Antonios Roumpakis

Familistic welfare capitalism in crisis: social reproduction and anti-social policy in Greece

Familistic welfare capitalism is a model of national political economy prevalent in many regions in the world (Southern Europe, Latin America, and Asia), where the family plays a double role as the key provider of welfare and a key agent in the models socio-economic and political reproduction. The article offers a new approach to the study this model by adopting an expanded concept of social reproduction to capture its historical evolution, using Greece as a case study. Our empirical analysis of austerity measures on employment and pensions demonstrates, how, in the Greek case, a crisis of social reproduction of the traditional form of familistic welfare capitalism was already underway prior to the well-known sovereign-debt crisis. And further we show how the adoption of austerity measures and pro-market reforms is deepening this crisis by severely undermining the key pillars of familial welfare security while rapidly transforming the model into a political economy of generalised insecurity.

Rattling Europe’s ordoliberal ‘iron cage’: the contestation of austerity in Southern Europe:

This article explains the popular revolt against austerity in Southern Europe as the outcome of profound politico-economic changes that are shaped by the transformation of the European Union’s (EU’s) macro-economic governance. It comprises three parts. The first part demonstrates how ordoliberalism – the Germanic variant of (neo)liberal economic thinking – was embedded in the EU’s new macro-economic governance, in processes that constitutionalise austerity and remove democratic controls over the economy. The second part examines the impact of austerity-driven reforms on welfare and employment in the aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis. These reforms undermined the social reproduction of Southern Europe’s familistic welfare model by destabilising three key pillars of social protection: employment security for households’ primary earners; small property ownership; and pension adequacy. The third part analyses the emergence of anti-austerity social politics in Southern Europe, both parliamentary and grassroots, and assesses their effectiveness in light of the collapse of public trust in both EU and domestic political institutions. The article concludes with our reflections on the fragility of EU’s integration process under the hegemony of ordoliberalism.