2 Compared to other branches of the welfare state, unemployment insurance encountered by far the greatest resistance, and its introduction therefore was critically facilitated under conditions of national emergency. 1 We focus on this program because among all social protection schemes unemployment insurance was the most unlikely to be adopted. In this paper, we examine the effect of both world wars on the adoption of unemployment insurance in 18 Western countries. Despite this provocative hypothesis, however, the questions of whether and how large-scale military conflicts shaped welfare state development were widely neglected by comparative welfare state research (Castles 2010). In his seminal essay, Titmuss ( 1958: 78) even contended that the impact of war on social policy increased with the intensity and scale of warfare. This rise of total war climaxed in two world wars killing more than 60 million people.īeginning with Richard Titmuss ( 1958), several scholars argued that war brought life to the modern welfare state (e.g., Briggs 1961 Preller 1978 Dryzek and Goodin 1986 Dwork 1987 De Maria 1989 Reidegeld 1989 Porter 1994 Kasza 20 Castles 2010 Rehm 2016 Obinger, Petersen and Starke 2018). Since then interstate wars were waged with an ever-increasing intensity and brutality.
This holds true particularly for the industrialized mass wars that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century after major developments in military technology and the spread of conscription in continental Europe.
War is an event usually involving nefarious destruction, carnage and inconceivable human suffering.
0 kommentar(er)
