European Foundations of the Welfare State EUROPEAN FOUNDATIONS OF THE WELFARE STATE Franz-Xaver Kaufmann Translated from the German by John Veit-Wilson with the assistance of Thomas Skelton-Robinson Berghahn Books New York • Oxford Published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2012 Franz-Xaver Kaufmann All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaufmann, Franz-Xaver. European foundations of the welfare state / Franz-Xaver Kaufmann ; translated from the German by John Veit-Wilson, with the assistance of Thomas Skelton-Robinson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-476-8 (hbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-477-5 (ebook : alk. paper) 1. Welfare state—Europe. 2. Public welfare—Europe. I. Veit Wilson, John H. II. Skelton-Robinson, Thomas. III. Title. HN373.K38 2012 330.12’6094—dc23 2011040758 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-0-85745-476-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-477-5 (ebook) To my beloved wife Karin – in the fi fty-third year of our sharing life CONTENTS List of Figures ix Foreword x Anthony Atkinson Translator’s Preface xii Acknowledgements xvi Introduction. A Sociological Perspective 1 PART I. INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS Chapter 1. Pioneers of Social Reformism: Sismondi, List, Mill 37 Chapter 2. German Origins of a Theory of Social Reform: Hegel, Stein and the Idea of ‘Social Policy’ 58 Chapter 3. Christian Infl uences on Social Reform 75 Chapter 4. Welfare Internationalism before the Welfare State: The Emergence of Social Human Rights 94 PART II. THEORY OF SOCIAL POLICY Chapter 5. Social Security: The Leading Idea and its Problems 133 Chapter 6. Social Policy Intervention: Elements of a Sociological Theory 146 Chapter 7. First-order and Second-order Social Policies 180 PART III. THEORY OF AND FOR THE WELFARE STATE Chapter 8. The State and the Production of Welfare 197 viii • Contents Chapter 9. National Welfare State Traditions and the European Social Model 225 Chapter 10. Towards a Theory of the Welfare State 248 PART IV. THE FUTURE OF THE WELFARE STATE Chapter 11. The Welfare State’s Achievements and Continuing Problems 277 Chapter 12. Human Assets and Demographic Challenges to the Welfare State 300 Chapter 13. Solidarity and Redistribution under the Pressure of International Competition 316 Chapter 14. What Comes after the Classic Welfare State? 331 Bibliography 356 Index of Names 381 Index of Subjects 384 FIGURES 6.1. Social Participation and Social Policy Intervention 163 6.2. Forms of Intervention 177 8.1. Particular Interests and Systems Rationality 207 8.2. Pure Forms of Institutional Coordination 221 FOREWORD When Professor Kaufmann kindly asked me to write this foreword, he probably did not know that one of my fi rst jobs, some fi fty years ago, be- tween school and university, was in an institution of the German welfare state: the Alsterdorfer Anstalten in Hamburg. Working as a Hilfspfl eger (care assistant) did not allow much time for reading, and I learned lit- tle about the history or logic of continental welfare. Moreover, despite this unusual start for a British academic economist, my knowledge has remained defi cient. It is therefore with great pleasure and benefi t that I have read this collection of Professor Kaufmann’s essays, translated from German by Professor Veit-Wilson. This book renders accessible a rich set of essays on the past and future development of the welfare state in Europe. As the introduction to the 2010 Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State (Castles et al., 2010) points out, only the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of the non- English-language literature on the welfare state is translated into English. As an economist, I have been doubly handicapped. My economics course in Cambridge in the mid 1960s not only required me to read Smith, Ri- cardo, Marshall and Keynes but not List, Menger or the German historical school, but it also taught little about even the English-language literature on the welfare state. (Marshall was Alfred, not T.H.—although I did meet the latter at the home of James Meade). More recently, economists have discovered the welfare state but tend to view it from their own particular perspective of its functions and dysfunctions in the context of a market economy. This brings me to the fi rst lesson I drew from reading Professor Kaufmann’s impressive and wide-ranging book. As the author says, the book ‘offers a way of thinking about the welfare state that may not be familiar to an international audience’, which is also a way of thinking different from that of mainstream economics. To quote from chapter 1, ‘the development of systems of public provision of wel- fare are not only a by-product of industrialization, compensating for some dysfunctions of processes of economic and social change, but an essential Foreword • xi factor in the constitution of modern European societies’. I still believe, as I argued in my Geneva Association annual lecture twenty years ago, that the all-or-nothing nature of industrial employment (which means that people who fall sick or become unemployed can lose all their income) was one of the reasons why social insurance came into being, but I recognize that this is only part of the story. As Professor Kaufmann says, social poli- cies are essential for cultural, political and social integration. It is no ac- cident that new political entities of the nineteenth century like Germany and New Zealand were in the lead. This is also relevant to the ‘European Social Model’, a term that has little meaning when used to analyse the past history of national welfare provisions but resonates in contemporary debate about future social policy: to quote from chapter 10, ‘the rhetoric of a European social model becomes more credible if we consider it as a discourse within the framework of the search for a European identity’. The book contains many rich themes, and I can highlight only a few. One of these themes is the emphasis, in chapter 3, on the infl uence of re- ligious movements on the development of the European welfare state. In the case of Britain he refers to R.H. Tawney, and one can also cite empiri- cal social investigators such as Seebohm Rowntree, whose fi ndings about poverty were so infl uential. Another is the stress Professor Kaufmann plac- es on international infl uences on the emergence of social rights (chapter 4). With references to the ILO Declaration of Philadelphia in 1944 and to the roles of Eleanor Roosevelt, H.G. Wells and others, he argues that 1945 was a watershed in the development of fundamental social rights. This in turn had important consequences for national welfare states. In Britain, the post-war Beveridge-based social security legislation was less revolutionary than often claimed (being largely a rationalization of exist- ing schemes), but it broke new ground in its espousal of universalism and in linking social security to the wider issues of employment, education and health (fi ghting the fi ve ‘Giant Evils’ of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness). I hope that these brief remarks have whetted the reader’s appetite. Pro- fessor Kaufmann ends chapter 10 by observing that the future politics of the welfare state ‘will resemble more the attempt to steer a sailing ship dependent on fair winds than to command a steamer dependent on the power of its own engine. It is the task of social science to redefi ne and explore empirically the boundaries between the dynamics of markets and their social consequences in a multi-tiered political system’. The present volume is essential reading for all who seek to rise to this challenge. Anthony B. Atkinson, May 2011 TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE Scholarship is a triumph of the human mind because it is capable of imposing order and pattern on the unruly mate- rial of human experience. —Noel Annan, “Lytton Strachey and His Critics”1 What is a welfare state? The question has many disparate answers, and the term itself is treated as having many meanings across the spectrum of debate, from the most punctilious and intensive scholarship to the crudi- ties of everyday party-political argument. Some meanings have positive associations in some countries and ideologies, some negative, but debate rarely extends to examination of the underlying and often confl icting assumptions and diverse histories that the exchanges take for granted. For that reason, I was not only honoured but pleased to be asked to help Franz-Xaver Kaufmann translate his book so that, to complement their own understandings, the English-reading public could be offered an in- troduction to the meanings and intellectual roots of the concept of the welfare state as understood from the European continental perspective. The disagreement about meanings goes far deeper than mere semantics or ideology: it is rooted in differences in the national cultures of intellec- tual and scholarly approaches to the subject. In his seminal essay on intel- lectual styles, the sociologist Johan Galtung (1981: 817–856)2 analysed some of the contentious issues, and among the ideal-type styles he distin- guished, two are relevant to this translation – the saxonic (roughly speak- ing, the Anglo-Saxon intellectual style that can be distinguished into UK and US versions) and the teutonic intellectual style (which is not confi ned to Germans).