Solidarity in a Post-welfare Era: The Catholic Church and the Politics of Migration

Will Kymlicka’s (2015) recent argument for ‘inclusive solidarity through a multicultural welfare state’ defines the welfare state as ‘not primarily about either class struggle or universal humanitarianism, but rather about an ethic of social membership’; embodying ‘Marshall’s “direct sense of community membership”’. The cultural diversity resulting from recent migrations and increasing levels of inequality potentially undermine the Marshallian notion of rights anchored in national welfare states. Drawing on Cavaillé and Trump’s (2015) findings of continued support for state-led redistribution in Britain, but a hardening of attitudes linked to notions of ‘deservingness’, Kymlicka argues that negative attitudes towards immigrants in particular tend to be rooted in ‘the perception of economic burden’. Contemporary European responses of coercive civic integration are found wanting by Kymlicka who poses the national multicultural welfare state as a preferable response to promoting shared membership. However, the implications of ‘denationalized capitalism’, which includes the diversion of resources from public to private sectors as states support failing banks and the interests of transnational business corporations over the protection of citizens, are not addressed in his model (Favell 2016; McCabe 2015). This paper engages with evidence that new conventions of ‘the social’ are emerging that privilege relational notions of welfare and discretionary private generosity over social citizenship and rights. States across Europe are out-sourcing the funding and delivery of welfare and associated judgements about deservingness and processes of redistribution to local configurations of NGOs, social entrepreneurs, private companies, philanthropic funders and faith-based organisations (Göçmen 2013). My central concern in this paper is with how the welfare state secular contract with religion is coming under pressure specifically via the mobilisation of Christain charity and care as a postwelfarest mode of social relationality. The way I address this question is to look at how the Christian ethos mobilises ideas of benevolent love and gifting as a basis for solidarity with and against a welfare state framing of population. I identify some examples of how the material and human resources of the Catholic church in particular are welcomed by Irish state and other stakeholders in developing migrant integration policy and services. As austerity politics become normalised and judgements of deservingness are applied more punitively, I ask what kind of biopolitics is at stake in ‘Christian love’ and practices of care? I consider how the turn to NGOs and churches in particular might be understood in terms of the replacement of redistributive welfare with a relational welfare (Cottam 2014); an ethic of social membership that works with diversity and inequality.