Thanks to the generosity of the VolkswagenStiftung, the Arbeitsbereich Paul Nolte of the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, had the pleasure to host “Worlds of Welfare: An Interdisciplinary Conference at the Free University of Berlin”, held 9-10 July 2015 in the beautiful Harnack-Haus der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Dahlem. The participants included a stimulating mix of established professors, early-career academics and graduate students.
The assumption behind Worlds of Welfare was simple: Western welfarism has constituted statemaking in the most capacious sense; it has been both a culture and a politics, indeed a human event of epoch-making proportions, the more so retrospectively as it continues to confront renewed challenges post-2008. A fuller, clearer picture of the welfare state in Europe and North America—one better adapted to the conceptual and moral demands of the twenty-first century—can be won only if we consider the welfare state as a simultaneously transnational and whole-society endeavor, taking into account ties and transfers between and within borders, groups, networks and ideological registers. Thus prompted by the dual imperative of contemporary politics and developments in scholarship over the past fifteen years, Worlds of Welfare aimed to cull the latest research on the Western welfare state broadly conceived. Papers taking a transnational or comparative perspective and/or bridging the study of formal/official/elite governance with that of working-class or popular culture were favored. We fostered a multilayered dialogue between scholars in the humanities and social sciences, above all in order to find ways to reconcile more ethnographic approaches, those “from below,” with the recent gains in transnational or global methodology that sometimes seem to discourage the former. Worlds of Welfare featured a keynote and four thematically organized panels: “Law, power and social/civil rights”; “Culture(s) of the welfare state?”; “Social reform and state intervention as transnational phenomena”; and “Western welfarism transposed/from outside,” the latter with non-Western or colonial/postcolonial contexts in mind.
After a welcome from Chase Richards (Berlin) and Paul Nolte (Berlin), MICHELE LANDIS DAUBER (Stanford University) delivered a keynote based on her award-winning first book, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (2013). Dauber talked about her genealogical excavation of the origins of the American welfare state in federal disaster relief, all the way back to the beginnings of the republic. She referred to the success and problematic implications of a “disaster narrative” for the past, present and future of social provision in the American context, according to which it is “better” to be a disaster victim than to be poor. This “old idea” has expressed itself both through institutional logics and in the views and behavior of generations of Americans. She stated her claim boldly: “The history of disaster relief in the US is the history of welfare policy.” Her expansive outlook and wide-ranging use of sources provides a model of interdisciplinary work, and in line with the objectives of the conference Dauber spoke with participants about how she has sought to bridge the high-political with the everyday of people’s lives, in this case the lives of those who have become “poor through no fault of their own.”
Kicking off the first panel, “Law, power and social/civil rights,” JULIA GUNN (University of Pennsylvania) shared work from her project on the politics of civil rights, labor and economic development in postwar Charlotte, North Carolina. She discussed how gains in the civil rights movement emboldened workers to claim inclusion in the New Deal order. For her paper she drew on a case study of the organization Domestics United to probe the status of its members as women and mothers and the fate of their activism beneath the umbrella of the North Carolina Fund. CHRISTINA REIMANN (Berlin) shifted the focus from the American Southeast to Rotterdam and Antwerp, delivering a paper, likewise in the form of a case study, on the implications of transnational entanglements for the implementation of social security in Western European port cities. She lamented the lack of research on the transnationalism of mutual aid societies and stressed how one must not place too much emphasis on statutory schemes, that we need a broad conception of “law” in order to come to grips with the crisscrossing memberships, transfers and exchanges involved in the relationship between social insurance and migrant workers historically.
JAMES CHAPPEL (Duke University) began “Culture(s) of the welfare state?” with a paper on the German economic theorist and pension reformer Wilfrid Schreiber, pivoting within his old-age thematic from the biopolitical valence of Schreiber’s pension-related ideas to a much broader critique of how historians deal with, or rather fail to deal with, the problem of aging. Our stories of agency seem to preclude stories of suffering, such as that represented by aging, focusing instead on active or generative tasks, which means that people who do not perform such tasks are rendered “illegible to the historical gaze.” ANNA GOODMAN (UC Berkeley) moved to the culture of volunteerism in the twentieth-century United States, specifically with relevance to the link between volunteer-driven building for the poor and state-administered welfare. She presented a story of citizen-making rather than statemaking, a “decentralized voluntary welfare,” characterized most famously by Habitat for Humanity. Given the meager ameliorative gains of such programs, why have they proved so popular? They reflect a more complex agenda, Goodman cautioned, than simply supplanting the Keynesian welfare state. BEN ZDENCANOVIC (Yale University) retained this American frame, examining instead the reception of 1940s Western European welfarism in the US political imagination. His argument was not unprovocative, articulating as it did the wish to problematize the “post-exceptionalism” of US historiography. In this case study, Zdencanovic stressed, we see American “welfare exceptionalism” as an evolving, malleable “strategic device” that historical actors could wield to further their own interests and resist unwanted influences.
“Social reform and state intervention as transnational phenomena,” the conference’s third panel, concentrated the other of the conference’s twin formal problematics. Already present in preceding papers, here transnationalism per se became the main object of inquiry. BEATE ALTHAMMER (Trier) juxtaposed foreigners with public assistance programs in order to ground her argument that the historiographical claim of shrinking social rights in the early twentieth century must be challenged. The proceedings of international conferences in Paris and Copenhagen speak to the existence of a consensus that the host society should be responsible for social assistance, regardless of a person’s national origin, and that repatriation ought not to be automatic. Though the resolutions stemming from both conferences failed to become international law, their influence was enduring, and they demonstrate how the emergence of the welfare state did not deprive foreigners of social rights; local interests remained salient, and social insurance improved the lot of migrants. JACOB REMES (SUNY Empire State College) presented a paper on migrant stories of social assistance in the borderlands between the northeastern United States and Canada, citing the increasing centrality of disaster relief, as in Dauber’s work, to studies of North American welfare provision. In other words, this applied in the past to transnational contexts as well. “Disaster created proto-welfare states that were shaped and experienced transnationally,” argued Remes, citing how migrants could maximize support from relief societies while minimizing the claims of the latter to authority over their own lives as recipients of social assistance. Last but not least, SARA SILVERSTEIN (Yale University) traced the filiations between post-Habsburg Central Europe and the League of Nations. Focusing on the achievements and vision of Polish physician Ludwik Rajchman, founding director of the League of Nations Health Organization, Silverman illustrated how cooperation in Central European public health following the transition to nation-states after the First World War occasioned no dramatic transformation of public health in the region. Here there took place a truly “transnational discussion of what the ideals of social medicine should be.” For reasons both historical and individual, Central European reformers consciously created an alternative model of public health to that of Western Europe.
The fourth and final panel, “Western welfarism transposed/from outside,” continued the train of intriguing talks. Ed NAYLOR (Portsmouth) drew on the partnership between LOGIREM (Logement et gestion immobilière pour la région Méditerranée), tasked from 1960 with the resettlement of Algerian families in Marseille, and the private worker-assistance charity ATOM (Aide aux travailleurs d’outre-mer), in order to highlight the complexity of decolonization in metropolitan social administration, as well as of the forms of exclusion that many preferred to ignore in the phenomenon of “integrative welfare.” Next, DANIEL NETHERY (Australian National University) gave a paper constituting a history of policy transfer, of welfare state history as a case study in policy reform, yet with reference not to “compact nations” but rather “seats of empire.” Both the French and British welfare states, contended Nethery, were indelibly shaped by the imperial histories of their respective countries, but in different ways; divergent constellations of prewar imperial migration and postwar hopes offer the best explanation for such differences. Bringing the panel to a close, NIHAN TOPRAKKIRAN (York) explored adaptations of Western welfarism in contemporary Turkey, specifically with regard to means-tested social assistance as implemented by SYDVs (social assistance and solidarity foundations). While means-tested programs have in fact broadened welfare coverage in Turkey, due to a lack of formalization in the labor market, maintained Toprakkiran on the basis of her fieldwork, their fundamentally ambiguous position between public and private have led to an even more confused structure of provision than in the West, from which such policies have been derived.
The second afternoon ended with a roundtable wrap-up centering on the status of transnationality and culture in scholarship on the welfare state and their capacity to be reconciled. Alyosha Goldstein’s Poverty in Common (2013) was cited as a methodological exemplar, dealing as it does with “grassroots” agents who conceived of themselves in transnational ways, thus showing how transnationality and culture can converge in the object of study itself. Additionally, one ought to see not only people but also the nation-state as fundamentally interconnected and embedded; it is in this sense that transnational history is still about the nation, including the welfare state so intimately associated with it. Then came the cautionary reminder that the nation-state remains important, but it is also contested and changing. Transnational history at its best shows this. Yet doesn’t the welfare state, another participant asked, have to be seen as a very national story? But what about borderlands studies? responded another. Transnational history, as an approach, can amount to so many different things. And it depends too on structure: international organizations concerned with public health, for instance, cannot be conceived of on a state-restricted basis, but historically they have constituted a very real part of the welfare state. The latter has responded historically to developments across borders.
In the end, the discussants were cautious about suggesting the existence of an easy way to marry transnational history with attention to non-elites (particularly non-migrants), but all were in agreement that the welfare state affords critical scholars a crucible of tensions in national and transnational methodology, as well as a “really nice site” for transnational interdisciplinary collaboration.
Konferenzübersicht:
Welcome
Chase Richards (FU Berlin) and Paul Nolte (FU Berlin)
Keynote
Michele Landis Dauber (Stanford University): The Sympathetic State
Panel 1: Law, power and social / civil rights
Julia Gunn (University of Pennsylvania): “Alone We Can Do Little”: Domestic Workers, Anti-Unionism, and the War on Poverty in the Urban South
Christina Reimann (HU Berlin): National Integration vs. Transnationalism: A Micro-Study of Legal Practice Concerning Migrants’ Social Security in Late 19th Century Port Cities
Panel 2: Culture(s) of the welfare state?
James Chappel (Duke University): Old Volk: Wilfrid Schreiber between Nazism and the Pension Reform of 1957
Anna Goodman (UC Berkeley): Volunteer Building: A Citizen-Oriented Welfare Strategy
Ben Zdencanovic (Yale University): “The Opposite of a European Democracy”: The Rise of the Western European Welfare State in the American Political Imagination, 1941-1949
Panel 3: Social reform and state intervention as transnational phenomena
Beate Althammer (Universität Trier): The Borders of the Welfare State: Migration, Social Rights and Expulsion
Jacob Remes (SUNY Empire State College): Disasters and Cross-Border Relief: Two Diasporas and the Creation of a Transnational Welfare State
Sara Silverstein (Yale University): Post-Habsburg Europe, the League of Nations, and the Transnational Roots of Public Health in the Modern State
Panel 4: Western welfarism transposed / from outside
Ed Naylor (University of Portsmouth): “Everyone has his chance”: Colonial Welfare and Clientelism in 1960s France
Daniel Nethery (Australian National University): At the Heart of Empire: Imperial Legacies in the French and British Welfare States
Nihan Toprakkiran (York University): Adaptations of Western Welfarism: The Case of Means-Tested Social Assistance in Turkey
Roundtable wrap-up