Friday, November 5 12-2 pm
Jonah Birch: Communism, Mobilization and the Welfare State
In this paper I want to suggest that there is a gap in the existing social science literature on the welfare state, such that even the most robust models struggle to account for several of the key developments of recent years. The problem is that all of the major perspectives in the sociological literature on the welfare state failure to account for two interrelated factors: first, the divergent effects of national-specific histories of Communist versus social-democratic dominance of the labor movement and left during the post-WWII period; and second, the relative propensity of workers and other aggrieved groups to engage in mass, cross-sectoral, political mobilizations in order to achieve desired goals - an outcome significantly influenced by the specific, contradictory legacies bequeathed by the two core political currents that competed for hegemony over the West European left after the War. These variables, I will argue, help us to understand the increasingly divergent experiences of welfare state reform in France and Germany over the course of the past fifteen years: most importantly, these two traditional “coordinated market economies”, with their Bismarckian welfare states, have been separated by the inability of would-be reformers in France to liberalize state labor market policies, and other parallel policy and institutional arenas of France’s political economy. That failure was not the result of a lack of desire on the part of employers or state actors, but instead reflected the relative breadth and strength of oppositional mobilizations there.