Belonging, Solidarity and Expansion in Social Policy

S. Börner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137319586
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the relationship of belonging and social policy in a historical-comparative perspective reconstructing individual arguments in favour of or opposed to the expansion of solidarities.

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 conceivable 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 developments 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). 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 governments 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 preconditions 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 transformative 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 documents of benefit societies in Germany and the United Kingdom in order to examine the preconditions of expanding membership spaces in social policy, the members’ redistributive preferences and their motives. Given the fact that solidarity in these societies was typically organised in local or occupational terms within rather narrow social bonds, the underlying assumption is that the expansion, either voluntary or enforced, of this small-group solidarity was not unproblematic. The research investigates whether a sense of belonging plays a role in arguing for or against a nationalisation of social security.

Taking the constructed community of the national welfare state (and its frequently evoked decline) as a starting point, I ask how previous organisations in charge of health insurance reacted to the expansion of their membership spaces and whether categories of belonging played a role in arguing for or against a nation-wide insurance scheme. As important predecessors of public health insurance, they represented a major form of collective self-help organised by the working classes across the nineteenth century (see van der Linden 1996a; Harris 2012). They combined the pooling of risks with a convivial aspect provided by regular meetings and symbolic practices that furthered a specific sense of solidarity among these groups of workers (Frevert 1984; Cordery 2003; Weinbren 2006). But solidarity within these privately organised and administered funds was rather small in scale. Either it was restricted by definition to a locality or occupation, or in the case of bigger societies, was divided into local branches. The projected rescaling of health insurance challenged this kind of solidarity. Mutual benefit societies are therefore ideal for studying redistributive preferences and the nexus between social policy and belonging.

The two cases – German Hilfskassen and British friendly societies – form the background in which the analysed texts emerged to be considered in detail and link the actors’ interests and motives to the concrete historical context in order to explain why, in some cases, the sense of belonging dominated the arguments, and in others did not. The period of investigation covers the years around which the two national health insurance schemes were introduced. Pioneering the universe of social insurance, German health insurance was enacted in 1883, followed by the British equivalent almost 30 years later, in 1911. So during the years 1880 to 1884 in Germany and 1907 to 1912 in the UK, both countries’ provident societies extensively debated the bills and the advantages and disadvantages of expansion linked to it. At that time, friendly societies faced a central but, given the liberal tradition, rather weak state that was nevertheless perceived as one unit despite its plurinational character. In contrast, Bismarck had the difficult task of ruling over the young German nation, which consisted of single states that still seemed to prevail in the citizens’ perception.¹ In other respects, case selection also follows the logic of a most different case design (Bennett and George 2005). A state’s mutual-society movement diverged in terms of political intervention and its relationship to state authorities. While Great Britain was characterised by a rather friendly attitude towards the organisations attempting to give them a legal status and definition, and sometimes even privileges, the German approach can be considered as authoritative, trying to restrict and control voluntary insurance (van der Linden 1996b).

So, the groups acted within strongly diverging heterogeneous legal and political systems, traditions and economies, which, in turn, shaped their behaviour and attitudes. The comparative perspective prevents us from rejecting the argument for the sake of historical idiosyncrasy. It is puzzling that besides the crucial differences, benefit societies in neither of the countries were in favour of the health insurance acts. What is even more striking, as the analysis will show, is that certain cross-country mechanisms and patterns operated before and during the expansion of solidarities. This allows me to draw conclusions with regard to the relationship between social policy and belonging and even to apply them to the current transformative period; that is, the challenge faced by national risk communities in the face of European integration.

Social policy and belonging

Historically, social policy and belonging have always been entangled, for the community one feels attached to is closely linked to social policy (for instance, Banting 1995; Moreno and McEwen 2005; Béland and Lecours 2008):

Social policy is both the vehicle whereby common ideals can be expressed and the means whereby a society consciously reproduces its own identity. […] As to the former aspect, consider how social policy is bound to reflect common definitions of need which none the less may vary substantially across cultures. (Miller 1995: 101–02)

Although poor relief in the UK and the German states was initially only granted to natives, this principle was later expanded to include established residents (The Poor Relief Act 1662 (Fraser 2003), Gesetz über den Unterstützungswohnsitz 1870 (Stolleis 2001b)). Social insurance also shifted from smaller to bigger units, but remained separated according to those belonging together (Baldwin 1990; Alber 1992; de Swaan 1997). Thus, in the course of the nineteenth century the connection of social security to local citizenship was gradually replaced by national citizenship (Stolleis 2001b: 217). Béland and Lecours (2008: 5) highlight a close link between territorial solidarity and social security claims for today’s welfare systems, too. Using the example of sub-state nationalism, they convincingly show how actors seek the congruence of boundaries of social policy to the sub-national community. Another strand of research explores individual attitudes with regard to social welfare in times of growing ethnic diversity in the course of migration. These studies on welfare chauvinism suggest an antagonistic relationship between growing diversity and the level of social spending or the support for welfare institutions (Soysal 1994; Alesina and Glaeser 2004; van Oorschot 2006; Burkhardt and Mau 2009).

Also, processes of European integration attracted academic interest in the territorial dimension of welfare politics and the influence of group membership on social policy making. This link between the development of welfare policies, territorial politics and identity formation has been neglected for a long time (Wagner and Zimmermann 2003; Moreno and McEwen 2005). In a similar vein to the works on welfare chauvinism, some scholars have been trying to show that the collective preconditions for EU social policy are not met, given the virtually insurmountable institutional and structural, but also cultural, heterogeneities. Since Romania and Bulgaria entered the Union, 23 official languages are spoken in the EU, reflecting its cultural diversity. Europe’s multilingualism symbolises the ethnic diversity of historically-grown institutions and nationally formed collective solidarities of the members (Lepsius 1993: 255). At least five major welfare state regimes resulting in different social structures contribute to the immensely diverging interests in regard to collectivisation and scenarios of social security.² Due to these heterogeneities at the institutional as well as the normative level, Pablo Beramendi shows that most citizens would not be willing to share their resources through a cross-country mechanism of redistribution:

Upper-income citizens of wealthier countries are the likely net payers of any integrated system. Their first preference is fiscal independence. In turn, poor citizens of rich countries have no incentives to share their transfers with poorer citizens of poorer countries. On the contrary, they have incentives to coalesce with their wealthier fellow nationals to prevent any loss of resources from which they benefit the most. […] Finally, it is not straightforward that poorer nations would automatically endorse a centralized fiscal policy in the EU. […] A majority of citizens in these countries may fear that changes imposed to their social security by a centralized decision maker will be the source of increasing inequalities, despite the transfers of absolute resources. (Beramendi 2007: 808–09)

But given the still growing diversity, researchers have come to this conclusion not only in economic terms:

As far as, in addition, the ‘nation’-state is concerned, some source of cohesion is present that unites the population into a collectivity with a shared sense of its identity, its historical origin and fate, constitutive political principles, a common language and culture, and some widely recognized norm of national solidarity. Both the state’s capacity to impose a system of protective status rights and the nation’s sense of homogeneity and solidarity that supports such imposition and tolerates its redistributive outcomes are necessary conditions for a fully developed welfare state. (Offe 2003b: 455–56, emphasis in original)

The quotation states a nexus between a cognitive community and successful European social policies. Claus Offe treats the insufficient level of pan-European identity and solidarity among European citizens as the natural reason for the poor prospects of EU-level social policy.³ But the argument that the institutional arrangement of a society requires an identity-creating community assumes a causality that remains unproven. In fact, sociological institutionalism grants institutions the constitutive role in the formation of a community (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Lepsius 2000, 2006; Laffan 2004). According to Lepsius, a polity’s central structures and institutions contribute decidedly to the development of a social consciousness. Over time, they shape the citizens’ sense of belonging and self-understanding as they serve as objective reference points around which their interests and claims unfold. As a consequence, collective identities and solidarities begin to emerge. The problem with Europe is that within the European multi-level system, the assignment of responsibilities is unclear; EU citizens do not know which institution to address for which claim or they are not aware that the right they make use of goes back to European agency. This inhibits the formation of a European consciousness. Hence, the development of a ‘sense of solidarity’ among European citizens that is necessary to realise a fiscal equalisation scheme is not about to flourish either (Lepsius 1997: 951).

Also Scharpf (1997: 20) states that it is indeed possible to artificially construct communities namely with the help of said institutions, but in the same breath he concedes that political institutions require a ‘pre-existing sense of community – of common history or common destiny, and of common identity’ in order to work properly. This apparent inconclusiveness of different a priori explanations hints at a complex interrelationship between institutions and feelings of community. While institutional arrangements are supposed to promote the creation of a collective consciousness by acting as a clear reference point to which people can direct their claims and interests, at the same time such a collective ‘we-ness’ is expected to serve as a normative foundation for institution building.

So there can be no doubt about the link between social policy and belonging. But the vivid debate regarding the question of whether an existing solidarity community becomes integrated into an institutional frame or whether it evolves by virtue of such an institutional frame has remained mainly on a rather theoretical level. Although some scholars base their arguments on national experiences, their works lack a solid base of empirical findings. In so doing, they indirectly draw an analogy between the nation state and the EU. Critically building on this approach, this study points out one way of closing the empirical research gap and coping more offensively with past periods of social policy making.

Outline of the research programme

This book adopts a perspective different from those discussed above. From a historical-sociological perspective it compares different eras of boundary shifting and social policy rescaling with respect to solidarisation processes, namely local sick clubs on their way to becoming incorporated in the national system during the nineteenth century and national welfare schemes that are about to lose parts of their sovereignty given the increasing power of EU-level political actors. The proposed dialogue between the past and the present is an attempt to actively cope with the above described lack of empirical evidence, for it allows me to comprehensively draw on primary sources and to make a strong case for certain current developments at the same time.

The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, I examine the systemic transition from mutual benefit societies, which were in charge of social security for the working classes before state authorities took over the responsibility on a national scale, to the modern welfare state. Here, the workers’ attitudes and motives with regard to the projected extension will be tackled directly and linked to contextual factors in order to figure out what fostered the willingness to show solidarity towards strangers. With the insights gained the second analytical step turns to the current transformative period.

This does not mean that a simple analogy between the nation state and the EU is possible. Analogy does not mean similarity! Like every comparison, it refers to commonalities in single dimensions, alongside which differences still remain. Diachronic comparisons of different historical periods have to keep in mind the highly diverging contexts and especially the fact that the EU polity differs strongly from national political orders. Generalisation will only be possible at a higher level of abstraction. Some of the patterns and mechanisms of how individuals shift their loyalties and solidarities towards larger political units evoke images of former transformative periods ‘although their particular content may differ dramatically’ (McNamara 2011: 2). It is these recurring patterns that allow for new insights and alternative interpretations to evolve with the help of such a perspective. Although it is the main thrust of historical sociology to study both the idiosyncrasies of empirical cases and uncover inter-temporal patterns and mechanisms, this interactive element of historical sociology to directly link conclusions from the past to current problems often remains marginalised or is limited to the academic dialogue with other research perspectives and explanatory approaches.

In turn, the proposed perspective also offers an opportunity to broaden our knowledge about the past and suggest new interpretations. Thus, the analysis provides new insights into the socio history of mutual benefit societies. Moreover, the approach allows former periods of social policy extension to be considered with regard to the occurring struggles and inconsistencies and is hence able to contribute to de-naturalising the national welfare state (Wagner and Zimmermann 2003). Just as at the European stage today, the emergence of social...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Social Solidarity and the Welfare State
• Part II Benefit Societies and the Welfare State
• Part III Social Solidarity Between Europe and the Nation State
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Material
• Index