State and welfare

The "cancellations" of benefit provision and experiences of insecurities amongst the Czech- and Slovak-speaking migrants in Glasgow that I described earlier should thus be understood in this wider historical and contemporary context of ongoing transformations. Continuous and radical reform of the UK welfare state has given rise to and consolidated an individualised

112

For more details on these reports see: http://www.jrf.org.uk/search/site/welfare%20reform. There have also been various other studies documenting and predicting the impact of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act and the austerity measures introduced by the Coalition government, for example, Beatty and Fothergill (2013) on the effect of these reforms on local and regional level, Williams et al. (2013) on housing, Duffy (2013) on disabled people, etc. Providing an overview of these studies and/or a discussion of the (actual or potential) impact of the Act is, however, neither the focus nor the aim of this chapter.

notion of welfare. Often, this direction of change has been interpreted as a 'rolling back' of the state. From this perspective, the so-called benefit sanctions are understood as resulting from cuts to welfare budgets and a diminished role of the state in people's negotiations of insecurity (Harvey 2005). Such an interpretation has, however, been rejected by Wacquant (2009) who argues that far from retreating, the state is actually becoming more invasive in people's lives. For Wacquant, what we have seen over the past three decades in many Western countries, especially the US and the UK, is a reconfiguration of the state, increasingly moving away from its social mandate and agenda to a penal one. Theoretically, rather than treating the state as a coherent, functional entity, Wacquant draws on Bourdieu's notion of the state as a bureaucratic field entailing various forces seeking to define and regulate the allocation of resources. This is illustrated by an analogy of "the Left hand" and "the Right hand" of the state; the Left hand symbolises the protective and caring side such as provision of health services, housing and welfare, whereas the Right hand is tasked with enforcement of regulations and rules and the disciplining of the population via budget cuts, economic regulations and so on. Wacquant extends this metaphor to include the police, the courts and prisons as central elements of the Right hand of the state (p. 289) and puts forth the image of a strengthening of the Right hand and a weakening of the Left hand of the state in recent years. He sees the 1990s when the New Democrats in the US and New Labour in the UK came to power as the beginnings of a period which is marked by what he calls the "punitive turn".

With regard to the UK, for example, the number of people imprisoned rose sharply between 1992 and 2004 despite a falling crime rate (p. 309). The increase in the incarceration rate is symptomatic of extended activities by the police, justice and correctional state bodies which are becoming more intrusive in the lives of the poor (p. 6). This signifies the advent of what Wacquant calls the "neoliberal government of social insecurity" in many Western countries. Under such government, the poor and unfortunate are not only expected to deal with insecurities on their own (as empowered individuals) but are punished for problems and anxieties wrought by economic restructuring and neoliberal globalisation such as fragmentation of wage labour, growth of informal and precarious working conditions and diminishing of workers' rights. Here lies the difference between Wacquant and other commentators on neoliberalism; for the former, "the invasive, expansive, and expensive penal state is not a deviation from neoliberalism but one of its constituent ingredients" (p. 308). In

other words, Wacquant understands neoliberalism not as an economic project gone wrong but as a political project facilitating and depending on the immiseration of large sections of the population, namely those deemed dangerous, deviant or dependent. He emphasises the need to reconceptualise the notion of social welfare and analyse it within a broader framework of statecraft that includes "prisonfare", that is,

the extended policy stream that responds to intensifying urban ills and assorted socio- moral turbulences by boosting and deploying the police, the courts, custodial institutions (juvenile detention halls, jails, prisons, retention centres), and their extension (probation, parole, criminal data bases and assorted systems of surveillance, supervision and profiling such as "background checks" by public officials, employers, and relators), as well as commanding images, lay and specialized idioms, and bodies of expert knowledge elaborated to depict and justify this deployment (chief amongst them the tropes of moral indignation, civic urgency, and technical efficiency) (pp. 16-17).

Crucially for my argument here, Wacquant's analysis leads us to examine my informants' various experiences and encounters with social welfare providers in Glasgow not merely within the confines of what is traditionally understood as social policy but as shaped by and informing processes of state-building. However, his account mainly remains on the societal and discursive level and does not engage in detail with the everyday and the empirical realities of statecraft as experienced by ordinary people. To fill this gap, I draw on conceptual approaches to state-making which are concerned with the routine and mundane practices and workings of the state.

This body of literature on the modern state gained momentum especially during the 1990s mainly within anthropology (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). This literature questioned the commonsensical view of the state as a discrete, institutionally and geographically fixed entity, manifest in its policies, laws and institutional system and gave rise to new conceptualisations of the state. States were now considered "powerful sites of symbolic and cultural production that are themselves always culturally represented and understood in particular ways" (p. 981). In these conceptualisations, the state was not taken for granted as empirically given but seen as a regulating force (Foucault 1991) or bureaucratic field (Bourdieu 1999) that (re-)enacts, 'stretches' and 'translates' itself into the life of people (Gupta 1995; Fuller and Benei 2001), while simultaneously regulating and containing its symbolic power. This perspective moved the attention of scholars beyond formal institutions and opened up new terrains in which the

workings and effects of the state could be examined. Studies looked, for example, at how the state is experienced and imagined by ordinary people as being both 'above society' and enclosing its population and territory; how the state makes itself felt, how it materialises in everyday life; and how it maintains its aura and secures legitimacy. Concerned with these questions, various objects of study were considered: material manifestations such as passports, identity cards, documents and files (Torpey 2000; Hansen & Stepputat 2001; Navaro-Yashin 2007), borders (Kelly 2006), roads (Harvey 2005), as well as broader themes such as terror (Aretxaga 2000), bureaucracy (Herzfeld 1992) and corruption (Gupta 1995). Alongside images of and discourses about the state, these studies drew attention to the mundane, routine practices of state agents and non-state actors and their varied interactions that happen 'on the ground', all of which was seen as constitutive of the state.

Drawing on these insights, the fieldwork data I introduced at the beginning of the chapter can be read as more detailed empirical examples of how Wacquant's notion of the punitive state variably materialises in the everyday experiences of Slovak- and Czech-speaking migrants in Glasgow. The ways in which welfare is presented and framed vis-à-vis welfare applicants and the general public and the ways in which the state makes itself felt not only through the provision but, perhaps even more so, through the removal or suspension of welfare payments can then be thought of as illustrating how the state reproduces itself. Benefit sanctions or other (sometimes unexplained) measures by the welfare authorities seemed to have become rather 'normal', as the prevalence of anxieties around welfare provision and resulting insecurities showed. These experiences point to a strengthened 'Right hand' of the state; this is well captured in the term 'sanction' deployed in the official discourse of the government and the relevant state authorities. 'Sanction' entails an element of wrongdoing and places the blame on the benefit recipient. Interestingly, this is in contrast to how my research informants understood these events; their use of the rather neutral term 'cancellations' points to the fact that they did not perceive these suspensions or rejections as caused by their own behaviour but, instead, related to a malfunctioning of the British welfare system or the arbitrary actions of individual state agents. It is in this sense that, from the perspective of my research informants, state benefits became associated with a game of chance and, thus, as governed by (bad) luck rather than rules pertaining to welfare entitlements. In other words, the political goal of the

'lean state'113 materialised in everyday life as a 'mean' state. In some ways, however, the element of punishment remained unacknowledged by those it was imposed upon, thus resulting in hardship for those affected without actually fulfilling its supposedly 'educative' aim. Hence, while insecurities resulting from benefit sanctions are likely to be experienced more widely by benefit claimants in the UK, who find themselves being blamed and shamed for their misfortune,114 the theme of 'cancellations' points to specific ways in which Czech- and Slovak-speaking migrants understood and interpreted the wider transformations of the British welfare system.