The great unsung hero of the global economic and financial crisis was the welfare state. This is the premise for Anton Hemerijck and Robin Huguenot-Noel's book. Using a wealth of data for macroeconomic performance and labour market participation, they underline how important social programmes were in underpinning economic resilience. This positive contribution of the welfare state explains not only why many northern European countries did better than their southern neighbours but also why parts of Europe – despite the travails of that continent's sovereign debt crisis – outperformed the United States. And, if the welfare state underpinned economic resilience during the economic and financial crisis, it played an even more important role in stabilizing economic performance during the Covid-19 pandemic. The conclusion to draw from this experience is not that everyone should embrace a European-style welfare state but that they should at least give fresh consideration to what the welfare state represents.

This premise is only the start of the argument. What follows is a subtle enquiry into the enduring significance of traditional claims about the trade-offs politicians must face between equity and efficiency, the longer-term financial viability of social safety nets, the rigidity of welfare state institutions and the interaction between different “worlds of welfare” – as Gosta Esping-Andersen famously characterized them – and the macroeconomic paradigms in which they are embedded. Along the way, Hemerijck and Huguenot-Noel make three fundamental observations.

Their first is that the rules of thumb that politicians use when talking about welfare states have remained much the same over the past three to four decades but the institutions themselves have changed in important ways – and so have the societies in which they operate. The potential for cognitive dissonance in this context is manifest.

The second observation is that the family resemblances between different countries that Esping-Andersen captured so effectively in the early 1990s have not survived this recalibration; some similarities remain between some countries – such as Italy and France, for example – but many have faded away. Here, again, it is hard to see how the old rules of thumb make sense.

The novel coronavirus pandemic taught the world three things: money invested in public healthcare pays huge dividends in terms of social and economic resilience; government deficit spending to support economic performance is better than seeing the destruction of human and physical capital; and some of the least attractive and least well-remunerated jobs are nevertheless “essential” for the functioning of society. Europe's political leaders were quick to recognize these “truths” as manifest. The first major European lending programme targeted national health systems; the second targeted national employment protection schemes; and all the while European leaders celebrated their societies’ “frontline workers”. Now everyone in Europe is looking ahead to the double challenge of planning for recovery and resilience because meeting that challenge is critical for Europe's next generation. Where European integration looked to be stumbling in the aftermath of the last crisis, particularly following the British referendum, now the European project has a powerful narrative behind it.

The question Peo Hansen asks is whether that new narrative is powerful enough to overturn deeply rooted misconceptions shared among Europeans about the financial cost of refugees and asylum seekers. These are people who come to Europe by necessity rather than out of choice. When they arrive, they are usually prevented from seeking employment until their applications for asylum can be processed. By implication, they receive “benefits” in the form of food, lodging, healthcare and education long before they are able to pay taxes. Once those applications are processed, those who are accepted enter the workforce wherever they can find a job – which often means doing unskilled or semi-skilled labour in the public or private sector. Because those jobs tend not to pay high wages, these refugees tend not to pay high taxes even as they continue to access social benefits. Hence, the conventional wisdom in Europe is that refugees impose a cost that the rest of society must bear.

For Hansen, however, that financial reckoning is wrong because it focuses too much on the refugee as “benefit recipient” and on the rest of society as a sort of aggregate “taxpayer”.

T. H. White (2015) wrote The Once and Future King during the Second World War. It is a story of King Arthur and the knights of the round table in five volumes and with two endings. The first ending comes at the close of the fourth volume. Arthur prepares to go to battle with Mordred with the help of a page boy, named Thomas. In a moment of reflection, Arthur tells his page to leave the battlefield. Thomas’ mission is more important than combat. It is to carry the idea that nations should use their might for justice and not for conquest. He knights Thomas – Sir Thomas Mallory – and sends him away to ensure that the dream of Camelot remains alive. When the collection was first published in 1958, only four volumes were included and so this ending was definitive.

The revised collection, published in 1977, added that fifth volume back in and so included the second ending, in which Arthur agrees a truce with Mordred to divide up the kingdom between them. The decision is difficult for Arthur, but he accepts compromise as better than endless warfare. He meets with Mordred on the battlefield to finalize the new arrangement. Before the deal can be done, however, an accidental movement by one of the soldiers reignites the conflict. Both Arthur and Mordred are slaughtered in the ensuing violence.

White wrote his collection as an argument against war and in favor of peace. He also wrote it as a statement on the human condition. Camelot falters not because the idea of justice is unworthy or impractical, but because it is governed by people; even great people – people of legend – make mistakes of judgement and action. The lesson is that we should keep the ideal alive but also that we should prepare for misunderstanding. At its finest, European studies embraces this obligation, promoting an ideal of Europe as a civilizational power or normative superpower, but accepting that Europeans are human and so pushing back against their great potential for violence and misunderstanding.

The last century of European history follows a pattern very close to White's story of Camelot (Jones & Menon 2019).