Belgium as a Model Integral State: A Gramscian Research Agenda from the Social Pact of 44 to the Aftermath of the Crisis of 2008

Antoine, Sébastien
(2018) Historical Materialism - Fifteenth Annual Conference - “Taking on the Right” — Location: School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London, UK) (8.November.2018)

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In a time when the very idea of social security is becoming a target of recuperation by the xenophobic right – putting it demagogically in the balance in its populist struggle against immigration (De Wever 2018) – this paper aims at providing a deeper critical look on the Western European welfare state, taking into account both the political history rooted in the contradictions of the post-war consensus, as well as the tensions currently tearing them apart, in the aftermath of the crisis of 2008 and its subsequent wave of austerity policies. As case study, the ongoing research here presented is focusing on a peculiarly strong instance of social conciliation and corporativism (Arcq and Marques-Pereira 1991): Belgium. The Belgian social pact of 1944 (Luyten and Vanthemsche 1995) was indeed the starting point of an “increasingly more sophisticated internal articulation and condensation of social relations” (Thomas 2009) within the very specific form of the post-war welfare state. It saw formerly more independent unions and mutual insurance organizations – originating both from the social-democrat or Christian-democrat pillars – becoming the main vectors of payment of public unemployment and healthcare benefits; situation quite exceptional regarding most European countries and still working today. Looking at this profound integration and interdependency between Belgian civil society, on the one hand, and its political society – or “the State in the narrow sense of the governmental-coercive apparatus” (Gramsci 1971b) – on the other, this paper is therefore working on the hypothesis that Belgium constitutes a model example of the integral state mentioned in the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1983, 1971a). This gramscian intervention then allows to renew a critical analysis of Belgian society by sustaining a twofold objective: (1) to cast a new light on its very constitutive political cleavages, in a historical perspective; (2) to grasp the concrete tensions arising from the position of mediation between citizens-workers and the state played by these organizations of civil society. The first step of this research project would be to question the very dynamic of pillarization of Belgian society – classically analyzed (Frognier 1978, 2007, de Coorebyter 2008) through quite a static Structural Functionalist approach (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) – by studying concretely the processes by which those cleavages were actually thematized by political parties, as key articulation points between civil and political society (de Leon, Desai, and Tugal 2015). It is therefore a question of looking back on classical historical research on both the Belgian Labour Party (Liebman 2018) and the Christian Workers Movement (Joye and Lewin 1967) through a dynamic gramscian framework, putting back politics at the core of historical analysis. As its second step, this research project then aims at researching the concrete consequences of this structuration, tackling empirically through an extended case study (Burawoy 1998, 2009): on the one hand the impact of austerity policies on unions – often confused with the state itself by workers seeking their right to public unemployment benefits – and on the other hand, the politics of mutual healthcare insurance organizations, facing limitations of state reimbursement and accompanying the moving front line of the struggle for the financialisation of the Western European healthcare sector.
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Antoine, S. (2018). Belgium as a Model Integral State: A Gramscian Research Agenda from the Social Pact of 44 to the Aftermath of the Crisis of 2008. Historical Materialism - Fifteenth Annual Conference - “Taking on the Right”, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London, UK). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/55565