Warfare and Welfare

Jennifer Mittelstadt, Professor of History, Rutgers University. 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, theyll find just as many to be new. And more importantly theyll find novel questions to ask of their own research. This book will become necessary reading for scholars of war and of the welfare state.

Gsta Esping-Andersen, Professor of Sociology, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Warfare and Welfare is one of those rare books which bring us path breaking research. The influence of wars on the evolution of welfare states has been discussed for decades, but has, so far, never been given any systematic empirical treatment. In this pioneering comparative study, the authors identify with impeccable scholarship the multiple and quite complex causal pathways that link the dynamics of war to welfare state development. It is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in the history of social policies.

Peter Baldwin, Professor of History, UCLA and NYU. 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.

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.

1: Herbert Obinger, Klaus Petersen, and Peter Starke: Introduction: Studying the Welfare-War Nexus 2: Peter Starke: The Impact of War on Welfare State Development in Germany 3: Herbert Obinger: War Preparation, Warfare, and the Welfare State in Austria 4: Maurizio Ferrera: Italy: Wars, Political Extremism, and the Constraints to Welfare Reform 5: Timothy B. Smith: The Two World Wars and Social Policy in France 6: Gregory J. Kasza: Welfare Policy and War in Japan 7: Robert P. Saldin: Foreign Policy on the Home Front: War and the Fevelopment of the American Welfare State 8: David Edgerton: War and the Development of the British Welfare State 9: Christopher Lloyd and Tim Battin: Reinforcements for the Wage-Earners' Welfare State? The Effects of the Two World Wars on Australia's Model of Welfare 10: Pauli Kettunen: Wars, Nation, and the Welfare State in Finland 11: Klaus Petersen and Nils Arne Sorensen: From Military State to Welfare State: The War-Welfare Nexus in Denmark, 1848-1950s 12: Dirk Luyten: Diverging Paths: The Impact of the Two World Wars on Welfare State Development in Belgium and the Netherlands 13: Matthieu Leimgruber: War and Social Policy Development in Switzerland, 1870-1990 14: Michael Shalev and John Gal: Bullets and Benefits in the Israeli Welfare State 15: Herbert Obinger, Klaus Petersen, Carina Schmitt, and Peter Starke: War and Welfare States Before and After 1945: Conclusions and Perspectives