SOCIAL SECURITY, SOCIAL INEQUALITY 217
and 1998. This considerably weakened the competitiveness of the Ger-
man economy in the international markets. As of the 1990s, Germany
was no longer considered to be one of the motors of growth because it
had become one of the weakest countries in terms of growth in Europe.
This put new pressure on the Achilles’ heel of the German welfare state,
namely the tight link between the state of employment and the fi nancial
leeway aff orded social policy.
Since the end of the 1990s, several governments have made a con-
certed eff ort to reverse these developments. From 1999 to 2007, the co-
alition government of the SPD and the Greens introduced its so-called
Agenda Policy, which was then continued under the second grand co-
alition (SPD and CDU). This policy approach resulted in some rather
deep clefts in the continuity of sociopolitical goals, management tactics,
and sociopolitical practices. The crisis of the fi nancial markets that hit
in 2008, however, tripped off a countermovement and the renaissance
of consensus-oriented crisis management policies. It was also accompa-
nied by a “re-legitimation”^61 of the German welfare state model that had
come under pressure with the introduction of the Agenda 2010. Some
elements of these agenda policies have been revised as a result. Thanks
to its welfare-state based “crisis Keynesianism,” Germany has emerged
from the recent economic disasters in much better shape than most of its
European neighbors.^62
Although it is still somewhat diffi cult to assess the key trends of more
recent social policy, four main aspects should be emphasized:
- The erosion of “national” social policy. Globalization and European
integration have fundamentally changed the conditions, scope, and con-
texts of the impact of social policy. European integration, for example, has
eroded what used to be a tight link between the welfare state and the na-
tion-state by incrementally creating a cross-state social space that arches
over national systems of solidarity and transfers responsibilities to the
level of the European Union. This development has had ambiguous con-
sequences for the EU member states. On the one hand, it has boosted the
importance of social security as a separate goal of European integration.
On the other hand, more traditional forms of national social policy now
collide even more often with the basic economic liberties of the common
market. Moreover, involvement in the Lisbon strategy adopted by the EU,
with its focus on competitiveness, has demanded market-compatible so-
cial policy measures (such as private risk hedging), putting classic social
benefi t programs increasingly under pressure to prove their legitimacy. - Marketization and fi nancialization. Since the 1990s, the balance be-
tween the state, the markets, and families has tipped a good bit in favor of
the markets. These changes can be seen as a shift in emphasis rather than