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Perspectives for Transnational Social Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Abram de Swaan
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Extract

WELFARE STATES ARE NATIONAL STATES, AND IN EVERY country welfare is a national concern, circumscribed by the nation's borders and reserved for its residents alone. In the course of centuries, these states have emerged from and against one another, in mutual competition, and in the past century this process of state formation in the West went in tandem with the collectivization of care. The welfare state is the national state in its latest phase. It may be succeeded by another stage which we may eventually see.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1992 , pp. 33 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1992

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References

1 Cf. Myrdal, Gunnar, Beyond the Welfare State; Economic Planning in the Welfare States and its International Implications, London, Methuen, 1960 (p. 119)Google Scholar: ‘… the democratic Welfare State in the rich countries of the Western world is protectionistic and nationalistic’.

2 Cf. my In Care of the State; Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe and the United States in the Modern Era, Cambridge/New York, Polity Press/Oxford University Press, 1989, also Jens Alber, ‘Is there a crisis of the welfare state? Cross-national evidence from Europe, North America, and Japan’European Sociological Review, 4.3, December 1988, pp. 181–207 and p. 200).

3 Cf. Myrdal, op. cit., p. 131: ‘The very experience of living and participating in the increasingly erective WeIrare State of the rich Western countries must tend to turn people’s interests inwards.’

4 Cf. for example E. Peter Hennock, ‘The origins or British National Insurance and the German Precedent, 1880–1914’ in: Mommsen, Wolfgang J. and Mock, W. (eds), The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany 1850–1950, London, Croorn Helm, 1981, pp. 84–106.Google Scholar

5 Social democrats have time and again advocated explicit policy measures to match the formation of an integrated market with the integration of social policies, e.g. in the field of employment; cf. for the Netherlands Den Uyl, Joop, Inzicht en uitzicht; Opstellen over economie en politiek, Amsterdam, Bert Bakker/Wiardi Beckman Stichting, 1988, pp. 192–6.Google Scholar

6 The Schengen agreements between Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands of 1985 and 1990 represent an attempt to develop joint border controls and a common policy towards aliens. However, the U.S.-Mexican border provides a sobering analogy, cf. Sheehan, Edward R. F., ‘The Open Border’: New York Review of Books, 37.4, 15 03 1990, pp. 34–8.Google Scholar

7 This issue represents one of the main themes of my In Care of the State, op. cit.

8 Cf. Mesa-Lago, , ‘Social Security and Extreme Poverty in Latin America’ Journal of Development Economics, North Holland Publ. Co, 12, 1983, pp. 83–110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, speaks of the ‘stratification of social security’ (p. 89) and: ‘With few exceptions, those below the extreme poverty level in Latin America are not protected by social security.’ (p. 85). See also MacPherson, Stewart and Midgley, James, Comparative Social Policy and the Third World, Sussex/New York, Wheatshear Books/St Martin’s Press, 1987. p. 122.Google Scholar

9 CT. for England, Gilbert, Bentley B., The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain: The Origins of the Welfare State, London, Michael Joseph, 1966, p. 226 Google Scholar, and, Collins, Doreen, ‘The Introduction of Old Age Pensions in Great Britain’, Historical Journal, 8, 1965, pp. 246–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Cf. Zolberg, Aristide A., Suhrke, Astrid and Aguayo, Sergio, Escape from Violence; Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 232.Google Scholar

11 Ruggie, John Gerard, ‘Political Structure and Change in the International Order: the North-South Dimension’ in: Ruggie, J. G. (ed.), The Antinomies of Interdependence; National Welfare and the International Division of Labor, New York, Columbia University Press, 1983, pp. 423–89.Google Scholar

12 It is now known that the most perfect border which mankind has ever seen could withstand a pressure of fifteen million people, or ten humans per meter, for exactly twenty-eight years before it finally succumbed, in the heart of Berlin.

13 Cf. Aristide A. Zolberg, ‘The Future of International Migrations’, Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development Working Papers.

14 Granting ‘entitlements’, in the present case in cash, also appears to be the most effective policy in preventing famines, as has been shown by Drèze, Jean and Sen, Amartya, Hunger and Public Action, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989.Google Scholar