The aim of this article is not to describe in detail the social protection system in Greece or in the other southern European countries. Its mam ambition is to offer a general overview of its formation and an explanation for its parti cularities. The basic thesis is that essentially the Greek Welfare State belongs to the conti nental model. Its consolidation is very recent, because the post-civil war 'dual society' (1946-74) did not allow the formation of a viable social consensus, a necessary prerequi site for the welfare state. There are, conse quently, important distortions in the develop ment of the social security system. Although many of these institutional particularities are common in the Mediterranean South, they are not qualitatively sufficient so as to create a new institutional paradigm or a 'South-European' Welfare model. In the first section an attempt is made to clarify the problem of the existence of a 'Latin-rim' welfare model and the classifi cation of the Greek social protection system within it, in order subsequently to examine its specific characteristics in relation to the turbu lent history of this country. The conclusion of the author is that although there is a clear trend in the direction of convergence of the Greek welfare system with the median Euro pean standards, Greece still has a considerable lag to overcome.
The last thirty years have seen a clear trend in devolution of responsibility for social protection from the State to the private sector. However, the pure form of privatisation, i.e., the absence of any public action in the field of social security, is quite marginal. More widespread are different degrees of ‘functional’ privatization in a framework where networks of multiple welfare providers compete in ‘quasi-markets’. Therefore, the public-private divide should not be conceived anymore in terms of binary logic: There is not a dichotomy, but rather a continuum along the public-private axis. However, the private and public tiers of social security are not functionally equivalent. For instance, only a public, PAYG system can fulfill a redistribution function. Still, at least from the viewpoint of a human rights approach, the most significant danger of unbalanced privatisation is its impact on the protection of social security as a right of social citizenship. A recognition of the normative content of the social right to social security as a fundamental constitutional right is, in this sense, a prerequisite for social citizenship.
<p>The present paper examines the identity of<br />the “South European” deviation against<br />classical typologies. Against this background,<br />the argument presented some years<br />earlier by Katrougalos and Lazaridis (2003)<br />is revisited, bearing in mind later contributions<br />in the field as well as recent data.<br />The article then proceeds by presenting the<br />main traits of Southern European states, arguing<br />that they all share the basic characteristics<br />of the “state-corporatist” welfare<br />model. Nonetheless, important differences<br />can be discerned among them, while some<br />seem to share more common features with<br />France than with the other members of the<br />Southern cluster. These differences are in<br />turn attributed to their historic traditions,<br />and in particular the dissimilar weight of<br />patronage and clientelism.</p>
The idea that the traditional Welfare State has reached its limits and that it should be replaced by a new ‘Welfare Mix’ of private and public services is nowadays an almost universally accepted axiom. Welfare policies, under the serious external economic and social pressures from globalisation, exacerbated by the dominant neoclassical, are moving increasingly towards the goals of retrenchment and cost containment. Market principles, such as competitiveness and the maximisation of cost efficiency, are becoming more prominent across Europe contradicting those principles that have traditionally associated with social policy like equity, solidarity, social justice. This multiple ideological, political and economical process involves a new balance between public and private components of social security. This paper, which aims to offer a critical appraisal of this trend, contains two parts. The first part briefly outlines a comparative overview of privatisation reforms of social insurance systems. The second part attempts a prescriptive analysis of the impact of these reforms, from the viewpoint of a commitment to human rights.
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