Welfare state
복지국가
A form of state that protects and promotes citizens' economic and social well-being through social provision such as pensions, unemployment insurance, health care, education and housing. It began with Bismarck's social insurance in 1880s Germany and, after the Great Depression and the Second World War, reached its fullest forms in post-war Western Europe. It is read in several ways: as conservative reform to forestall socialism, as a gain won by the labour movement, and as a compromise between capital and labour.
In depth
The first welfare state in a modern industrial society was established by Bismarck in 1880s Imperial Germany. His Imperial Message to the Reichstag of 17 November 1881 called the programme "practical Christianity", and insurance against industrial accidents, sickness and old age followed. Such corporatist welfare was designed from the start to divide the working class, undermine the power of organised labour and tie the individual closer to the state, so socialists and workers' organisations were at first sceptical and organised their own welfare societies. In Britain the Liberal reforms of 1906–14 introduced old-age pensions (1908), free school meals (1909) and the National Insurance Act (1911).
The Great Depression, which brought unemployment and misery to millions, was decisive in the move to the welfare state. It was then seen as a "middle way" between communism on the left and unregulated laissez-faire capitalism on the right. In December 1942 Britain's Beveridge Report called for war on "the five giants" of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness, proposing that all people of working age pay a weekly National Insurance contribution in return for benefits when sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. The Labour government elected in 1945 enacted it, and on 5 July 1948 the National Insurance Act, National Assistance Act and National Health Service Act came into force as the key planks of the British welfare state. After the Second World War some Western European countries moved to comprehensive "cradle-to-grave" coverage.
Welfare states differ greatly. In The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) the Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen distinguished three types: liberal welfare states with weak working-class mobilisation, relying on means-tested benefits and private provision (the United States, Canada, Australia); conservative corporatist states rooted in Catholic conservatism that favour social insurance but limit redistribution (Austria, Italy, France, Germany); and social-democratic states with strong working-class participation and social democratic parties, offering universal benefits and broad redistribution (Sweden and the Nordic countries).
Interpretations differ too. Marx, in the Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League written after the failed revolution of 1848, warned that measures to raise wages and provide social insurance were bribes that would make the workers' situation temporarily tolerable and weaken revolutionary consciousness. The historian Alan Ryan held that the modern welfare state stops short of an "advance in the direction of socialism": it shifts income across stages of a life rather than across classes, and neither expropriates owners nor changes hierarchical management. The historian Walter Scheidel argued that Western welfare states were partly a reaction by elites who feared the Bolshevik Revolution, and were cut back as the threat receded. From the other side, conservative and libertarian groups argue that welfare creates dependence and a disincentive to work. Empirical studies find that taxes and transfers considerably reduce poverty in Western countries whose welfare states make up at least a fifth of GDP.