The Future of Welfare in a Global Europe

Bernd Marin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351889063
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the future of welfare in Europe? The European welfare state is generally considered to be one of the finest achievements of the post-1945 world. Set up to eradicate poverty by providing a minimum standard of living and social safety net, the welfare state has come under increasing strain from ageing societies, growing unemployment, a deskilling society, and mass migration (both from inside and outside of Europe). With contribution from some of Europe's leading experts on this subject, this path-breaking volume highlights the internal and external pressures on the welfare state and asks whether any European welfare model is sustainable in the long term. This book will be of interest to all students, academics and professions working in the field of European social policy.

Part I:
FROM WARFARE TO WELFARE AND WORKFARE

CHAPTER 2

War and the Welfare State*

Herbert Obinger / Klaus Petersen

Introduction

The relationship between war and the welfare state is contested. While some scholars consider war as a pacemaker of the welfare state (Titmuss, 1950; Wilensky, 1975; Preller, 1978; Kaufman, 1983; Dryzek and Goodin, 1986; Dwork, 1987; Marwick, 1988; Porter, 1994; Kasza, 1996, 2002; Klausen, 1998; Skocpol, 1992; Reidegeld, 1989; Castles, 2010), others emphasize a sharp trade-off between guns and butter and highlight the negative impacts of military conflict on social protection (see Gal, 2007, for a recent overview). However, many of these findings are based on case-study evidence or only focus on social spending. A systematic comparative analysis of the impacts of war on the patterns and pathways of welfare state development as well as the underlying causal mechanisms is still lacking.¹ A possible reason why comparative welfare state research has not systematically paid attention to war as an explanatory variable of welfare state dynamics is the exceptional nature of the phenomenon itself. War is a rare and anomalous contingency that is conceptualized in the human and social sciences as exogenous shock, ‘abnormal event’ (Kasza, 1996), ‘black swan’ emergency (Castles, 2010) or a critical juncture (cf. Capoccia and Kelemen, 2007). All these conceptualizations suggest that conventional theories of comparative public policy rarely apply under circumstances of war and are therefore only to a limited extent suitable for generating meaningful hypotheses on the nexus between war and the welfare state. Even in democracies, special executive emergency powers, censorship, the suspension of democratic rights, public control of the economy and the coalescence of government and opposition are prevalent in wartime, while institutional veto points become less important. Furthermore, wartime decision-making takes place under conditions of high uncertainty and under circumstances in which the military becomes a relevant, if not the dominant actor. In a nutshell, wartime politics follows radically different rules and takes place under markedly different circumstances from those of normal peacetime politics.

This chapter argues that war is an important causal factor for explaining cross-national differences in welfare state development and welfare state patterns. Its ambition is to set up an analytical framework that allows a systematic empirical analysis of the war-welfare state nexus. We therefore offer an exploratory analysis of causal mechanisms linking war and the welfare state and examine the resulting effects on the patterns and developmental dynamics of advanced welfare states. However, four important qualifications are necessary in the forefront of this endeavour.

First, we do not claim that war is the only or even the most important single factor explaining the development of welfare states. The usual suspects in the comparative welfare state literature such as political parties and interest organizations, economic growth, political institutions, and ideas, are all very important explanatory factors. Since we know quite a lot about these factors and the related mechanisms, we focus on war. However, we claim that war had a significant impact on all these determinants. Second, not all kinds of military conflict are related to welfare state development. We argue that modern mass warfare, a phenomenon stretching over the period from ca. 1860 to 1960, is most likely to be connected to the welfare state.² Hence this chapter naturally has a focus on the two World Wars “[a]s the only full-scale wars ever fought among industrialized powers” (Porter 1994: 150). Third, the impact of large-scale military conflict on social policy is not expected to be similar across countries. Apart from analyzing belligerent countries (aggressors and attacked countries) it is also necessary to shed light on countries which were not directly involved in military hostilities.³ It is plausible to argue that the impact of war varies with the duration of conflict and is contingent upon whether and to which extent a country’s home territory was the arena of military hostilities. T.H. Marshall stated in 1965 that “the experience of total war is […] bound to have an effect on both the principles of social policy and the methods of social administration. But the nature of this effect will depend to a considerable extent on the fortunes of war – on whether a country is invaded or not, on whether it is victorious or defeated, and on the amount of physical destruction and social disorganization it suffers” (Marshall, 1965: 82). It is therefore reasonable to assume that the mechanisms discussed in the following have different effects for aggressors than for attacked or neutral countries with more or less defensive strategies. Super-powers and imperial countries will possibly be quite different in many respects compared to small states. Moreover, democracies and authoritarian states may display different political logics.

Finally, it is not sufficient to focus only on war-related contexts and the decision-making process during wartime. Antecedent conditions and the long-term policy repercussions of wars in the post-conflict period need to be carefully studied as well. Wars are anticipated and planned (Boemeke et al., 2006; Hamilton and Herwig, 2010) and cast long shades into peacetime. An inquiry into the impacts of war on social policy therefore requires distinguishing between a war preparation phase, the period of conflict itself, and the post-war period. In fact, we demonstrate that the underlying causal mechanisms differ considerably between these three phases.⁴ What they have in common, however, is that they all – and often in an unintended manner – have paved the way for more public intervention in social affairs and have crowded-out markets from social provision. In addition, mass war has influenced programme adoption (i.e. the timing of welfare state consolidation) and has boosted social spending in the post-war era. The magnitude of these effects, however, varies with the duration of conflict and is contingent upon whether and to which extent a country’s home territory was the arena of military hostilities. Since the extent of destruction on the home territory is strongly related to the outcome of war, the impact of war on the welfare state is expected to be stronger in the defeated countries. As will be shown for neutral countries, however, war has also affected welfare state development in countries not directly involved in combat.

The chapter is organized as follows. The next three sections provide an overview of possible causal mechanisms linking war and the welfare state. Relying on empirical evidence from war-waging and neutral countries each of these sections is divided into sub-sections devoted to a particular precipitating factor. In the fifth section we discuss the effects resulting from industrialized warfare on the patterns and developmental dynamics of advanced welfare states. The final section concludes.

The Phase of War Preparation

Charles Tilly has famously pointed out that war makes states and states make war (Tilly, 1975: 42). However, between the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 Europe escaped large-scaled military conflicts between the great powers (Chickering et al., 2012). In retrospect, however, war was the rule in Europe and given this experience a future war remained a likely scenario. In fact, the rivalries between the great powers steadily increased over these decades and imperialist attitudes fuelled massive war preparation efforts everywhere. A key player in terms of war preparation was the military. However, the longer the previous war receded into history, the greater was the uncertainty among the army commands about the nature of the future war. The major reason for this uncertainty was the rapid progress in military technology from the 1870s onwards. The invention of the machine gun, tanks and submarines, technical improvements in artillery and the building of huge battleships and modern aircrafts have dramatically increased the fire power of weapons and fundamentally changed the nature and conduct of war as demonstrated for the first time by the U.S. Civil War (Chickering et al., 2012). The precise consequences of industrialized warfare, however, were widely unknown. The only thing taken for granted was that an upcoming violent conflict would be waged as a mass war with unprecedented destructive consequences. The two World Wars confirmed the truth of this image of a total war (with World War 2 being even more high-tech), and the inter-war period can be considered for some countries as one long phase of war preparation.

The emergence of mass war is closely related to the spread of the mass conscript army during the second half of the 19th century (cf. Figure 1). The emergence of universal conscription in continental Europe was mainly the result of military setbacks and military competition (Posen, 1993). Prussia was the first country that emulated the French people’s army by introducing universal male conscription in 1814. Military defeats against Prussia motivated Austria-Hungary (1868) and France (1873) to (re-) introduce general conscription, while the defeat in the Crimean War had a similar effect for Russia. In Scandinavia, Denmark had introduced universal conscription in the democratic constitution of 1848 as part of a national mobilization against Prussia, and Finland (1870), Sweden (gradually in the 1880s) and Norway (1905) followed in the coming decades. The United Kingdom only introduced universal conscription during the Great War in 1916.

Figure 1: Introduction of conscription in European countries until 1918

Mass conscription was an important element in the construction of national citizenship and nation-building (Frevert, 2004) and may have at least three effects for the welfare state in a broad sense.

Mass conscription and public health

The introduction of mass conscription generated a close nexus between the health status of the (male) population, high infant mortality and military power. Given the poor health status of young men and children caused by the repercussions of industrialization, urbanization and rampant diseases such as tuberculosis, concerns about force levels and combat power increased both among politicians and the military⁵ and triggered, in consequence, social reforms with special emphasis on the social protection of (future) soldiers and mothers (Skocpol, 1992). Arguably the first historical instance is a report by Prussian Lieutenant General Heinrich Wilhelm v. Horn to King Frederik William III in 1828 in which he complained about the declining number of soldiers in the Rhineland due to the widespread child labour in the textile industry (Potthoff, 1915: 6). This report prompted the first labour protection Act in Germany (Prussia) which stipulated a ban of child labour for children under 9 years of age, banned Sunday as well as night-work for juveniles and restricted working-time for adolescents.⁶

In the second half of the 19th century, improvements in recruitment statistics provided reliable information on the health status of large parts of the population (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2010; Hartmann, 2011). A common problem was that many of the medically examined young men did not qualify for military service. For example, in Austria-Hungary 70% of the recruits did not pass the draft physical in 1912 (Schmidl, 2003: 149n15; Tálos, 1981: 24–25). The share of young men who were deemed unfit for military service amounted to 54% in the early days of the German Empire and 51% in Switzerland in 1878 (Cohn, 1879: 518n1).

Figure 2: Army draft physical in Nazi Germany (1935)

Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R99783 / Photographer: unknown.

Also war itself revealed physical problems among soldiers. In Britain, a country lacking conscription until 1916, contemporary observers attributed the poor British military performance in the Boer Wars to the “social degeneration of officers and soldiers, due to urbanization and industrialization in the British motherland” (Leonhard, 2007: 290). Nearly half of the recruits that had been mustered in industrial cities such as York, Leeds, and Sheffield between 1897 and 1901 failed the medical examination and were deemed unfit. These were shocking revelations which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Introduction The Future of Welfare in a Global Europe
• Part I From Warfare to Welfare and Workfare
• Part II Demographic Metabolism, New Measures of Age and Ageing, and the Active Ageing Index (AAI) 2012 – 2015
• Part III Towards a Human Investment State: Future-Able Education, Skill Formation, and Economic-Financial Literacy as Prerequisites of Sustainable Welfare Society
• Part IV Class, Generation, Gender, and Age Cleavages in Ageing Societies
• Part V Too Sick to Work? Disability – and Happiness – in Stressful and Long-Life Societies
• Part VI Fragile Welfare Sustainability: Two Model Cases in Point
• Part VII No European Social Model in Europe – or Towards a European Social Union?
• List of Contributors