Beginning of 1990s was a watershed in welfare state development. If the limits of the Welfare State were met in the 1980s in countries with developed welfare state programs like in Europe, in 1990s the retren-chment and recalibration measures started to be realized and have continued since then. There are struc-tural reasons for this, both internal and external, like ageing of the populations and opening of the global markets and economic integration both globally and in the EU with the establishment of Economic and Monetary Union. Economic integration did not happen by itself, it was a result of changes in economic thinking on how to increase economic growth and employment and how to keep EU Europe competitive in the global market. These ideational changes in economics have affected also social political thinking. Some researchers have called it a paradigm change in social policies. The phenomenon is transnational although it has been argued that the ideational change has two faces, one more neo-liberal and the other emphasizing social policy measures as social investments.
Public pension programs form a major part of welfare state expenditures in all European countries. Major changes made to these programs affect whole populations and the nature of the welfare state development in these countries. In this paper, which is part of a larger research on transformation of pension policy objectives in Europe since 1990s, the transnational pension reform debate is analyzed. This debate started in the middle of the 1990s and was heated almost ten years after which it seems to have calmed down if not ended. The paper has two targets, first, to analyze the content of the policy debate and the different policy alternatives presented in it to see if they represent different paradigmatic thinking. If they do, and if a policy alternative is chosen in a country which is based on new paradigmatic thinking then paradigm change in pension policy will realize in that country. The second target is to investigate the actors in this debate to see if they form different transnational epistemic communities advocating different pension reform alternatives. While transnational, having members working at national level and in international organizations, they form a link between transnational debate and national policymaking. The data used in the analysis were books, articles and papers published by those international organizations which have provided a forum for the debate and participated in it.
The analysis showed that there are three major reform alternatives advocated by three transnational epis-temological communities. One was defending the principles of existing social insurance programs and suggested their parametric reform, second was advocating a radical multi-pillar pension reform, based on new paradigmatic thinking, and third was advocating a transformed multi-pillar model which combined elements of both the old social insurance paradigm and the new savings paradigm. The last alternative if implemented could mean a gradual paradigm shift in pension policy.
