resources to operate effectively in a system organized around political rules.

When we try to answer the question of whether community and social ties have weakened as the welfare state has grown, we find evidence that can support almost any response. A reasonable conclusion might be that both the social trends associated with the welfare state and, to an undeterminable degree, the welfare state itself have altered the character of every-

day life, moving it from informal reliance on what Gösta Esping-Andersen and Walter Korpi call "kinship and community altruism" toward what they call "the strength of entitlements to welfare based on social citizenship." As a consequence, we can agree with them that in this part of the world "the principles of the welfare state are pushed further into civil society than is internationally common."^[70]

The notion of social citizenship embodies all the strengths and weaknesses of a political approach to moral regulation. Citizens, even social citizens, have rights. People who live in civil society have obligations. The replacement of one language by the other implies a movement from society to politics, from a recognition that we owe things to one another because we share certain understandings to a recognition that we can expect things from others because we vote and belong to an organized political community. This is not a problem if one believes, as Helga Hernes does, that "although the institutional balance between state and society in Scandinavian social democracies has quite clearly gone in favor of the state, there is . . . an awareness of the dangers of alienation that has resulted in important participatory reforms at all levels, involving individuals in their functionally limited corporate roles."^[71] But if one shares a Weberian distrust of government, even of benevolent and participatory ones, a political approach to moral regulation, by thinning out the moral texture of civil society, does seem to contribute to a sense that moral obligations can be satisfied without the active participation of individuals as moral agents.

From Welfare State to Welfare State

Created by working-class men at a time of economic insecurity, the welfare state brought into being a new kind of society, characterized by a commitment to full employment, the provision by government of services deemed essential to the realization of a better life (such as medicine and education), and a system of transfer payments designed to promote the general goal of rough equality between social classes. So impressive has been the overall performance of the Scandinavian welfare states that we tend to forget how recently they were constructed. As Esping-Andersen and Korpi point out, the "Scandinavian model" is almost entirely a post—World War II phenomenon.^[72]

Just as the Scandinavian welfare state itself is a recent phenomenon, even more recent is the emergence of a "new" welfare state emphasizing the construction of institutions designed to carry out tasks once assigned

to civil society. (The commitment to the building of public day-care centers, for example, stems only from 1970.) If the old welfare state, in the course of the 1980s, has stopped growing and is instead entering a period of consolidation, the new welfare state is growing more rapidly than ever.^[73] If it continues to grow at the pace it has, we can expect that by the year 2000 Scandinavia will again have created a new social experiment. Unlike the earlier version, this welfare state will be one in which both men and women work while their children are cared for in public institutions. (It may also be the case, as a Norwegian projection points out, that women will come to dominate the public sector as men flee to the private sector.)^[74] At the same time, the industrial working class will continue to shrink and the middle class will not only grow but also, to a greater degree than ever before, avail itself of the benefits of the welfare state. Finally, public policy will not only protect against economic insecurity but also try to secure the good life for as many as possible. These societies, in short, will continue to be caring ones, but the caring will increasingly be carried out by therapeutic professionals in institutions and less by immediate kin, neighbors, and social networks. Moral obligation will, in that sense, be more public than ever before: government, to an unprecedented degree, will be involved in the structuring both of obligations to distant others and of obligations to intimates.

What is taking place in Scandinavia, in short, is the replacement of the welfare state by the welfare state . Instead of familial and community relations creating a sense of responsibility for the welfare of others, which the state enforces as a matter of last resort, the state is becoming the primary moral agent in society, seeking to express, as best as it can, a sense of responsibility for the welfare of those who no longer have much power in civil society. The emergence of the new welfare state has helped to create an atmosphere of uncertainty about future directions. That uncertainty can be understood neither politically, for the welfare state is still very popular,^[75] nor economically, for it has not faced, at least to this point, an unsolvable economic crisis.^[76] It is, rather, moral in nature. In everyday life it takes the form of tax avoidance, distrust of authority, and, in the words of former Danish social minister Bent Rold Andersen, a feeling that "the Nordic governments, in their steady expansion of the public sector, have overrated the willingness of individual citizens to contribute their share to the communal pot."^[77] Among academics and social scientists, it usually takes a conservative form, with the argument that the welfare state has become "heartless" and tends to weaken families and private charity.^[78] (Left-

ist intellectuals, who in the 1960s were critical of the welfare state, now tend to defend it and to call for its extension; feminist thinkers, similarly, while often ambivalent, generally find the programs of the welfare state to their liking.)^[79] At no time since World War II has concern over the moral consequences of state intervention been as strong in Scandinavia as during the past few years.

There are, in particular, two essentially moral issues that the new welfare state has been unable to address satisfactorily. The first involves the dilemmas of the public family. Early notions of the welfare state were premised on the idea that men would work and women would stay home, thereby making unnecessary (to be more correct, unthinkable) the idea of government substituting for one critical ingredient of civil society—the family. As one Danish historian has put it, "While the working class movement strongly stressed a struggle over the old society's patriarchy and patriarchal relations in production and the public society, it was completely silent about patriarchal relations in the workers' own families."^[80] Now that the rates at which women work for a wage are higher in Scandinavia than in most other countries, reliance on government to carry out tasks of social reproduction fills the gap between the society that existed a generation ago and the one that exists now.

As many feminists have correctly argued, the bulk of welfare work has traditionally been invisible and unpaid, performed by women within the family.^[81] The entry of women into the labor market on the one hand and the growth of a new welfare state on the other make the invisible a public policy and the unpaid a civil service career. This represents progress: women are freer, workers are less easily exploited, contributions are recognized, and the problems of destructive families are corrected. Yet when the state is responsible for social reproduction, the family cannot be as responsible, despite the best efforts of many families. One can therefore admire the frankness of someone who argues that in the face of all these problems, our best hope is to accept the reality of Goffmanesque "total" institutions for carrying out these tasks and to try to make them as humane as possible.^[82]

That we may have to turn our moral responsibilities over to institutions, no matter how reformable they may prove to be, acknowledges, however, why the new welfare state, for all its benefits, treads on slippery moral ground. Day care provides an illustrative example. Surely any two-income couple is grateful to be able to deliver their small children to a day-care center before going to work. And most people recognize that, despite cutbacks and staffing problems, day-care centers try to be caring places.^[83]

Yet when small children spend the greatest number of their waking hours being watched by public employees—who have their own children, their own rights, and their own wage to consider—moral dilemmas easily arise. What is in the best interests of parents, especially two working parents, is not always in the best interests of children (see Chapter 6 for more on this theme). While parents generally like the system of public day care, they would prefer different kinds of work arrangements that would allow them more time with their children—and reduce their feelings of guilt.^[84]

It is, in short, possible to have two full-time-employed partners, state-financed day-care institutions, and well-functioning families, but not all three at once. Yet most people want, and feel entitled to, all three. One response to such a dilemma is not to choose among the three goals, but to juggle. Each of the Scandinavian societies juggles in a different way: in Norway, public day care is relied on far less than in the other two countries, and friends, neighbors, and grandparents are relied on more; Sweden has a very large amount (second only to Norway among the industrialized countries) of part-time work for women, which, in combination with paid maternity leaves, substantially reduces the number of small infants in public day care; and Danes, who tend to be more libertarian than Norwegians and Swedes, solve the problem by somehow finding a way to pick up their children by 3:30 P.M.^[85] Yet such juggling does not resolve the moral guilt that people, especially women, feel. No matter how publicly articulated the ideal is that raising children is a social responsibility which can be carried out by the state, many women still feel that the responsibility is their own. The result has been described by Natalie Rogoff Ramsøy:

Women today suffer from a role squeeze—an incompatibility between their family and other obligations. Recent surveys document the problems that result. Married women with young children have far less time at their disposal than any other group in the population, and they also exceed all others in psychosomatic symptoms—sleeplessness, nervousness, depression, use of tranquilizers, etc.^[86]

As a substitute for the family, it would seem, government is a second-best solution. Given other goals—the most important of which is greater sexual equality in the workplace—state intervention in civil society becomes a necessary, but not completely satisfactory, response.

A similar set of moral problems follows from a second difficult dilemma: the degree to which the new welfare state, instead of transferring funds from the rich to the poor, becomes a subsidy for the middle class. The original goal of the welfare state was to alter the rules of distribu-

tive justice in society by reducing the barriers between social classes. As Esping-Andersen and Korpi have argued, a political strategy designed to represent only the interests of the working class could never hope to succeed. In order to appeal to middle-class voters, Social Democratic parties developed notions of universality in the distribution of benefits. Benefits were no longer a matter of charity but a right, comparable to the property rights historically enjoyed by the rich.^[87] The popularity of Social Democratic governments in the 1960s and early 1970s was due to the political success of universal programs financed by seemingly endless economic growth.

The very success of the welfare state in raising more people into the middle class has, however, changed its moral equilibrium. Unlike the egalitarian thrust associated with the first welfare state, which used the powers of government to level income differences between classes, the new welfare state increasingly begins to provide disproportionate benefits to the middle class. (This is true not just of Scandinavia, but of other societies as well.)^[88] To some degree, this change in the distributional effects of welfare programs is directly attributable to the fact that the new welfare state, unlike the old, builds institutions to carry out tasks of moral obligation once associated with civil society. For one thing, a large number of people elevated to the middle class are themselves public employees working in the labor-intensive area of service delivery. As they begin to exceed the number of people employed in the private sector, they develop a double claim on the welfare state as both providers and users: "In Scandinavia, the producers and clients of the welfare state together make up between 40 and 50 per cent of the electorate."^[89]

In addition, the political dynamics of service delivery are quite different from those of transfer payments. It is, administratively speaking, relatively easy to universalize a cash payment, since all it involves is sending out a check in the mail to everyone. When government provides a service, by contrast, those who are most likely to benefit are those organized to take advantage of it. In the field of day care, where the ideal of universal access would come close to bankrupting society, selectivity had to be introduced, and the selectivity, not unexpectedly, shows a class bias: working-class women are more likely to stay home with their children or, when they work, to rely on relatives or hire other mothers (often paid for, and regulated, by the state).^[90] Furthermore, when cutbacks become necessary, it is more difficult to cut back institutions with highly articulate middle-class clients and constituencies. The idea of universality, which made perfect

sense when the primary task of the welfare state was to redistribute income, becomes an impossible goal (and can only contribute to cynicism toward the welfare state's objectives) when society is better off.

As opposed to transfer payments, which represent a "vertical" redistributive effect from the rich to the poor, institutions such as day-care services tend to benefit the middle class and therefore represent a "horizontal" shift from one part of the middle class to another. This may help to explain why no legitimacy crisis faces the welfare state. It may also help to explain why the tax revolt against the welfare state has fizzled (the welfare backlash parties in Norway and Denmark, after a period of decline, are now as strong as ever, but their focus is as much on immigration as on taxation), since it was only a matter of time before the middle class discovered that, for all the tax burden imposed by the welfare state, the advantages in policy were considerable. Hence, white-collar workers in Norway have begun to polarize in their attitudes toward the welfare state, with those who work in the private sector more against it and those in the public sector more for it.^[91] In Denmark, the number of lower-paid civil servants who supported the parties to the left of the Social Democrats nearly doubled, between 1971 and 1984, going from 14 to 26 percent of the vote.^[92] Even in Sweden, where working-class solidarity for the welfare state is strongest, other income groups clearly recognize an interest in government provisions.^[93]

The middle-class bias that follows when the welfare state intervenes in activities once carried out by civil society undermines the logic of solidarity that made the welfare state such a powerful idea in the first place. Esping-Andersen in particular has emphasized that the moral power of the welfare state comes from the "decommodification" logic it introduces by universalizing benefits.^[94] Yet if reliance on institutions, as opposed to transfer payments, is inevitably selective, the result is to re commodify what government has to offer. The new welfare state increasingly enables middle-class people to buy the labor of others who will perform their moral obligations for them. That is not only a far cry from what the welfare state was originally designed to do, but it also raises the uncomfortable question of whether subsidizing middle-class life-styles can generate the same kind of consensus and moral solidarity once associated with creating greater social equality.

The Scandinavian welfare states have for over half a century been premised on the assumption that the state could act as the moral conscience of society. It is remarkable how long that assumption has been maintained, and certainly many people think it can continue to be so maintained indefi-

nitely. Yet it is also the case that in Scandinavia society has acted as the moral conscience of the state. Ties of political consensus, strong moral traditions associated with Lutheranism, solidaristic ideologies growing out of social and political movements, and common moral lessons taught by the family have long worked to insure that state intervention would occur within generally accepted boundaries. In particular, government intervention took place primarily within the economic sector of society, and its major forms—even in Sweden, where reliance on the state was strongest—were indirect. (Sweden did not consider nationalizing private companies until the 1970s, and it remains reluctant to regulate private industry; indeed, in many ways direct government regulation of industry is more directly enforced in the United States than in Sweden.)^[95]

Unlike the situation in the United States, where the entry of the market into civil society was heralded by Chicago school theorists before it happened in practice, in Scandinavia the boundary between the state and civil society was increasingly crossed in practice without anyone thinking about it in theory. As the Scandinavian welfare states approach the year 2000, the precarious balance between state and society that made the older welfare state work so well is becoming harder to maintain. Families and communities, instead of contributing to the articulation of moral understandings that soften political regulation, are themselves increasingly organized according to political rules. Notions of solidarity and a consensus around the principle of equality, which made sense when governmental intervention was indirect, are turning into a defense of the interests of those classes who benefit primarily from the new services the welfare state offers, as interest groups become passionate about defending the programs that benefit them but less concerned about the programs that benefit others. Nearly everyone laments the increase in antisocial behavior associated not only with criminality, but also with everyday rule-breaking and moral shortcut-taking. The international outlook and humanitarian instincts long associated with Scandinavia are put under strain as a result of increased immigration. Surely not all these changes can be attributed to a greater reliance on politics as a way of organizing moral rules, but at the same time, such a reliance does make it more difficult for the Scandinavian societies to protect traditions of consensus and solidarity—for which state intervention can be a helpful, but never complete, substitute.

The concept of welfare, Erik Allardt has written, contains three elements: having , defined as the realization of both physical needs such as good health and long life and material needs such as sufficient income;

being , defined as individual identity and the possession of enough political resources to realize this identity; and loving , defined as "needs of solidarity, companionship, or, above all, participation in a network of social relations, in which people think about and pay attention to one another."^[96] The question posed by the new welfare state is whether a weakening of loving will affect having and being. One way to find out is to examine the implications of greater state intervention in the intimate sphere of society on the same measures of moral obligation to distant strangers used earlier with respect to the market: intergenerational transfers, ties to others expressed through altruism and charity, and the webs of social existence defined by common possession of cultural symbols. If there is a moral problem with the new welfare state, it will show up precisely where the older one was strongest: in the sense of solidarity people feel toward those they do not know and probably never will.