“European welfare states are under pressure: increasing defence spending adds to budgetary pressures confronting many European governments, whilst new social and health-related challenges require new reform efforts (such as the growing number of citizens living with incapacity benefits). In this lecture, I will return to fundamental questions that shaped social policy in European welfare states and the EU over the last 40 years, notably the issue of ‘personal responsibility’ versus ‘solidarity’ and ‘moral hazard’ as a limit to the organization of solidarity. These questions apply both to interpersonal relations between citizens in a welfare state and to relations between political entities, such as the EU and its member states. I will highlight long-term trends and swings in the ideational debate on welfare state solidarity, personal responsibility and moral hazard. On that backdrop, the question is: what is an adequate conception of personal responsibility and solidarity that answers the challenges of contemporary welfare states and allows a robust defence of welfare state solidarity.

The reference to ‘responsibility’ in the lecture’s title also refers to my own role: having been both a policy-maker and politician and an academic, the question is also one about pragmatism in political action: how can one reconcile, in the realm of social policy, one’s own understanding of social justice and solidarity with the dominant political realities of our time?”

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Speaker bio:

Frank Vandenbroucke was born in 1955 and studied economics in Leuven and Cambridge, UK, and received his D.Phil. in Oxford in 1999. He was Minister for Social Security, Health Insurance, Pensions and Employment in the Belgian Federal Government (1999-2004), and Minister for Education and Employment in the Flemish Regional Government (2004-2009). In that period, he played a key role in the ‘activation turn’ in Belgian employment policy. Vandenbroucke was closely involved with the launching of the EU’s Lisbon Strategy in 2000, notably with the development of its social dimension. He was a member of the High Level Group on Social Investment Policies set up by the European Commission (2011-2014). He was the chair of the Belgian Commission on Pension Reform (2013-2014).

Frank Vandenbroucke was full-time engaged in politics until 2011, and then returned to academic research at the Universities of Leuven, Antwerp (in association with the Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy) and Amsterdam. He published on the role of the EU in the development of social policy, patterns of household employment and poverty, social investment, the architecture of the welfare state and the problem of ‘institutional moral hazard’, pension policy, public attitudes on risk-sharing, and child poverty. His publications are available at www.frankvandenbroucke.be.

In 2020, Vandenbroucke returned to politics, to become Minister of Social Affairs and Public Health in the Belgium Federal Government during the Covid 19 pandemic. He currently plays a prominent role in debates on EU health policy. He was re-appointed Minister of Social Affairs and Public Health in January 2025.