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While the first half of the 20th century was characterized by total war, the second half witnessed, at least in the Western world, a massive expansion of the modern welfare state. A growing share of the population was covered by ever more generous systems of social protection that dramatically reduced poverty and economic inequality in the post-war decades. With it also came a growth in social spending, taxation and regulation that changed the nature of the modern
state and the functioning of market economies. Whether and in which ways warfare and the rise of the welfare state are related, is subject of this volume.
Distinguishing between three different phases (war preparation, wartime mobilization, and the post-war period), the volume provides the first systematic comparative analysis of the impact of war on welfare state development in the western world. The chapters written by leading scholars in this field examine both short-term responses to and long-term effects of war in fourteen belligerent, occupied, and neutral countries in the age of mass warfare stretching over the period from ca. 1860 to
1960. The volume shows that both world wars are essential for understanding several aspects of welfare state development in the western world.
About the author
Herbert Obinger is Professor of Comparative Public and Social Policy, University of Bremen. His research focuses on comparative welfare state research and comparative political economy. His publications include The Political Economy of Privatization in Rich Democracies (with Carina Schmidtt and Stefan Traub, OUP, 2016), The Welfare State as Crisis Manager (with Peter Starke, Alexandra Kaasch, and Franca van Hooren, Palgrave 2013), and The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State (co-edited with Francis G. Castles, Jane Lewis, Stephan, Leibfried, , and Christopher Pierson, OUP, 2010).
Klaus Petersen is Professor of Welfare History and Director of the Danish Centre for Welfare Studies, University of Southern Denmark. His research focuses on welfare state history, the Nordic model of welfare, and on contemporary Danish history. He has published in a number of leading journals including Journal of European Social Policy and the British Journal of Political Science.
Peter Starke is Associate Professor at the Danish Center for Welfare Studies, University of Southern Denmark. His research is in comparative welfare state research, qualitative and mixed methodology and political economy. His publications include Radical Welfare State Retrenchment (2008) and The Welfare State as Crisis Manager (2013), as well as articles in journals such as Policy Studies Journal, the Journal of European Public Policy, and Politics & Society.
Summary
This book provides a systematic theoretical discussion of the various impacts of mass warfare on welfare state development and brings war back into comparative welfare state research
Additional text
Though they seem like opposites, warfare and welfare are in fact kissing cousins. The argument of this masterful work is that war has not just drained the coffers that might pay for social programs, but also stimulated their growth and development: creating new groups requiring assistance (veterans and the wounded), prompting worries about demographic decline that needed intervention, raising expenses and taxes and thus potential sources of funding for other programs, empowering formerly unrepresented social classes whose needs commanded attention after the end of hostilities, stimulating the state to regulate the economy in new ways that could later be channeled into social policy.
Report
An ambitious inquiry into the historical relationship between war and welfare. Warfare and Welfare asks the big question about how wars affect welfare states, and answers it by comparing detailed case studies from over a dozen industrialized nations in the twentieth century. The contributors challenged themselves to examine interactions between more than one armed conflict and the entirety of the welfare state in each nation. While scholars will find many warfare-welfare interactions they identify familiar, theyâll find just as many to be new. And more importantly theyâll find novel questions to ask of their own research. This book will become necessary reading for scholars of war and of the welfare state. Jennifer Mittelstadt, Professor of History, Rutgers University.
