The rise of the welfare state in international society

Abstract

In this article I seek to develop a case for viewing the welfare state as a primary institution in international society. This is with particular reference to Norden (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden), where in the course of the 1930s, and particularly in the post-1945 era, the welfare state was elevated to a core principle of legitimacy, largely defining the idea of nationhood for these countries. Furthermore, I will attempt to show how the adoption of this principle of legitimacy conditioned the Nordic countries’ interpretation of a number of other primary institutions in international society such as diplomacy, war and trade. A key contribution of this approach is that it aspires not only to examine the evolution of one institution in isolation, as has often been attempted in English School scholarship, but to actively explore how institutions interact with each other.

Notes

1 It should be noted that this is only a partial agreement, as some scholars working within the tradition have actively resisted a focus on institutions and instead opted to emphasize other aspects of international society. See in particular Peter Wilson (2009).

2 Following Lawler (1997), Ingebritsen (2006) and Bergman (2006; 2007), I see a constitutive causal connection between the welfare state principle of legitimacy in the domestic political structures of the Scandinavian states and their propensity towards solidarist policies in the international sphere. When I therefore say below that their solidarist foreign policies are ‘tied to’, ‘associated with’ or ‘ventailed by’ the welfare state ideology, it is this constitutive causal logic I am referring to. However, I must emphasise that I am not making general claims about any intrinsic international solidarity of socialist or social democratic states. As the case of Germany has shown us, national socialism can imply the very opposite. I am only making claims about the specific way international solidarity was/is conceptualised in the context of the Scandinavian welfare state. Moreover, as the analysis hopefully shows, this sense of international solidarity was first and foremost directed towards the other peoples of Scandinavia and only secondly towards the peoples and nations of the wider international society.

3 Lars Bo Kaspersen (2006) has recently proposed an alternative explanation, seeing the development of specifically the Danish welfare state as a response to various external pressures resulting from geopolitical circumstances. However, I do not find his argument convincing for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is unconvincing because it is based on the highly questionable realist assumption that all international politics is a struggle for state survival (see Wendt (1992; 1999) for a possible refutation of this). Secondly, the supposed strategy of using the welfare state to chart a middle course between communists and capitalists does not hold in a comparative perspective. According to this logic, one would expect that the altogether more exposed Finland would have been the front-runner when it came to promoting the welfare state, which it was not; or that equally exposed Austria would have adopted a welfare system similar to the one found in Scandinavia, which it did not do. There is not much to suggest that the ideological conflicts of the 1930s and the Cold War fundamentally dictated these countries’ internal political struggles.

4 Iceland's direct contribution was of course rather limited, since it did not have a standing army.

5 Excluding Finland and Iceland.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laust Schouenborg

Laust Schouenborg is assistant professor in Global Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. His forthcoming book, from which this article is derived, is entitled The Scandinavian International Society: Primary Institutions and Binding Forces, 1815-2010 (Routledge 2012).