LOGO

Xavier Haendler is a political scientist and social policy researcher whose work examines the global foundations of welfare states, development governance, and international inequality. He studied at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Oxford, and has held positions at the British Department for International Trade, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, the German Federal Foreign Office, and the University of Buenos Aires.

This talk examines the global foundations of European welfare states. It argues that welfare expansion in Europe was materially contingent on colonial extraction and structural trade hegemony, while official narratives presented welfare as a purely domestic achievement. Drawing on archival research in the UK, West Germany, and Argentina, the project explores how these narratives obscured the global conditions underpinning welfare capitalism and investigates the moral and political tensions this concealment continues to generate. The talk also considers how contemporary development institutions rationalize structurally extractive North–South arrangements as benevolent intervention, and concludes by examining alternative experiences of welfare provision in Cuba and Argentina as comparative perspectives on the contingency of the European welfare model.