Abstract (EN)

This article contributes to a transnational history of the social state at the turn of the 1970s-1980s. The production and reception of the report perceived as emblematic of the neoliberal “groundswell” against the Welfare state (OECD, The Welfare State in Crisis, 1981) provides an entry-point to trace the transformation of transnational spaces confronting governments, international secretariats, and competing academics, employers’ associations and trade unions. Against the backdrop of a short-sighted and teleological narrative, this investigation underscores the embeddedness of this report in a longer-term project of integration of the social and the economic at the OECD, which purported to become the “new Beveridge report” and to extend the Welfare state. This initiative built on the expansion of the informational and social capital of the Directorate for social affairs of the OECD towards new domains (labor, environment, education, housing, health). Resistance against this initiative from economic sectors within and outside of the OECD altered the scope and political significance of this endeavour. The article shows that the cleavages between “economic” and “social” sectors permeated not only international secretariats like the OECD and national state apparatuses, but also academic spheres and trade union sectors. These dual and asymmetric oppositions, deployed in a homologous way across different spaces, shaped both the power relations at play and the meaning conferred to the project. They help explain the failure of the socio-economic and environmental initiatives fostered by the OECD, as well as the European Commission and the ILO. The hegemony of economic sectors, most often anticipated by social sectors, contributed to the enduring neoliberal economisation of the social and environmental state.