Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Two things come out with utmost clarity from this message as being
of central concern to the new departure: class relations, or more
specifically, the integration of the working class into the existing
society and state through support-cum-repression; and the role and
structure of the state, or a reorganization of state-society relations
(concretely by effacing the strict liberal demarcation of civil society
versus parliament-cum-bureaucracy by means of corporatist arrangements). These issues - class and state - were decisive both
to Bismarck and to his opponents." The Reich government withdrew
its first proposal of 1881, after the Diet had accepted the insurance,
but not what the government regarded as the proper role of the state
in it. One of Bismarck's administrative collaborators, Theodore
Lohman, wrote about Bismarck in a private letter in 1883:
The accident insurance in itself is a secondary point for him; the main
point is to use this opportunity to bring corporative associations into
existence, which little by little would have to be extended to all the
productive classes of the people, so that the foundation for the
establishment of a representative instance of the people may be brought
into being, which would constitute an essentially participatory
legislature, replacing or alongside the Reichstag .... 4
There is little connection between, on the one hand, the "blood and
iron" concerns of the Reich government of the 1880s to repress
(through banning of the extraparliamentary activities of Social
Democracy) and integrate the working class by reorganizing the state
in a corporatist direction, and, on the other, the latter-day Whig interpretation along the lines of "an answer to the increasing demands
for socio-economic equality in the context of the evolution of mass
democracies" (emphasis added).
The working class is held to be significant only as the main
beneficiary of welfare-state development, particularly in the latter's
democratic responsiveness to demands for socio-economic equality
and security, and the state's acquisition of a new legitimacy through
social services and transfer payments. With a discrete understatement, it is noted in passing, though, that "the creation of the modern
welfare state did not precede the aggravation of business cycle effects and the intensification of class conflict in the last decades of
the nineteenth century."6
However, it would be unfair to judge two independently
distinguished scholars on the basis of their lowest common
denominator, even though that tells us someting about the state of
well-informed scholarly opinion. To the volume cited above,
Heidenheimer has contributed a paper that opens up a new vista on
the trajectory of welfare states. He introduces public secondary and
tertiary education as one of the welfare state's possible features and
analyzes mass higher education as a possible alternative to socialsecurity leiglsation. Flora, in his personal contribution, shows the
fragility of industrialization and urbanization explanations for the
beginnings of the welfare state, and brings out the importance of
state structure in the form of constitutional monarchies (more progressive) versus parliamentary democracies. In an even more thought-
Goran Therborn/Welfare
States
and the 1980s. In particular, the paper attempts to bring out the class
context of the beginning of the welfare state; differential forms of
welfare commitments and their determinants; and the location of
the welfare state in the history of states, including an answer to the
previously unasked and unanswered question of when the state
became a welfare state.
Two Centenaries: Marxism and Social Insurance
Implied by the Imperial Enunciation quoted above is a break with
Liberalism, not only in the usual sense of a break with laissez-faire
and its socio-economic Iegacy.v' but also as a conception of what
the state is, or has to be, in relation to classes, and not just to individuals. There seems to be a not irrelevant coincidence between
the emergence of modern social-security legislation and of the modern
labour movement.
Labour historians and social-law historians do not seem to mix
very well, but it is, of course, a striking fact that the first modern
welfare-state legislation developed in the country of the first - and
for a long period the dominant - modern labour movement. A
"modern labour movement" involves (1) a political party appealing
to, and trying to organize, the workers as a class, different from other
classes, with a view to gaining political power; and (2) a trade-union
movement organizing the workers as a class for economic struggle
with capital. The crucial constitutive movement in both respects is
the establishment of permanent, unified party and trade-union
organizations having the same territorial range as state authority (i.e.,
a "national" party and a "national" trade union confederation).
The Paris Commune of 1871 was a watershed in labour history
as well as a crucial trigger of modern welfare-state developments.
With regard to labour history, the Paris Commune was the last major manifestation, in Western Europe, of the insurrectionary crowd;
and the international repression it unleashed brought to an end the
heterogeneous proto-labour movement, the First International. In
its place came the working-class mass party and the unified tradeunion movement.
The new class-specific labour movement, like the welfare-state,
meant a break with the traditions of the bourgeois revolution - both
its radical-plebian and bourgeois-liberal variants. Being a country
of vigorous industrial capitalism and of an aborted bourgeois revolution, Germany led the way. Lassalle's successor, Schweitzer, brought
together a German trade union confederation as early as 1868, the
same year as the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was founded in Bri-
11
12
Goran Therborn/Welfare
States
Table 1
Timing of Working Class Party Unification, Trade-Union
Unification, and First Major or Moderate Social Insurance Law
Germany
Austria
Denmark
Norway
France
Belgium
Netherlands
Britain
Switzerland
Sweden
Italy
Social Insurance
1883
1888
1891
1894
1898
1900
1901
1908
1911
1913
after 1914)
Notes: Dates are taken from national labour history monographs and refer
to the constitution of a nationally unifed working-class parties and tradeunion confederations. The selection of countries is that used by Peter Flora
in his "Solution or Source of Crisis? The Welfare State in Historical Perspective," in The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany, ed.
W.J. Mommsen (London 1981).
Statistically, the relation between party foundation and social insurance
legislation is not very compelling. The rank correlation is 0.46. However,
compared with the relationship between the rate of industrialization during
the 1880s and 189Os,the figure is quite respectable. The rank correlation between first significant social insurance legislation and rate of industrialization is - 0.07. See Jens Albers, Von Armenhaus zum Wohlfahrtsstat
(Frankfurt and New York 1982), 120.
If the complex Swiss constitution is taken into account, the correlation
becomes considerably higher. Already in 1889, the Swiss Federal Assembly
commissioned the federal government to enact social insurance legislation.
But this meant a constitutional change, which first had to be submitted to
a referendum, which in turn carried the proposal in 1890. But then, the referendum institute thwarted government and parliamentary initiatives until 1911.
If 1889 or 1890 is taken as the year of Swiss legislation, rank correlation with
labour party foundation would be 0.65, as compared with a correlation with
the rate of industrialization of 0.11. See A. Maurer, "Landesbericht Schweiz,"
in P. Kohler and H. Zacher, eds., Ein Jahrhundert Sozialversicherung (Berlin
1981), 780ff.
Such statistics speak to statisticians. To social and political historians,
another figure is perhaps, more telling. In 1877, when a modern labour party had not yet been founded anywhere else, the SAPD [German Socialist
Democratic Party] polled 39.2 per cent of the votes in Berlin, the capital of
social insurance. See H. Wachenheim, Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung
l844-l9l4 (Cologne 1967), 188.
14
Goran Therbom/Welfare
States
15
16
Goran Therbom/Welfare
States
17
18
Goran Therbom/Welfare
States
of the first welfare-state developments. We may formulate them provisionally through a set of dichotomizing questions:
1. Do pre-industrial, publicly regulated insurance systems exist? In
countries where they do, social-policy developments from the latenineteenth century onwards tend to pioneer in, and to concentrate
on, creating obligtory insurance schemes. Since such was the case
with the older insurance institutions, these new obligatory schemes
tend to have a corporatist form of organization. (This pattern is exemplified by Germany, Austria, and, to a more limited extent,
France.)29
2. Do local and provincial authorities have a wide competence and
a significant fiscal autonomy or not? Where they have, modern social
polities begin to grow primarily on the basis of these authorities (Scandinavia in general; Denmark in particular; Switzerland.w Belgium,
in the case of unemployment insurance);"
3. Do strong categorical institutions of private social security exist,
catering for particular social categories? Where they do, the new
public social policy tends to buttress these institutions with financial subsidies, legal recognition, and legal protection. (This pattern
is exemplified by Belgium, France and the Netherlands.)
In a country such as Britain, for which the answer would be no
to all three questions, the institutional heritage would predispose the
country to development of a welfare state system in which social insurance comes relatively late and is not regarded as the dominant
institution of social policy, and one in which a relatively centralized
system catering to individual citizens in need is developed. The
available evidence seems to bear this out.
Our argument so far may be summed up in this way. The development towards a welfare state began on a broad scale in those countries that first experienced the challenge of a working-class party.
The new social policies adopted were initiated from above and were
largely shaped by distinctive national traditions of law, state structures, and state-society relations, prior to late-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. These traditions are in many ways still visible
in their contemporary effects, and the adaptations of them before
World War I in turn left a further institutional heritage to later
generations.
However, the growth of the labour movement meant the emergence
of another set of determinants of welfare-state politics and policies:
the demands and the perspectives of the classes of industrial
capitalism. On the basis of existing institutions, the outcomes of industrial patterns of class conflict have shaped the welfare states of
19
today.
The Working-Class Perspective
The histories of the welfare state have hitherto, on the whole, been
written from above, with the historian's searchlight fixed on governments and civil servants and mainly with a view to looking into what
and when they contributed to the development of what from today's
perspective apears to be the main features of the welfare state: social
insurance and other large-scale income-maintenance programs. The
typical trajectory pictured in these histories is one from poor relief
to income maintenance, as indicated by the title of the work of J ens
Alber, and the subtitle of that by Hugh Heclo, mentioned above.
Against the background of this conventional wisdom, the following questions need to be asked: What did the workers and the
workers' movement think and do about the "workers' question?"
What did they demand and what did they fight for? But such questions have a further implication. By answering it, we also begin to
get a basis from which to assess how much the labour movement
has contributed - directly, and not only as a threat to the existing
social order - to the making of contemporary welfare states.
In another essay I have tried to develop a working-class perspective on social policy. Properly speaking, that is a task for large-scale,
social-historical research. My own contribution is more limited, based
first of all on an overview reading of nineteenth-century labour and
social-policy historiography (particularly of the major European
countries), and, secondly, on a study of the programmes and congress resolutions of the First, Second, and Third Internationals, as
well as of the major parties of the Second International. This latter
source gives us the perspective of organized labour before it was
shaped by national constraints in conjunctures involving parliamentary responsibility and delimited governmental margins of manoeuvre. The former, secondary sources provide at least a possible
check on whether or not the early programmatic statements of labour
parties were consistent with the demands and strivings of workers
in struggle. 32
From such research, a set of characteristics of the working-class
perspective on social policy may be formulated:
The Guiding Principle
Most immediately and most directly, what workers rose and organized
to fight for were workers' rights to a livelihood and to a decent human
life. A conception of workers' rights seems to be the guiding princi-
20
---------------------
------
Goran Therborn/Welfare
States
pie running through working-class perspectives on social policy a principle opposed to insurance as well as to charity, an assertion
overriding liberal arguments about the requirements of capital accumulation, dangers to competitiveness, and the necessity of incentives. The labour perspective is first of all an assertion of the rights
of working persons against any logic involving objects of charity,
market commodities or thrifty savers.
One cannot deny that this working-class principle may at times
overlap with the compassion of humanitarian middle-class reformers,
an aristocratic sense of paternal obligation, a radical conception of
citizens' rights, or the enlightened self-interest of businessmen and
statesmen concerned with the reproduction of the labour force, of
the soldier force, or of the existing social order. But there are also
occasions and issues on which the working class tends to be left alone
with its principles, and on which other concerns take on an overriding importance for other groups and classes. Unemployment and
the treatment of the unemployed is such a crucial issue. Shall the
unemployed have the same rights and conditions as the workers
(whom it is profitable to employ) in public-works employment or
as benefits receivers? Should the prevention of unemployment be a
task of social policy overriding all others? Questions like these form
touchstones of class perspectives.
Task Priorities
The first working-class priority is undoubtedly protection of the class
itself (Arbeiterschutz or workers' protection, as it is termed tellingly
in German): safety at work, union rights, and leisure from work.
The labour movement has always been male-dominated and, in
spite of the explicit demands for the legal equality of women, this
workers-protection orientation often includes a patriarchal, special
protectionist attitude towards women (often assimilated with children)
and women's work.33 Class also has a gender aspect.
The second priority of the labour movement has been the right
to work, the maintenance of employment under non-punitive conditions. Income maintenance and social insurance arranged by the
state is not an original working-class demand. Insurance by means
of associations of mutual aid developed early in working-class history,
but state insurance comes from elsewhere. For instance, it does not
figure in the Social Democratic Gotha Programme of 1875, in spite
of the programme's half-Lassallean, pro-state perspective.> The
founding congress of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party,
in December-January 1888-89, dismissed the Workers' Insurance
21
22
23
the Socialist party, waged a vehement resistance against workers' contributions to a public pensions insurance, and against the bill as a
whole, which became law in 1910. The law was a failure; the CGT
had expressed the interests of the French workers on this issue. (The
critique also referred to the capitalization scheme and the high age
of retirement.) After the war, however, the CGT became a champion of social insurance with principled acceptance of workers' contributions as the legitimate basis for trade-union control of the administration. (And the belated health and old age insurance act of
1930 was also accepted and supported in practice by the workers.P?
Part of the redistributive perspective is also an early demand for
public services free of charge: education, health care, and later, a
wide range of municipal services (not necessarily free of users'
tariffs). 40
Opposed Social-Policy Perspectives
24
Goran Therborn/Welfare
States
25
Class Perspective
Guiding Principle:
favourable conditions
for capital
accumulation.
Coverage and
Organizational Form:
more restricted.
26
-----------------------------
Finance: insurance
principles
Administrative Control:
against union and state
control
Guiding Principle:
incentives.
6. "Employers ....
should review the
voluntary social benefits ... to see
whether they correspond to a real
need of the employees or whether
they have become superfluous due
to the expansion of the social
benefits required by collective
agreement. "
No corresponding
analytical perspective.
Finance: nonredistribution.
Coverage and
Organizational Form:
against uniform public
organization.
'1.7
Views
1. "Full Employment as the Major
Aim"
"Each human being has the fundamental right to a decent job ....
For the trade unions the real issue
in the immediate future is to
reorient economic policy so that it
would stimulate such economic activity which would restore full
employment.' ,
Trade-Union
2. "Alternatives Through
Cooperation"
"Free collective bargaining in lean
Administrative Control:
years is difficult enough, and the
workers' selfgovernments should not aggravate
management with
bipartite or tripartite
the task of trade unions by attacking this valuable channel through
arrangements as second
and third best.
which many crucial measures of
social policy can also be
negotiated. "
"Priority should also be given to an
analysis on the extent to which programmes fail to reach those who
would be eligible: in this again, cooperation with the trade unions is
necessary. "
3. "Selective Growth and Basic
Values"
"Growth has never solved social
problems alone. Even selective
growth does not eliminate tension
between social and economic aims.
Social policies in the 1980s should
create a framework for workers and
their unions to exert an increasing
influence in the decision-making
process at all levels, including the
enterprise level. . ."
28
Administrative Control:
workers' selfmanagement; bipartite
or tripartite
arrangements.
Finance: redistribution
by progressive taxation
or employers'
contributions
Coverage and
5. "A certain level of protection
Organizational Form:
should be extended to each individual in society, for the society's wide.
own sake ....
Selective protection
of disadvantaged groups is not an
alternative to universal action, but
it must come on top of it, to ensure
equality. "
6. "Educational policies are an essential part of this overall policy aiming at full employment, to
guarantee retraining and the continuous upgrading of skills in the
face of technological
developments. "
No corresponding
analytical principle.
19
8. "Questions
of policies to address
the quality of work ought to occupy
a central role in the deliberations of
this Conference. The improvement
of working conditions would
alleviate a number of
problems ....
"
Coverage and
Organizational
uniform.
Form:
" ....
TUAC [Trade Union
Advisory Committee] opposes any
increased privatization
of social
services. "
Sources:
30
31
31
---
--------------------
Goran Therbom/Welfare
States
Table 3
Expenditure on and Employment in Public Social Services in
Britain in 1951 and Sweden in 1950 (Per Cent of Total Public
Expenditure and of Total Public Employment, Respectively)
Social Expenditure)
Social BmploymentNotes:
Sources:
Britain
38
20
Sweden
43
28
33
Table 4
Welfare-State Expenditure! As a Percentage of Total Public
Expenditure in 1981, and Total Outlays of Government as a
a Percentage of GDP in 1981
Welfare-State Expenditure
Canada
United States
Japan
Australia
New Zealand
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Ireland
Italy
Netherlands
Norway
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
34
53
59
57
612
Total Expenditure
41
35
34
34
51
58
742
533
564
6JS
66
382
52
64
50
56
59
39
49
49
36
552
61
51
62
56
48
(52)6
487
55
65
288
47
Goran Tberborn/Welfare
States
35
--------
-------------------------
Notes
1. Goran Therborn, "The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy," New
Left Review 103 (1977), 3-41
2. D. Zollner, "Landesbericht Deutschland," in Bin Jahrhundert Sozielversicherung, ed. P. Kohler and H. Zacher (Berlin 1981), 87
36
og sociallovgivning
1850-1970
18. P. Hennock, "The Origins of British National Insurance and the German Precedent 1891-1914," in Mommsen, Emergence of the Welfare State,
84ff. (see n. 7 above); H. Heclo, Modern Social Politics in Britain and
Sweden (New Haven and London 1974), 170ff.
19. M. Liebman, Les socialistes belges 1885-1914(Brussels 1979), 46ff; Kritak,
Wat Zoudt Gij Zonder 't Werkvolk Zijn? (Leuven 1977), 38-9
20. F. Tenstedt, Sozialgeschichte der Sozialpolitik in Deutschland (Gottingen
1981), 222
37
38
Goran Therborn/Welfare
States
32. Goran Therborn, "The Working Class and the Welfare State" (Paper
presented to the Fifth Nordic Congress of Research in the History of the
Labour Movement, in Murikka, Finland, August 1983). (To be published
in Congress proceedings.)
33. The Social Democratic women demanded no prohibition of nightwork
for women, for instance. (Nor did they demand family or chid allowance,
but this was in agreement with the male perspective; see further below).
Huitieme Congres Socialiste International (Gand 1911), 492-5
34. Of its six specific demands, one deals with education and five deal with
worker protection, in the German-Scandinavian sense. From Karl Marx,
"Kritik des Gothaer Programms," in Marx-Engels Werke, 19: 30ff.
35. Beschliisse des Parteitages 2401-2. (See n. 23 above.)
36. Programm der sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutsch1ands (Berlin 1891).
37. The universalism of the Swedish old age pensions insurance of 1913 was
incidental, and followed most directly from the pragmatic character of
Swedish politics. The originally proposed, very wide coverage derived,
however, from Swedish class relations - from the political strength of
the peasantry and its link to the working class. From early on it was clear
that pensions scheme should comprise those two classes together. See
Therborn, "The Working Class and the Welfare State" (see n. 32 above).
38. Thus, at the time of the introduction of unemployment insurance in Britain (by the Liberal Lloyd George government) the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC proposed that the insurance should be restricted to
unionists. The government refused this, naturally enough for such a
government. See J. Harris, Unemployment and Politics (Oxford 1972),
317-8. In Sweden, unemployment insurance is still wholly in the hands
of the unions, as it is in Belgium to a predominant extent.
39. Hatzfeld, Du pauperisme, 229ff. (See n. 29 above.)
40. At the Paris Congress of the Second International, in 1900, the Belgians
had a resolution passed on "municipal socialism," concerning the promotion of municipal services as "embryos of the collectivist society." Cinquieme Congres Socialiste International (Geneve 1980), 112ff. The most
important development of municipal socialism came after World War I,
headed by the Socialists of Vienna.
41. See H.C. Galant, Histoire politique de 1a securite socia1e irenceise
1945-1952 (Paris 1955); H.G. Hockerts, Sozialpolitische Entscheidungen
im Nachkriegsdeutsch1and (Stuttgart 1980); T. Berban and G. Janssen,
"Vakbeweging en sociale zekerheid in Nederland na 1945," (M.A. thesis,
Institute for Political Science, Catholic University, Nijmegen, Netherlands,
1982).
39
42. The Labour Party 41st Annual Conference Report 1942, p. 132, here
quoted from J. Hess, "The Social Policy of the Atlee Government," in
Mommsen, Emergence of the Welfare State, 297
43. See Heclo, Modern Social Politics 253-283. Heclo himself does not see
it that way, but a reader whose attention has been directed to the class
perspectives outlined above will certainly recognize them in Heclo's
narrative.
44. This is true also of non-European countries. For instance, opposite class
alignments with regard to the organization of unemployment insurance
in the 1930s or of health insurance after World War II emerge clearly,
albeit in passing, from the studies of Canadian social reforms by Don
Swartz and Alvin Finkel in The Canadian State, ed. Leo Panitch (Toronto 1977), 323, 329, 353
45. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, The Welfare
State in Crisis (Paris 1981).
46. H. Heclo, "Towards a New Welfare State?"and in Flora Heidenheimer,
Development of Welfare States, 384. (See n. 5 above.)
47. G. Therborn, "When, How and Why Does a State Become A Welfare
State?" (Paper presented to the ECPR Joint Workshops Meeting in
Freiburg, March 1983), part 2.
48. The Swedish figure does not include municipal housing expenditure.
49. M. Abramowitz and V. Eliasberg, The Growth of Public Employment
in Britain (Princeton 1957), 101; Goran Therborn, Klasstrukturen i Sverige
1930-1980 (Lund 1980), 116. The Swedish employment figures are based
on detailed occupational breakdowns, which tend to give slightly higher
figures than statistics based on departmental lump sums. Calculations on
the basis of the latter-type of materials have yielded Swedish figures for
1930 and 1950 of 28 and 27 per cent, respectively.
50. Therborn, "When, How and Why," 30. (see n. 47 above.) The sources
used there are International Labour Organization (lLO) figures on social
security and OECD figures on education expenditure and total public expenditure (including capital formation).
51. The sources are the same as those of Table 3.
52. United States, Bureau of Census, The Statistical History of the United
States from Colonial Times to the Present (New York 1976), 1102, 1104,
1141
53. H. Armstrong, "The Labour Force and State Workers in Canada," in
Panitch, Canadian State, 299, 300, 302 (tables 4-6). (See n. 44 above.)
40
41
----------------------------