Janina Gosseye

Designing the Belgian welfare state 1950s to 1970s: social reform, leisure and ideological adherence

Introduction: Belgium, a pillarised state The Belgian welfare state came about, like most others in Western Europe, as a political project at the end of the Second World War. The Social Pact that in April, 1944, was signed between representatives of the labour movement, leaders of the employers’ organisations and a few high-ranking civil servants, provided the basis for what later on became a well-elaborated system of social insurance, covering health care, unemployment, old age pensions, child benefit and the annual vacation. In Belgium as elsewhere the political basis for the grandiose new ‘social contract’ came forth from the profound uncertainties that people had been exposed to during the war. Because quality-of-life prospects had become blatantly unreliable, it was generally felt that social justice on an impartial basis should be guaranteed by the State. In contrast with American corporate capitalism and Soviet communism, the welfare state project was an attempt to devise a specific European answer to Cold War politics and to emerging postcolonial realities. In most European countries this resulted in strong legislation which offered social security to the majority of the population, administered by a new bureaucracy. This was paralleled by the establishment of planning institutions meant to facilitate the redistribution of wealth, knowledge and political power. Hence all Western Europe saw the rise of heavily subsidised housing estates and social infrastructure, such as health facilities, cultural or community centres and sports facilities. The way in which these amenities were planned, financed and managed varied considerably among the different nation-states. In some countries, such as the Netherlands or Sweden, planning was very much centralised and the distribution of amenities was carefully administered by national institutions. In other countries, such as Belgium, a more decentralised policy prevailed that, thanks to subsidies from the state, enabled local authorities to plan and realise these new facilities. Historical, sociological and philosophical studies of the welfare state abound. Studies that focus on how the welfare state was translated into built reality are scarcer. The domain of housing is by now reasonably well covered. Less attention, however, has been paid to the other built infrastructure to which the welfare state gave rise: the cultural centres, sports fields, hospitals, schools, universities, retirement homes and other social amenities that were built as part of the effort to provide equal access for all to provision that previously catered only to the happy few. These massive construction programmes have so far not been systematically 557