On 7 November Professor Frank Vandenbroucke, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Social Affairs and Public Health for Belgium, addressed the concept of pragmatism in political action at DSPI’s annual Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture 2025.
In his lecture, ‘Responsibility and the demands of solidarity: defending the welfare state in hard times’, he reviewed the challenges faced by contemporary welfare states and how we can reconcile our own understanding of ‘social justice and solidarity’ with dominant political realities.
“As a true scholar with a long successful career in politics, Prof Vandenbroucke has changed the lives of millions of Europeans – not least in his work on providing a stronger legal basis for welfare policies in the EU,” commented Professor Kenneth Nelson, Head of DSPI. “I consider him to be the ‘inventor of social Europe’ and his insights into how social policy in the EU has been shaped and the issues of ‘personal responsibility’ vs ‘solidarity’ are invaluable.”
Prof Vandenbroucke was engaged full-time in politics until 2011 when he returned to academic research at the Universities of Leuven, Antwerp (in association with the Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy) and Amsterdam. He returned to politics in 2020 to become Minister of Social Affairs and Public Health in the Belgium Federal Government where he currently plays a prominent role in debates on EU health policy. He is an alum of the University of Oxford, earning his PhD from the Faculty of Social Studies in 1999 and was a visiting fellow at Nuffield College between 2001 and 2009.
The Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture was first given in 1917 and has featured prominent scholars and luminaries including John Keynes, Sidney Webb, Richard Tawney, Sir William Beveridge, and Richard Titmuss. Prof Vandenbroucke’s lecture was the 119th in the series.
Find out more about the Sidney Ball Memorial Lectures.
Watch the lecture recording on DSPI's YouTube channel
