Marginalized Groups, Inequalities and the Post-War Welfare State

Whose Welfare?

Monika Baár, Paul van Trigt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429754746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Examining the ways in which societies treat their most vulnerable members has long been regarded as revealing of the bedrock beliefs and values that guide the social order. However, academic research about the post-war welfare state is often focused on mainstream arrangements or on one social group. With its focus on different marginalized groups: migrants and people with disabilities, this volume offers novel perspectives on the national and international dimensions of the post-war welfare state in Western Europe and North America.

1 Rescuing the European welfare state

The Social Affairs Committee of the early European Communities, 1953–1962

Brian Shaev

Introduction¹

Welfare and European integration are emblematic of Western Europe’s revival after the tumult of economic depression, social dislocation, mass population movements, genocide and war that marked the first half of the twentieth century. They were children of the post-war era, though they drew and built upon pre-war models. Several decades ago, Charles Maier famously employed the phrase “the politics of productivity” to analyse the nexus of domestic and international socio-economic policies that shaped the “post-war consensus” from the Marshall Plan to the early European communities.² Maier’s formulation fits well with John Ruggie’s concept of “embedded liberalism,” in which international institutions provided an anchor of stability and a propitious setting around which national governments constructed welfare states.³ In these accounts, the philosophy that guided the hands of the architects of Western Europe’s revival was that a stable institutional foundation for economic growth would in itself engender an improvement in living standards and welfare, a view shared as well by the International Labour Organization.⁴ The European communities, which later became the European Union (EU), were among the most important products of this context of designing institutions to manage the economics and politics of inter-state bargaining. For his part, historian Alan Milward took a different approach to Maier and Ruggie, famously arguing that the European communities were designed to “rescue” national welfare systems, in particular by passing the costs of welfare in troubled economic sectors (Belgian coal and European agriculture) to the European level.⁵

Though social rights have found piecemeal recognition in European conventions and treaties in the last sixty years, they have generally been subordinated to internal market issues in European law. The second-tier position of social rights in the European communities mirrors their marginalization in Western conceptions of international human rights law established in the 1940s–1950s. The 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights embodied “a dominant Western paradigm of individual rights” in which “economic, social, and cultural rights were included … but in a secondary position” that was further degraded when debates shifted to negotiating a legally binding human rights convention.⁶ Despite the UN General Assembly voting multiple times for the inclusion of ­economic and social rights in a single covenant with civil and political rights, the “human rights convention … was further fragmented into two treaties – civil and political rights, championed by Western states, and economic, social, and cultural rights, supported, albeit less forcefully, by Third World states and the communist bloc and therefore given an inferior legal and political status in the UN system.”⁷ The 1950 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), described by one scholar as “the crown jewel of the Council of Europe and more generally postwar Europe,” also excluded social rights; it contained instead only “a select number of civil and political rights.”⁸ According to Marco Duranti’s influential study, the ECHR must “be understood as a product of its free-market and social conservative origins” in which a coalition of conservatives and Christian Democrats defeated centre-left concepts of social rights as human rights in the 1949–1950 debates in the Council of Europe.⁹ Nonetheless, the ECHR remained largely a dead letter until the end of the 1950s, whereas a supranational European community opened in 1952–1953. The Treaties of Rome (1957) that established the European Economic Community (EEC) largely omitted social policy, though it figured more prominently in the Treaty of Paris (1951) that created the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).

Social policy in the European communities, the subject of this chapter, was contentious from the start. In the spirit of Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi’s work on the UN and of Duranti’s book on the Council of Europe, this chapter does not view “the denigration of economic and social rights” within the European communities as “inevitable nor inescapable” but rather as “closely contested and historically contingent.”¹⁰ Historians have investigated the intergovernmental negotiations that led to the (limited) social provisions of the EEC Treaty, the role of member states and the European Commission in setting up the European Social Fund and the European Investment Bank, the collaboration of the International Labour Organization in the social policy of the ECSC/EEC, and the consultative Economic and Social Committee that brought together employer, trade union and consumer organizations.¹¹ This contribution is among the first to analyse in its own right the early years of the Social Affairs Committee of the Common Assembly, from 1958 the Social Committee of the European Parliamentary Assembly, the predecessor of today’s European Parliament.¹² European deputies were national parliamentarians delegated by their parliaments to oversee community activities and ensure the democratic accountability of the High Authority and European Commission, the communities’ executive bodies. The assembly held few formal powers and its claims of democratic representation were undermined by the exclusion of communist and far-right deputies. Nonetheless, the deputies’ positions were strengthened by their dual mandates in national and European assemblies and their persistence in treating the Common Assembly as a formidable European parliament in the making. The initiative for the creation of the Social Affairs Committee came from community socialists, who argued for a robust and expansive mandate for the assembly during its inaugural sessions. Dissatisfied with the proposal for a committee mandate limited to “housing issues,” they proposed a committee “on work and social questions” in September 1952 that would deal with “questions concerning workers’ policies, freedom of migration, living standards, and social affairs and benefits.” The Social Affairs Committee was inaugurated in January 1953 as one of four large committees (along with common market, investment and external relations) that would conduct the lion’s share of the assembly’s day-to-day work overseeing ECSC policy.¹³ It is worthwhile examining how this international group of politicians conceptualized welfare in the move from a coal and steel common market to a general common market in the 1950s–1960s. Doing so brings to the fore the contested nature of early European social policy. In this committee, moderate socialists, centre-left Christian Democrats and socially minded liberals held a majority that supported social rights and distrusted aspects of the “politics of productivity.” The chapter covers a timeframe from the opening of the coal and steel market in 1953 to the move from the first to second transitional stage of the EEC customs union in 1962. It begins by considering how committee members conceptualized the impact that a coal and steel common market would have on the working conditions, (un)employment, and social rights of coal and steel workers in 1953–1955. It then examines their attempts to influence and revise the social clauses of European treaties in communication with the High Authority and the intergovernmental team negotiating the Treaties of Rome in 1955–1957. Finally, it analyses their efforts to build supranational welfare policies in and beyond heavy industry during the first years of the EEC in 1958–1962. Through an examination of committee minutes, resolutions and communications the analysis demonstrates (1) how committee members claimed to speak for workers in their repeated criticisms of the inadequacy of European social policy, (2) how they differentiated between groups of workers as they campaigned for supranational social rights, and (3) how the focus on employment as the basis for social rights as well as their acceptance of contemporary social and gender norms constricted their otherwise large ambitions to build legitimacy for the European project by means of a pro-active and interventionist European social policy.

Building legitimacy for European integration by promoting workers’ welfare, 1953–1955

Jean Monnet, president of the supranational ECSC High Authority, spoke of the “tight interdependence” between economics and social policy in his first appearance in April 1953 before the Social Affairs Committee of the ECSC Common Assembly. In preparation for this meeting, Monnet wrote, “I believe that it is no exaggeration to say that all of the High Authority’s activities have a social character.”¹⁴ Despite Monnet’s gloss, the ECSC treaty’s philosophy is better summed up by Albert Coppé, a High Authority commissioner, who told the first meeting of the Common Market Committee that “it is essentially by means of a rise in productivity, the principal task of the Community, that we will arrive at an improvement in the living and working conditions of workers.”¹⁵

This interpretation of the treaty as an embodiment of the “politics of productivity” found a cold welcome in the new Social Affairs Committee. From its inception, committee members were at odds with core aspects of this governing philosophy of the European Community. The elected chair, Gerard Nederhorst of the Dutch Labour Party, opened the committee’s second meeting in March 1953 by stating, “When we examined the report of the High Authority” in January, “I had the impression that our committee did not fully approve the method employed by the High Authority to develop projects in the social domain.” He complained that the High Authority “has given the wrong impression that social policy is of secondary importance” and that “compared to the constant movement in the economic field, the major lines of policy that the Coal and Steel Community intends to practice in the social field remain vague and poorly defined.”¹⁶ He suggested a formal protest to Monnet, a request his colleagues unanimously approved. It was this protest that prompted Monnet to respond with the assurances quoted earlier.

In the first committee meetings, members expressed concern that a neglect of social policy could gravely damage the legitimacy of the European project. The committee attempted to add weight to social policy by strengthening its own position vis-à-vis the High Authority and the other Common Assembly committees. Nederhorst and his colleagues insisted that the High Authority consult the committee before making major decisions on issues like pricing and cartel policy, core fields of community activity. In these early years, comments such as this were common: “It is [unacceptable] that a decision has been taken in the economic or financial domain without having first examined the social consequences of these decisions.”¹⁷ In addition, committee members emphasized the importance of expanding units of the High Authority bureaucracy devoted to employment and social issues that were understaffed compared to their economic counterparts.

Most glaring were the apprehensive remarks committee members repeatedly made about how people in their countries perceived the newly founded community. Italian member Italo Mario Sacco said during Monnet’s appearance that

the creation of the International Labour Organization in the Treaty of Versailles gave birth to great hopes of the improvement of working conditions but these hopes were in large part disappointed. The reason was that certain countries, fearing competition, adopted an overly restricted or prudent social legislation and were forced to do so by their neighbouring countries. It is necessary not to fall into the same error.¹⁸

Sacco emphasized the “psychological problem” that “workers have the impression that the interest in the social aspect of problems is somewhat neglected,” pointing to employers using “the pretext of the uncertainty born of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Rescuing the European welfare state: the Social Affairs Committee of the early European Communities, 1953–1962
• 2 From territorialized rights to personalized international social rights? The making of the European Convention on the Social Security of Migrant Workers (1957)
• 3 The ILO and the shift towards economic liberalization in the international professional rehabilitation policies of people with disabilities after World War II
• 4 Farewell to social Europe? An entangled perspective on European disability policies in the 1980s and 1990s
• 5 The history of a phantom welfare state: the United States
• 6 Managing the transition from war to peace: post-war citizenship-based welfare in Italy and France, 1944–1947
• 7 Disabled citizens and the neoliberal turn in Britain: whose rights and whose responsibilities?
• 8 Welfare: defended, questioned, complemented? Belgian welfare arrangements in the 1970s–1980s from the perspective of disability organizations
• 9 A new inequality in the Danish welfare state: the development of immigration and integration policy in post-war Denmark
• Conclusion: beyond citizenship and “responsibilization” in the exclusionary welfare state: realizing universal human rights through social resilience-building and interactional justice?
• Index