Belonging, Solidarity and Expansion in Social Policy

226 Pages·2013·2.341 MB·English

by  Stefanie Börner (auth.)

Belonging, Solidarity and Expansion in Social Policy
Belonging, Solidarity and
Expansion in Social Policy
Stefanie Börner
Free University of Berlin, Germany
© Stefanie Börner 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-31957-9
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-45736-6 ISBN 978-1-137-31958-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137319586
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
For my grandparents
Contents
List of Tables and Figures vii
Acknowledgements viii
1 Introduction 1
Part I Social Solidarity and the Welfare State
2 Towards a New Historical Sociology? 17
3 Solidarity and Social Policy 35
Part II Benefit Societies and the Welfare State
4 Social Security Beneath the Nation State 55
5 Collectively Against the State 92
6 Debating the Expansion of Solidarity 103
7 Coping with Change 128
Part III Social Solidarity Between Europe
and the Nation State
8 Beyond the National: The Construction of Social
Solidarity in the European Union 147
9 Conclusion 174
Notes 187
Bibliography 195
Material 213
Index 217
vi
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
3.1 Analytical dimensions of solidarity 42
4.1 Mutual benefit societies and industrialisation 56
4.2 Comparison of friendly and collecting societies 68
4.3 Number of benefit societies in Germany around 1870 72
4.4 Benefit society members related to active population
before and after the introduction of health insurance 80
6.1 Argumentative patterns endorsing or disapproving the
widening of solidarity 125
7.1 Trade union membership, 1890–1910 135
8.1 Absolute and relative population figures of foreign EU
residents, 2010 152
Figure
3.1 Different types of solidarity according to the different
individual orientations 52
vii
Acknowledgements
First, I would like to thank Herbert Obinger and Steffen Mau from the
University of Bremen, who from the very beginning supported the idea
of this study and gave me invaluable encouragement and advice. The
Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) and
the University of Bremen have not only provided the funding for the
study, but its colloquia and people have been a steady source of inspira-
tion for me.
I would also like to thank Georg Vobruba (University of Leipzig) for
the continuing support he has provided throughout my studies.
The research project ‘Social Europe’ led by Monika Eigmüller at the
University of Leipzig was also important to this study. I am especially
grateful for the theoretical discussions we had at the project meetings and,
last but not least, for Monika’s invaluable help throughout this work.
I also want to express my gratitude to Florian Tennstedt and Dan
Weinbren for their words of advice during the early stages of develop-
ing this study. Thanks go, of course, to the staff in the archives I visited,
especially the Public Record Office in Hamburg, the Modern Records
Centre in Warwick and the National Archives in London.
I want to thank my family for having always been there. Their sup-
port cannot be measured in simple terms such as understanding, love,
encouragement and confidence.
viii
1
Introduction
The modern welfare state – an indispensable but highly contested
aspect of our societies – has been considered a national phenomenon
for a long time. The European integration process calls this fact into
question. Only five years after Abram de Swaan (1992: 33) claimed that
‘[w]elfare states are national states’, he conceded that the European
Union (EU) constitutes an effective supranational agency that is able to
implement and regulate transnational social policies (de Swaan 1997).
Suddenly, alternative designs and scales of social policy were conceiv-
able and the national welfare state lost its naturalness. This entirely new
dimension is puzzling to political scientists, historians and sociologists
alike and poses new questions in regard to the scaling and rescaling of
social politics. Why did and still does the nation state represent the
dominant scale of social security for such a long time? What triggers
social policy expansion to a wider scale? Will there ever be a European
welfare state? These are some of the questions being asked here.
It is remarkable how, in the long run, public arrangements to cope
with destitution have been rescaled to a still higher level during the last
few hundred years and thus the scope and scale of social policy has been
expanded constantly. This development culminated in the national
welfare state that extended social insurance on behalf of ‘increasing
numbers of citizens to ever greater varieties of risk’ (Baldwin 1990: 1).
From this point of view it is understandable that it is hard to get away
from the idea of national social politics. However, the recent develop-
ments at the European level give more than one reason to think about
the historical co-occurrence of nation states and welfare states. While
we are observing the dissolution of boundaries of the economic system
and labour markets, actual social transfers to single persons remain
with the nation state (see, for instance, Böhnisch and Schröer 2005).
1
2 Belonging, Solidarity and Expansion in Social Policy
This has consequences for social integration at the national level since
the approved national solidarity is about to break up (Münch 1998).
This transformation is accompanied by a loss of national sovereignty,
fostered by the growing importance of transnational political structures.
Albeit a multi-level organisation constituted by nation states since its
foundation, the EU has been steadily gaining power, and national gov-
ernments are increasingly affected by decisions of the European Court
of Justice as well as by regulations of the European Commission. Thus,
in the face of these political, economic and social shifts the precondi-
tions of social integration within a sovereign national framework can
no longer be taken for granted (Clarke 2005: 407; Bach 2006: 175).
Notwithstanding these slow-moving transformations, many social
scientists are deeply sceptical towards transnationalising social policies
(de Swaan 1992; Streeck 2000; Scharpf 1997; Offe 2003a, 2003b). Given
the fact that global competition is said to decrease the amount of public
spending and that comprehensive welfare policies are to become less
likely (Tanzi 2002), they fear a race to the bottom ( Jessop 2002). Most
prominently, the prospects of a more redistributive social policy at the
European level are widely considered to be very narrow in the literature
due to country-specific heterogeneities and – linked to this – immensely
diverging interests, as well as democratic and financial deficits within
the institutional framework of the EU (Streeck 2000; Leibfried and
Obinger 2008). Another often cited reason for the rather bad prospects
of a more intensified and redistributive social dimension is Europe’s
lack of a so-called ‘we-identity’ (Scharpf 2000: 12) or solidarity among
the citizens (Offe 1998, 2003a). Interestingly, the often cited hypothesis
of Lepsius (1990, 1997), according to which a common consciousness
develops only after institutions have been built, is reversed here.
In other words, the question is whether social integration requires a
perceived common bond between its single elements at all or whether
it is the institutional arrangement that provides for such feelings of
togetherness and mutual responsibility in the first place. In order to
answer this question on a more empirical basis, the thematic focus of
this analysis lies on an already completed historical period of social
security extension, namely the transition from small health insurance
funds, so-called mutual benefit societies, to much larger and sometimes
even nation-wide risk communities that took place at the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Because this trans-
formative moment will be considered here from the micro level, I take
this process as rescaling of solidarity – solidarity being the willingness
to accept the costs that are linked to this expansion. I analysed internal