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The article presents a discussion of modern social policy and its postmodernisation and then attempts to apply these ideas to analysing the development of the notion of Social Europe, focusing in particular on the Green and White Papers on social policy published by the European Commission in 1993 and 1994 respectively. Modern social policy is driven by the mission of combining capitalist economic efficiency with social and national cohesion. It recognises the primacy of social class divisions within the social structure and its corporatist political basis is the solidarity between the social partners, the representative organisations of capital and labour. The analysis of the texts of the Green Paper and the White Paper on social policy hopefully demonstrates that postmodernisation processes are seeping through into the thinking of the Commission and that the idea of Social Europe is moving in more realistic directions. With the realisation that a supra-national, federal EU welfare state will never happen, attempts have been made by political scientists to theorise the nature of EU social policy now and in the future. Social policy in Europe is being driven hard by economic policy, notably the Maastricht convergence criteria, which arguably reflect more of a neo-liberal agenda and the narrow economic interests of capital. Great concern is expressed about social cohesion, but it is not sufficient to be translated into effective policies.

This section presents the preface of the book Survival of the European Welfare State, edited Stein Kuhnle. Contributions to this book are mainly based on papers especially prepared for the roundtable in Bergen in September 1997. Chapters 8 and 12 are revised versions of papers first presented at a panel on Rethinking the Welfare State that the editor convened during the World Congress of the International Political Science Association in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in August 1997. Chapter 7 was later commissioned to achieve a more balanced coverage of empirical developments in all the four major types of (West) European welfare states during the 1990s. The contributions in this book embody a range of views and interpretations of recent and current developments of national welfare states in Europe, but analyses of crises, challenges, successful reforms and unsuccessful reform efforts all relate to the survival-thesis. The aim of the book is to provide a more informed empirical basis for interpretations of welfare state development in a historical and comparative perspective, and thus also a better basis for theorising about the European welfare states. The book would not have been possible without support of various kinds.