Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Welfare, Redistribution and Solidarity
- 1 The Origins of the Solidaristic Welfare State: Scandinavia
- Interlogue
- 2 The Triumph of the Solidaristic Welfare State: Britain and Scandinavia
- 3 The Failure of the Solidaristic Welfare State: France and Germany
- 4 From Beveridge back to Bismarck: The Superannuation Issue
- 5 Solidarity by the Back Door
- Conclusion: The Social Bases of Solidaristic Reform
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Solidarity by the Back Door
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Welfare, Redistribution and Solidarity
- 1 The Origins of the Solidaristic Welfare State: Scandinavia
- Interlogue
- 2 The Triumph of the Solidaristic Welfare State: Britain and Scandinavia
- 3 The Failure of the Solidaristic Welfare State: France and Germany
- 4 From Beveridge back to Bismarck: The Superannuation Issue
- 5 Solidarity by the Back Door
- Conclusion: The Social Bases of Solidaristic Reform
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Having rejected welfare reform of an all-inclusive, comprehensive kind during the immediate postwar period, France and Germany found themselves ushering in solidaristic social policy, almost surreptitiously, by the mid 1970s. Coming full circle, neo-universalist legislation brought to provisional closure one of the major disputes in the history of Continental social insurance. The new measures were in many respects a mirror image of the initiatives attempted in the immediate postwar period. The needy, on whose behalf redistribution promised to work, were no longer workers, but declining independents. The self-employed, opponents of reform in 1945, became its chief advocates now that they stood to gain. Conversely, the left and the labor movement's earlier aspirations to solidarity turned out not to have been universal. Once it became clear that risk reallocation worked to their disadvantage, that wage earners — as a group blessed by comparative demographic and economic good fortune — had become potential redistributive losers, workers proved as determined to maintain acquired privileges as independents had been earlier.
In the period immediately following the war reformers had been unable to include all equally under the state's wing and were forced by protest from white-collared and self-employed groups to rest content with social insurance fragmented by class and category.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics of Social SolidarityClass Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975, pp. 248 - 287Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990