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"Welfare states are currently challenged by a number of developments: the globalization or internationalization of the economy, changing demographics, a transformation from industrial to post-industrial economies, as well as social and cultural changes. Although all of these variables might be very important for specific changes in social policy arrangements, in this paper the author will only address the effects of globalization on social policy arrangements. It will be argued that the specific perception of globalization and the constructed links to social policy arrangements within the political discourse will have to be taken into account as a key variable in analyzing the effects of globalization on social policy arrangements. Hence, the central questions addressed in this paper are: Was globalization causally related to changes of welfare systems within the political discourse? Did the constructed links between globalization and the welfare system become dominant or even hegemonic within the political discourse? Have welfare systems changed in a way consistent with the specific perception of globalization? Furthermore, the author argues that focusing solely on the state's activity within the social policy realm might lead to distorted and misleading results. As case studies he has chosen Germany, Japan and the United States. These three countries constitute the centers of the current globalization process while at the same time they have large domestic markets and therefore seem less vulnerable to external economic developments. Furthermore, Germany, Japan, and the U.S. have three very distinct welfare systems. In the following part of the paper, the author will briefly take up the debate within social sciences about the economic limits of state social policy and highlight the importance of analyzing the political discourse, before he will discuss the concept of welfare systems in the second part. Third, the author will show how various links between globalization and the welfare system are socially constructed in different welfare systems. Fourth, he will sketch the more recent reform tendencies at the policy level. Finally, he discusses the different dynamics of welfare systems in an era of globalization in a broader theoretical framework. It will be argued that the concept of path dependency, which has often been used to characterize recent social policy developments, underestimates the changes that have taken place in the various welfare systems." (excerpt)
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