The post-World War II reconstruction from 1945 onwards brought with it a massive transformation in the ways in which states organized welfare and healthcare systems. In Portugal, the public healthcare system, the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS), was founded in 1979, providing comprehensive healthcare services to the country’s residents. Across Scandinavia, the Nordicmodel established a universal welfare state, albeit one which enshrined an historical ‘compromise’ between capital and labour. In those countries which were subsumed under the USSR sphere of influence, there was the readjustment to the colossal outreach of state managed bureaucracy in all aspects of welfare. While in the UK, this took the form of the creation of the National Health Service (NHS), which united practically all forms of health services into a single, overarching infrastructure, in Soviet Union and countries of Eastern and Central Europe all health services were financed from a tax-filling budge within direct responsibility of the communist governments as a single payer. This initial grand transformation, which in many cases can be precisely dated (e.g. the creation of the NHS on 5th July 1948),drew on longstanding political and economic debates, given sudden impetus by the closing of the second world war. It initiated a period of some three decades or more during which many of the welfare arrangements that defined modern European states were refined and progressively embedded. For instance, the idea that universal healthcare could absorb all aspects of wellbeing, including mental health, drug addiction counselling and elderly care, and could in turn be integrated within population level lifespan planning, became a taken-for-granted aspect of social policy in many European nations. But this ‘compact’ around welfare has not lasted – the welfare systems which now operate acrossEurope have been subject to a gradual reconfiguration that has in many cases resulted in an undoing of post-war social and economic settlements. Some of these more recent transformations can also be dated. For instance, the neoliberal measures taken by successivegovernments throughout Europe (such as UK, the Netherlands, Nordic countries) since the 1980s and 1990s has created ahighly marketized and outsourced welfare. At the same time, the dissolution of the USSR and the accession of manycentral European states to the European Union has resulted in a no less dramatic reshaping of welfare systems. But thenature, speed and timing of these transformations is much more difficult to discern and thus to memorialise andcommemorate. There is – as yet – no clear consensus on exactly when the Nordic model became more heavily marketized, on when the very idea of the NHS came to be called into question. Nevertheless, something profound has happened tothe universal model of ‘cradle-to-grave’ care provided by the state and complex new forms of exclusion and division have become enacted. There is an urgent need to address how these changes can become objects of remembering, and how to foster communities of memory who find themselves at the sharp end of neoliberal social and economic violence. In order to address this, we will need to explore how the idea of slow memory can become attuned to the subterranean currents of gradual and uneven transformations of social welfare systems. In some case, these transformations have begun from suchdifferent starting points that the post-war social compact never really properly existed in the first place. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, in welfare terms some communities ‘have never been modern’ to begin with. Equally, there are significant social groups, such as mental-health service users, who have been under-served all along, merely in different ways during the post-war and post-1980s periods. Some of these transformations also have a somewhat non-linear character, where echoes and recapitulations of prior historical practices are repeated at different scales. For example, the nineteenth century workhouse no longer exists at any density across Europe, but decentralized and informally managed practices associated with modern slavery(e.g. captive housing, indentured labour, massive personal debt) are found everywhere, not least suffered by migrant workers. As an opening attempt in developing our thinking, we make three scholarly moves. First, we schematically note a number of ways in which the post-war compact impacted on the lived experiences of recipients of welfare and the consequences this hadfor collective and personal remembering. Second, we extend this towards the current welfare landscape in an effort to make a broad comparison and to establish the memorial challenges this currently creates. Finally, and substantively, we propose aseries of analytic domains that might prove fruitful for further development in understanding the purchase slow memory has on changing welfare arrangements in and beyond Europe.

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