A Hundred Years of the Welfare Society

I have never been the protesting type. I was born in the golden age of the welfare society, and to me protests looked like my parents' way of reminiscing about the past. How wrong I was! Only while making this timeline did I realise how big a role ordinary people have played in change. Not because the welfare society was built on protests alone. Change seems to have emerged on many fronts and at many levels at once. Someone imagined something that did not yet exist. Free school meals!?

A five-day working week! An old-age pension – a completely unthinkable idea.

As we tried to grasp something as massive as the birth of the welfare society, we arrived at one essential question: how did responsibility shift from the individual and the family to society?

The welfare society as we know it was not built on the plans of great men. Behind it were the demands, struggles, coincidences and ideas of organisations, trade unions, researchers, professionals and ordinary people – ideas that sounded utterly utopian at the time. One law at a time, responsibility was moved from the individual to be carried together. Laws turned shared responsibility into a permanent structure of society. So permanent that we no longer even notice it. School, the child health clinic, the health centre. Everyday life now. Pure utopia before! People were willing to give of their own so that everyone would be better off. It was seen as being in the interest of the whole society.

What about now? Where should responsibility lie now? Can I think that this is not my headache, that someone else will take care of it?

But I began to see protests differently. They make real what happens when enough people no longer accept things as they are.