War Made the Welfare State? State Formation and Social Insurance
Yet, in political sociology more broadly, the expansion of state services is widely understood as a cornerstone of state development. Indeed, both in the late nineteenth century and during the postwar period, state benefits closely overlapped with profound geostrategic tensions—first due to New Imperialism and second with the Cold War. If Charles Tilly was correct that “war made the state,” (Tilly 1990), why has it thus far been largely neglected in our study of the welfare state?
I examine the orientation of British and American labour movements to universal benefits at the turn of the twentieth century. I find that the organisational forms made available to labour movements by governing elites profoundly informed their organising strategies and political positions. In both countries, voluntary associations for mutual aid were encouraged throughout the nineteenth century as a form of benign working-class association. By the turn of the century, elite dispositions toward voluntarism had diverged: In the UK, the Boer War coupled with imperial competition unified governing elites behind the principle of government insurance. By contrast, in the US, voluntarism remained a convenient principle to resolve tensions between diverse labor markets in the South, North, and West. Consequently, while British trade unions progressively veered away from benefit provision and embraced state aid, American trade unions clung to voluntary insurance benefits as one of their only legitimate means for survival.