Civility on trial: welfare in the Western world

In the Western world, the hot issue of welfare and related social services is being scrutinized by austerity-minded governments. Uncertainty about the security of the working and middle classes abounds. If uncertainty gives way to societal unrest resulting from cutbacks in social spending, we can expect to see an increase in crime, political extremism, and other social pathologies. Depending upon how far the downsizing of Western welfare systems is carried, many on both sides of the Atlantic agree that, on the eve of the twenty-first century, civility itself is on trial.

In order to assess the functioning of welfare systems on the other side of the Atlantic, I spent nearly a month in France and Italy this past summer interviewing two dozen government officials, business executives, academicians, journalist, and physicians. When I returned home to California, I compared my findings with recent developments in the welfare controversy in the United States.

Of the European countries, France has the most complex and certainly one of the most comprehensive social-welfare systems. Nearly 22 percent of the gross national product is spent on welfare-including health, retirement, unemployment, and education - and over half of the GNP is spent on social services overall. France is also burdened with an unemployment, level of 12.5 percent (more than double that of the United States) and, like Italy and the United States, it must address the needs of a growing elderly population. The high rate of unemployment is problematic because fewer workers means less government revenue, and in large measure the social-insurance system, especially pensions, is based upon length of employment.

Still, the munificence of France's "womb-to-tomb" social-welfare system is remarkable by any standard. There is comprehensive and largely reimbursable medical and dental coverage. Retired persons receive pension payments of unlimited duration for up to 80 percent of a white-collar worker's final salary and 70 percent for blue-collar workers. The state has mandated an official minimum wage of $1,200 per month, and a minimum of five weeks of paid vacation and two weeks of paid public holidays per year. To help the hard-core unemployed, the government issues Revenue Minimum d'Insertion payments ($460 per month for individuals) to poor people over 25 years of age. And, as in many other European countries, there is free education from elementary grades through doctoral and professional programs. Not surprisingly, all of the French people I interviewed gave high marks to their country's welfare system.

All of this is not without a price, naturally. Reining in the high costs of assistance and the high level of taxation (about 60 percent of gross individual salary) needed to sustain the current level of welfare and related social services presents President Jacques Chirac's conservative government with a daunting challenge. For one thing, he is confronted with his country's sense of civic sohdarity - the sens civique - that united enough people in support of strikes in December 1995 to force the government to abandon proposed welfare and other social spending cuts.

Across the political spectrum, there is a great deal of consensus among those left and night of the political center to resist austerity reductions in the interest of humane governance or civility. For example, Jean-Pierre Sakoun, an avowed conservative, and business executive whom I interviewed in Paris, did not see a need to dismantle or even shrink his country's welfare system. He spoke for nearly all of the Parisians I inter, viewed when he remarked:

It's natural for the French people to think that the state is the guarantor of society - caring for the aged and poor. The French do not think society will be cared for without intervention of the state.... Americans would see this as the worst system in the world. Our current economic crisis will not change this sharing of the wealth. France has decided to maintain its system even if the economy is in trouble.

The French model of a highly centralized, efficient welfare state contrasts sharply with that of Italy, which is decentralized and loosely organized. Like the French system, However, the Italian system provides national health care, generous unemployment benefits and retirement pensions, and free public education through the university level. Most of Italy's poverty is found in the south, where the unemployment rate is 20 percent and where, according to those I interviewed, welfare fraud is rampant. About 45 percent of the elderly live with and are cared for by their family (the corresponding figure for France is 25 percent).

The Italians I interviewed valued their welfare system - though they did not speak as proudly of it as the French did of their own system - and called for paring it down while preserving, its basic commitments to those in need. Corrado Serra, vice-president of Banca di Roma in Milan, for example, told me that Italy's health-care system "distributed benefits fairly but was not well managed." To improve health-care management, he urged more privatization. The CEO of Istituto Europeo di Oncologia, Dr. Stefano Mchelini, likewise recommended increased privatization.

Gian Franco Blower, president of Helitalia in Florence, feared that, unless the social-welfare system is reorganized and downsized, Italians will bankrupt it. The same view was expressed, by Marco Cecchini, a journalist for Italy's largest newspaper, Corriere della Sera. An added incentive for lowering welfare expenditures is that, in order for Italy to participate fully in the European Union's plan for a common currency, it will have to reduce its national debt by one-half in order to reach the Maastricht debt ceiling of 60 percent of the GDP.) When asked which welfare systems were the best in the world in terms of quality and cost-effectiveness of services, the Italians (and even the French, to a lesser degree) usually pointed to those of Scandinavia in general or Sweden in particular. an individual's lifetime, but no more than two years consecutively. Both food stamps and federal assistance to legal immigrants who have not yet become citizens will be reduced substantially. Washington thereby expects to save $60 billion over the next six years. A central (and commendable) goal of the "welfare-reform", bill is to move poor people off welfare and into jobs; however, some five million jobs will be necessary to employ all welfare recipients.

Certainly welfare reform was and is needed. If jobs are available, all able-bodied adults of sound mind should work - both for their own good and that of society. But for those unable to earn a living wage or to care for themselves, the new "welfare-reform" law is too draconian, particularly as it relates to children. The Clinton administration estimates that approximately, one million more children will slide into poverty with the ending of AFDC, and a year before AFDC was abolished the New York Times published an editorial on the results of a study conducted by a nonprofit group in Luxembourg which stated: "Poor children in America are worse off than poor children in 15 of the 18 Western industrialized countries included in the study."

In early September 1995, liberal Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked his colleagues to picture in their minds what conditions for poor children would be like in ten years if the proposed "welfare-reform, measure passed. He then painted a scenario of people picking up on winter mornings the frozen bodies of youngsters who had fallen asleep on street grates. Shortly afterward, conservative columnist George Will sounded a similar note of disgust in the Washington Post regarding the pending bill: "No child is going to be spiritually improved by being collateral damage in a bombardment of severities targeted told me that, although France would have to reduce social spending, it "would not follow America into abandonment of the poor." Marco Cecchini, who, as we noted previously, acknowledges the need for cuts in Italy's welfare spending, does not want his country's welfare system "to move in the direction of America's."

Furthermore, nearly all of those I interviewed indicated that they would be afraid to get sick in America because, unless they could afford health insurance, their lives would be at risk. David Elkharrat, a French physician who manages the emergency care facility of a Paris hospital, remarked: "The American system {of health care} is very unfair, and I'm sorry the Clintons did not pass their healthcare reform measure. As it stands, if a person in your country is seriously ill, they cannot get health insurance. In France, the more serious your sickness, the more health, insurance coverage you get." Though Europeans may not know that 39 million Americans have no health-care coverage, including 10 million children, they rightly perceive an absence of civility in our health care and other social systems for the disadvantaged.

The rolling back of the advances of America's welfare state via the "welfare-reform" measure, says economist Lester C. Thurow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is due largely to our culture of rugged individualism and its attendant emphasis upon near-total personal responsibility for our own fate. Such values and ideas are foreign to many Europeans, who stress the role of economic systems and social injustices in producing poverty.

While in Europe this summer, I got in touch with this country's culture of individualism, risk-taking, and "can-do" attitude by reading excerpts from a biography of Microsoft's cofounder Bill Gates. I found the story of his meteoric rise exhilarating and characteristically American. But at the same time, Gates' type of "turbo-driven capitalism" is leaving million of our people behind in a dust cloud of poverty. The Twentieth, Century Fund recently concluded that one percent of our population owns about 40 percent of the nation's wealth. This disparity might not pose a danger to civil society if we could count on that one percent of "can-do" rugged individualists to provide sufficient jobs, training, and social assistance for all to succeed.

The question I have now is this: can we Americans adapt the European welfare philosophy to our own unique needs in order to share our bounty with those of our fellow citizens who do not have their basic needs met in terms of food, clothing, housing, health care, and education? Just over 60 years ago, an economically depressed America answered with a resounding "Yes!" The result was the establishment of the American welfare state which, with all of its many imperfection, marked the greatest social advancement in our country since the abortion of slavery. For the first time, the federal government committed itself to help those who were least able to help themselves.

As the twenty-first century dawns before us, civility is again being tested throughout the Western world. Demagogues and extremists like those of the 1930s stand ready to exploit impoverished and distressed peoples. Earlier it was Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin; today their imitators among racist, terrorist, and anti-government groups everywhere feed on the socio-economic, discontent of the underclass. The nations of Europe are mindful of this. Not nearly as wealthy as the United States and stretched economically to the limits, they seem determined to keep their welfare and related social programs intact as much as possible. Can America afford to be so uncivil as to ignore their example?

Thomas J. Osborne teaches in the history department of Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana, California, where he also coordinates the honors program.

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