Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe 1009370855, 9781009370851

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Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe

Social justice has returned to the heart of political debate in present-day Europe. But what does it mean in different national histories and political regimes, and how has this changed over time? This book provides the first historical account of the evolution of notions of social justice across Europe since the late nineteenth century. Written by an international team of leading historians, the book analyses the often-divergent ways in which political movements, state institutions, intellectual groups, and social organisations have understood and sought to achieve social justice. Conceived as an emphatically European analysis covering both the eastern and western halves of the continent, Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe demonstrates that no political movement ever held exclusive ownership of the meaning of social justice. Conversely, its definition has always been strongly contested, between those who would define it in terms of equality of conditions or of opportunity; the security provided by state authority or the freedom of personal initiative; the individual rights of a liberal order or the social solidarities of class, nation, confession, or Volk. martin conway is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a number of works, including Western Europe’s Democratic Age 1945–68 (Princeton University Press, 2020). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Académie Royale de Belgique. His next project is on political masculinity in twentiethcentury Europe. camilo erlichman is Assistant Professor in History at Maastricht University, where he heads the interdisciplinary research cluster Democracy in Europe: Past and Present. His doctoral thesis won the British International History Group Prize, and he has published on the history of mid-twentiethcentury Europe. He is now working on a project on the history of property.

Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe Edited by

Martin Conway University of Oxford

Camilo Erlichman Maastricht University

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05-06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009370851 DOI: 10.1017/9781009370868 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2024 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Conway, Martin, 1960- editor. | Erlichman, Camilo, editor. Title: Social justice in twentieth-century Europe / edited by Martin Conway, University of Oxford, Camilo Erlichman, Maastricht University. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023040874 (print) | LCCN 2023040875 (ebook) | ISBN 9781009370851 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009370813 (paperback) | ISBN 9781009370868 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Social justice–Europe–History–20th century. Classification: LCC HN373.5 .S6254 2024 (print) | LCC HN373.5 (ebook) | DDC 303.3/720940904–dc23/eng/20231213 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040874 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040875 ISBN 978-1-009-37085-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgements 1

Social Justice: A Historical Introduction martin conway and camilo erlichman

2

Social Justice within a Market Society: The Debate in Western Europe from the End of the Nineteenth Century ido de haan

page vii ix 1

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Catholic Conceptions of Social Justice from 1891 to Pope Francis rachel johnston-white

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Social Justice through Taxation? Taxing the Rich in Belgium in the 1920s simon watteyne

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A Fascist Social Justice? Hierarchy, Order, and Equity in Southern European Corporatism pedro ramos pinto

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Social Justice in Authoritarian Central Europe: Czechoslovakia under Nazism and Communism radka sˇ ustrova´

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Social Justice in a Socialist Society: Understandings of Social Justice and Social Policy in Hungary after 1945 sa´ ndor horva´ th

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Immigrants and Social Justice in Western Europe since the 1960s daniel a. gordon

9

Reimagining Peace through Social Justice in Mid- to Late Twentieth-Century Europe simon reid-henry

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Contents

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Social Justice or Sexual Justice? Social Justice and the Problem of Women in Twentieth-Century Europe 205 celia donert

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Equity Rules: Social Justice on the Ruins of Socialism adrian grama

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Bridging the Void: Social Justice in the History of the European Union kiran klaus patel

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Postscript samuel moyn

Index

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Contributors

martin conway is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in History at Balliol College. ido de haan is Professor of Political History at Utrecht University. celia donert is Associate Professor in Central European History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Wolfson College. camilo erlichman is Assistant Professor in History at Maastricht University. daniel a. gordon is Senior Lecturer in European History at Edge Hill University. adrian grama is a Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. sa´ndor horva´th is Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Department for Contemporary History at the Institute of History in the Research Centre for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. rachel johnston-white is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Groningen. samuel moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. kiran klaus patel holds the Chair of European History at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU) and is Director of Project House Europe. pedro ramos pinto is Associate Professor in International Economic History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. simon reid-henry is Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Honorary Professor of Historical and Political Geography at Queen Mary University of London.

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List of Contributors

radka sˇustrova´ is Researcher at the Institute of Economic and Social History at Charles University Prague. simon watteyne is FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher at the Free University of Brussels.

Acknowledgements

All notions of social justice contain at their heart a vision of a future that lies ahead. In the writing of this book, we sometimes felt that the lack of a defined terminus point that is so characteristic of conceptions of social justice might become the distinctive feature of our project too. That this should have been so owes much to the broader context within which this book was written. This volume has had an unusually long gestation and its completion was complicated by the vicissitudes of the global COVID19 pandemic, which disrupted individual lives and collective writing schedules. The contributors of this volume met at four workshops, held in Amsterdam (March 2018), Oxford (July 2019), and subsequently online (September 2020 and April 2021). The result is a volume that reflects our collective effort as a team to grapple with the history of social justice. We are, therefore, indebted to all contributors for the ways in which they have left their imprint on how we have come to think about the subject as a group. We are also very grateful to the institutions that provided generous funding for this project. They include the University of Amsterdam, which awarded us a ‘Network Grant – Consolidate’ from its Cutting Edge Research Fund, as well as the John Fell OUP Research Fund at the University of Oxford. Luiza Bialasiewicz and Linda McDowell were instrumental in the initial stages of the project and co-convened the first two workshops with us, for which we are very grateful. We should also like to express our debt to those who participated at the workshops and contributed to the project with their multi-disciplinary expertise on the past and present of social justice: Clive Barnett, Christina de Bellaigue, Jackie Clarke, Marion Demossier, Ben Jackson, Don Kalb, Pieter Lagrou, Klaus Petersen, David Pinder, Felix Römer, and Eve Worth. We very much hope they will recognise the influence of their contributions in this volume. Kate McIntosh compiled the index with great professionalism. Finally, we are grateful to our editor at Cambridge University Press, Liz Friend-Smith, for her enthusiasm for the project and for the trust that she has placed in us.

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Acknowledgements

The present book is not intended as the definitive word on the history of social justice. Rather, its primary ambition is to put social justice on the map for historians, who, in contrast to practitioners from other disciplines, have hitherto largely eschewed the subject. If this volume manages to act as a stimulus to others to explore further the intricacies of social justice in twentieth-century Europe, then its objectives will have been achieved. Martin Conway and Camilo Erlichman Oxford and Maastricht, September 2023

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Social Justice A Historical Introduction Martin Conway and Camilo Erlichman

Social justice is a subject that in contemporary Europe is understood primarily by its absence. Whichever way one might define it – in terms of the material equality of living standards, the rights of specific social groups, the policies of public authorities, or the wider ethos of society – the perceived deficit in social justice is a pervasive element of debate in early twenty-first-century Europe. The wealth of the new global rich, the stark disparities in access to the basic securities of life between European citizens and migrant communities, and the prevalence of gendered and racial inequalities within supposedly egalitarian European societies have all contributed to the contemporary preoccupation with social inequality. Most notably, perhaps, after a period of relative marginalisation during the 1990s and 2000s, questions around material inequality have been catapulted back onto the political agenda. This is evident in the success of a range of publications – most prominently Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century – that have encouraged a debate about the prevalence of social inequality as well as contributing to broader public discontent surrounding the markers of wealth and poverty.1 But it is also apparent in the priority accorded to social justice among groups that a decade ago would have dismissed such discussions as an absurd irrelevance. From the Davos World Economic Forum to the party manifestos of the British Conservatives, references to social justice have re-entered the mainstream of political vocabulary. This renewed discussion of social justice is part of a larger story of change taking place in contemporary Europe, and can be seen as one of several distinctive shifts that marked the end of the twentieth century.2 But what is less new in this debate is the tendency to refer to social justice in terms of its 1

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T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2014). For other examples of this genre, see, e.g., A. B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, MA, 2015), and B. Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA, 2016). For a forceful exploration of the implications of inequality on life chances, see G. Therborn, The Killing Fields of Inequality (Cambridge, 2013). On the notion that the twentieth century has ended, see M. Conway, ‘The Crisis of European History’ (2020) at https://europedebate.hypotheses.org/142.

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absence. In many ways, this has always been so. Social justice is a subject that has rarely existed in the present tense. A few moments of revolutionary hyperbole aside, notably in the Soviet Union in the 1930s,3 it has generally been used in Europe in the past tense – as a lament for a world that has been lost – or in the future tense – as a goal to be achieved through incremental or radical change.4 Social justice has therefore always been measured in terms of the distance between an imperfect present and an ideal that resides somewhere else in time. However, even when they are placed in this longer perspective, there remains something distinctive about the present-day debates. Concern about inequality is in part the consequence of the heightened visibility of differentials of wealth in many European societies;5 but it also reflects changes that have taken place in understandings of what constitutes a society of civic and moral justice. The emergence of new concepts of the social rights – both individual and collective – of groups defined by their gender, sexuality, culture, or race necessarily casts a stern eye on the societies of the recent past. Not just the flagrant forms of discrimination practised by a wide range of regimes in twentieth-century Europe, but the quieter, institutional inequality that characterised almost all areas of administration and policy-making across the entire modern project of state rule, reveal just how inadequate – or fundamentally wrong – were the understandings of social justice held until recently by rulers, social organisations, and many citizens.6 Demands that institutions and societies should acknowledge these failures have become part of contemporary political culture: through campaigns for restitution for historic acts of discrimination committed by governments and social institutions, or for the removal of statues and other public symbols of the crimes of the past.7 Each of these issues – and most powerfully the presence of victims bearing witness to the discrimination and suffering that they experienced – serves to deepen the divide between the present and the twentieth-century past. But it is not only attitudes that have changed. So too have the wider social and economic frameworks of European states within which demands for social justice are shaped. The shift away from an 3 4

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S. Webb and B. Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (London, 1935). The paradigmatic example of social justice as a goal to be achieved is the International Labour Organization’s Philadelphia Declaration of 1944. On this, see A. Supiot, L’esprit de Philadelphie: La justice sociale face au marché total (Paris, 2010). D. Dorling, Inequality and the 1% (London, 2014). Much of this literature bears the imprint of Michel Foucault’s work on the disciplining power of the state. See notably M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977). Among the many examples, one might cite the Black Lives Matter and the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns, as well as the prosecutions of members of the Catholic Church in a number of countries for acts of child abuse.

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employment-oriented model of the economy, as well as the development of a new fabric of social relations defined more by market forces than by state policy, has reconfigured the structures within which people work and live.8 The European continent of the early twenty-first century is more unified than at any time since at least 1914, and yet it is also fractured within and across national boundaries by forms of economic and social fragility that find expression in protest movements, such as the gilets jaunes in France in 2018–19, and in the emergence of xenophobic mentalities that are emphatically products of the present rather than inheritances from the past. These changes in understandings of social justice as well as in the wider social and political context have deprived social justice of what was for much of the twentieth century its most pervasive feature: namely, its historical narrative, built around the sense of European societies moving forward, primarily under the impetus of structures of beneficial rule, towards an ethos of equality and a reality of social inclusion. The sense of mourning for a lost ideal of social justice often voiced by the social-democratic left in Europe in recent years has its origins, especially among older generations, in an awareness that the campaigns, languages, and aspirations of the twentieth-century past no longer possess the same purchase in the much-changed landscapes of the present.9 For some, such as Eric Hobsbawm, by the early twenty-first century the languages and politics of social justice that his generation could recognise had seemingly exited Europe and migrated to other continents.10 For others, social justice has moved out of reach and collective imagination, as the opaque structures of governance of the European Union, the lack of democratic accountability of a transnational capitalism, and the concomitant hollowing out of the sovereignty of nation states have combined to suffocate a politics and language of social justice.11 This pervasive loss of popular and national sovereignty and the consequent impotence of government – at any level – to construct an alternative model of society encourages more sectional and

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For an early exploration of this shift away from an employment-oriented model of work, see the report for the European Commission by A. Supiot (ed.), Au-delà de l’emploi: Transformations du travail et devenir du droit du travail en Europe (Paris, 1999). See, e.g., T. Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on our Present Discontents (New York, 2010). For an account of how mourning has always been a prominent and mobilising feature of the political left, see E. Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York, 2017). ‘Today, ideologically, I feel most at home in Latin America because it remains the one part of the world where people still talk and conduct their politics in the old language, in the 19th- and 20th-century language of socialism, communism and Marxism.’ Cf. ‘Eric Hobsbawm: A Conversation about Marx, Student Riots, the New Left, and the Milibands’, The Guardian, 16 Jan. 2011, www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/16/eric-hobsbawm-tristram-hunt-marx. See the manifold publications by Wolfgang Streeck that have popularised this sentiment, e.g., W. Streeck, Gekaufte Zeit: Die vertage Krise des demokratischen Kapitalismus (Berlin, 2015).

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individualist attitudes in which the justice that can be imagined or campaigned for is anything but social. *** This loss of the template of societal change marks a major change from the political culture of the twentieth century. Ever since the emergence of mass politics, a wide range of regimes and other social institutions had placed concepts of universal social justice at the centre of their ideologies and actions. In the ensuing competition between various political forces, no single group could claim exclusive ownership of notions of social justice.12 The fascist and authoritarian rulers of the 1930s and 1940s, the Socialist regimes established after the Second World War in East-Central Europe, or the various forms of welfare democracy that emerged in Northern and Western Europe after 1945 all made their claims to the provision of social justice a major focus of their public rhetoric and also of their more private self-justifications. Social justice was a means of critiquing their opponents, but also of defining the better society they were seeking to bring into existence.13 That social justice had become deeply ingrained within what one might describe as Europe’s competing hegemonic discourses was perhaps nowhere more visible than in the way in which those who mobilised against the existing regimes drew on the language of social justice as a major tool of their critique. This was most notably the case in post-war Eastern Europe, where dissident intellectuals were quick to recognise that using the very language of social justice was an effective means of attacking the existing order and challenging its legitimacy by measuring it on its own terms. As Adam Michnik observed about the collapse of Communism in Poland, this had been a ‘revolt against communism in the name of the egalitarian values espoused by communism’, and ‘social justice was one of its key ideas’.14 The priority accorded to social justice was indicative, at a broader level, of the shift that occurred during the twentieth century in the legitimation of government away from languages of historic privilege or of monarchical and dynastic right: government could be justified only through the benefits it brought – or, in the managerial discourse common to many state authorities, 12

13 14

The notion of reading the twentieth century as a competition between different regimes owes much to the approach of M. Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998). T. Toranska, Oni: Stalin’s Polish Puppets (London, 1987), esp. pp. 13–29; O. Ruin, Tage Erlander: Serving the Welfare State, 1946–1969 (Pittsburgh, 1990), pp. 208–21. See A. Michnik, ‘Three Kinds of Fundamentalism: For Jonathan Schell’, in I. Grudzińska-Gross (ed.), Adam Michnik: Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives (Berkeley, 1998), p. 181. For a similar argument, see J. Kuroń, ‘Man muß träumen: Soziale Gerechtigkeit als soziale Bewegung’, Transit – Europäische Revue, 6 (1993), 6–24.

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delivered – to the people. There was, however, little agreement as to what that social justice might be. Approached from a liberal or socialist standpoint, it implied the achievement of the emphatic civic or material equality of all citizens; but for more conservative ideologists it required the retention or reinforcement of the vertical or ‘natural’ hierarchies of society. Nor was there agreement as to its spatial limits. Social justice was often presented as a universal, or even global, goal; but for many political ideologies of the midtwentieth century it made sense only within the more restrictive borders of the nation, the state, the people, or the ethnic or racial Volk. This also reflected a wider divergence as to the agents of social justice. For those at the centre of political power, it was the responsibility of the state to ensure equality of provision and of rights. However, for others, the over-mighty state was the problem rather than the solution. Instead, social justice could only be brought about through the devolution of power to social organisations, corporatist social and economic bodies, and the institutions of local government. These differences indicated also the ambivalent role that the people occupied within projects of social justice. While the language of social justice was often democratic in tone, it was also adopted by those who rejected the pluralist structures of political democracy in favour of an authoritarian popular community or Volksgemeinschaft.15 This was of course most dramatically so in the Third Reich, where the explicit determination to destroy the Jewish minority and create a new racial hierarchy went hand in hand with the social benefits that this would deliver to the German majority.16 A key element of many different regimes of the mid-twentieth century was therefore not so much about taking the people as they were as about improving them through policies of health provision, mass education, and public housing, which would overcome the ills of modernity as well as giving birth to a ‘New Man’ possessed of a new social mentality.17 These projects of social engineering reflected the way in which social justice all too often served as a means of legitimation for those who knew best. In the modernising cultures of twentieth-century Europe, social justice was defined primarily by experts and elites who, according to the rational logics of modern 15

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See the extensive debate about the concept of ‘Volksgemeinschaft’, e.g., I. Kershaw, ‘Volksgemeinschaft: Potenzial und Grenzen eines neuen Forschungskonzepts’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 59 (2011), 1–17; F. Bahjor and M. Wildt (eds.), Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2012). See, above all, M. Wildt, Die Ambivalenz des Volkes: Der Nationalsozialismus als Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Berlin, 2019), esp. chs. 1–3; J. Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA, 2008). P. Fritzsche and J. Hellbeck, ‘The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany’, in M. Geyer and S. Fitzpatrick (eds.), Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 302–42.

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government, believed themselves best qualified to identify the needs of the people, and imprint them on society.18 These top-down policies of social amelioration did, of course, have a number of origins, including long-standing traditions of paternalist charity. But they derived much of their energy from the explosion that occurred in the scope and ambitions of the state and of other public institutions, most notably during times of war. This was not limited to the territories of Europe. Social improvement became the pervasive legitimator of imperial rule, justifying the abolition of pre-existing mentalities, belief systems, and patterns of social organisation in the name of a Western-defined modernity and civilisation. In this way, the colonies became the testing ground for ambitious projects of social engineering and ‘development’, which were subsequently transferred in their content and methodology to the urban centres and peripheral regions of Europe.19 The purpose of this collectively written volume is to explore the manifold complexities of social justice across Europe during the twentieth century. Its methodologies are primarily historical; and, as such, it consciously avoids establishing a single definition of its subject matter. Social justice was too plural and too contextual a phenomenon – in terms of time as well as space – to be encapsulated in a fixed manner. Instead, the volume embraces the different ways in which the term, but also the reality, has been understood. In doing so, it therefore also rejects a dominant narrative of social progress. The assumption – often semi-submerged in the historical literature – that the European experience of the twentieth century was broadly characterised by a transition to a more democratic, equal, and just society constitutes part of the collective inheritance of Europeans, at least in the west and north of the continent.20 However, as present-day critiques of past projects of social justice have emphasised, there was no ‘high road’ towards social justice; justice and injustice were always inextricably interlinked in the projects of governments. This is not to deny the tangible benefits that were achieved: most notably quasi-universal access to health care, substantially expanded welfare benefits, and the provision of a wide range of social goods, including transport infrastructures and access to subsidised educational and cultural provision. But social justice has to be about more than adding up the benefits; and much depends on who does the addition – and the subtraction. 18 19

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M. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age 1945–1968 (Princeton, NJ, 2020), pp. 205–12. M. Nasiali, Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship, and Everyday Life in Marseille since 1945 (Ithaca, NY, 2016), esp. p. 9; A. Lyons, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization (Stanford, CA, 2013); G. Sinclair and C. Williams, ‘“Home and Away”: The Cross-Fertilisation between “Colonial” and “British” Policing, 1921–85’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35 (2007), 221–38. H. Kaelble, A Social History of Western Europe 1880–1980 (Dublin, 1989).

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The three decades after 1945 occupy an almost mythical place in this familiar narrative. Echoing the often-repeated but largely unquestioned designation of the period by the French economist Jean Fourastié as ‘les trente glorieuses’, much historical writing has described this era as the moment when Europeans got closest to achieving just societies in a period of rapid economic growth and increased affluence, through the substantial expansion of welfarestate provision, the reining-in of social inequalities, increases in social mobility, and the resulting reduction in class differentials.21 This chimed well with the tenor of a flood of analyses advanced by influential social scientists of the time, who optimistically announced that European societies had ceased to be real class societies and had metamorphosed into what the sociologist Helmut Schelsky, analysing the Federal Republic of the early 1950s, famously called a ‘nivellierte Mittelstandsgesellschaft’, or a levelled middle-class society.22 Nor was this an exclusively Western European phenomenon. Social and demographic changes in East-Central Europe wrought by occupation policies during the Second World War and in its aftermath removed privileged elites,23 followed by the massive expansion that occurred in welfare provision as well as the rise in living standards which contributed to the increasing levels of consumerism encouraged by the state-socialist regimes of the 1960s.24 This implicit understanding of the post-war period as one of egalitarian reforms has percolated into collective memory as well as into many popular critiques of Europe’s current condition. In Britain, contemporary celebration of the National Health Service – so visible in the era of the COVID pandemic – has reinforced the image of the era of the Labour government elected in 1945 as a decisive moment of social reform against which the actions of all subsequent governments must inevitably pale. These perceptions, however, speak more to present dissatisfactions than to the reality of the social reforms implemented after 1945.25 Elsewhere too, there has been a persistent tendency, both within historical writing and in broader public debate, to use the first decades of the post-war period as a template against which the inadequacies of 21 22

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J. Fourastié, Les trente glorieuses ou la Révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris, 1979). H. Schelsky, Wandlungen der deutschen Familie in der Gegenwart: Darstellung und Deutung einer empirisch-soziologischen Tatbestandsaufnahme (Stuttgart, 1955). For a forceful demolition of this sociological literature, see H.-U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 5: Bundesrepublik und DDR, 1949–1990 (Munich, 2008), pp. 110–9. The classic analysis is J. T. Gross, ‘Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe’, East European Politics & Societies, 3 (1989), 198–214. See also B. Abrams, ‘The Second World War and the East European Revolution’, East European Politics & Societies, 16 (2002), 623–64. See especially the essays in P. Bren and M. Neuberger (eds.), Communism Unwrapped: Cultures of Consumption in Postwar Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2012). For a recent historical critique of the myths around Britain’s post-war Labour government, see D. Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History (London, 2018), esp. pp. 217–8, 224–6, 236–44.

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their contemporary societies – and governments – can be judged.26 Such narratives should not, however, be accepted uncritically. Experts who propagated them such as Fourastié were not neutral observers, but were personally invested in the technocratic projects of social amelioration of the era and had their own reasons for claiming the success of the policies they had helped design. Above all, the crises around 1973 and the ‘end of the boom’ led to a sense of nostalgia for a past that seemed full of promise but had now seemingly evaporated.27 The reality was, as always, more complex than the myth. Though post-war governments in the west and east took substantial measures intended to achieve more egalitarian societies, there was no decisive forward march of social justice. Differentials of social class remained an enduring reality in postwar Europe, and were reinforced by the unequal distribution of the fruits of the welfare state. Social mobility was much more constrained than historians had long tended to assume; and, while social inequality did not increase, neither was it reduced considerably. Most notably, perhaps, poverty remained a widespread phenomenon in Europe, while many of the familiar ingredients of middle-class affluence – from ownership of fridges to TVs and cars – reached the majority of Europeans only by the mid-1960s, and for significant sectors of the population never materialised.28 Above all, race and gender retained their distinctive power of stratification, and acquired an enhanced importance as they limited severely the access of many newly arrived citizens to the opportunities of education and stable employment. The unequal distribution of the fruits of the boom was perhaps most evident in the emergence, at the height of the trente glorieuses, of shantytowns in the banlieues on the outskirts of French cities, where the recently arrived migrants from France’s former imperial territories were left languishing in desolate conditions as a result of repeated government failure to address the housing crisis.29 The grim material reality of the lives of working-class migrants and so-called guest 26

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E. J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London, 1994), pp. 257–86, was influential in popularising the notion of the ‘Golden Years’. See also, e.g., G. Eley, ‘Corporatism and the Social Democratic Moment: The Postwar Settlement, 1945–1973’, in D. Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford, 2012), pp. 37–59. R. Pawin, ‘Retour sur les “Trente Glorieuses” et la périodisation du second XXe siècle’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 60 (2013), 155–75. See, e.g., the special issue on ‘Contesting Affluence’ in Contemporary British History 22 (2008), 445–597; C. Reinecke, ‘Localising the Social: The Rediscovery of Urban Poverty in Western European “Affluent Societies”’, Contemporary European History, 24 (2015), 555–76. C. Reinecke, ‘Die dunkle Seite des modernen Komforts: Zu einer Neubewertung der “glorreichen Nachkriegszeit” im (post)kolonialen Frankreich’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 42 (2016), 298–325. See also the essays in C. Pessis, S. Topçu, and C. Bonneuil (eds.), Une autre histoire des ‘Trente glorieuses’: Modernisation, contestations et pollutions dans la France d’aprèsguerre (Paris, 2013).

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workers across Western Europe contrasted markedly with the images popularised by contemporary advertisements promoting the newest fitted kitchen and the leisure opportunities generated by post-war affluence.30 Historians – more than social scientists – have been slow to digest the implications of these findings. History, in the overused phrase, is written by the winners; but, more tangibly, the history of social justice has on the whole been related by its beneficiaries. Historians, in Western and Eastern Europe after 1945, were among those who profited most directly from the expansion in access to state-funded structures of university education, public-sector employment, and the provision of public services.31 Consequently, too, they have predominantly regarded social justice, along with an expanding range of personal and intellectual freedoms, as among the key defining features of advanced European societies. These forms of implicit partisanship have been reinforced by the long-term narratives present in much modern historical writing. The emancipation of European societies from the aristocratic and clerical control of the ancien régime has merged with the struggles of emancipatory movements – notably, trade unions, socialist parties, and women’s suffrage organisations – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to forge an over-determined account of the democratic and egalitarian societies that emerged in Western Europe after the Second World War.32 In adopting this approach, historians have been influenced, too, by their source materials. Social justice is most readily traced through the official archives, and more especially through the bureaucratic energy and resources invested by regimes of all political colours in projects of social reform. As a consequence, much of the writing on social justice has adopted a state-centred narrative, following the paper trail conserved in state archives.33 This has not excluded attention to wider social forces, especially when the policies of regimes encountered resistances from sectional groups or 30

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See, e.g., F. Cumoli, ‘Exode rural et crises du logement dans l’Italie des années 1950–1970’, Le Mouvement Social, 245 (2013), 59–69; S. Hacket, Foreigners, Minorities and Integration: The Muslim Immigrant Experience in Britain and Germany (Manchester, 2013). K. Vernon, ‘Engagement, Estrangement or Divorce? The New Universities and Their Communities in the 1960s’, Contemporary British History, 31 (2017), 501–23. See also the comment by Hans-Ulrich Wehler that the period from 1960 to 1980 was ‘eine goldene Zeit für akademische Karrieren’: Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, p. 381. G. Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York, 2002); S. Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 2006). This has been understandably particularly so of histories of the construction of new welfare policies during and immediately after the Second World War. See, for notable examples, J. Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford, 1977); P. V. Dutton, Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914–1947 (Cambridge, 2002). For a corrective to state-centred approaches, see notably P. Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (Cambridge, 1990).

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from the mass of the population. But all too often it has been the actions and ‘ways of seeing’ of state officials that have been the central focus of histories of social justice in both Eastern and Western Europe.34 As a result, the history of social justice risks becoming trapped in a hall of mirrors that reflects the actions of the state and of other public institutions, while evading the more complex question of how these policies were shaped and constrained by the shifting patterns and values of European societies. This volume probably does not evade these forms of bias, but its starting point lies in a shared belief among the contributors of the need for a more open-ended and plural history of social justice in twentieth-century Europe. Ownership of social justice, as we understand it, was almost always contested, between different political groups, but also between a wide range of social actors, each of which sought to advance their understandings of what it should mean in practice. The path to the implementation of policies was therefore rarely straight; and, especially within the complex decision-making structures that characterised both authoritarian and democratic regimes in twentiethcentury Europe, they bore the imprint of many hands. Nor were these limited to those within structures of political power. Intellectuals, religious organisations, campaigning movements, and the attitudes – both real and perceived – of populations also played their part in the making of policies that were always partial and never complete. *** This also implies that social justice cannot be approached as a self-contained subject. It is striking how rarely social justice features as a subject in its own right in analyses of twentieth-century Europe.35 One explanation for this lies in its amorphous nature; but, more substantially, it also reflects the way that understandings of social justice operate within cloistered disciplinary frontiers. As this volume demonstrates, historians approach the phenomenon in particular ways that are not shared by those who operate within the conceptual frameworks and forms of social knowledge specific to other disciplines, notably political science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and social anthropology. When these different approaches have prompted interdisciplinary cross-pollination, historians have on the whole been notable by their

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J. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT, 1998); P. Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800 (Cambridge, 2013). Notable exceptions include P. Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals (Cambridge, MA, 2013), and S. Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA, 2018).

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absence.36 Consequently, approaches to social justice within other disciplines have often appeared overly ahistorical; while historians have taken refuge in a somewhat predictable tendency to evade issues of definition by focusing on empirical case studies.37 For historians, much of the explanation of this terminological elusiveness lies in the way in which concepts of a more just society were located at the confluence of other historical narratives. Four of these were of particular importance. The first, most obviously, was the rise of state power in twentieth-century Europe. The expansion in the remit of the state was, of course, a long-term process that in some significant ways reached back into the preceding decades, most notably in the area of education and in the concomitant centralisation of notions of national identity.38 Yet the economic and human mobilisation demanded by the wars of the first half of the twentieth century, the pressures generated by mass politics, and the functional need for state regulation and coordination of more mobile and complex societies were all forces that drove the expansion of the actions of the state into ever more varied areas of public and private life. The impact of these policies was often fundamentally unequal or even oppressive, but it was rarely devoid of the ambition of bringing about beneficial social change. The provision of sewers and electricity, the expansion of education, and the repression of criminality escalated into a self-assumed responsibility on the part of state officials to address a broad range of social and economic ills. Government was no longer simply the guardian or protector of society, but the pro-active agent of change, implementing social reform through the intelligent tools of bureaucratic rule. Planning, the collection of statistical data, and the complex techniques of fiscal management and taxation were all part of the repertoire of methods deployed by the state and parastatal bureaucracies – which were national but also increasingly trans-national in scope – as they became the all-purpose

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This plurality of approaches is well demonstrated by the journal Social Justice Research. It is noteworthy that when the journal was established in 1987, it sought to create a forum for interdisciplinary debate on social justice, but excluded history from the range of disciplines that were thought to have anything useful to say on the subject. This has remained so until today. See M. Lerner, ‘Introductory Statement’, Social Justice Research, 1 (1987), 1–3. Similarly, the recent and impressive International Handbook of Social Justice, despite recognising the importance of a historical approach, is noticeable for the absence of historians amongst its authors: M. Reisch (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Social Justice (London, 2016). A parallel discussion is in many respects the recent controversy about whether ‘neoliberalism’ can be used as a meaningful analytical term. See ‘Forum I: Neoliberalism as a Concept of Contemporary History?’, Journal of Modern European History, 17 (2019), 381–411. The most influential but subsequently contested expression of this argument can be found in E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA, 1976).

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problem-solvers of twentieth-century European societies.39 As a consequence, blueprints for social justice lost their utopian edge and became the domain of professional and qualified experts. Social workers, public-health officials, and experts on childhood development, education, public housing, and a whole range of other specialist fields were the architects and engineers of policies designed to bring about effective and durable social reform.40 The gradual ascendancy of such expert groups and their transition from relative marginalisation during the inter-war period into interlocutors and agents of the state was a process that occurred across Europe.41 The net result was a strengthening of the influence of the state and a considerable expansion of the social control it could exercise over populations that became the objects of multiple projects of social amelioration.42 This advance of state power had a certain political neutrality. If it was most emphatic during the inter-war years in regimes of the left and right that set ambitious goals for the transformation of their societies, many of the same methods were imitated and modified by the very different regimes of Western Europe after the Second World War.43 This adaptability indicates how social reform formed part of a second wider history: namely, the emergence of cultures of social improvement. The idea that lives, collectively and individually, could and should be made better became such a widespread assumption in 39

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P. Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Post-War Era (Princeton, NJ, 2010); P. Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford, 2013); E. Van der Vleuten, I. Anastasiadou, V. Lagendijk, and F. Schipper, ‘Europe’s System Builders: The Contested Shaping of Transnational Road, Electricity and Rail Networks’, Contemporary European History, 16 (2007), 321–48. W. B. Newsome, ‘The “Apartment Referendum” of 1959: Toward Participatory Architectural and Urban Planning in Postwar France’, French Historical Studies, 28 (2005), 329–58; S. Todd, ‘Family Welfare and Social Work in Post-War England’, The English Historical Review, 129 (2014), 362–87; S. Levsen, Autorität und Demokratie: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Erziehungswandels in Westdeutschland und Frankreich, 1945–1975 (Göttingen, 2019). R. Šustrová, ‘A Dilemma of Change and Cooperation: Labour and Social Policy in Bohemia and Moravia in the 1930s and 1940s’, in S. Kott and K. K. Patel (eds.), Nazism across Borders: The Social Policies of the Third Reich and Their Global Appeal (London, 2018), pp. 105–38; Nord, France’s New Deal. A good example of this is the re-introduction of the ‘means test’ in Britain in 1931 for those claiming unemployment benefits, which represented a mix of welfare policies coupled with measures meant to increase social control over the working class. See S. Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010 (London, 2014), pp. 61–94. This continuity across the war period is a major theme of much recent work. See notably Nord, France’s New Deal; K. K. Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton, NJ, 2016); P. Romijn, Der lange Krieg der Niederlande: Besatzung, Gewalt und Neuorientierung in den vierziger Jahren (Göttingen, 2017). See also the classic essay on the continuity of the state by C. Pavone, ‘La continuità dello Stato: Instituzioni e uomini’, in E. Piscitelli et al. (eds.), Italia 1945–48: Le origini della Repubblica (Turin, 1974), pp. 137–289. For a pioneering exploration of how the Soviet Union fits within the broader, trans-ideological trend of the inter-war years, see S. Kotkin’s seminal article ‘Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture’, Kritika, 2 (2001), 111–64.

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European society across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that it is often difficult to perceive it. The manifestations of this mentality were, however, manifold. It was evident in campaigns for moral and social improvement, in the international humanitarianism of the age, in the activism of Catholic and other religious organisations at home and abroad, as well as in programmes of racial regeneration and social hygiene. Though their motives and ideological assumptions were diverse, the purposes were often convergent. Social organisations, political movements, and non-state actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, collaborated to counter the immediate threats of hunger, disease, and destitution, but also to achieve larger objectives of peace, the protection of women and children, and the promotion of a wide range of social rights. The formulae and institutions for delivering these forms of social justice were often imperfect, rooted in racial and gendered social assumptions that reinforced inequality at the same time as they addressed immediate needs. But this social activism rapidly expanded in scale and ambition in early and mid-twentieth-century Europe, to respond to the sufferings of the manifold victims of the wars, famines, epidemics, and economic crises that proliferated during the First World War and its aftermath.44 This combination of public and private energies gathered momentum over subsequent decades. The structures of welfare provision introduced by governments after 1945 rested on the experience and personnel of a large number of social and confessional organisations within Europe, just as the expanding domains of humanitarian and development policies within European colonial territories, before and after formal decolonisation, traversed the interconnected domains of missionary activity, charity, and state policy.45 The ambition of social improvement was thus a transcontinental process that cut through the Cold War divide and was visible across the divergent political regimes of Eastern and Western Europe.46

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P. Houlihan, ‘Renovating Christian Charity: Global Catholicism, the Save the Children Fund, and Humanitarianism during the First World War’, Past and Present, 250 (2021), 203–41; M. Cox, Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany 1914–1924 (Oxford, 2019); A. Thompson ‘Unravelling the Relationships between Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Decolonization: Time for a Radical Rethink?’, in M. Thomas and A. Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford, 2018), pp. 453–76. H. Ashford, ‘The Red Cross and the Establishment of Maternal and Infant Welfare in the 1930s Gold Coast’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47 (2019), 514–41; F. Cooper, ‘Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept’, in F. Cooper and R. Packard (eds.), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 64–92; M. Hilton, ‘Charity, Decolonization and Development: The Case of the Starehe Boys School, Nairobi’, Past and Present, 233 (2016), 227–67. We are grateful to Kate Skinner for her insights on this point. See, e.g., L. Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (Berkeley, 2002). For a broader comparative examination of this development during the twentieth century, see A. Weiner (ed.), Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, CA, 2003).

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It might seem self-evident that social justice was desired by those who were the victims of the most flagrant forms of inequality. In fact, the reality was more complex. Many of those who were the most immediate targets of policies of social reform – notably, slum dwellers, Romany populations, racial minorities, and impoverished rural communities – were often ambivalent in their response to measures of improvement, which imposed new forms of conformity and discipline alongside their rather uncertain benefits.47 To present social justice as simply demand-led would therefore be misleading. However, it did relate to a third, wider history, namely, that of changing popular expectations of government. One of the shortcomings of a history of social justice that focuses on rulers is that it all too easily leaves out what people wanted or expected their rulers to do. Though obviously inflected by national and ideological differences, the expectations that people had of their rulers, and more especially of how they wanted them to behave, were largely similar, at least across much of Western and Northern Europe where populations had since the end of the nineteenth century come to accept the legitimacy of state power.48 Initially, these expectations were limited to the provision of order and legality, combined with a certain economic and social stability. However, over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century, they expanded to incorporate a wider range of benefits and services that citizens expected to receive in return for their obedience, their payment of taxes, and, in the case of young men and their families, their military service. This indicated a new social balance of power in which rulers had to take account of the interests and aspirations of citizens. This reconfiguration of social forces was in part the outcome of the gradual expansion of the franchise. But it also reflected a widely shared awareness among rulers, born out of the experiences of the mid-twentieth century, that sociopolitical stability – and indeed the very survival of their regimes – could be achieved only through policies that delivered tangible benefits to populations. The closer relationship of populations with the state could encourage an individualist mentality of ‘what is in it for me?’ But the calculations that citizens made were often more than self-interested. In particular, their conceptions of what constituted good governance were shaped by the worldviews of the families and communities to which they belonged. These could be strongly influenced by the actions (and propaganda) of rulers, especially with regard to 47

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M. Young and P. Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London, 1957); C. Donert, The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge, 2017); M. Cohen, Des familles invisibles: Les Algériens de France entre intégrations et discriminations (1945–1985) (Paris, 2020). For an impressionistic account of the mixed popular responses to projects of urban modernisation, see D. Eribon, Retour à Reims (Paris, 2009). M. Conway and P. Romijn, ‘Introduction’, Contemporary European History, 13 (2004), 377–88.

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more distant issues of national policy-making. But in the more local communities within which most people lived, attitudes to government were defined by a nexus of more socially embedded values. In particular, most citizens expected their rulers, whatever their political hue, to behave in a legal and predictable manner, to care for the victims of misfortune, and to protect the wider interests of the community.49 To describe these values – and the durable culture of localism within European society that they embodied – as a form of social justice risks imposing too great a clarity on views that were generally more felt than explicit. But conceptions of social justice always had a resonance wider than the actions of rulers or the declarations of political elites. They also built on social assumptions of what was fair or moral that had been inherited from the past, but which were adapted and remade in response to the pressures imposed on communities, workplaces, and families by the vicissitudes of the twentieth century.50 In contrast to these collective value structures, the fourth – and last – wider influence on social justice was the more political domain of citizenship. The idea that individual Europeans were citizens of nation states possessed of concomitant duties and rights was the product of long-term evolutions in attitudes, and above all in political practices.51 The enfranchisement of adult males, which (in a striking demonstration of the limits of contemporary notions of social justice) was extended in a number of European states to adult women only after the Second World War,52 gave citizens the opportunity to pass judgement on their rulers through elections and the more occasional tool of referenda, albeit only in periodic and often rather limited ways. The emergence of a broader culture of citizenship was necessarily more gradual, and was constrained by the different levels of civic freedom possessed by the citizens of democratic states, compared with those of the Socialist regimes of east-central Europe or the dictatorships of Iberia. More pervasive, however, was the emergence of a shared culture of social citizenship. This had, most prominently, been captured in an essay published in 1950 by the British sociologist 49 50

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M. Conway and P. Romijn (eds.), The War for Legitimacy in Politics and Culture 1936–1946 (Oxford, 2008). The highly localised experience of occupation and liberation in much of Europe during the Second World War was often important in this respect. See, for representative examples, I. Origo, War in Val d’Orcia: A Diary (London, 1947); M. Koreman, The Expectation of Justice: France 1944–46 (Durham, NC, 1999); N. Stargardt, ‘Legitimacy through War?’, in D. O. Pendas, M. Roseman, and R. F. Wetzell (eds.), Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany (Washington, DC, 2017), pp. 402–28. M. L. Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2000); P. Nord, The Republican Moment. Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA, 1995), esp. pp. 1–14. S. Reynolds, ‘Lateness, Amnesia and Unfinished Business: Gender and Democracy in Twentieth-Century Europe’, European History Quarterly, 32 (2002), 85–109; M. Tambor, The Lost Wave: Women and Democracy in Postwar Italy (Oxford, 2014).

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T. H. Marshall, who had argued that the shift towards the inclusion of social rights next to civil and political ones was one of the defining features of the twentieth century. The new category of social citizenship encompassed, in his characteristic prose, the ‘whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society’.53 This new conception of social rights contributed to an increasing sense amongst Europeans that the state had a duty to provide them with an acceptable standard of living as well as with solid protections against the risks of life. The definition of the citizen was individual, but also had a larger family dimension. For most Europeans across the twentieth century, citizenship was inseparable from the rights of themselves and of their families to have access to housing, health care, education, decent conditions of employment, and the modest security provided by welfare benefits and old-age pensions.54 This also rendered citizenship more inclusive. Though many aspects of political citizenship remained strikingly male until the latter decades of the century, social citizenship was a domain of female activism, through the modern archetype of the housewife as the manager of the household, conscious of her rights as a consumer and as a citizen.55 Political parties were well aware of this new significance of women, and it was therefore no coincidence that women featured prominently as addressees in the election campaigns of the post-war era in Western Europe.56 In state-socialist countries, women were also the focus of much of the political discourse of the era. Here too, many of the pre-existing gendered assumptions on the role of women as managers of the household and related notions of maternalism were carried over into the post-war period. The mass mobilisation of women for the labour force and their targeted recruitment into Communist parties at the end of the war, however, meant that substantial energies were devoted to presenting women as essential to the building of the new Socialist societies. This went hand in hand with an expansion of women’s social rights. Though the reality for many 53

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T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1950), p. 11. Marshall’s argument applied to Britain, but it can easily be transferred to other western European states. For a forceful demonstration of this, see M. Mann, ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, Sociology, 21 (1987), 339–54. P. Ginsborg, Family Politics. Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900–1950 (New Haven, CT, 2014); Nasiali, Native to the Republic. E. Carter, How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997); R. J. Pulju, Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France (Cambridge, 2011). See also the reflections in E. Gubin, ‘Les femmes d’une guerre à l’autre: Réalités et représentations, 1918–1940’, Cahiers d’Histoire du Temps Présent, 4 (1998), 249–81. R. G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley, 1996). See also Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age, pp. 240–7.

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women in Eastern Europe was the ‘double burden’ of having to participate in the labour market while still bearing the brunt of taking care of the household, this shift necessitated a new public discourse in which women and men were constructed as equal and entitled to the same rights. As a result, women assumed a much more assertive presence in public and political life, most notably at the local level. This, in turn, created increasing expectations amongst women that their rulers should deliver a social order in which a language of gender equality would emancipate itself from the formulas of constitutions and the mantra of party discourse and become a lived reality.57 The demand of citizens not merely to be recognised but also to be heard and listened to made itself felt in steadily more insistent ways in Europe, east and west, during the 1950s and 1960s: in demands for better housing, in strikes for better – and more equal – conditions of pay, and in campaigns for divorce and abortion rights, for greater civil rights for specific groups (such as the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland and recently arrived immigrant populations), and for better state provision for displaced people such as the Vertriebene in West Germany, the pieds noirs in France, or rural communities threatened by state policies of expropriation.58 This social militancy was often local and sectional in its origins and goals, but it carried within it implicit larger messages about social justice, especially when these demands were incorporated into the mass mobilisations that occurred in the late 1960s in Prague and Paris, as well as in many other towns, factories, and universities across Europe.59 The consequence was a consistent undercurrent of social and civic protest in Europe across the final third of the twentieth century, in which local grievances and sectional campaigns merged with wider – even global – languages of social justice. In the late 1960s, the exploitation and simple harshness of working conditions in many workplaces, exacerbated by the impersonal nature of state authorities, fuelled a new repertoire of protest actions, which focused on demands for freedom and justice that were simultaneously individual and

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F. de Haan, ‘Women as the Motor of Modern Life: Women’s Work in Europe West and East’, in J. Regulska and B. G. Smith (eds.), Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union (London, 2012), pp. 87–103. See also the special issue on ‘Women, Work and Value in Post-War Europe’ in Contemporary European History, 28 (2019), 449–511. M.-T. Coenen, La grève des femmes de la F.N. en 1966 (Brussels, 1991); J. Clarke, ‘Work, Consumption and Subjectivity in Postwar France: Moulinex and the Meanings of Domestic Appliances 1950s–70s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47 (2012), 838–59; R. Gildea and A. Tompkins, ‘The Transnational in the Local: The Larzac Plateau as a Site of Transnational Activism since 1970’, Journal of Contemporary History, 50 (2015), 581–605; M. Boruta and J. C. Hansen (eds.), Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France: Comparative Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2016). G.-R. Horn, The Spirit of ’68. Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford, 2007).

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collective.60 This shift from past models of political revolution and mass mobilisation gravitating primarily around questions of material inequality to one of rights and of differentness gathered pace over subsequent decades. The separatist feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, but also those of immigrant groups, ethnic minorities, and of campaigners for the rights of gay and lesbian people, legitimised their demands through their right to be different, and to be respected as such. This changed, too, understandings of social justice. What had hitherto been primarily envisaged in terms of an inclusive language of integration became one of sectional rights, in which the measure of a regime of social justice was its acceptance of difference – and indeed its celebration – through the achievement of a consciously pluralist society. This found its expression in the replacement of a politics of material redistribution based on a universalist conception of society, which had been characteristic of the first decades of the post-war period, by a politics of recognition centred around the acceptance of group differences that came to dominate in the final decades of the century.61 This shift towards a language of rights also encouraged the concern with personal autonomy and individual responsibility that was increasingly ubiquitous in many spheres of European societies. Even within industry and business, there was a marked shift from the hierarchies and discipline of the past. Drawing on the new language of rights, business elites in the 1970s sought to justify the transition to a post-Fordist system of production by emphasising the individual freedom and flattening of professional and social hierarchies that would emerge through a break with the machine-based production lines and rigid welfare systems of the industrial era.62 This was accompanied by the gradual retreat from collective forms of working-class organisation towards the establishment of a ‘capitalism of singularity’ in which ‘the worker’s productivity depended on his [sic] ability to mobilise his own resources and invest himself autonomously in his task’. Individual creativity, adaptability, and responsibility became the hallmarks of a new discourse of personal liberation and material advancement.63 The initial impulse behind such campaigns was often sectional or individual, but they also encouraged a more emphatically global language of human

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M. Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York, 2004); L. Bantigny, 1968: De grands soirs en petits matins (Paris, 2018). N. Fraser, ‘Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation’, in N. Fraser and A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A PoliticalPhilosophical Exchange (London, 2003), pp. 9–25. L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, rev. ed. (Paris, 2011). Rosanvallon, Society of Equals, pp. 218–21, quotes at p. 221.

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rights.64 This was evident in campaigns in support of political dissidents within the Soviet bloc, but also, most strikingly, in the new prominence that the Global South acquired in campaigns for social justice.65 More long-standing campaigns in support of the collective rights of formerly colonised peoples of Africa and Asia to national self-determination merged with a much broader concern with the rights of women, the safeguarding of minorities, access to education, health care, and legal protection and political freedom across the post-colonial world.66 But it also produced a wider preoccupation with what gradually became known as ‘global justice’ or ‘global solidarity’. This found its expression in the expansion of movements in Europe seeking to redress the material inequities, exploitative economic structures, and larger political dependencies that, in their view, impeded the development of the Global South and perpetuated the power relations of the colonial era. For some, such as those involved in the ‘fair trade’ movement or in the boycotting of multinational companies, these were problems that could be remedied within the existing capitalist order, such as by educating citizens to become ethical consumers. This, they hoped, would stimulate the growth of ‘socially responsible’ businesses at home, dislodge unequal trade relationships, and raise social standards in the Global South.67 Yet for others, the enduring reality of global disparities pointed to the insoluble contradictions of late twentieth-century European societies. The anti-globalisation movements that emerged from the end of the 1980s were therefore the product of a long process by which notions of social and global justice amalgamated to the extent that they became indissoluble.68 The ways in which the languages and policies of social justice operated within and between this matrix of larger histories underscore the need for a history of social justice that is sensitive to the particularities of time and place. There were indeed certain continuities – perhaps most obviously the quasiuniversal recognition of the responsibility of the state to provide for the most visible needs of the population – but it is the discontinuities that were more

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S. Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, 2010); E. Davey, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988 (Cambridge, 2015). Q. Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC, 2012); C. Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950–1976 (Cambridge, 2016). Moyn, Not Enough, pp. 171–2. T. Sasson, ‘Milking the Third World? Humanitarianism, Capitalism, and the Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott’, American Historical Review, 121 (2016), 1196–224; see also the special issue on ‘Trajectories of Global Solidarity: Fair Trade Activism since the 1960s’ in Contemporary European History, 8 (2019), 512–80. G. Curran, 21st Century Dissent: Anarchism, Anti-Globalization and Environmentalism (Basingstoke, 2006).

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evident: between regimes, eras, and national, confessional, and local communities. Social justice was never universal; and it took shape within particular national histories of state development that differed markedly between, most obviously, the republican model of France and the pillarised societies of the Low Countries.69 Similarly, while the concept of the ‘welfare state’ resonated with the state-oriented cultures of Britain and of western Scandinavia, it was alien to the Catholic confessional cultures of areas of western Germany, Austria, and Italy, which favoured the provision of welfare, education, and health services through quasi-independent social organisations.70 The ruptures between east and west in the post–1945 era were of course more marked still. Competition between the state-driven models of welfare provision in the east and the more plural and localised structures in the west formed part of a wider rivalry between models of social justice, rooted in conflicting priorities of social solidarity and individual self-reliance. The freedom that became during the Cold War such an integral element of the self-image of Western societies was contrasted against the notions of social equality and collective provision that became the defining feature of the socialist societies in the east. For the builders of these new socialist societies, universal social justice was a central goal, which was reflected in the resources devoted to new housing complexes, all-day nurseries, and the expansions in structures of education and health care, but also in the effort expended on encouraging a new socially oriented mentality within their populations. This was social justice that not only would exist in words, but would be made manifest through visual representation, physical environments, and the future-oriented worldview of those who inhabited them.71 This was a project, moreover, that acquired greater prominence as the regimes of East-Central Europe hesitantly abandoned the repressive logics of Stalinism in favour of seeking novel means of legitimising their rule, through the social benefits afforded by state-socialist planning and provision.72 Despite the emancipatory rhetoric that accompanied such schemes, these were, however, highly gendered projects. They fell short of the expectations of women to attain real equality and personal freedom, and did little to remedy deeply ingrained forms of gendered inequality. ‘Welfare

69 70

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Rosanvallon, Society of Equals. M. Conway, ‘Legacies of Exile: The Exile Governments in London during the Second World War and the Politics of Post-War Europe’, in M. Conway and J. Gotovitch (eds.), Europe in Exile: European Exile Communities in Britain 1940–1945 (New York, 2001), pp. 255–74. T. Inglot, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 1919–2004 (Cambridge, 2008); K. Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–1956 (Ithaca, NY, 2013); M. Colla, ‘Prussian Palimpsests: Historic Architecture and Urban Spaces in East Germany, 1945–1961’, Central European History, 50 (2017), 184–217. See also the biographical account provided in M. Leo, Red Love: the Story of an East German Family (London, 2013). P. Kolář, Der Poststalinismus: Ideologie und Utopie einer Epoche (Cologne, 2016).

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dictatorships’73 were therefore less interested in ameliorating the position of women by devising solutions together with them than in providing them with solutions that were crafted primarily by men in an attempt to increase the participation of women in the workforce and so increase productivity.74 For all of their apparent stark differences, the conceptions of social justice in east and west, therefore, perhaps came to differ more in their external structures than in their inner conception. Once the shock of the early Stalinist years had passed, so policies of social justice in the east shifted from the imposition of universal models to negotiation with the organisations of civil society and local communities. That of course was also the case in Western Europe, once the initial post-war flurry of ambitious social-welfare reforms gave way to the incremental erosion of more obstinate forms of inequality, such as intergenerational poverty. In this way, the regimes of social justice in the west and east came closer together75 prefiguring the convergence that occurred after the demise of the state-socialist regimes in 1989, and the shared participation of west and east in the European Union. Yet, unlike other areas of public policy-making that migrated towards the European level in the 1980s and 1990s, it was striking how social justice always remained primarily a matter of national policy-making. European institutions served as places of exchange between governmental experts and the representatives of social organisations; but the ways in which social justice was conceived and implemented remained rooted within more local cultures of state action, social negotiation, and societal norms.76 When notions of social justice were taken up by the institutions of European integration, this was framed primarily in economistic terms that were markedly different from the redistributive language adopted at the nation-state level: economic cooperation, productivity, and growth were seen as the best solutions to the problems of social inequality and internal societal conflict. The measures instituted by the European Communities consequently centred on the concept of ‘access justice’, predicated on removing obstacles to the market, while seeking to create a dynamic European market citizen.77 This resilient diversity makes social justice a rich and properly historical subject. It demonstrates how the preoccupation with creating a more just

73

74 75

76 77

K. H. Jarausch, ‘Care and Coercion: The GDR as Welfare Dictatorship’, in K. H. Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York, 1999), pp. 47–69. See Chapter 10 in this volume. W. Süss, ‘Social Security, Social Inequality and the Welfare State in East and West Germany’, in F. Bösch (ed.), A History Shared and Divided: East and West Germany since the 1970s (New York, 2018), pp. 191–238. K. K. Patel, Project Europe: A History (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 105–9. See Chapter 12 in this volume.

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society was a durable but also continuously evolving focus of state policies, social campaigns, and political projects. Above all, it was an ambition that was always in the process of creation: it was never achieved, but neither was it entirely out of reach. As such, it is indicative of the spirit of restless ideological debate and societal reform that from the vantage point of the twenty-first century seems to be one of the principal characteristics of the European twentieth century between the First World War and the 1990s. Definitions of this period as an Age of Extremes or as a European Civil War emphasise how the intense conflicts of the era generated murderous cycles of military warfare, social violence, and ethnic and ideological wars.78 But these conflicts formed part of a larger preoccupation with projects of social change. The present was always imperfect, and the priority was the definition of the future.79 The means of achieving that change varied greatly between modest reforms and radical action, just as the visions of the future ranged from the reactionary to the revolutionary. However, beyond this diversity of means and ends, the preoccupation with dreams and projects of social justice was one of the defining characteristics of the spirit of the age. *** The conception and organisation of this volume engages with three vectors that lie at the heart of understanding the history of social justice in twentiethcentury Europe. The first can be grouped under the heading of temporalities. It used to be easy to write the history of twentieth-century Europe by dividing it into discrete periods that matched the political upheavals and regime shifts of the century (1918–1939–1945–1973–1989). This certainty about periodisation has, however, fractured. Much recent historical work has been at pains to pull down the boundaries between different time periods and, instead, emphasises the significant continuities in ideas, attitudes, policies, people, and institutions as well as in social and economic structures across moments of regime change. This is especially so in the long-standing debate about 1945 as a European Stunde Null (Zero Hour), where it has become clear that notions of ruptures are more often than not myths that serve the self-interested agendas of new rulers and the broader society alike.80 Above all, concepts of a Stunde Null – be it in 78

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Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes; D. Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen: Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Munich, 1999); E. Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914–1945 (London, 2016). See the interesting reflections of Marcus Colla on the role of the future in state-socialist societies: M. Colla, ‘The Politics of Time and State Identity in the German Democratic Republic’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 29 (2019), 223–51. H. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA, 1991); R. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001).

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1918, 1945, or 1989 – have ultimately little to do with the complex realities of sociopolitical transitions, which always incorporate elements of the new and the old.81 Yet, as the familiar frontiers of the century have been challenged, so have many of our assumptions about the dividing lines behind political regimes of radically different ideological persuasions. This has led to a reconsideration of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch has called the ‘distant relations’ between different regimes and to relativising the distance that in fact existed between them.82 Writing the history of social justice in twentieth-century Europe therefore raises fundamental questions about continuity and change, and about the way in which conceptions of social justice travelled across different political regimes, times, and places. Accordingly, this volume applies an open-ended approach that seeks to trace conceptions of social justice from whence they came and to wherever they went. Poking holes in established historiographical building bricks does not, however, mean simply demolishing them. Rather, as the debates about turning points in the twentieth century have also shown, there was undoubtedly much that did change at such junctures. The chapters in this volume consequently demonstrate the extent to which the familiar turning points of twentieth-century European history functioned rather like the poles in an imperfect slalom ski run: conceptions of social justice travelled across the century, moving themselves elegantly around the start and terminus gates, but often grazing the intermediate points in passing and sometimes fully colliding with them. Alongside this general pattern of the gradual evolution of notions of social justice, there were, of course, periods of acceleration. As Chapters 4 and 6 in this volume well demonstrate, the crises provoked by invasion and warfare often acted as stimuli to enact changes in social-welfare provision that would otherwise have had a more lengthy gestation, or perhaps would not have occurred in the same way at all. These shifting conceptions of social justice across time prompts the question of whether any more long-term pattern is discernible. To explore this, one might think of the genealogy of conceptions of social justice in terms of a sequence of ‘regimes’ of social justice, to appropriate an influential formula that has been used productively within the field of the history of emotions.83 This prompts a range of questions about the origins and evolution of such ‘regimes’, including the reasons why a particular regime of social justice came to dominate at a particular moment, the identity of the sociopolitical and 81 82 83

M. Conway, P. Lagrou, and H. Rousso (eds.), Europe’s Postwar Periods – 1989, 1945, 1918: Writing History Backwards (London, 2019). W. Schivelbusch, Entfernte Verwandschaft: Faschismus, Nazionalsozialismus, New Deal, 1933–1939 (Frankfurt am Main, 2008). See also Patel, The New Deal. For the influential notion of emotional regimes, see W. M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001).

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material dynamics and structures that led it to triumph and subsequently to collapse, and the ways in which elements of the pre-existing regime were transferred into the next era. Deploying the formula of a ‘regime’ risks, of course, imposing too great a uniformity and coherence onto what were often highly heterogenous amalgams that rarely conformed to the ideal-types that are so prominent in social-science writing on the subject.84 Regimes of social justice were necessarily the result of complex compromises. Yet, as shown in Chapter 2, it is possible to approach the history of social justice in terms of three eras, in which different market-related conceptualisations of social justice came to the fore. This comprised a first period starting in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and gravitating around the ‘social question’; a second period beginning in the 1920s and dominated by conceptions of social justice focused on the establishment and maintenance of a productive labour force as well as on the institution of insurance-based social-security systems; and, finally, a third period from the 1970s, marked by the expansion of a residualist notion of social justice understood as social rights, culminating in a redefinition of social justice as equality of opportunity and a concomitant focus on social investment as a means to inculcate an entrepreneurial mentality amongst the population. In addition to these issues of temporality, the essays in this volume engage, second, with how notions of social justice were shaped by a particular place and community, that is, with their spatiality. Notions of social justice were intrinsically tied to the local, regional, and national contexts in which they were expressed. This is, in many respects, not surprising: for much of the twentieth century, the expectations of populations towards their rulers were formulated in primarily local or national terms. At the same time, rulers sought to respond to popular demands by devising policies that delivered tangible benefits to those defined as full members of the national community. In the age of mass politics, this was the group that mattered electorally, and for those in power it simply did not pay to heed calls for extending the remit of collective solidarity to those thought to be outside the nation. Migrants, as Chapter 8 in this volume well demonstrates, were the most obvious victims of structures of social justice that linked social rights to national citizenship. Since the late 1960s, efforts have been made to address these inequalities, but the tension between migration and social justice has proven to be a durable one. Over recent decades, ideologues on both the right and left have repeatedly construed migrants – and the forms of diversity they embody – as antithetical to the homogeneity necessary for the flowering of projects of social justice.

84

See, e.g., G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge, 1990).

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Social justice has been a subject – and a form of provision – over which the nation state has often tried to assert exclusive ownership. This is well demonstrated in the analysis in Chapter 5 of the welfare policies constructed by the authoritarian regimes of the mid-twentieth century with grand rhetoric and more modest achievements. However, popular notions of what was socially just were never entirely under state control. They often originated outside the structures of the state, within social and confessional communities, and local societies.85 In particular, the definition of insiders and outsiders, as well as the internal frontiers between those deemed to be the deserving and the undeserving, reflected the enduring influence of socially rooted notions of a ‘moral economy’. This is a concept that has been highly influential amongst historians of early modern Europe, but that has had a strikingly limited impact on our understanding of twentieth-century Europe.86 Yet E. P. Thompson’s exploration of the collective ‘moral assumptions’ of a community, their notions of ‘legitimate and illegitimate practices’, and more generally their views of ‘social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community’, offers a useful analytical framework for understanding the attitudes of Europeans in the twentieth century too.87 It is only in more recent decades that the framework within which socialjustice claims are formulated has shifted to incorporate the international and supranational level. As Chapter 9 demonstrates, notions of positive peace, as they developed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, prompted a relocation of social justice from the national to the makings of a new global order. Moreover, the expansion in the powers and reach of the European Union since the final decades of the twentieth century has led to far-reaching hopes for the implementation of visions of a ‘Social Europe’.88 As shown in

85

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See, e.g., the special issue on ‘Urban Societies in Europe’ in Contemporary European History, 24 (2015), 475–622; R. Gildea, Marianne in Chains: in Search of the German Occupation, 1940–1945 (London, 2002); L. Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2011); R. Wakeman, Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse, 1945–1975 (Cambridge, MA, 1997). For a stimulating exception, see D. A. Gordon, ‘L’économie morale des banlieusards: Aux origines de la “crise des transports” en France des années 1970?’, Vingtième Siècle, 126 (2015), 119–31. E. P. Thompson ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), 79. For the triumph of the concept in the analysis of areas other than Europe, see the influential work by J. C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT, 1976). The neglect of the moral economies of the twentieth century is currently being remedied. See the stimulating articles in the dossier on the moral economy in Humanity 11 (2020), as well as the research projects conducted at the new International Max Planck Research School for Moral Economies, www.mpib-berlin.mpg .de/forschung/forschungsbereiche/geschichte-der-gefuehle/imprs-moral-economies. A. Bitumi, ‘An Uplifting Tale of Europe: Jacques Delors and the Commitment to Social Europe’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 16 (2018), 203–21.

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Chapter 12, since the 1970s the institutions of European integration made significant and often neglected inroads into the field of social policy by passing anti-discrimination legislation, establishing protections for workers and consumers, and implementing regulations guaranteeing a fair access to the market and expanding social inclusion. They remained wedded, however, to a conception of social justice understood as the dismantlement of obstacles to the market, and they only gradually retreated from this notion after the financial crisis of 2008 and the deep crisis of legitimacy it produced. The preponderance of the local and national in the domain of social justice was therefore a defining feature of the twentieth century and one that prompts the question of whether in fact a broader transnational European story of converging attitudes can be traced amidst the multiplicity of national and local experiences.89 While this volume cannot provide a definitive answer to this question, it is striking how many of its chapters spill beyond the frameworks of the nation state. In particular, Chapter 3 on Catholic social justice and Chapter 6 on Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation and subsequent state-socialist era demonstrate how local and national cultures of social justice found ways of co-existing alongside the broader ambitions of these imperial projects. Conversely, the survival of regimes of social justice in Mediterranean Europe after the demise of the fascist and authoritarian structures in which they initially emerged, as well as the legacies of state-socialist conceptions of social justice in Central and Eastern Europe during the privatisations of the 1990s, explored in Chapter 11, show that the connections between the local and the national were more complex than a political chronology might suggest. This raises the third set of fundamental questions, namely, the identity of those actors and agencies involved in driving the articulation and solidification of conceptions of social justice. If the authorship of structures and understandings of social justice was always more broadly shared than the machinations of elites, be they political, social, or intellectual, the frame of study has to be expanded to encompass the complex space between rulers and ruled. This contextual approach not only restores agency to those who were subjected to projects of social justice, but also seeks to complicate a narrative that sees populations as simply the consumers of forms of social provision devised and administered by others. This interactional nature of notions of social justice is well demonstrated by the case of the non-democratic regimes of Europe’s twentieth century. Thus, the chapters in this volume showcase how even the most authoritarian regimes, from Fascist Italy to Salazar’s Portugal and state-socialist Hungary, could not simply trample underfoot

89

M. Conway and K. K. Patel (eds.), Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches (Basingstoke, 2010).

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expectations of fairness and material amelioration coming from below. Instead, elites within these regimes were all too conscious of the ways in which their broader legitimacy depended on responding to such expectations. In the absence of other means of legitimisation, social justice was therefore a language that authoritarian rulers ignored at their peril, and at times felt more obliged to deploy than democratic rulers. To be sure, they rarely lived up to their ideological promises, and often used references to social justice for patently propagandistic purposes. Nor was there ever a real consensus within these regimes as to the meaning of social justice and the means to achieve it. Yet a consistent undercurrent in Europe’s twentieth century was the way in which rulers felt the pressure to make decisive gestures clothed in a rhetoric of social progress to appease broader sectors of the population. *** In adopting this approach, we hope to encourage historians of twentiethcentury Europe to take social justice seriously as a historical subject in its own right, rather than merely regarding it as one of the ingredients in other histories. Social justice, we argue, was one of the main sites of political and social contestation across the continent. It therefore needs to be put centre stage in any understanding of the twentieth century that seeks to bring together the actions of regimes but also the influence of civil society and the responses of populations. By taking its history seriously, a multiplicity of new perspectives open up that, as the chapters in this volume hope to demonstrate, challenge established assumptions about political regimes, social movements and organisations, state institutions, material structures, ideologies, gender relations, and the circulation of ideas and knowledge. In a broader sense, however, they also lead us to question our sense of the spatial, political, and social convergence of European nation states. A history of social justice therefore impinges on the viability of European history as a subject matter in itself, contributing to the larger question of whether Europe functions as a useful analytical category for understanding the vicissitudes of the twentieth century.90 Above all, taking social justice seriously as a historical subject implies overcoming its prevalent politicisation by throwing overboard some of the normative weight that often accompanies it. Instead, it is necessary to accept that it was not owned by a single ideology or political grouping, and that tracing its history might sometimes lead us to places that we do not like.

90

On the viability of European history as a field and subject matter, see the ongoing debate on Why Europe? Which Europe? at europedebate.hypotheses.org.

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This volume is emphatically not intended as a comprehensive survey of the genealogy of conceptions of social justice. Instead, our ambition is the more modest one of seeking to put the subject on the historical agenda by suggesting a conceptual shape that others might find useful when pursuing the archival work that the subject still necessitates. The book therefore includes both overview chapters that chart distinctive paths of social justice across longer time spans and more specific case studies that apply our approach to particular spatial and temporal contexts. The chapters thereby showcase the sheer diversity of the ways in which the quest for social justice was pursued in Europe. They encompass different spatial dimensions, reaching from the west to the east, from the south to the north, from the local to the national, and from the European to the global. They explore different types of political orders and ideologies: from interwar liberalism to authoritarian and fascist conceptions of social justice; from Catholic understandings to state-socialist notions; and from the democratic regimes in Western Europe to the post-Socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. And, finally, they explore a range of actors, groups, and institutions, including the top level of national politics and international organisations as well as the bottom-up actions of activists and social movements. If a collective conclusion can be derived from these chapters, it is that the evolution of social justice in twentieth-century Europe was never linear or singular: social justice meant different things at different moments to different Europeans. The basic questions of why a particular regime of social justice came to predominate at a given moment, why it ended, and how it mutated into a new configuration of attitudes, language, and policies, however, carry within themselves implications that reach beyond the subject matter of this volume. Understanding the permutations of social justice is one of the ways in which we can make sense of the present we inhabit today. It therefore forms part of a wider quest amongst historians to write the history of the present.91 But it also demonstrates the constructiveness and contingency of conceptions of social justice, and the way in which such notions grew out of the intricate interplay between rulers and ruled. In doing so, it highlights – to borrow again E. P. Thompson’s phraseology – the extent to which ‘the authorities were, in some measure, the prisoners of the people’.92 Such an analysis of what one might describe as ‘social justice in context’ can give cause for a cautious degree of optimism. Whatever the predicaments and shortcomings of our contemporary

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See the stimulating essays in A. Doering-Manteuffel, L. Raphael, and T. Schlemmer (eds.), Vorgeschichte der Gegenwart: Dimensionen des Strukturbruchs nach dem Boom (Göttingen, 2016). Thompson, ‘Moral Economy of the English Crowd’, 79.

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attitudes towards social justice, its history demonstrates that such notions are never fixed, and are likely to change as a result of the interaction between political, social, and material forces. If anything, therefore, an analysis of these dynamics demonstrates the innate malleability of social justice, and might offer a useful starting point for reflecting on the possibilities as well as the limits of sociopolitical change in contemporary Europe.

2

Social Justice within a Market Society The Debate in Western Europe from the End of the Nineteenth Century Ido de Haan Introduction: How to Write a History of Social Justice?

There seem to be two ways in which one can write the history of social justice. On the one hand, the evolution of notions of social justice can be seen as a key element in any history of distributive justice. Following Aristotle, ‘everyone agrees that the just in distribution must be in accordance with some kind of merit . . . but not everyone means the same by merit’.1 A history of distributive justice then entails the reconstruction of the shifting understandings of merit, for instance, in terms of the values of equality, welfare, and opportunity, which are presented in Chapter 1 of this volume as crucial dimensions in a history of social justice. Other guiding ideas might be security, equity, liberty, solidarity, and subsidiarity.2 But, irrespective of the set of notions that are subsumed under the concept of social justice, the main focus of such a history is on the moral disposition of individuals and groups.3 On the other hand, the history of social justice can be reconstructed through a genealogy of ‘the social’ and by tracing changing conceptions of social order. Social justice then involves categories such as risk, inclusion, integration, redistribution, and recognition.4 As David Miller has argued, any understanding of social justice is based on the assumption that there is ‘a bounded 1

2

3

4

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1131a25–27; as quoted by R. Polasky, ‘Giving Justice Its Due’, in R. Polasky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge, 2014), p. 159. S. Lessenich (ed.), Wohlfahrtsstaatliche Grundbegriffe. Historische und aktuelle Diskurse (Frankfurt a.M., 2003). Similarly, Ben Jackson, analyzing the ‘rhetoric of redistribution’ in the United Kingdom, points at ‘a cluster of values judged to be more popular than the seemingly polarising goal of ‘economic equality’ . . .: opportunity, security and fairness’. B. Jackson, ‘The Rhetoric of Redistribution’, in J. Callaghan, N. Fishman, B. Jackson, and M. McIvor (eds.), In Search of Social Democracy (Manchester, 2009), p. 241. A clear example of this approach is E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, 50 (1971), 76–136; for a more recent example, see S. Mau, The Moral Economy of Welfare States: Britain and Germany Compared (London, 2003); S. K. Wegren, The Moral Economy Reconsidered: Russia’s Search for Agrarian Capitalism (New York, 2005); L. Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Finde-Siecle France (Berkeley, 2019). Lessenich (ed.), Wohlfahrtsstaatliche Grundbegriffe.

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society with a determinate membership’ – ‘a universe of distribution’ – with institutions that distribute benefits and burdens, the fairness of which can be evaluated and adjusted by way of deliberate action, that is, ‘legislative and policy changes that a well-intentioned state is supposed to introduce’.5 Social order and moral disposition are, of course, intertwined. As John Rawls argued from a philosophical perspective, in a fair society, ‘citizens act willingly so as to give one another justice over time. Stability is secured by sufficient motivation of the appropriate kind acquired under just institutions’.6 Yet institutional frameworks and individual moral dispositions are also historically connected through various forms of citizenship: varying sets of rights, obligations, and dispositions of the members of a community. In that sense, T. H. Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class (1950) is a seminal contribution to the history of social justice because of its central idea that notions of social justice imply historically variegated interpretations of social order. Conceptions of social justice therefore do not develop in isolation, but are bound to a broader social and material context. Reviewing a series of studies on the history of social justice, Ben Jackson has argued that social justice proper came into play only after it came to be seen ‘as a virtue that applies to a “society” and not simply to individual behaviour: social institutions that distribute material resources and social positions are open to assessment as just or unjust’.7 From a historical point of view, the shift from a moral to an institutional perspective, and from private charity to social right, was a protracted and faltering process. When, how, and why this happened is a matter of debate. According to Jackson, following an argument developed by Samuel Fleischacker, this shift initially occurred in the revolutionary era between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century, with the politicization of poverty and the emergence of ‘an ideology according to which the poor should have a legal right to improved economic conditions, not merely a right to survive alongside a moral claim on rich people’s charity’.8 But, as Stedman Jones has argued, the claim to one’s rightful share in the prosperity of one’s community collided not only with the vagaries of the labour market but also with the postrevolutionary suspicion that the call for social justice was in fact an attempt to abolish property rights. The ruling elites of the time maintained that for those who lacked property, the only legitimate source of wealth was labour, the insecurity of which made the claim to justice an illusion.9

5 6 7 8 9

D. Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2001), pp. 4–6. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), pp. 142–3. B. Jackson, ‘The Conceptual History of Social Justice’, Political Studies Review, 3 (2005), 360. S. Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2004), p. 81. G. Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty (London, 2004), p. 12.

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Ido de Haan

The point of departure for this chapter is that it was only at the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of the debate on the social question, that the distribution of wealth and the burdens of labour came to be seen as a matter of right and as an object of state intervention. Only then, two conditions were met that seem crucial for any notion of social justice to emerge. First, a history of social justice cannot be separated from the emergent understanding of ‘the social’ as a separate sphere of interaction. Second, social justice can only emerge on the basis of a denaturalized conception of the market. Only after the market came to be seen as neither an abstract universal entity nor as a spontaneous order did it become an object of creation, intervention, and adjustment, geared to the requirements of equality, welfare, and opportunity, or any of the other values that underlie a conception of social justice. How to Write a History of the Market? The main conclusion from the foregoing considerations has to be that a history of social justice needs to be written in the context of changing conceptions of a capitalist social order, which has the market at its centre, not as an entity with universal characteristics, but as a variable understanding of a viable social order. This, however, is not an easy task, not least from a methodological point of view: Where should one look for conceptions of the market? The otherwise useful overview Market Society by Don Slater and Frank Tonkiss remains limited to a reconstruction of intellectual ideas, predominantly forged by economists and sociologists. The same is the case for Thomas L. Haskell’s and Richard F. Teichengraeber III’s reconstruction of three conceptions of the market, on the basis of the work of Karl Polanyi, C. B. MacPherson, and Fernand Braudel.10 Yet, as Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann argue compellingly in their introduction to Markets in Historical Contexts, conceptions of the market are shaped not only by intellectual traditions but also by social practices. Beyond looking at the work of canonical thinkers, writing the history of the market requires ‘expanding our perspective beyond the canon to the ideas of groups who are all too easily neglected in the literature on markets, such as conservative elites or organized consumers’.11 Next to the methodological challenges, a historical reconstruction of the changing conceptualization of the market is complicated by well-established 10

11

D. Slater and F. Tonkiss, Market Society. Markets and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge, 2001); T. L. Haskell and R. F. Teichengraeber III, ‘Introduction: The Culture of the Market’, in T. L. Haskell and R. F. Teichengraeber III (eds.), The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 1–39. M. Bevir and F. Trentmann, ‘Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas, Practices and Governance’, in M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds.), Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World (Cambridge, 2004), p. 2.

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interpretations of the history of market economies. The rise of the market is one of the most cherished aspects of a self-congratulatory and often teleological history of modernity, the rise of the West, and the unavoidable victory of liberal capitalism. Even when the genre allows for setbacks and crises, such as in Michel Beaud’s Histoire du capitalisme, 1500–1980, the triumphalism is never far off in accounts of the ‘relentless revolution’ that created modern capitalism – a story about ‘how entrepreneurs, companies, and countries triumphed in three industrial revolutions’.12 Characteristic of such histories is the assumption of a universal definition of the market, which might vary in its state of completion, but never in its nature. This triumphalist story is conventionally written as a series of victories over the obstacles to the untrammelled functioning of the market, which is then able to work increasingly on its own terms, in a pure form of market exchange. This understanding of the evolution of the market also characterises the more pessimistic approach to the history of market economies, first articulated by Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi, who both argued that markets in a capitalist society replaced ‘the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”’.13 Even if such an approach is primarily quantitative – the market expands or contracts – the underlying concept of the market appears to be more multifaceted. It is based on the idea that a variety of goods can be regulated by market exchange, and that the capitalist expansion of the market comes about not only because of the increased geographical scope of market exchange – from the local to the global village – but also as the result of the marketization of an increasing variety of goods: land transforms from common property to tradable asset, capital becomes a monetized good exchanged on financial markets, while workers have nothing left to sell but their own physical labour.14 According to Polanyi, this resulted in a market society, in which ‘the substance of society itself’ became subjected to the logic of market exchange.15 Moreover, these pessimistic accounts emphasize the crisis-ridden nature of a market society. As the economic historian Bas van Bavel recently argued (building on the work of Marx), the emergence of factor markets in the 12

13 14

15

M. Beaud, Histoire du capitalisme, 1500–1980 (Paris, 1981); J. Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York, 2010); T. K. McCraw (ed.), Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions (Cambridge, MA, 1995). K. Marx and F. Engels, ‘Communist Manifesto’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1969 [1848]), pp. 98–137. See, for instance, J. Kocka, Geschichte des Kapitalismus (Munich, 2013). See also the forum debate ‘Wie schreibt man die Geschichte des Kapitalismus?’, Journal of Modern European History, 15 (2017), 457–88. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 2001 [1944]), p. 71.

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end results in the collapse of a market economy, due to the increased concentration of capital and concomitant social inequality.16 Yet the point remains that such a line of argument, whether triumphalist or pessimist, presupposes a universal definition of markets – such as ‘systems for exchanging and allocating resources by way of monetary transactions’17 – based on a series of abstractions, from the spatially defined marketplace, with merchants, customers, and material goods, to a set of rules of engagement between abstractly defined actors.18 Using a universal and abstract notion of the market implies writing the history of social justice as a genealogy of consecutive attempts ‘to redistribute resources to those disadvantaged by a market distribution’.19 Social justice is thus seen as the attempt to push back the expansion of the market and to replace market exchange by other forms of coordination. In this vein, Polanyi observed a double movement: ‘the market expanded continuously but this movement was met by a countermovement checking the expansion in definite directions [in] reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric of society, and which would have destroyed the very organization of production that the market had called into being’.20 This idea is pointedly formulated in the title of Gosta Esping-Andersen’s study of the origins of the welfare state: Politics against Markets. The gist of his argument is that a coalition of socialist workers with other groups – agrarian or middle-class – created the conditions for a welfare state that stimulated solidarity, immunized ‘workers from the disciplinary whip of the market’ by creating social rights that ensured the ‘decommodification’ of basic goods, and promoted social equality, as both a precondition and outcome of solidarity and social rights.21 In the end, such a perspective leads us to understand the history of social justice in the context of a market economy in antagonistic terms, in which a market order and an order defined by social justice follow different logics: they stand in a zero-sum relation to one another, but neither one is fundamentally affected by the interaction with its counterpart. A historically more sensitive approach to conceptions of the market would seem to be at the heart of attempts to identify ‘varieties of capitalism’. However, this is only partially the case. Most of the variation observed by 16 17

18 19 20 21

B. van Bavel, The Invisible Hand? How Market Economies Have Emerged and Declined since AD 500 (Oxford, 2016). Van Bavel, The Invisible Hand?, p. 3. For a discussion of similar conceptions developed by Douglas North, Harrisson White, and Viviana Zelizer, see M. Callon, L’emprise des marchés: Comprendre leur fonctionnement pour pouvoir les changer (Paris, 2017), pp. 42–3. M. Callon, L’emprise des marchés, pp. 27–38. Jackson, ‘The Conceptual History of Social Justice’, 358. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 136. G. Esping-Andersen, Politics against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power (Princeton, NJ, 1985).

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scholars who follow this line of argument remains quantitative and contextual. Markets develop along different paths due to the broader institutional framework (as argued by Peter Hall and David Soskice, Douglas North, Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson, and Paul Johnson) or because of the ways in which they are culturally embedded (as articulated in the work of Joyce Appleby, Deirdre McClosky, and Liah Greenfeld),22 but the nature of the market itself is unaffected by the conditions under which it blossoms – or fails to. A similar understanding seems to underlie Esping-Andersen’s adjusted interpretation of the development of the welfare state in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. In this view, the logics of social justice and the market are no longer fundamentally opposed; instead, the welfare state is functional in alleviating the crisis tendencies of a capitalist market order. As such, ‘decommodification’ and a redistribution of goods compensates for the more radical and unstable social stratification that a marketized form of exchange brings about.23 Such notions of the market are ultimately ahistorical, for they neglect the ways in which conceptions of markets and social attitudes towards them were subject to change. As Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann have suggested, it might be possible to advance ‘the debate about the embeddedness of markets by shifting the attention beyond questions of institutional preconditions and trust to those of ideas, languages, and alternative visions found within them’.24 Such an expanded understanding of markets might make it possible to distinguish between a variety of ways in which markets have been conceptualised across time and space. An important example of such an exercise in conceptual history is Albert O. Hirschman’s Rival Views of Market Society. Hirschman discusses four conceptions of the market, organised along two dimensions: the extent to which the market comes to dominate pre-capitalist, feudal forms of interaction, and the extent to which these anterior orders reinforce or undermine the market.25 In this perspective, markets are never just modes of 22

23 24 25

P. A. Hall and D. Soskice (eds.), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford, 2001); D. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1990); D. Acemoğlu and J. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York, 2012); P. Johnson, Making the Market, Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Cambridge, 2010); Appleby, The Relentless Revolution; D. McClosky, Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago, 2006); L. Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism, Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA, 2001). See also J. R. Hollingsworth and R. Boyer (eds.), Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions (Cambridge, 1997). G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ, 1990). Bevir and Trentmann, ‘Markets in Historical Contexts’, p. 2. A. O. Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 105–41. This was originally published as ‘Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?’, Journal of Economic Literature, 20 (1982), 1463–84. These remarks require further analysis and discussion, yet they are inspired by a pluralist

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interaction regulated by a price mechanism between rationally self-interested social actors, but hybrid and varying constellations of institutional legacies and moral attitudes. Historical conceptions of the market thus involve shifting assumptions about the contexts in which markets function. Such an interactive and contextualized understanding of the market helps us to understand what Michel Callon calls the ‘cadrages’ (framings) that markets presuppose: shifting notions about the anthropological, moral, social, and political implications of a market order.26 The implications of such an account of the market for a history of social justice are profound. The emphasis on the social constructedness of markets suggests that our understanding of the market is informed by ideas of social justice, turning markets into what Marion Fourcade has identified ‘as intensely moralized, and moralizing, entities’ whose history reflects ‘trends in the public justification of the contemporary economic order’.27 Yet in reverse, such anthropologically, socially, and morally saturated market orders also have performative qualities: they shape our understanding of social justice, just as conceptions of social justice shape our view of the market.28 Seen from this dialectical perspective, conceptions of social justice, including the individual dispositions and social institutions that come with them, are historically never external to understandings of the market, but intricately interwoven with them. They entail shared and entangled understandings of actors and the basis of their mutual recognition, the mechanism of social interaction and the goods that mediate them, and the institutions and their regulation that sustain both markets and social justice. A history of social justice in the context of a capitalist market society needs to address actors, social mechanisms, and institutions as they are conceptualized not just by intellectuals and theorists but by the people who contribute to and participate in the formation of market orders. These considerations provide the context for the second part of this chapter, where I present an outline of a history of social justice in interaction with

26

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understanding of justice developed by M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York, 1983), and by L. Boltanski and L. Thévenot, De la justification: Les économies de la grandeur (Paris, 1991). Another example of a more nuanced view of variation along the dimensions of individual or collective responsibility for distribution, and control by the state, users, or producers, resulting in six ideal types of markets, is proposed by J. R. Gingrich, Making Markets in the Welfare State: The Politics of Varying Market Reforms (Cambridge, 2011). Callon, L’emprise des marchés, pp. 55–9; see also M. Callon, ‘Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics’, The Sociological Review, 46 (1998), Special Issue 1: The Laws of the Markets, 1–57. M. Fourcade and K. Healy, ‘Moral Views of Market Society’, Annual Review of Sociology, 33 (2007), 286. M. Fourcade, ‘Theories of Markets and Theories of Society’, American Behavioral Scientist, 50 (2007), 1015–34.

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changing conceptions of the market in Europe between 1870 and the end of the twentieth century. More than one caveat is opportune here. Despite the plea, implied in the arguments presented above, to embed such a history within the context of a nuanced understanding of a capitalist market society, relying not only on intellectual ideas but also on concrete practices, the following pages will remain overly abstract and general. It is a provisional sketch more than the actual thing. And although the title of this chapter makes a claim about Western Europe, the present outline focuses mainly on the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, with some reference to Germany. This selection covers the three worlds of welfare capitalism that Esping-Andersen identified, but it probably misses out on some of the characteristics of Southern Europe, where not only familial ties but also house ownership and the structure of the labour market lead to different conjunctions of social justice and the market.29 I will make a distinction between three periods: the debate on empowerment and political agency in the context of the social question between 1870 and 1930, the creation of nation-wide social security schemes based on the idea of productive contribution between 1930 and 1970, and the turn towards social investments and residualism in response to the crisis of the welfare state after 1970. It must be kept in mind, however, that the principles of solidarity and productivity, social security and insurance, and investment and residualism are at play in each of these three periods: it is the shifting balance between these elements, rather than any abrupt breaks or paradigmatic shifts from one element to another that marks the transition between different regimes of social justice. Empowerment in the Age of the Social Question As argued above, the history of social justice started only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the market lost its natural status, and the social came to be seen as a separate sphere of interaction. This denaturalization of the market involved a departure from the creed of economic harmony propagated above all by Frédéric Bastiat, who argued that ‘société est échange’ (society is exchange) and that the immutable laws that govern human society were in perfect harmony due to the fact the ‘tous les principes, tous les mobiles, tous les ressorts, tous les intérêts concourent vers un grand résultat final . . .: l’égalisation des individus dans l’amélioration générale’ (all principles, all motives, all impulses, all interests converge towards a great final result . . .: the equalization of individuals in the context of a general improvement).30 29 30

M. Petmesidou, ‘Southern Europe’, in B. Greve (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Welfare State (London, 2013), pp. 183–92. F. Bastiat, Harmonies économiques: Oeuvres complètes VI (Paris, 1864 [1850], p. 141.

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Within this framework that presupposed a harmony of interests, equal opportunity, and growing wealth for all, poverty was primarily an issue of poor relief directed at the deserving poor, who were too young, too old, or physically incapable to provide for their own livelihood. The main marker of distinction was private property, which not only distinguished the diligent and frugal from the idle and spendthrift worker, but also the politically responsible citizens from the immature rabble.31 Such assumptions about the harmony of interests that would presumably come into being once economic exchange was simply given free rein came to be questioned in the fin de siècle. A summary of that critique was eloquently formulated by John Maynard Keynes, who in 1926 summarized fifty years of critique on the credo of laissez-faire: ‘The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide.’32 When Keynes formulated these rebuttals, the faith in Bastiat’s harmony of interests had long dissipated. The analysis as to why a market society resulted in conflicting interests and loss of wealth remained, however, highly contested, as it depended on different interpretations of the ‘social question’. The term denoted much more than the need for a larger scope of state intervention, from the constitution of political power to the organization of social life, from civil and political rights to social rights, and from the charity of the few to the solidarity between the many. This image of expanding justice, classically described by T. H. Marshall, was closely connected to the emergence of the new social formation of the labour movement, motivated by ‘a growing awareness’ of the objective injustices of a capitalist economy.33 Yet a much deeper dynamic was at play, one that is ill-captured by what one might describe as the social-democratic account of social justice that focuses on the incremental expansion of social rights and protections. Rather, the emergence of the social question indicated above all a transformed understanding of the social order: the emergence of ‘the social’ as a domain of interaction between

31 32

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G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York, 1984). J. M. Keynes, ‘The End of Laissez-Faire’, in E. Johnson and D. Moggridge (eds.), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 9: Essays in Persuasion (Cambridge, 1978 [1926]), pp. 287–8. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950). The ‘growing awareness’ is the title of the Dutch survey on the social question: A. C. J. de Vrankrijker, Een groeiende gedachte: De ontwikkeling der meningen over de sociale kwestie in de 19e eeuw in Nederland (Assen, 1959). See more recently S. Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2006).

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the individual and the state, and also as an arena that extended beyond their direct interaction.34 Some defined it primarily in economic terms. For instance, the German constitutional lawyer, economist, and sociologist Lorenz von Stein, argued that ‘daß, da die gegenwärtige Gestalt der Gesellschaft wesentlich durch die wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse bedingt sei, die gesellschaftliche Ordnung überhaupt nichts anderes sein könne, als gleichsam der Ausdruck der wirtschaftlichen . . . Ordnung der Menschen untereinander’ (because the present shape of society is conditioned in a substantial manner by economic circumstances, the social order cannot be anything but the expression of the economic . . . ordering of humans among themselves).35 In this context, the social question became a ‘soziale Krankheit’ (social malaise), which the Swiss ‘red minister’ Paul Bernhard Pflüger diagnosed as increased economic dependency and insecurity; unemployment, especially among the youth; rising housing costs in the urban areas; growing indebtedness of the farmers; the growing number of people, notably women, without a spouse; and ‘der schnell zunehmende Reichtum einer Minderheit neben großer Armut der Massen’ (the rapidly growing wealth of a minority alongside the great poverty of the masses).36 For others, the social question was primarily an issue of political rights. For instance, the first edition of the weekly newspaper Justice: The Organ of the Social Democracy, published in London on 19 January 1884, formulated ‘adult suffrage’ as its first demand, and placed its only socioeconomic demand, the ‘nationalisation of the land,’ as the ninth item on a list of twelve. Similarly, the first issue of the Dutch progressive journal Recht voor Allen (Justice for All) formulated as its primary demand ‘the self-government of the people, not just in name, apparently, or legally on paper, but ACTUALLY’, even if it was directly acknowledged that ‘political reform should go hand in hand with social [reform]’.37

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J. Donzelot, L’invention du social: Essai sur le déclin des passions politiques (Paris, 1994 [1984]) ; R. Castel, Les métamorphoses de la question sociale: Une chronique du salariat (Paris, 1995). See also C. May, ‘Poverty in Transnational Discourses: Social Reformers’ Debates in Germany and the Netherlands around 1900’, in B. Althammer, A. Gestrich, and J. Gründler (eds.), The Welfare State and the ‘Deviant Poor’ in Europe, 1870–1933 (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 21–41. L. von Stein, ‘Der Socialismus in Deutschland’, in L. von Stein, Schriften zum Sozialismus (Darmstadt, 1974 [1852]), p. 145, as quoted by C. Quesel, Soziologie und Soziale Frage (Wiesbaden, 1989), pp. 45–6. P. B. Pflüger, Einführung in die soziale Frage (Zurich, 1910). Justice: The Organ of the Social Democracy, 1.1, London, 19 Jan. 1884, 1; Recht voor Allen, 1.1, Amsterdam, 1 Mar. 1879, 1. It argued for ‘zelfregeering des volks, niet in naam of in schijn of op papier in de wet slechts, maar in de DAAD’, but ‘Politieke hervorming moet hand aan hand gaan met de sociale’.

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A third understanding of the social question was ethical. As the ‘Democrats’ song’ (‘Demokratenlied’), published in the 31 December 1881 issue of Recht voor Allen demonstrated, this increasingly radical journal of the SociaalDemokratische Bond (Social-Democratic Union) used the term ‘social’ first of all ‘because we love all / We call ourselves SOCIAL / . . . / Brave are we democrats / Raise the Social Flag! / Fear? not for Aristocrats / The eyes on the gates of heaven’.38 The ethical, if not religious dimension was also addressed in a widely read pamphlet of the German philosopher Theobald Ziegler, who apologized for lacking the specialist knowledge of the ‘Nationaloekonomen’ to analyse the social question from the perspective of ‘die heutigen Wirtschaftsverhältnisse mit ihrem Kapitalismus und ihrer Großindustrie, ihrer Maschinenarbeit und Arbeitsteilung’ (today’s economic conditions, including capitalism and big industry, machine work and the division of labour). But as a ‘moralist’ for whom ethics in ‘unserer Zeit des Realismus’ had to become a ‘Sozialethik’, he emphasized that the social question was primarily an ethical, and even a religious issue, which included a stance on the role of the church, the position of women, overpopulation, and a discussion on poverty and wealth in terms of luxury and happiness.39 In this way, social justice also became a prominent concern of those Christian figures – Catholic and Protestant – who sought to provide a moral and ethical solution to the ills of modern society. As discussed in Chapter 3 in this volume, these concerns were voiced in the encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891, in which Pope Leo XIII attributed ‘the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class’ primarily to the abolition of the guilds, after which ‘no other protective organization took their place’, and ‘working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition’. Yet contrary to reviled socialists, the pope saw private property, notably landownership, as the foundation of justice, and for those who lacked such assets, Christian faith should guarantee that the ‘following duties bind the wealthy owner and the employer: not to look upon their work people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character’, as well as to understand that ‘working for gain is creditable, not shameful, to a man, since it enables him to earn an honorable livelihood; but to

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Recht voor Allen, 3.44, The Hague, 31 Dec. 1881, 1: ‘En omdat we allen minnen / Noemen wij ons SOCIAAL, . . . Moedig zijn wij demokraten; / De Sociale Vlag omhoog! / Vrees? voor geen Aristokraten/De oogen naar den hemelboog.’ T. Ziegler, Die soziale Frage eine sittliche Frage, 5th ed. (Stuttgart, 1895 [1891]), pp. 5–6. A similarly strong religious impetus is clear from U. Sinclair (ed.), The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest (New York, 1915).

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misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers – that is truly shameful and inhuman’.40 The moral, if not moralistic, tone was by no means an exception. Even the economist Keynes defined the economic issues of his time primarily in moral terms: ‘the greatest economic evils of our time are the fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance. It is because particular individuals, fortunate in situation or in abilities, are able to take advantage of uncertainty and ignorance, and also because for the same reason big business is often a lottery, that great inequalities of wealth come about; and these same factors are also the cause of the unemployment of labour, or the disappointment of reasonable business expectations, and of the impairment of efficiency and production’.41 These ‘social’ considerations had an important impact on the understanding of the market. The emphasis on exploitation and the lack of autonomous agency undermined one of the core claims of the liberal interpretation of the market, namely, that of the existence of the fully informed rational actor.42 But in a wider sense, the moral and political dimension of the social question indicated that the problem of the market was no longer that it created poverty and dependency as such, but the way it affected the conditions of life of those who in principle were able to generate earnings from their own labour. Instead of a debate on those who often lacked independent earning capacity (such as women, children, the elderly), the focus shifted to the empowerment of adult and able-bodied men. While in most countries, the traditional institutions of poor relief remained intact – in the Netherlands without any fundamental reform until 1965 – the primary efforts of social reformers became focused on political rights, the distribution of wealth and income, and on the organisation of the labour market. The first area of social reform was focused on political rights. From a progressive liberal point of view, the struggle for general suffrage could be seen as a completion of the political emancipation set in motion with the French Revolution. For the reformist wing of the socialist parties, however, political rights were the means to electoral and parliamentary power, and thereby as the precondition for the achievement of a more equitable society. In addition, they also represented the actualization of social justice itself, in the sense that the achievement of ‘social democracy’ elevated the autonomous judgment and political maturity of the working classes, denied to them as members of a liberal market society.43 40 41 42 43

Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labor (Rome, 1891). Keynes, ‘The End of Laissez-Faire’, p. 291. W. B. Greer, Ethics and Uncertainty: The Economics of John M. Keynes and Frank H. Knight (Cheltenham, 2000). G. Eley, Forging Democracy. The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 18–22.

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Second, social justice came to be formulated in terms of a fair distribution of resources, notably through the levying of income tax.44 This was introduced in various European countries around the turn of the century, against opposition of conservatives and classical liberals who saw it as form of Communist redistribution and objected both to the breach of property rights as well as to the public records of income that such a type of taxation required.45 But, as became clear from the debate in the Netherlands, where an income tax was introduced in 1894, its supporters defended it as a fair distribution of the tax burden, and not as a redistribution of income. As was argued by Nicolaas Pierson, who as Minister of Finance introduced the legislation for an income tax, the aim of an income tax was not to enforce a redistribution of income – in that sense, the price mechanism remained intact – but to honour the principle of equity, which required ‘equal proportionality between sacrifice and enjoyment’. An income tax therefore should take into account the diminishing marginal utility of income: ‘The first income components are absolutely indispensable, the second a little less, the third give comfort, the fourth opulence, the fifth are set aside out of necessary precaution, the sixth, because people have no idea what else to do with it.’46 In other words, it was not the levelling morality of social justice, but in the end the moral psychology of individual actors on the market that dictated what an equitable distribution required.47 A third set of reforms that aimed to bring about social justice were concerned with insurance against disability due to work accidents, sickness, unemployment, and old age. This is generally framed in terms of a wellknown narrative, starting with Bismarck’s authoritarian social legislation, followed by British liberal welfare reforms, France’s delayed solidarist policies, and the American New Deal, culminating in the so-called social democratic moment of the post-war Keynesian welfare state. Yet beyond this familiar template of welfare-state history, it is important to note that this involved a transformed understanding of the value and even the nature of property, and a shift in the material basis of self-respect from material property to legal entitlements. As Abram de Swaan has indicated, the rise of insurance 44 45 46

47

On the question of taxation, see Chapter 4 in this volume. P. Rosanvallon, La société des égaux (Paris, 2011), pp. 227–34. N. G. Pierson, ‘De progressieve inkomensbelasting’, De Economist, 37 (1888), 748, 750 (‘gelijke evenredigheid bij allen tusschen offer en genot’ . . . ‘De eerste inkomensdeelen zijn volstrekt onmisbaar, de tweede iets minder, de derde geven comfort, de vierde weelde, de vijfde worden opgelegd uit noodzakelijke voorzorg, de zesde, omdat men niet weet wat er anders mede aan te vangen’). For a history of the income tax in the Netherlands, see C. Smit, Omwille der billijkheid. De strijd over de invoering van de inkomstenbelasting in Nederland (Amsterdam, 2002). I. Moscati, Measuring Utility: From the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economics (Oxford, 2018).

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schemes involved a transition from privately accumulated wealth as the foundation of personal security, ostensibly in terms of immovable property like land and housing, to transferable, legally binding claims to financial support and in-kind services, to be provided to people who contributed to these schemes of mutual support by way of productive work, taxes, and premiums.48 A telling example of this less grounded, more abstract understanding of economic agency is the widespread preoccupation with labour exchanges, defined as ‘measures of organisation, not of relief . . . to organize simultaneously “the mobilities and stabilities of labour” – both to facilitate the search for work (the task of labour exchanges) and at the same time to prevent the economic breakdown of homes and families while this search was in progress (the task of national insurance)’.49 In other words, the main goal of this particular conception of social justice was not to circumvent or restrict the market for labour but to improve its functioning by facilitating the mobility of labour and establishing a security of income. Productive Contribution in the Age of the Welfare State It is this element of efficiency that became one of the dominant concerns in the second period of market-related conceptualizations of social justice that started in the 1920s. There were a wide range of factors that played a role here. An important aspect is that European states tended after 1918 towards implementing policies of economic autarky and saw the economic relations within Europe as a zero-sum game, rather than as an expression of the harmony of interests implied in the free-trade ideology that had been dominant in the previous century. This also meant that the political and military strength of states came to be defined in terms of national productivity. At the same time, as Charles Maier has argued, the post-war reconstruction of bourgeois Europe restored a modified market economy in which the labour movement became integrated within a corporatist bargaining system. This was complemented by a process in which the state continuously assumed a growing role, not just in social legislation and insurance but also in investments and innovation, eroding the distinction between public and private property. Moreover, in this context there was an increasingly prominent role for technical and managerial expertise. In combination with the shift from a critical and oppositional role of socialists and Communists towards a more collaborative search for viable 48 49

A. de Swaan, In Care of the State: Health Care, Education, and Welfare in Europe and the USA in the Modern Era (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 152–60. J. Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 171–2. The quote is from Churchill. For similar discussion about labour exchanges in the Netherlands, see P. de Rooy, Werklozenzorg en werkloosheidsbestrijding 1917–1940: Landelijk en Amsterdams beleid (Amsterdam, 1978).

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forms of economic planning, European states began to invest both financially and ideologically in the productivity of their national economy. This dynamic was well demonstrated by the search for reliable measures of growth, resulting in the introduction of the gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of national strength. After 1945, notably in the context of ideological justifications of the Marshall Plan, the American level of GDP also became the yardstick to be reached, both in terms of productivity as well as increasingly in terms of the rising level of consumption.50 In this context, the primary concern in terms of social justice therefore became the interaction between the productivity of labour and the growing spending capacities of individual workers, as expressed through their level of consumption. In a way this demonstrated the continuing impact of a poor-law logic: those in power believed that providing aid without a clear obligation to work would stimulate idleness and rent-seeking. This notion was, for instance, an important element in the Beveridge report, the foundational document of the British welfare state. It allowed ‘giving direct assistance to individuals in need, after examination of their means. However comprehensive an insurance scheme, some, through physical infirmity, can never contribute at all and some will fall through the meshes of any insurance.’51 Similar considerations were also the guiding thread in plans for social security formulated in the Netherlands by a committee established in 1943. Inspired by the Beveridge report, its chair, A. A. van Rhijn, argued that the goal of a new system of social security was ‘to organize society in such a way, that all members of society are able to find decent work, so that productivity can be raised and consumption, notably of the less fortunate, also can follow this very strong increase’.52 In other words, an important aim of the socialjustice provision developed during this phase was to encourage and support market exchange by promoting both the cost-efficiency of labour and the spending power of individual consumers. A second concern was to limit the extent of state intervention as the means to achieve those aims. As the Beveridge report observed, social security had to be achieved through a system of social insurance instead of state allowances, ‘since benefit in return for contributions, rather than free allowances from the State, is what the people of Britain desire . . . This objection springs not so 50

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C. S. Maier, Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (Cambridge, 2014); C. S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, NJ, 2015); P. Lepenies, The Power of a Single Number: A Political History of GDP (New York, 2016). W. Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services: Report by Sir William Beveridge (London, 1942), p. 12. Sociale zekerheid. Rapport van de Commissie, ingesteld bij Beschikking van den Minister van Sociale Zaken van 26 Maart 1943 (The Hague, [1945–6]), vol. 1, p. 17.

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much from a desire to get everything for nothing, as from resentment at a provision which appears to penalise what people have come to regard as the duty and pleasure of thrift, of putting pennies away for a rainy day. Management of one’s income is an essential element of a citizen’s freedom.’53 In the Dutch report, this was an even more important issue, leading to a conflict-ridden debate that resulted in an adjustment of the original report, whereby the proposal of a central administration was replaced by a ‘communal’ administration bureau of unions and employers, without any direct state control. This became the foundation for the Dutch system of social security.54 The limitation to the role of the state was the long-term legacy of what in the British context was called the ‘Orthodox Treasury view . . . that, whatever might be the political and social advantages, very little additional employment and no permanent employment can in fact be created by State borrowing and State expenditures’.55 Yet many of the objections to increased state intervention as a means to implementing social justice were reinforced by an aversion to large-scale administrative bureaucracies. In the Netherlands, the neoCalvinist idea of sovereignty within one’s own sphere of life and the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity inspired an aversion against both the liberal and the social state; in France a statist tradition was accompanied by a syndicalist social policy; in Germany the very limited impact of revolutionary, Napoleonic, and liberal forces created room for the continuation of guild-like structures.56 Similar considerations were voiced by Keynes, who argued that ‘the ideal size for the unit of control and organisation lies somewhere between the individual and the modern State. I suggest, therefore, that progress lies in the growth and the recognition of semi-autonomous bodies within the State . . . I propose a return, it may be said, towards medieval conceptions of separate autonomies.’57 Keynes’s recapitulation of the ‘feudal blessings’ thesis reverberated with a widely shared tendency within European social and economic thought, shared by guild socialist, corporatist, solidarist as well as neoliberal thinkers, that, in order for markets to function, they had to be embedded in a small-scale social order. Such order, or ‘Ordo’, as the main inspirator for German neoliberals, 53 54

55 56

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Beveridge, Social Insurance, pp. 11–12. B. Mellink, ‘Politici zonder partij: Sociale zekerheid en de geboorte van het neoliberalisme in Nederland (1945–1958)’, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, 132 (2017), 25–52; D. O. Nijhuis, ‘The Puzzle of Dutch Welfare Solidarity and the Politics of Old Age Pension Reform (1945–1975)’, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, 136 (2021), 58–80. Winston Churchill in the House of Commons in 1928, quoted in G. C. Peden, Keynes and His Critics: Treasury Responses to the Keynesian Revolution, 1925–1946 (Oxford, 2004), p. 57. De Swaan, In Care of the State, ch. 6; C. Crouch, Industrial Relations and European State Traditions (Oxford, 1994); L. Hancher and M. Moran (eds.), Capitalism, Culture, and Economic Regulation. Government-Industry Relations (Oxford, 1989). Keynes, ‘The End of Laissez-Faire’, p. 288.

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Walter Eucken, called it, ‘accords with the essence of humans: this means an order in which proportion (measure) and balance exist’.58 As one of Eucken’s main followers, Wilhelm Röpke, argued, from an ordoliberal point of view, one had to reject not only the collectivist state but also the dominant tendency of capitalist economies towards ‘Monopol- und Kolossalkapitalismus’. In order to break the power of economic monopolies in favour of small businesses, Röpke therefore proposed a ‘positive[n] Wirtschaftpolitik’ (positive economic policy), based on a ‘starken wie unparteiischen Staat’ (strong and impartial state), aiming to support ‘die Kleinen und Selbständigen . . ., die Bauern, die Handwerker, die Gewerbetreibenden, die Kleinhändler, die freien Berufe’ (the small and self-employed, the farmers, craftspeople, the petty merchants, the liberal professions) and to stimulate the growth of ‘diese Rettungsinseln der Menschen’ (these life rafts of people).59 Seen from this perspective, the differences between social democracy and neoliberalism were a matter of degree, and not of principle.60 Despite their differences, they shared the assumption that economic policy should be aimed at guaranteeing a proper competitive functioning of the market, allowing workers to make a vital contribution to the production of material wealth. This was to be supported by social services and a legal framework that included social rights establishing the rules that would constrain economic activity within the ethical confines provided by notions of basic forms of decency. In the end, such conceptions of social justice were implemented within the context of a measured market economy, a ‘soziale Marktwirtschaft’, as it developed after 1945 in much of Western Europe.61 58

59 60

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W. Eucken, Grundsätze der Wirtschaftspolitik (Tübingen, 1990 [1952]), p. 372, quoted in R. Ptak, ‘Neoliberalism in Germany: Revisiting Ordoliberal Foundations of the Social Market Economy’, in P. Mirowski and D. Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA, 2015), p. 105. W. Röpke, Mass und Mitte (Erlenbach, 1950), p. 194. The relation between Keynes and Hayek, and by implication the divide between Keynesianism and neoliberalism, is a topic of extensive debate. For the account emphasizing the principled difference between the two, see N. Wapshott, Keynes vs. Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics (New York, 2011); K. R. Hoover, Economics as Ideology: Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics (Lanham, MD, 2003). More nuanced accounts can be found in J. Shearmur, ‘Hayek, Keynes and the State’, History of Economics Review, 26 (1997), 68–82; B. Jackson, ‘At the Origins of Neo-Liberalism: The Free Economy and the Strong State, 1930–1947’, The Historical Journal, 53 (2010), pp. 129–51; A. Farrant and E. McPhail, ‘A Substitute End for Socialism? F. A. Hayek and Keynesian FullEmployment Policy’, The Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 1115–23; B. Jackson, ‘Hayek, Keynes, and the Origins of Neo-Liberalism: A Reply to Farrant and McPhail’, The Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 779–83; B. Jackson, ‘Freedom, the Common Good, and the Rule of Law: Lippmann and Hayek on Economic Planning’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 73 (2012), 47–68. A. J. Nicholls, Freedom with Responsibility: The Social Market Economy in Germany 1918–1963 (Oxford, 1994); J. C. Van Hook, Rebuilding Germany: The Creation of the Social Market Economy, 1945–1957 (Cambridge, 2004); C. L. Glossner, The Making of the

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Entrepreneurial Investment in the Age of Neoliberalism A third episode in the entanglement of conceptions of social justice and the market was inaugurated by the debate on the crisis of the welfare state at the end of the ‘trente glorieuses’ in the first half of the 1970s. In many of the contemporary accounts of this period, financial causes play a dominant role in explaining the shift in public discourse, such as most notably the combination of stagnating growth, inflation, and high unemployment that, in this view, depleted the resources of the state to pay for the rising costs of social security. Yet as Colin Hay has argued, a deliberate discourse of crisis was required to create the awareness that such objective contradictions must be addressed.62 It was only after ‘the new right’s account of a crisis of an overextended, overloaded and ungovernable state “held to ransom” by the trade unions’63 found public resonance that a fundamental reform of the welfare state came to be seen as justified, resulting in a fundamental change in attitudes towards social justice within a market society. The emergence of this crisis discourse was in part a response to the reformulation of social justice in terms of universal and human rights that had gradually taken place across the post-war period. As Samuel Moyn has argued, this process originated with the Atlantic Charter of 1941, which included amongst its provisions ‘the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security’.64 This reflected Franklin Roosevelt’s earlier insistence on the freedom from want as one of the four freedoms on which a future world order ought to be built. The idea that social justice had a universal appeal was confirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, according to which everyone possesses a set of social rights, such as the right to work (as well as leisure), the free choice of employment, just and favourable conditions of work, equal pay for equal work, as well as protection against unemployment, but also ‘the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity’.65 These social rights came to the fore of public discourse in subsequent decades. The right to ‘an

62

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German Post-War Economy: Political Communication and Public Reception of the Social Market Economy after World War II (London, 2010). C. Hay, ‘The “Crisis” of Keynesianism and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Britain: An Ideational Institutionalist Approach’, in J. L. Campbell and O. K. Pedersen (eds.), The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis (Princeton, NJ, 2001), p. 203. Hay, ‘The “Crisis” of Keynesianism’, p. 209. Atlantic Charter, 14 Aug. 1941, available at avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 22–24.

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existence worthy of human dignity’ informed, for instance, the Dutch General Law for Public Assistance (Algemene Bijstandswet), which in 1965 replaced the old Poor Laws. The law was presented as an alternative to social insurance, as it expressed the duty of the state to provide basic support regardless of social status and was presented as a result of the growing understanding that ‘social right provides support for human beings on no other ground than that he is human, and as such has a right to a dignified existence’.66 Such a conceptualization of social rights implied a proliferation of claims to social rights that were difficult to contain, as they became anchored in a nonterritorial notion of basic needs that guaranteed their universal validity as a human right.67 But the expansion of rights was also implied in the notion of human dignity, which left the definition of a dignified existence to individual decisions as to what constituted acceptable standards of recognition of an individual. As such, the expansionist tendency of social rights was not seen as problematic, but rather appeared to confirm the basic tenet that social rights were a universal principle that each state had to observe. At the same time, the idea of human dignity implied that the idea of social justice had to be reformulated, and extended, in relation to a new set of criteria on which distribution was to be based.68 The narrative of crisis, however, was not so much a response to the expansionist logic of human rights as such, but rather the result of a reformulation of these rights in economic terms. As Samuel Moyn has argued, ‘the difference principle that Rawls championed may never have come closer to fulfilment . . . than the day his book [A Theory of Justice, 1971] was published’, yet ‘[i]ronically, he let loose the owl of Minerva’ at the moment his account of social justice was about to be replaced by a neoliberal approach.69 The irony was even more pronounced, since the restoration of the homo economicus that neoliberals presented as a solution to the crisis of the welfare state was actually the crucial step towards its abandonment. It was only after the expansion of social rights had been reinterpreted within a broader discourse about the market that these social rights came to be seen as costly preferences that were inadequately priced. This economization of social rights resulted in a discourse

66

67 68 69

‘Memorie van Toelichting: Nieuwe regelen betreffende de verlening van bijstand door de overheid (Algemene Bijstandwet)’, Handelingen Staten Generaal 1961–1962, 6796, nr. 3, 10 (‘Deze conclusie sluit aan op de ontwikkeling van de opvattingen betreffende het sociale recht, dat naar zijn tendens opkomt voor de mens op geen andere grond dan deze, dat hij mens is en als zodanig recht heeft op een menswaardig bestaan’). S. Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA, 2018), ch. 5. Contra N. Fraser, ‘From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a “PostSocialist” Age’, New Left Review, 212 (1995), 68–93. Moyn, Not Enough, p. 39.

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that attacked those who were presumably draining the state of its material assets. In the United Kingdom the main blame was directed against the trade unions and the civil servants who were, in the view of their neoliberal critics, intent on protecting a Keynesian nanny state to defend their own positions. In Germany and the Netherlands, by contrast, the primary culprits were the new ‘intellectuals’, the social-justice professionals, trained in the social sciences and experts in social work and mental care. As the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky argued, they formed a new priesthood that served its class interests by presenting themselves as guardians of universal social values. In the Netherlands, the philosopher Hans Achterhuis suggested that they operated on a ‘market of well-being and happiness’, in which they created their own demand by exacerbating the dependency of the clients they claimed to help in regaining an autonomous existence.70 This analysis of a state captured by special interests of experts in social justice found a more general expression in the report of the Trilateral Commission on the Crisis of Democracy, which argued that the expansion of social rights had triggered rising expectations, leading to an overload of the state, which as a result became an ungovernable leviathan as well as an incontrollable financial burden on its citizens.71 The narrative of the crisis of the welfare state posited the vested interests of dependent citizens, social-justice professionals, and trade unions as the problem and presented the market as the solution to the problems created by the expansion of social rights. In part, this was presented as a drive to ‘roll back the state’, following the neoliberal creed to compartmentalize state and market more thoroughly, and to prevent principles of social justice from being applied to the allocation of benefits. As Hayek argued in 1976, such misapplication would create the illusion that there was ‘a personal distributing agent whose will or choice determines the relative position of the different persons or groups’.72 The most significant impact of this narrative was, however, the generalization of the market as a set of principles that not only defined a separate sphere of human activity, but could be applied – ‘rolled out’ – to all forms of social interaction, including the ways in which the state provided for social justice. The implications of such a perspective were spelled out by the British prime minister Tony Blair and the German chancellor Gerhard

70 71 72

H. Schelsky, Die Arbeit tun die anderen: Klassenkampf und Priesterherrschaft der Intellektuellen (Opladen, 1975); H. Achterhuis, De markt van welzijn en geluk (Baarn, 1979). M. Crozier, S. P. Huntington, and J. Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York, 1975). F. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (New York, 1982 [1976]), p. 236.

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Schröder in their Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte (1999). In this manifesto, the social-democratic leaders pleaded for a public sector tailored to ‘the concepts of efficiency, competition and high performance’ in order to ‘promote a go-ahead mentality and a new entrepreneurial spirit at all levels of society’. That required ‘a competent and well-trained workforce eager and ready to take on new responsibilities’, ‘a social security system that opens up new opportunities and encourages initiative, creativity and readiness to take on new challenges’, and ‘a positive climate for entrepreneurial independence and initiative’. The position of these selfproclaimed ‘modern social democrats’ regarding social justice was therefore ‘to transform the safety net of entitlements into a springboard to personal responsibility: . . . the imperatives of social justice are more than the distribution of cash transfers. Our objective is the widening of equality of opportunity.’ These opportunities also entailed seeing ‘periods of unemployment in an economy without jobs for life’ as ‘an opportunity to attain qualifications and foster personal development’.73 Despite the lip-service that Blair and Schröder paid to solidarity and equality, social justice formulated in these terms was primarily an investment in personal development as a precondition to earning capacity and market efficiency. While in previous notions of social justice – as empowerment or as productivity – the capacity of citizens to participate in a market setting was equally relevant, the neoliberal approach retreated from the notion of political agency and social security, and focused instead on fostering an entrepreneurial mentality, not only as an attitude that was required in a market society, but, more importantly, as the expression of a virtuous moral personality. This entrepreneurial concept of social justice also had emphatically punitive consequences for those who failed to develop the required moral character. This type of ‘roll out’ neoliberalism within the sphere of social policy therefore gravitated around a residualist approach to those ‘left behind’. As Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell have argued, it involved ‘the (re)criminalization of poverty, the normalization of contingent work, and its enforcement through welfare retrenchment, workfare programming, and active employment policies . . . Market discipline, it seems, calls for new modes of state intervention in the form of large-scale incarceration, social surveillance, and a range of microregulatory interventions to ensure persistent “job readiness”.’74

73

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T. Blair and G. Schröder, ‘Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte’, in H. Slomp, Europe, a Political Profile: An American Companion to European Politics (Santa Barbara, CA, 2011 [1999]), pp. 307–18. J. Peck and A. Tickell, ‘Neoliberalizing Space’, Antipode, 34 (2002), 391–2.

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Conclusion Shifting conceptions of social justice were intricately entangled with changing conceptions of the market in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Understanding this interwoven history requires an analysis of the anthropological, moral, social, and political constructions of a market order. This observation was the starting point for a sketch of three distinctive periods of entanglements between conceptions of social justice and understandings of the market. In exploring this history, this chapter has sought to identify actors, social mechanisms, and institutions that have contributed to and participate in the formation of subsequent social orders and the construction of what one might describe as regimes of social justice. In the first period, defined by the social question, I have identified that a transformed, more abstract notion of property as entitlements to social security created the social basis for the recognition of political agency and the empowerment of precarious workers. These notions moulded the second period, centred on the creation and maintenance of a productive work force, with sufficient spending power to contribute to the efficiency of markets and the growth of national wealth. This inspired an insurance-based system of social security that was predicated on not undermining the work ethic of the labour force and sought to contain the undue growth and centralization of the state through the expansion of welfare state systems. The third period was characterised by a reaction to the proliferation of an understanding of social justice as social rights that included universal entitlements intended to guarantee to everyone a particular ethical standard of human dignity. The spread of such expansive understandings of social rights came to be seen as a problem. This culminated in a pervasive discourse of crisis that was clothed in a language denouncing social rights as expensive preferences draining the state of its resources. The solution to this predicament was found in a radicalization of a calculative morality, which led to a reconceptualization of social justice as a form of investment, intended to stimulate an entrepreneurial mentality amongst the population and focused on creating equality of opportunity rather than on a reduction of material inequalities. This account leads away from what one might describe as a socialdemocratic understanding of the history of social justice. This narrative is conventionally organised around a teleological story tracing the incremental steps that led to a growing awareness of the immorality of the market and the creation of an alternative ‘social’ social order. By contrast, as this chapter has sought to demonstrate, social justice and the market were not oppositional but entangled notions, and conceptions of social justice were always embedded within understandings of a market order. This account of social justice therefore also helps to historicize the market. The history of the market should be

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written not as the more or less complete realization of a fixed set of market principles but as a shifting amalgamation of a wide range of anthropological, moral, social political, and institutional aspects. This, in turn, implies that a history of the market cannot be written without also writing a history of social justice, while a history of social justice cannot be written without a history of market conceptions. Social justice is not an alternative to a market morality; they together contribute to shifting entanglements of ‘socially’ informed markets and ‘market’ informed constellations of social justice.

3

Catholic Conceptions of Social Justice from 1891 to Pope Francis Rachel Johnston-White

The papacy of Pope Francis is fraught with contradictions. The first Latin American pope, Francis has instilled solidarity with the world’s dispossessed at the heart of the Vatican. On migration, climate change, and global economic justice, Francis has adopted radical stances that have provoked the enmity of conservative bishops throughout the world. Yet, in other respects, the pope has endorsed the same conservative views on LGBTQ+ rights (at least until recently), the ordination of women to the Catholic clergy, and, above all, reproductive rights, that have long defined the Church’s position, disappointing progressive Catholics who hoped for definitive change on these issues.1 These apparent paradoxes are not accidental. Francis embodies the conflicts within the Church that have been simmering for decades, if not centuries, on questions of social justice. This chapter will explore two competing Catholic conceptions of social justice, beginning with the promulgation of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, the founding document of Catholic social teaching. The first strand of Catholic social justice, rooted in Rerum Novarum and subsequent papal interventions, promoted a social order based upon a traditional familial structure. This ‘organicist’ ideal of social justice originally aimed at combatting Marxism, the ills of industrialization, and the erosion of the Church’s influence in European public life. Evolving in response to the dramatic political changes of the first half of the twentieth century, the ‘organicist model’ reflected the Vatican’s desire to carve out a more socially just ‘third way’ that would protect the ‘human person’, the family, and the position of the Church amidst the extremes of Communism and Fascism. During and after this tumultuous period, Catholic movements, including women’s organizations, embraced and at times reinterpreted this papal vision in a variety of ways. Although the Vatican-endorsed model of social justice

1

See A. Lyon, C. A. Gustafson, and P. C. Manuel (eds.), Pope Francis as a Global Actor: Where Politics and Theology Meet (Cham, 2018); J. Y. Tan, ‘Pope Francis’s Preferential Option for Migrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers’, International Bulletin of Mission Research, 43 (2019), 58–66; and C. Tollefsen, ‘Pope Francis and Abortion’, Christian Bioethics, 21 (2015), 56–68.

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predominated within the Church, not all Catholics embraced the antiCommunism and emphasis on the patriarchal family that ‘organicist’ social justice ideas tended to promote. The second strand of Catholic social justice – the ‘radical’ model – sprang from disagreements within the Church on how to respond to socialism, workers’ rights, dechristianization, and decolonization. As a largely decentralized phenomenon, this second strand varied more dramatically across time and space than did the ‘organicist’ model. ‘Radical’ social justice enjoyed support from grassroots activists, theologians, reformers, and even bishops and other Church leaders who endeavoured to empower the powerless in their societies and, from the 1950s and 1960s, around the world. The two strands at times intersected, with a plurality of views embodied in each; the distinction between ‘radical’ and ‘organicist’ serves, rather, to underscore the dynamic of intra-Church contestation that rendered debates about social justice so intense. Both strands of social justice challenge conventional distinctions between the political left and right in important ways. While emphasizing different aspects, the two ideals of social justice each focus on personal rights, social peace, and societal development within the context of civil society, including the family, religious institutions, and trade unions.2 Catholic ideas of social justice also bridge the national and the transnational; Vatican-led social teachings began as a universal appeal to protect the well-being of workers while balancing the demands of their bosses, reflecting common problems facing the industrialized nations of the world. Catholic radical alternatives prioritized the global poor on a worldwide scale, while still embracing national initiatives that responded to the particular circumstances of different times and places. By problematizing the political and spatial categories commonly used to discuss social justice, this chapter offers a useful corrective to existing social-justice narratives. ‘Organicist’ and ‘Radical’ Social Justice Caritas and the Birth of Catholic Social Teaching The year 1891, when Pope Leo XIII issued his encyclical Rerum Novarum, marked the formal inception of Catholic social teaching. The origins of Catholic thought on social justice, however, preceded this encyclical by nearly two millennia.3 According to the early Christian ideal, ‘every poor man or 2 3

See J. Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA, 2018). See S. R. Holman (ed.), Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society (Grand Rapids, MI, 2008).

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woman was Christ’ and should be treated accordingly.4 New Testament teachings on poverty, such as the last judgment according to the Gospel of Matthew or the parable of the heartless miser in the Gospel of Luke, emphasize the Christian duty of solidarity with the poor and present wealth as a barrier to reaching heaven.5 Over the centuries, the Catholic Church has interpreted these precepts within the principle of caritas. The term translates from Latin as ‘charity’ and has often been understood in common usage as simple gifts to the needy, but caritas has complex, shifting, and still-debated uses within Catholic theology. In its most basic form, caritas denotes love for God and then, as a way of demonstrating that love, for one’s neighbour. Throughout the medieval period, the Catholic tradition of almsgiving supported some basic provisions to those in need. These included shelter, food, and clothing, hospitality for pilgrims and travellers, the provision of sacraments and religious burials for the destitute, and care for orphans and the sick, sometimes even extending to dowries for poor unmarried girls.6 Especially from the twelfth century onward, the Church and affiliated institutions also operated a vast, if disjointed and decentralized, network of ‘hospitals, leprosaria, almshouses, orphanages, and confraternal and parochial charities’ across Roman Catholic Europe.7 Medieval caritas required the faithful to give generously to the poor during their lifetime, with the promise of rewards in heaven. Yet shifts within Catholic theology on caritas resulted in changes in the practices of the religious orders, clergy, and laypeople who attempted to fulfil this obligation.8 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the eremitical movement transformed the state of poverty itself into something holy; thirteenth-century friar Francis of Assisi exemplified the views of mystics, ascetics, and members of the Mendicant orders that a life of (voluntary) penury represented the highest calling.9 By the advent of the thirteenth century, theologians remained divided on the question of whether a life of asceticism and poverty fulfilled the requirement of caritas or whether, instead, the faithful ought to give alms within the framework of an ‘active life of virtue’ and never to the point of endangering their own

4 5 6 7 8 9

T. F. Ruiz, Review of ‘James William Brodman, Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe’, Speculum, 85 (2010), 647. B. S. Pullan, ‘Catholics, Protestants, and the Poor in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 35 (2005), 443. J. W. Brodman, Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe (Washington, DC, 2009), p. 200. Ibid., p. 1. M. Mollat, Les pauvres au Moyen Âge (Brussels, 2006), pp. 53–4. See also B. Geremek and J. Birrell, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge, 1987). Brodman, Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe, pp. 4, 24–5. See also G. Erner, ‘La morale économique chrétienne: Le tournant médiéval’, Revue Internationale des Sciences Sociales, 185 (2005), 513–22.

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subsistence or that of their families.10 Around 1200, with the intervention of Pope Innocent III and the writings of the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas, the latter perspective began to win out.11 Aquinas, in particular, advocated a capacious interpretation of the Christian duty to care for ‘all oppressed persons’, considering charity to represent the highest virtue of a religious life.12 He reflected at length in his influential Summa Theologica on the intertwined issues of justice and property, questions that would resurface in the late nineteenth century with the popularity of Neo-Thomism at the Vatican.13 The degree to which ordinary Catholics took these teachings to heart remains debatable. Undeniably, though, the strain of population growth in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the accompanying rapidly expanding ranks of the poor, undermined religious charitable practices. Charity remained a virtue, but attitudes hardened, ecclesiastical institutions struggled to cope, and the Church began to dissuade its faithful from giving alms to ‘vagabonds or those who could work’.14 Further distinctions between the virtuous and idle poor came into being under the dual influences of the Protestant Reformation and, later, the Enlightenment. The Catholic Church adjusted to these new challenges by embarking upon a counter-Reformation that transformed the almsgiving tradition based upon ‘charity and mercy’ which had prevailed in the previous centuries.15 At the same time, growing state power and bureaucracy in much of Western Europe coincided with the push to rationalize the provision of aid to the poor. In France, the rise of the centralizing state from the 1530s to the 1760s led to the closure of many small, Church-affiliated local hospitals where the poor, sick, and disabled had been treated over the previous centuries.16 In their place came larger hôpitauxgénéraux or hôtels-Dieu run by what Michel Foucault dubbed ‘the monarchical and bourgeois order’.17 As David Hickey has shown, Catholicism shaped both these new urban institutions and rural charitable missions. In France and elsewhere, bishops and new missionary orders urged

10 12 13

14 15 16 17

11 Brodman, Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe, p. 24. Ibid., p. 18. B. S. Pullan, ‘Catholics, Protestants, and the Poor in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 35 (2005), 444. St Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica II-II, Question 66, ‘Of Theft and Robbery’ (1947), www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/SS/SS066.html; R. J. Dougherty, ‘Catholicism and the Economy: Augustine and Aquinas on Property Ownership’, Journal of Markets and Morality 6 (2003), 488. See also E. Stump, ‘Aquinas on Justice’, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 71 (1997), 61–78. B. Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge, 2006), p. 192. Pullan, ‘Catholics, Protestants, and the Poor in Early Modern Europe’, 442. D. Hickey, Local Hospitals in Ancien Régime France: Rationalization, Resistance, Renewal, 1530–1789 (Montreal, 1997), p. 6. M. Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris, 1972), p. 61.

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parishioners to abandon indiscriminate and individual alms giving to the poor.18 Instead, they encouraged the faithful to donate to institutions, which would more effectively distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor.19 Although the Church remained a powerful force, the rise of state power coincided with the beginnings of a decline in religiosity, or deChristianization, in much of Europe. Nowhere was this trend more visible than in France.20 The French Revolution accelerated the decline of Catholic influence, threatening both the Church’s existence and the divine right of monarchs across the continent in the 1790s. Anti-clerical revolutionaries in France delighted in attempting to expunge the Church from the public sphere, even going so far as to try to replace Catholicism with a new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being.21 In the face of this existential challenge, the Church struggled to articulate a convincing response to new claims of justice for ordinary people. Instead, revolutionary zealotry begat reactionary zeal, and the Church occupied a vanguard position in this counter-revolution for a century after 1789.22 Rerum Novarum and ‘Organicist’ Social Justice after 1891 The rise of socialism as a political ideology in the second half of the nineteenth century finally jolted the Church into taking a new approach to the ‘social question’, that is, the living conditions of the working classes, in 1891. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum was as much a belated response to the evident appeal of socialism as it was an attempt to address the ills of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike his recent predecessors in the papacy, Leo XIII was an admirer of St Thomas Aquinas. Leo XIII’s papacy, and especially Rerum Novarum, marked the beginning of a revival of Thomism that would come to dominate the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing heavily from Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, the encyclical called upon Catholics to respond to the pressing social problems facing the world in the wake of de-Christianization, proletarianization, and the growing influence of Marxism.23 Although Rerum Novarum advocated certain

18 20 21 22 23

19 Hickey, Local Hospitals in Ancien Régime France, p. 8. Ibid., pp. 19, 126. M. Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle: Les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments (Paris, 1973). D. A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2009), p. 181. D. M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York, 2002). P. Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and Revolution, 1891–1956 (New Haven, CT, 2018), p. 24.

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reforms, the neo-Thomism of this era remained largely conservative, relying upon sixteenth-century interpretations of Aquinas, rather than close readings of his work.24 Despite this, Rerum Novarum offered the first substantial alternative to the reactionary, conservative monarchism that had dominated Catholic politics in Europe after the French Revolution. Rerum Novarum set forth the fundamental characteristics of Catholic social teaching, all of which would be further developed in subsequent papal interventions.25 These included the preservation of private property and the promotion of the patriarchal family as the foundation of society, coupled with the encouragement of social reforms to facilitate order, the rule of law, and peace between social classes. Together, these central pillars comprised what one might term the ‘organicist’ conception of social justice. The term ‘organicist’ appropriates the biological concept of ‘organicism’ to articulate the Vatican’s understanding of society as a unified whole, with particular emphasis on the role of the heterosexual, procreative family. Unlike the ways in which caritas functioned in earlier centuries, Catholic social teaching was directly concerned with analysing, and thus improving, ‘political, social, or economic conditions in the light of theological reflection’.26 From 1891 onwards, the Catholic notion of the ‘common good’, already associated with caritas, became entwined with social justice as well. Alongside this came an assumption of some redistribution of property in the interests of reconciling capital and labour. Echoing Aquinas, Leo XIII emphasized the societal function of private property: that those with means must use their property for the benefit of the working people of their society. Likewise, the pope indicated that the state had a role to play in acting ‘with that justice which is called distributive – toward each and every class alike’.27 However, in an overt rebuke to socialists, the pope indicated that the main responsibility for redistributing wealth lay not with workers, but instead with owners and capitalists. In short, Rerum Novarum offered a paternalistic alternative to the

24 25

26

27

S. Shortall, ‘Theology and the Politics of Christian Human Rights’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 79 (2018), 449. The most important documents of Catholic social teaching include Quadragesimo Anno (Pope Pius XI), Mater et Magistra (Pope John XXIII), Populorum Progressio (Pope Paul VI), Octogesimo Anno (Pope Paul VI), and Centesimus Annus (The Centenary, Pope John Paul II), along with the documents of Vatican II and the document ‘Justice in the World’ of the 1971 synod of bishops. R. P. Kownacki, ‘Catholic Social Thought: From Rerum Novarum to Centesimus Annus’, The Ecumenical Review, 43 (1991), 430. See also M. Zięba, Papal Economics: The Catholic Church on Democratic Capitalism, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate (Wilmington, DE, 2013). Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum: para. 33: www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docu ments/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html.

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empowerment of workers, calling upon employers to ‘give every one [of their workers] what is just’, so that each worker could ‘earn an honourable livelihood’ and support his family.28 The promotion of family life represented a particularly important theme within social Catholic teaching.29 Socialism was a danger, Leo XIII argued, precisely because socialists would place children under state authority, thereby ‘destroy[ing] the structure of the home’ and the authority of the father over his children.30 If socialism worried Leo XIII, it posed far more problems for his successors after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Communism lent a burning urgency to the enduring question of how to improve the lot of the world’s labouring poor. For the Vatican, the Soviet Union presented an existential threat, not only because Bolshevism left no place for God or religion, but – perhaps more insidiously – because it laid claim to the Church’s own terrain of justice for the dispossessed, the original message of Christianity. The Vatican responded by seeking alliances throughout the late 1920s and 1930s with states – including in 1929 with Fascist Italy, and in July 1933 with the Third Reich – willing to join in the Church’s anti-Communist crusade.31 In addition, Pius XI, who became Pope in 1922, doubled down on the social teachings of the Church, issuing the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (Fortieth Year) in 1931 to mark the anniversary of Rerum Novarum and reiterate the Vatican’s vision of a good society, which required a true commitment to ‘the common good, that is, social justice’.32 The encyclical reflected on the accomplishments of Leo XIII’s exhortation to improve the conditions of the working classes, while also acknowledging that much work remained to be done, particularly in light of the success of the Soviet Union. Though reserving much of his venom for Communism, the pope also spoke emphatically against liberalism, understood here as a system based upon ‘free [economic] competition of forces’ and ‘individualist economic teaching’.33 In fact, the Church held liberalism and its ‘evil individualistic spirit’ responsible for the social and economic ills that gave Communism such appeal across Europe.34

28 29 30 31

32 33

Ibid., para. 20. Chappel, Catholic Modern, p. 14. See also Chapters 2 and 5 in this volume. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, para 14. On the Vatican’s move towards concordat diplomacy after the First World War, see G. Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2019). On the Vatican’s diplomatic agreements, see D. I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (Oxford, 2014), pp. 98–113; H. Wolf, ‘Dogma or Diplomacy? The Catholic Worldview and Nazi Ideology’, in Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp. 223–32 and 245–52. Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, para. 58: www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/docu ments/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html. 34 Ibid., para. 88. Ibid.

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The political and social order the Vatican promoted instead threaded a path between these extremes. In Divini Redemptoris (1937), an encyclical better known for its scathing condemnation of Communism, Pius XI offered his clearest vision yet of the ‘third way’ that Catholicism offered: a society that guaranteed ‘the right and dignity of labour, the relations of mutual aid and collaboration . . . between those who possess capital and those who work, [and] the salary due in strict justice to the worker for himself and for his family’.35 At the same time, lest Catholics be tempted to see similarities between Catholic social teachings and socialism, the pope warned that ‘no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist’.36 Taken alongside Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno and Divini Redemptoris articulated a coherent, ‘organicist’ conception of Catholic social justice prior to the Second World War.37 It borrowed elements from both the political left, such as the rights of work(men) to a living wage, and the political right, including the sanctity of the paternalistic family and the place of women in the home. Beyond the Vatican, as James Chappel has shown, theologians such as Karl Adam and lay intellectuals including Mina Wolfring, Theodor Brauer, and Henri Massis played a central role in helping Catholics across Europe, especially in Germany and Austria, to embrace the role of the secular state in delivering policies, such as welfare for families, which had previously been reserved for Catholic organizations.38 The extent to which this Catholic ‘alternative’ to liberalism and socialism succeeded in various national contexts depended on several factors, including the experience of the Second World War. Only in Ireland did a moderate form of Catholic politics, what Sam Moyn calls ‘religious constitutionalism‘, win out prior to the Second World War.39 Elsewhere in Europe, from the 1920s until 1945, European Catholics proved willing to throw in their lot with various right-wing, reactionary, authoritarian, or fascist regimes, some of which – such as fascist Italy and Nazi Germany – had at least in theory promised protections for the Church. As Chappel cautions, relatively few Catholics were true ‘Catholic fascists’; instead, faced with a choice between allying with fascists or Communists, far more Catholics opted for 35 36 37

38 39

Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, 31: www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ p-xi_enc_19370319_divini-redemptoris.html. Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, para. 120. ‘Organicist’ Catholic social justice ideas had important aspects in common with fascist and authoritarian political corporatism, including the idea that individuals thrive only when embedded within hierarchically ordered social bodies. However, ‘organicist’ Catholic social justice both predated and ultimately outlasted the model of Catholic corporatism that aligned so well with fascist and far-right regimes. On this, see Chapter 5 in this volume, as well as A. Costa Pinto (ed.), Corporatism and Fascism: The Corporatist Wave in Europe (London, 2017). See Chappel, Catholic Modern, ch. 2. S. Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2015), p. 27.

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anti-Communist alliances with fascist regimes, following both the Vatican’s lead and that of national Church leaders and lay intellectuals.40 Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, and the clerico-fascist, Nazi-allied Slovak State (1939–45), the president of which was the Catholic priest Jozef Gašpar Tiso, went further, enshrining a reactionary version of Catholicism at the centre of the state itself.41 The Vichy regime in wartime France likewise gave Catholicism pride of place after decades of the Church’s marginalization within the French Third Republic, a choice that explains the enthusiastic support of a significant majority of French Catholics for the collaborationist state.42 Its slogan, ‘travail, famille, patrie’ (work, family, fatherland), echoed the dual preoccupations with justice for working men and protections for the patriarchal family that had characterized the encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI. Nevertheless, these farright regimes tainted the promise of Catholic social justice by making access to it dependent upon the recipients’ membership in a particular national, religious, racial, or political group. For all the inequalities – not least of gender and class – baked into Catholic social teachings, and the racist or reactionary views of some Church figures,43 the Vatican still spoke on behalf of the rights and needs of all people, as actual or potential children of the universal Church. It was therefore the failure of these far-right regimes during the Second World War – with the notable exception of the Iberian Peninsula – that paved the way for the resurgence of Christian democracy after 1945 and, with it, a new political framework for ‘organicist’ social justice.44 The war years had changed Catholicism. Pius XII, who had succeeded Pius XI in March 1939, broadcast two ‘Christmas Messages’ in 1942 and 1944 in which he set out his vision for the post-war world. The 1942 speech echoed many of the ideas of earlier encyclicals, especially Quadragesimo Anno,45 but also integrated a new strand of Catholic thought: Christian personalism.46 Personalism, championed in particular by French Catholic philosophers Jacques Maritain and his younger, more radical disciple Emmanuel Mounier, placed the human person at the centre of the ideal society. According to 40 41

42 43 44 45

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Chappel, Catholic Modern, pp. 62–3, 67. See Moyn, Christian Human Rights, p. 7; Chappel, Catholic Modern, p. 59; on Nazism and Christianity, see R. Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (New York, 2003). R. Rémond, Les catholiques, le communisme et les crises, 1929–1939 (Paris, 1960), pp. 8–12. On Catholic racism, see J. Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA, 2012), ch. 1. See Chappel, Catholic Modern, ch. 4. Pius XII had been a close adviser of his predecessor Pius XI, and they shared many of the same views on Catholic social teachings. See R. J. Rychlak, ‘Pope Pius XII on Social Issues’, in G. V. Bradley and E. C. Brugger (eds.), Catholic Social Teaching: A Volume of Scholarly Essays, (Cambridge, 2019), p. 108. See especially Chappel, Catholic Modern; Moyn, Christian Human Rights; and Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades.

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personalists, the human ‘person’, unlike either the ‘individual’ or the ‘masses’, required the social and spiritual nourishment of being part of communities such as the family, trade unions, religious associations, and the nation.47 The ‘person’ could not thrive in all regimes. While liberalism had ‘subordinated the whole of civil life to the profit motive’, totalitarian48 states (understood here as both Communist and fascist regimes) had instead reduced ‘everything and everybody [to their] utility to the state, to the exclusion of all ethical and religious considerations’.49 For workers, whose struggles had been the focus of previous encyclicals, both regimes had proved tyrannical. In response, a new kind of society was needed. The pope thus called upon Catholics to help bring about a more just world that would protect the ‘dignity’ of the ‘human person’ and safeguard the ‘common good’, most especially the family unit.50 The 1944 Christmas Message offered a more precise solution, indicating for the first time the Vatican’s conditional acceptance of democracy.51 The pope gave his blessing for Catholics to participate in democracies that served the ‘common good’, as long as Catholics remained vigilant to the dangers of Communism and mob rule.52 Taken together, Pius XII’s wartime statements signalled a sea change in the Vatican’s approach to a just society. Social justice, once seen as predominantly an issue of material inequality and class conflict, now necessitated broader protections – both from state violence and from violence wrought by unregulated capital. The Christian Democratic political movements that saw such success in much of Western Europe after the war effectively translated the Vatican’s aspirations for social change into viable form. Pius XII’s priorities – ‘the family as society’s foundational cell’, ‘support of workers’ rights [and] moderate social welfare policies’, ‘a communitarian vision of the human person, 47

48

49 50

51

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G.-R. Horn, ‘Left Catholicism in Western Europe in the 1940s’, in G.-R. Horn and E. Gerard (eds.), Left Catholicism 1943–1955: Catholics and Society in Western Europe at the Point of Liberation (Leuven, 2001), p. 28. On the term ‘totalitarianism’ and the role of Catholics in the creation of this idea, see J. Chappel, ‘The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe’, Modern Intellectual History, 8 (2011), 561–90. Pius XII, ‘The Rights of Man: The Feast of Christmas and Suffering Humanity’, Vatican Radio Address, 25 Dec. 1942. See also Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades, p. 10. Pius XII, ‘The Rights of Man’. On ‘dignity’, see Moyn, Christian Human Rights, p. 52. Moyn points to how novel the formulation of ‘dignity of the person’ was in the context of the Church. ‘Dignity’ had previously been used to describe labour, marriage, or the family, rather than individuals. M. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age (Princeton, NJ, 2020), p. 186. Pius XII insisted upon the value of virtuous men of character, whose leadership would help to prevent ‘the untrammeled expression of the will of the people’ within democratic regimes. Pius XII, ‘1944 Christmas Message of Pope Pius XII. Addressed to the People of the Entire World on the Subject of Democracy and a Lasting Peace’. See also P. C. Kent, The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic Church and the Division of Europe, 1943–1950 (Montreal, 2002), p. 81.

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and a hierarchical understanding of church and society’ – found expression within the policies that Christian Democratic parties promoted.53 From Austria and West Germany to Belgium, France, and Italy, reinvigorated and rebranded Christian Democratic parties channelled what Martin Conway has called ‘a certain social conservatism (and anti-Communism)’, which emerged as the dominant political mood of the post-war decade.54 The parties’ welfare policies disproportionately boosted male breadwinners’ earning power and ability to support their families, fostering the family life that mirrored the Church’s view of society. These parties also shared the Church’s desire to balance the demands of capital and labour, keeping Communists’ demands in check while protecting the livelihoods of workers. Yet, while Christian Democracy had substantial continuities with pre-war politics, its ‘leaders consciously sought to break with the confessional priorities of the past’.55 This was not a movement to reinstate a church-state fusion; instead, Christian democrats positioned themselves as separate from the Church, while invoking Christian-inspired ideals. Nevertheless, the institutional structures and broader mentalities that defined dominant conceptions of social justice in mid-twentieth-century Western Europe bore the mark of their Catholic ideological origins, even as they acquired state backing and secular framing. Thus, the welfare states that have come to embody state-led social justice based on a secular welfare model derive much of their underlying logic on issues such as support for the family from Catholic ideas about a socially just society.56 With the success of Christian Democracy and post-war welfare states, ‘organicist’ social justice transcended the divide between the Church and the secular states of Western Europe. As a political ideal, it proved remarkably successful, mobilizing Catholic youth, political figures, and leaders across Europe and implementing changes to social welfare that have, in many cases, endured to this day. And although the Church hierarchy remained the source of Catholic social teachings, the articulation of the ‘organicist’ model of social justice ultimately depended upon the engagement of a wide range of Catholic political figures, youth activists, and ordinary people. However, through that same process, an alternative ideal of Catholic social justice also emerged. Not all Catholics subscribed to the ‘organicist’ model’s paternalistic approach to improving workers’ lives or its insistence upon respect for ‘natural’ authority and hierarchy. Instead, bottom-up dissatisfaction with the ‘organicist’ model resulted in a ‘radical’ Catholic alternative to social justice.

53 54 56

Rychlak, ‘Pope Pius XII on Social Issues’, p. 110. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1968, p. 46. Chappel, Catholic Modern, pp. 188–200.

55

Ibid., pp. 45, 58.

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Contesting the Vatican’s Social Justice: Catholic Radical Alternatives The ‘radical’ Catholic ideal of social justice was a grassroots phenomenon that typically sprang from clashes between dissident Catholics and the various representatives of the Church hierarchy on issues ranging from socialism and workers’ rights to interreligious dialogue, evangelization, and decolonization. Despite the wide variety of forms their initiatives took, dissident Catholics had a common ethos, framing their beliefs and initiatives not as a rebellion against the Church, but instead as a true interpretation of Catholic teachings on poverty, suffering, and justice for the dispossessed. The variety of actors involved likewise demonstrates the heterogeneity of the ‘radical’ camp. Catholic theologians and lay intellectuals played a central role as vocal champions of an alternative Catholicism, but so did trade unionists, youth activists, students, and local priests.57 Communicating across national boundaries and later even the Iron Curtain, radical Catholics worked through journalistic publications, labour organizations, and missionary movements, as well as in seminaries, youth associations, and factories. Its activists sought solutions to many of the same problems the Vatican had identified, including the suffering of the industrial working classes. But, while the Vatican responded to these issues through paternalistic reforms to labour issues and categorical condemnations of Marxism, radical Catholics in a number of Western European states, such as the German theologian Walter Dirks, who did not hesitate to describe himself as a Catholic socialist, sought to engage deeply with the arguments put forward by Socialists and Communists.58 However, this radical tradition borrowed elements from both the secular left and right, drawing in particular on the intellectual tradition of Christian personalism, which won a wider international audience as a result of the upheaval of the war years. As scholars of Catholic politics have rightly warned, the secular left-right divide maps poorly onto the kinds of theologically informed debates that shaped Catholic engagement in the political sphere.59 On the whole, however, radical Catholics’ greater openness to 57

58

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On the essential role of Catholic trade unions in modernizing the Church and offering a more labour-friendly interpretation of social justice, see P. Misner, Catholic Labor Movements in Europe: Social Thought and Action, 1914–1965 (Washington, DC, 2015). A. Lienkamp, ‘Socialism out of Christian Responsibility: The German Experiment of Left Catholicism (1945–1949)’, in G.-R. Horn and E. Gerard (eds.), Left Catholicism 1943–1955: Catholics and Society in Western Europe at the Point of Liberation (Leuven, 2001), pp. 197–8. On secular vs. Catholic politics, see the ‘Introduction’ to S. Shortall and D. Steinmetz-Jenkins (eds.), Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 1–16. Horn adopts the terminology of ‘Liberation Theology’ to speak about these Catholics, arguing that the activism of Western European Catholics in the first half of the twentieth century represented

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socialism and their prioritization of the needs of labour over the demands of capital placed them to the left of centre in many political settings, particularly after the Second World War; there were even instances of Catholics joining parties of the left, including socialist and Communist parties, in the name of their faith and desire for social justice. For example, as Piotr Kosicki has shown, the young Polish Catholics of the Dziś i Jutro movement embraced a Catholic-Marxist fusion in the name of revolutionizing society and protecting the ‘human person’, a choice that led them to justify the Communist takeover of Poland after 1945.60 Likewise, the German Catholic socialists of the early post-war Christian Democratic Union (CDU) succeeded in winning the party’s support for their anti-capitalist Ahlen Programme of 1947, although the Christian socialist faction found themselves marginalized from the CDU by the end of the 1940s.61 Far more common, however, were politically ‘homeless’ Catholic activists who integrated aspects of socialism into their spiritual vision for society.62 Catholic associations that pushed the boundaries of Church teachings in this direction, such as the French Sillon movement and so-called progressivist journals such as Sept and La Quinzaine, provided a voice in the immediate post-war years for the most ambitious of these visions of a more just society. Many collapsed in the face of Vatican pressure or outright clerical condemnation; but their ideas and networks survived and came to the fore over the subsequent decades.63

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a ‘first wave’ of what would later become Liberation Theology. Chappel designates those Catholics who rejected the ‘organicist’, Vatican-directed, hierarchical model of society as ‘civil society’ or ‘fraternal’ Catholics. There is therefore no scholarly consensus on how to speak about these Catholics. This chapter adopts the terms ‘radical’ or ‘dissident’ to underscore the ways that Catholic activists positioned themselves in opposition to the ‘organicist’ model. See G.-R. Horn, Western European Liberation Theology: The First Wave (1924–1959) (Oxford, 2008), and Chappel, Catholic Modern. Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades, 135. Polish Catholic Marxists drew inspiration from French Catholic personalists and the new apostolic movements pioneered in France, such as the Mission de France, discussed below. On the Ahlen Programme, see R. Uertz, Christentum und Sozialismus in der frühen CDU: Grundlagen und Wirkungen der christlich-sozialen Ideen in der Union 1945–1949 (Berlin, 2010). D. Pelletier, ‘Une gauche sans domicile fixe’, in D. Pelletier and J.-L. Schlegel (eds.), À la gauche du Christ: Les chrétiens de gauche en France de 1945 à nos jours (Paris, 2012), pp. 17–51. On the Sillon, condemned in 1910, see G. Barry, The Disarmament of Hatred: Marc Sangnier, French Catholicism and the Legacy of the First World War, 1914–1945 (London, 2012); J. Caron, Le Sillon et la démocratie chrétienne, 1894–1910 (Paris, 1967); and Jean de Fabrègues, Le Sillon de Marc Sangnier: Un tournant majeur du mouvement social catholique (Paris, 1964). The revue Sept, founded with Vatican encouragement in 1934, abruptly lost the support of Rome in 1937. The revue Esprit, which shared some of Sept’s radical ideas, was threatened with Vatican condemnation in the late 1930s but survived. See A. Coutrot, Un courant de la pensée catholique, l’hebdomadaire ‘Sept’ (mars 1934–août 1937) (Paris, 1961), and Rémond, Les catholiques, le communisme et les crises, 1929–1939. See also B. Duriez, É. Fouilloux, D. Pelletier, and N. Viet-Depaule (eds.), Les catholiques dans la république, 1905–2005 (Paris,

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Much of this ‘radical’ alternative to ‘organicist’ social justice initially emerged in opposition to the demands of the Church hierarchy, sometimes after initial attempts to act in accordance with the directives of bishops or the Vatican. The earliest collisions happened over the issue of how the Church should respond to the problems of the working classes. In Italy, for example, the Catholic labour movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century took up the task set out in Rerum Novarum of reducing class conflict through social reforms. Concretely, this meant forming labour unions comprised of both workers and their bosses. Church leaders, especially under Leo XIII’s conservative successor Pius X, intended such unions to mitigate the risk of class warfare by uniting society and preventing the working classes from falling prey to the temptation of socialism. Yet, as Sánder Agócs has argued, the young Italian Catholic union activists charged with aligning the labour movement with the principles of neo-Thomism quickly realized their task was impossible.64 Despite the insistence of the Church hierarchy and the Italian Catholic bourgeoisie on the benefits for workers of ‘tutelage’ by the ‘superior classes’, cross-class unions won little support from workers, who ‘had no inclination to submit to permanent social inferiority’.65 Catholic labour activists instead abandoned cross-class unions in favour of worker-only unions, placing them at odds with their superiors in the Church. In this way, a generation gap emerged in Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe, between younger, more politically active Catholic activists and older, more conservative figures in the hierarchy and the leadership of Catholic movements. The conflict between these two definitions of Catholic social action was particularly marked in France. The increasing prominence of younger Catholic intellectuals, such as Emmanuel Mounier and his revue Esprit, sparked intense debate on social justice in the public sphere during the 1930s. Moreover, within the Church, the ‘new theology’ of the French Dominicans Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu defied the Vatican to become a powerful minority current of Catholic thought that extended beyond France to other groups of Catholic activists, notably in Poland.66 These groups survived the efforts of the papacy in the post-1945 years to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy, and the movements and journals they founded laid the foundations for the pastoral

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2005), p. 96. On La Quinzaine and the so-called progressivist crisis, see É. Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté (Paris, 1998); T. Keck, Jeunesse de l’Église: Aux sources de la crise progressiste en France, 1936–1955 (Paris, 2004). S. Agócs, The Troubled Origins of the Italian Catholic Labor Movement, 1878–1914 (Detroit, 1988). Ibid., p. 12. On ‘new theology’ and John Paul II, see Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades, pp. 205, 310. See also S. Shortall, Soldiers of God in a Secular World (Cambridge, MA., 2021).

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innovations and new ways of living Catholicism that came to the fore in the years following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Three sets of Catholic activists, considered below, demonstrate the central values that defined ‘radical’ Catholic social justice in the post-1945 years. Representing, respectively, the laity, the clergy, and the Catholic intelligentsia, they comprise the ‘specialized’ Catholic Action, the apostolic movement Mission de France, and their close collaborators, journalists Robert and Denise Barrat of Témoignage Chrétien, who were in turn connected to the broader intellectual milieu of radical Catholicism in the 1950s and 1960s. Taken together, the preoccupations of these groups show how Catholic ‘radical’ social justice gradually shifted its gravitational centre from the European working classes to the ‘Third World’. The ‘Specialized’ Catholic Action The generational divide that separated younger ‘radicals’ from older ‘conservatives’ within the Church had significant implications for the Catholic Action movement, one of the most important lay organizations of the first half of the twentieth century. Catholic Action was charged with reconquering for the Church ‘those sections of modern industrial societies which had fallen victim to secularization’.67 By mid-century, Catholic Action had become a mass movement with millions of adherents, an indication of the newly central influence of the laity within European Catholicism.68 Their mission was to translate Catholic social teachings in different sectors of society, such as students, workers, and rural populations. The most innovative work, however, occurred in movements that initially stood on the margins of the Vaticancontrolled Catholic Action. These were what would become known as the ‘specialized’ Catholic Action movements, organized by age, gender, and societal or class function. Unlike the central Catholic Action, the ‘specialized’ movements originated from grassroots initiatives to evangelize in new ways. The first such movement originated in Brussels in 1912, when Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn began working to improve the lives of working-class youth. His efforts evolved into the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC) in 1925, inspiring the creation of a parallel movement by Georges Guérin in France in 1927.69 Both Cardijn and Guérin focused their efforts on urban areas of their respective capitals where church attendance and rates of baptism and marriage

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Horn, Western European Liberation Theology, p. 21. E. Fouilloux, ‘Le catholicisme’, in J.-M. Mayeur et al. (eds.), Histoire du christianisme des origines à nos jours, vol. 12: Guerres mondiales et totalitarismes (1914–1958) (Paris, 1990), p. 223. Horn, Western European Liberation Theology, pp. 22–5.

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had declined, and participation in the Communist Party had increased in equal measure. Guérin began his work in the parish of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Clichy, one of Paris’ ‘red-belt’ suburbs with a Communist mayor. Like Cardijn, Guérin discovered that the social doctrine of the Church did not offer solutions to the material problems that workers faced. A new form of outreach was needed. The active approach that the JOC pioneered, based on workers’ self-determination, would transform not only the apostolic methods of the Church but also the social environment in which young workers lived and laboured. The Belgian and French JOCs diverged, however, on their ideas about social justice.70 The Belgian JOC oriented itself primarily towards fostering the inner spirituality of its participants. In France, however, the JOC developed into a force for workers to organize themselves as trade unionists and even to participate in the political upheavals that attended the rise of the Popular Front in France in the mid-1930s. As in Italy, young French Catholic workers resisted attempts by their superiors, both in the factory and in the Church, to impose class reconciliation on them in the name of Catholic social teachings. Instead, French Jocistes tested – and occasionally crossed – the Church’s boundaries, especially on socialism.71 In line with the Church’s directives, the JOC officially declined to collaborate with Communists, but they did participate in strike committees during the strikes of May and June 1936, ostensibly to exert a ‘reformist, anti-Marxist’ influence.72 The experience of German occupation and resistance reinforced these links between Catholic and Communist workers, especially after 1943, when the German-imposed Service de Travail Obligatoire (forced labour service) led many Jocistes to flee to the Maquis or ally themselves with Communists in German factories.73 These initiatives created conflicts with the Church hierarchy. The decision of the papacy to bring the Catholic Action groups under a central structure in 1931 aligned awkwardly with the independent, action-oriented model of the ‘specialized’ Catholic Action groups, whose adherents valued their selfgovernance. In 1910, Pope Pius X had reminded the activists of the 70 71 72

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Ibid., 26–7. F. Richou, ‘Apprendre à combattre: L’engagement dans La Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (1927–1987)’, Le Mouvement Social, 168 (1994), 51–82. O. L. Arnal, ‘Toward a Lay Apostolate of the Workers: Three Decades of Conflict for the French Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (1927–1956)’, The Catholic Historical Review, 73 (1987), 212. Archives départementales des Hauts-de-Seine, Fonds de la JOC, 46 J 139. Aumônerie générale, ‘Témoignage, une expérience d’action catholique française en Allemagne en 1943-45’. Undated; ibid., 46 J 1128. Testimonies gathered by Maurice Montaclair, preface by Father Guy Deroubaix, Bishop of St-Denis, ‘Des résistants sans armes en Allemagne nazie: Vivre l’espérance dans des situations désespérées, rester dignes dans l’abjection’. 1994. See also Arnal, ‘Toward a Lay Apostolate of the Workers’, 212–13.

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Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française (ACJF), the umbrella movement for French Catholic Action, that the ‘exact obedience with which you follow the prescriptions of the Roman Pontiff on social action’ was the ‘greatest merit’ of their movement.74 The friction that this generated within the movements, and between activists and the hierarchy, eventually caused the dissolution of the ACJF in 1956, in the midst of bitter disagreements over the Algerian War.75 While the national Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops expressed its support for the French Army’s actions in Algeria and for the maintenance of French control there, many Catholic Action participants considered France’s actions in a more critical light. In June 1956, the leadership committee of the ACJF issued a statement urging Christians to take individual responsibility for the ‘misery, suffering, and death of thousands’ of Algerians under French rule. Christians, they wrote, must not only ‘engage in an effective action according to the demands of justice and charity’, but also move beyond humanitarian action. ‘A political solution is necessary’, the committee wrote, and ‘we are responsible for it’.76 The ACJF did not yet embrace full independence for Algeria, but neither were its activists satisfied with the Church’s position that French control was necessary for the maintenance of ‘civilization’ in Algeria.77 The Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne (JEC), the student wing of Catholic Action, took the most militant positions on these issues in the 1950s. Jécistes, as they were known, insisted that the ‘filial deference’ the bishops wished to impose upon the organization threatened the movement’s ability to evangelize to students, who cared deeply about the revelations emerging in the press in 1957 that the French Army used torture in Algeria.78 When the Catholic hierarchy prohibited the JEC and its feminine counterpart (the JECF) from taking a public stance against torture, the national secretariats of both movements resigned in May 1957. In response, the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops sternly reprimanded Catholic Action, warning that their remit extended only to spiritual work, not political or ‘temporal action’.79 74 75

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B. Giroux, ‘De l’Action catholique aux JMJ: L’Église et la jeunesse catholique de France’, Transversalités, 119 (2011), 125. Duriez, Fouilloux, Pelletier, and Viet-Depaule (eds.), Les catholiques dans la république, p. 34; S. Chapeu, Des chrétiens dans la guerre d’Algérie: L’action de la Mission de France (Paris, 2004), pp. 12–13. CNAEF, Fonds de la Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne. Côte 12 LA 170. Dossier – Circulaires, notes, articles de la JEC et de la JECF (1956–1963). ACJF, ‘Algérie’, Paris, June 1956. The Paris-based ACJF Information published a special issue on Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in November 1955, which first articulated its stance on the Algerian War. On the shift within the Church in favour of decolonization, see D. Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge, 2016). CNAEF, 3 CO 233. Assemblée des Cardinaux et Archevêques de France, 27–8 Nov. 1958. CNAEF, Fonds JEC/F; 12 LA 230 – Relations de la JEC et JECF avec la hiérarchie. Dossier – Courrier des secrétaires généraux à la hiérarchie (1958-1962): Mgr Lallier (Président de la

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Many of the activists, however, continued to support political demonstrations and statements in defiance of their bishops’ instructions, insisting that spiritual and worldly concerns were one and the same in the context of torture and suffering.80 The JEC’s leaders even issued their own guidance to Catholic soldiers who faced orders to torture, believing the hierarchy’s advice to be inadequate.81 Despite these tensions, however, neither the JEC nor the other ‘specialized’ Catholic Action movements abandoned the Church. Their antiauthoritarian attitudes instead led them to question the existing political and, by the late 1960s, economic structures of society. After the Algerian War, activists from the JEC and JOC joined the growing number of Catholic activists, alongside the proto-NGO Comité Catholique contre la Faim et pour le Développement and Georges Hourdin’s revue Croissance des Jeunes Nations, who turned their attention to denouncing the exploitation of the Global South.82 These activists saw in the paternalist model of European-led ‘development’ of the ‘Third World’ many of the same power imbalances that they had experienced within the Church. The Mission de France Decolonization, therefore, had a significant impact on Catholic attitudes towards social justice. The JEC’s conflict with the Catholic hierarchy over torture came about because of verifiable reports from Catholic soldiers on the ground in Algeria, who shared their private journals and eyewitness testimonies with trusted priests. Foremost among these clergy were priests of the Mission de France.83 The Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops, led by Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris, established the Mission de France in 1941 with the

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Commission de Jeunesse), Mgr Courbe et Mgr Ménagel (ACF), Mgr Pirolley, Mgr Villot (Secrétariat Général de l’Episcopat). Lettre de Son Eminence Mgr Lallier, l’Archevêque de Marseille, à Maitre Goudareau, Marseille, 27 Nov. 1960. See also Archives du Diocèse de Paris, Archives du Cardinal Feltin. 1 D 15, 8: Guerre d’Algérie. ‘Lettre aux Cardinaux et Archevêques de France’. Signed by 52 activists in the movements Pax-Christi, ACI, ACGH, Paroisse Universitaire, ACO, Catéchiste, ACCF, JEC, MLP (mouvement de la Paix), JOC, Vie Nouvelle, CFTC, and Foyers Notre-Dame. Non-dated [Feb.–Mar. 1957]. See also B. Giroux, La jeunesse étudiante chrétienne (Paris, 2013), especially chs. 9 and 10. CNAEF, Fonds JEC. 12 LA 170. Dossier – Circulaires, notes, articles de la JEC et de la JECF (1956–1963). JEC and JECF national committees, ‘Circulaire aux responsables et aumôniers universitaires, en communication aux secrétaires fédéraux et aumôniers fédéraux’, Paris, 1960. The leaders of the CCFD mostly came from the JOC, the Action Catholique Ouvrière, and Pax Christi. On the CCFD, see G. D. Cumming, French NGOs in the Global Era: A Distinctive Role in International Development (London, 2009); and S. S. Stroup, Borders among Activists: International NGOs in the United States, Britain and France (Ithaca, NY, 2012), pp. 128, 130–1. See T. Cavalin and N. Viet-Depaule, Une histoire de la Mission de France: La riposte missionnaire 1941–2002 (Paris, 2007).

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purpose of training priests to evangelize to those areas of France where the Church had all but vanished by the 1940s.84 Alongside other seminaries, such as the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of Jesus and the Mission de Paris, the Mission de France adopted new methods of outreach in which Catholics ‘fully espoused the working condition’ in solidarity with the urban and rural poor.85 Beginning in 1942, priests of the Mission lived in working-class neighbourhoods, laboured in factories alongside union activists, and came to understand the political choices of the workers as a part of ‘their missionary practice’.86 They based their methods on the guidance of the Dominican theologian MarieDominique Chenu, the key theological adviser to the Mission,87 whose theology of labour considered the working classes to be the ‘basis for the spiritual liberation of humanity’.88 In such a setting, the categorical anti-Communism of the Vatican had no place. Instead, the students of the Mission’s seminary at Lisieux immersed themselves in the works of Karl Marx alongside the theology of St Thomas Aquinas; the reading room even subscribed to the newspaper L’Humanité, the press organ of the French Communist Party, to understand the appeal of Communist ideas.89 The goal was to win converts to Catholicism by speaking to workers on a terrain they understood; above all, that required using a language of ‘social justice’.90 If the Church was to remain relevant in the modern world, the priests of the Mission thought it would need to become revolutionary in its fight for justice. The worker-priest movement was the culmination of these apostolic methods. In the industrial regions of Belgium and throughout France, a handful of clerics – including some priests of the Mission de France – became full-time labourers whose parish was the factory, not the church. For these worker-priests, the choice to engage in political activism quickly led to a collision with the anti-Communist Catholic Church. With the onset of the Cold War and the death of Cardinal Suhard in 1949, the Vatican intensified its repression of the progressivist wing of the church; this culminated in the closing down of the so-called worker-priest experiment by the Vatican on 1 March 1954. Worker-priests then faced the difficult decision of whether to submit to the authority of Rome and their bishops or to continue as workers

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D. Pelletier, ‘Postface’, in R. Dumont, La condemnation des prêtres-ouvriers (1953–1954) (Paris, 2019), p. 692. D. Barrat and R. Barrat, Charles de Foucauld et la fraternité (Paris, 1958), p. 11. Chapeu, Des chrétiens dans la guerre d’Algérie, p. 13. Horn, Western European Liberation Theology, p. 243. M.-D. Chenu, Pour une théologie de travail (Paris, 1955), p. 92. Horn, Western European Liberation Theology, pp. 242–3. L. Augros, De l’Église d’hier à l’Église de demain: L’aventure de la Mission de France (Paris, 1980), p. 62, cited in Horn, Western European Liberation Theology, p. 242.

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without the Church’s support.91 French worker-priests never numbered more than a hundred before the Vatican ordered them back to their parishes, with Belgium never counting more than eight at one time;92 however, they represented a revolutionary innovation that inspired – and polarized – the Church.93 The Mission de France narrowly survived the condemnation of the workerpriests thanks to the efforts of several influential bishops, but this episode marked a turning point in their activities. After 1954, the Mission gradually shifted its orientation towards the oppressed of France’s colonies. In the process, the Mission became deeply imbedded in the anti-colonial activism of the Algerian War.94 Three of the Mission’s priests, Jobic Kerlan, Louis Augros, and Pierre Mamet, spent several years in Souk-Ahras on the outskirts of Algiers. Their determination to engage in dialogue with local Muslims, just as the Mission’s priests had done with workers in France, infuriated the local European population, as did Augros’ fiery sermon calling on all Christians to be ‘sensitive to any justice or injustice, [even at the level of] political, economic, and social structures’.95 More to the point, two of the three priests had also sheltered Algerian nationalists fleeing from the French military and police forces, and all three had collected powerful testimonies on torture from French soldiers serving in Algeria. Finally, in April 1956, the Catholic Europeans of Souk-Ahras violently expelled the three priests.96 In metropolitan France, other Mission de France priests, including Bernard Boudouresques, Jean Urvoas, and affiliated priest Robert Davezies, harboured Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) militants and occasionally helped them flee over the border to escape torture at the hands of the ‘forces of order’.97 When their actions came to light, all but Davezies claimed to have been acting out of spiritual rather than political motivations, prompted by fear that inaction would have led to torture. In an attempt to prevent the Mission as a whole from being condemned, Cardinal Liénart of Lille, patron of the Mission de France, 91

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C. Suaud and N. Viet-Depaule, ‘Corps de doctrine: L’esprit de corps des évêques français dans la crise des prêtres-ouvriers (1949–1954)’, in T. Cavalin, C. Suaud, and N. Viet-Depaule (eds.), De la subversion en religion (Paris, 2010), pp. 223–5. On worker-priests and their subsequent condemnation, see F. Leprieur, Quand Rome condamne: Dominicains et prêtres-ouvriers (Paris, 1989); J. Vinatier, Les prêtres-ouvriers, le Cardinal Liénart et Rome: Histoire d’une crise (Paris, 1985); C. Suaud and N. Viet- Depaule, Prêtres et ouvriers: Une double fidélité mise à l’épreuve, 1944–1969 (Paris, 2004); and especially N. Viet-Depaule (ed.), La Mission de Paris: Cinq prêtres-ouvriers insoumis témoignent (Paris, 2002). 93 Horn and Gerard (eds.), Left Catholicism 1943–1955, p. 35. Pelletier, ‘Postface’, p. 693. Chapeu, Des chrétiens dans la guerre d’Algérie. CNAEF, Fonds de la Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne. Côte 12 LA 170. Dossier: Documentation, coupures de presse, réactions d’autres associations. ‘L’Affaire de Souk-Ahras, 1956’. See also D. Fontaine, ‘Treason or Charity? Christian Missions on Trial and the Decolonization of Algeria’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 44 (2012), 733–53. Chapeu, Des chrétiens dans la guerre d’Algérie, pp. 142–8; M. Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, NJ, 2008), p. 205.

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framed the priests’ actions as the product of ‘Christian charity’.98 Davezies, who insisted upon a political motive for his actions, nevertheless argued that his actions reflected a long French ‘tradition of honour with regard to people who were persecuted’.99 His supporters maintained that Davezies had obeyed the teachings of his Church in recognizing in ‘our Algerian brother – oppressed, unhappy, deprived of his rights – a neighbour that one must love and serve’.100 Catholic Intellectuals and the ‘Third World’ The priests of the Mission de France represent a particularly striking example of the pivot within radical Catholicism towards the colonized and decolonizing world. The language of social justice now concentrated on condemning the exploitation of people outside Europe. This same shift happened within the French Catholic intellectual milieu. The topics discussed in francophone Catholic-inspired journals such as Esprit, Témoignage Chrétien, La Quinzaine (condemned in 1955) and its successor Le Bulletin, and the Jesuit revue L’Action Populaire reflected this transformation, as did the activities of the Centre Catholique des Intellectuels Français (CCIF), the annual Catholic ‘social weeks’ (Semaines sociales), and affiliated publication of the latter, the Chronique sociale de France. While the war France waged in Indochina from 1945 to 1954 caught the attention of various Catholic observers, it was the war in Algeria and the decolonization of French North Africa more broadly that prompted a far-ranging reorientation of Catholic intellectuals’ energies. Early observers of the crisis brewing in the French empire, such as André Mandouze, a professor at the University of Algiers and noted scholar of St Augustine, raised the question of social justice in relation to the deeply unequal living standards within Algerian society even before the outbreak of war in November 1954.101 In his short-lived journal Consciences maghrébines, published from March 1954 until the summer of 1956, Mandouze worked alongside humanitarian and youth activists from both Muslim and European communities in Algeria.102 They embraced the

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ANMT, Fonds Mission de France. 1996 028 0419. ‘Déclaration de S. Ém. le Cardinal Liénart, Prélat de la Mission de France’, Lille, 8 Jan. 1962. Davezies published a manifesto, Le temps de la justice (Lausanne, 1961), in which he laid out the reasons for his work alongside the FLN. ANMT, Fonds Mission de France. 1996 028 0419. ‘Le Procès Davezies: Déclaration préliminaire de Robert Davezies’, Lettre aux communautés, No. 41, Jan. 1962, 8. Ibid., 13. CHRD Lyon, Fonds André Mandouze. Carton NXVI, Folder 48, and NI Carton 5. On the AJAAS, which grouped together these social-aid activists, see A. Nozière, Algérie: Les chrétiens dans la guerre (Paris, 1979), p. 38; see also N. Forget, ‘Le service des centres sociaux en Algérie’, Matériaux pour l’Histoire de Notre Temps, 26 (1992), 38–9.

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anti-colonial cause early on. Mandouze articulated his views through an extended analogy to a biblical parable in the January–March 1955 issue: Who does not recall this passage in the Scripture where it is said that the father of a family does not give his son a snake when this same son asks him for food. I say that it is to ridicule the just demands of a people, I say that it is to menace [them] with a deadly snake to offer [them] a state of emergency when [they] demand bread. And I say that it is to ridicule [them] even more to offer a glimmer of hope that [they] will one day be able to satisfy [their] hunger if [they] consent to silence the national demands which are for [them their] dignity.103

By contrast, moderate religious leaders and figures such as the Catholic expert on Islam Louis Massignon sought to promote ‘reconciliation between Muslims and Europeans’ as a means of ending the war. The French Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops likewise called on ordinary Christians in Algeria to undertake this work as their ‘Christian vocation’.104 Suggesting both political reforms and new efforts at interpersonal connections, they proposed ‘an ever more intimate integration of Algeria to France’ in the name of peace.105 Robert and Denise Barrat, Catholic writers for the left-leaning Christian newspaper Témoignage Chrétien, helped to shift opinion on Algeria – especially on the problem of torture and the need for decolonization – through their work. This unorthodox couple lent their support to the Algerian FLN almost from the beginning of the war. While Robert came from a devout Catholic family, Denise, née Schoenfeld, grew up in a bourgeois Jewish family in France that she later described as ‘severe and atheist’.106 Narrowly escaping capture by the German authorities during the Second World War, she converted to Catholicism while hiding in a monastery.107 The Barrats met at the office of the Témoignage Chrétien journal in Paris, marrying in 1947. Denise and Robert discovered the problems of French North Africa in the summer of 1953, when the pair witnessed the events surrounding the deposition of the Sultan of Morocco. Robert’s book Justice pour le Maroc appeared shortly after their return to France, sparking intense debate within the CCIF.108 That experience, Denise later wrote, ‘opened [her] eyes to the 103 104

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Consciences maghrébines 4 (Jan.–Mar. 1955). SHPF, Archives du Pasteur Albert Nicolas, 028 Y. Boîte 1, Dossier 1 – Église réformée en Algérie, 1955–1963. Quoted in Pastor André Chatoney, ‘Message aux Protestants d’Algérie’, Algiers, 28 May 1958. Nozière, Algérie: Les chrétiens dans la guerre, p. 42. BDIC Nanterre, Fonds Famille Barrat. Letter from D. Barrat to P. Vellay, c. 1962–3, 24. Letter consulted with the kind permission of Patrice Barrat. See also P. Vidal-Naquet, ‘Préface’, in D. and R. Barrat (eds.), Algérie, 1956: Livre blanc sur la répression (La Tour d’Aigues, 2001), p. xii. Interview with Patrice Barrat, 8 July 2014, Nanterre. R. Barrat, Justice pour le Maroc (Paris, 1953), and J. Folliet, CCIF, ‘Colonisation et conscience chrétienne’, Recherches et Débats (Dec. 1953). See also C. Guyot, ‘Entre morale et

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colonial drama’ that became central to her life. From then on, she wrote, ‘it appeared clearly to me that the burden of the Christian, in the twentieth century, was to consecrate [their] life to the poorest and most abandoned, but [also] to those who lack more than bread, who lack liberty’.109 She resolved to ‘adopt completely the cause of the oppressed, of the Arabs’.110 Denise gave significant practical aid to the FLN, distributing messages and tracts, organizing safe houses, doing ‘everything’ except transporting weapons.111 When the police dismantled her network in February 1957, Denise was interrogated so brutally that she prematurely gave birth to her son Patrice. She was later put on trial for participation in the Jeanson network, the most substantial support network for the FLN.112 When the Jeanson network was dismantled in 1960, Denise was charged with ‘atteinte à la sûreté extérieure de l’État’ (endangering the external security of the state). At the trial, Denise denied the specific charges against her, while expressing her wish that she had, in fact, committed the acts of which she was accused. As a lay member of the Catholic Fraternité Charles de Foucauld, Denise explained, she had a ‘duty of hospitality’ to all.113 She also declared her opposition to the Algerian War, stating that she knew ‘the doctrine of the Church on the just war’ and considered this war ‘the epitome of an unjust war’.114 Her husband, Robert Barrat, became the first French journalist to speak to FLN leaders in the maquis in September 1955. His refusal to reveal his sources for a powerful article on the FLN in FranceObservateur won the couple the enduring trust of the movement, but at the cost of his first stint in prison.115 The couple subsequently hosted regular gatherings of like-minded people, including priests of the Mission de France and various other Catholic intellectuals, at their home in the Parisian suburb of Dampierre.116 When the Mission de France shared the testimonies on torture

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politique: Le centre catholique des intellectuels français face à la décolonisation (1952–1966)’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire, 63 (1999), 77–8. BDIC Nanterre, Fonds Famille Barrat. Letter from D. Barrat to P. Vellay, c. 1962–3, 30–1. 111 Ibid. Ibid., 4–5, 8–9. On the Jeanson Network, see H. Hamon and P. Rotman, Les porteurs de valises: La résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie (Paris, 1979), and J. Charby, Les porteurs d’espoir: Les réseaux de soutien au FLN pendant la guerre d’Algérie: Les acteurs parlent (Paris, 2004). BDIC, Fonds Famille Barrat. ARCH0056/23. Trial of the Réseau Jeanson, ‘Interrogatoire de Mme SCHOENFELD Denise, épouse Barrat’, 20 Oct. 1960, 1. Denise Barrat served as secretary of the Fraternité from 1950 to 1953. See also BDIC Nanterre, Fonds Famille Barrat. Letter from D. Barrat to P. Vellay, c. 1962–3, 28. BDIC, Fonds Famille Barrat. ARCH0056/23. Trial of the Réseau Jeanson, “Interrogatoire de Mme SCHOENFELD Denise, épouse Barrat,” 20 Oct. 1960, 2. R. Barrat, ‘Un journaliste français chez les hors-la-loi algériens’, France-Observateur, 15 Sept. 1955. See also Barrat, Un journaliste au cœur de la guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962) (La Tour d’Aigues, 2001). CHRD Lyon, Fonds André Mandouze, Algérie NIII, Boîte 12. Letter from D. Barrat and R. Barrat, ‘La Source’ Dampierre (So&O) – C.C.P. Paris 39.59.49 to friends and family who received the documents and testimonies they circulated, 6 July 1957.

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they had received from Catholic soldiers, the Barrats formalized their network into a ‘Committee of Spiritual Resistance’, which published a selection of the testimonies.117 The Barrats, and Mandouze, stood on the radical fringes of Catholic opinion on Algeria. Yet they remained influential members of the Catholic intellectual community at the time, through their work as journalists, activists, and speakers at the events of the CCIF. They acted as a vanguard in the extraEuropean engagement of many Catholic militants by the 1960s, anticipating the reorientation of Catholic ‘radical’ social justice towards ‘Third Worldism’ in the era of decolonization. Epilogue The 1960s brought sweeping transformations to Catholicism, reshaping the two traditions of Catholic social justice. The Second Vatican Council marked a turning point in the Church’s attitudes to the new apostolic methods pioneered by the JOC and the Mission de France. In particular, the Vatican’s 1965 decree Ad Gentes placed an important emphasis on solidarity with the poorest of the poor, endorsing the work that had previously been conducted by groups like the Mission de France and signalling the Church’s new orientation towards the Global South. Vatican II thus marked a moment of intersection between the ‘radical’ and ‘organicist’ social justice narratives and the integration of central elements of the former into the formal teachings of the Church.118 For example, Marie-Dominique Chenu, the Dominican whose theology of labour had shaped the work of the Mission de France and who was twice censured for his views before being banned from the seminary of Le Saulchoir, exerted perhaps the greatest unofficial influence of any theologian at the Council.119 This impact lasted beyond the end of the Council in 1965; Pope John Paul II had been deeply marked in his youth by Catholic personalism and the ‘new theology’ of Chenu and his fellow Dominican Yves Congar; the new forms of outreach and ways of living Catholicism that they pioneered visibly influenced how he articulated ideas about social justice during his papacy.120 At the same time, however, the 1960s marked the zenith of ‘radical’ Catholicism’s European presence. Subsequently, the radical vanguard of Catholic social justice shifted from Europe to Latin America, culminating in 117 118 119 120

Comité de Résistance Spirituelle, Des rappelés témoignent, Mar. 1957. See also Chapeu, Des chrétiens dans la guerre d’Algérie, p. 93. On Vatican II, see M. L. Lamb and M. Levering, Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition (Oxford, 2008). J.-L. Schlegel, ‘Changer l’Église en changeant la politique’, in D. Pelletier and J.-L. Schlegel (eds.), À la gauche du Christ (Paris, 2012), pp. 262–4. See Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades, pp. 205, 310.

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the Liberation Theology movement and its ‘preferential option for the poor’.121 The Vatican, however, remained opposed to radical experiments, acting against Liberation Theology because of its apparent Marxist influences. Even so, though marginalized within the Church, the legacies of Liberation Theology and of ‘radical’ Catholic social justice remain visible in global activist movements, whether in defence of migrants and refugees, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and racial justice initiatives, in opposition to everwidening income inequality within nations and between the Global North and South, or in campaigns for the ordination of women and rights for sexual minorities. The Vatican too has embraced justice for the world’s poor under Pope Francis and a more assertive language denouncing material inequality. But, both within the Church and in the contemporary political sphere, ‘organicist’ Catholics of various stripes have nevertheless come to predominate.122 In the wake of the global 1968 protests, Catholicism, with its focus on the family, traditional values, and reproductive teachings, re-emerged as a kind of counterculture to the militantly secular spirit of that decade. Especially since the 1980s, ‘organicist’ efforts to control the sexual behaviour of the faithful have in many cases displaced the more expansive social-justice aspirations in favour of workers’ rights and family life once inherent to this model. Even Pope Francis’ call for solidarity with the Third World excludes elements of gender or sexual justice, partly due to the lobbying power of conservative interests within papal institutions and to the central role reproductive teachings play within Catholic identity. These tensions within Catholicism about the meaning of social justice and the means to achieve it have yet to resolve themselves, even as the Church still aspires to carve a path in the modern world for its vision of a just society.

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See G. Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY, 1973). In 1968, the General Conference of CELAM (Latin American Episcopal Council) affirmed the idea of the ‘preferential option for the poor’. Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez used the term ‘Liberation Theology’ for the first time at this conference as well. See, for example, F.-P. Chanut and L. Ducerf, ‘La Manif pour tous: Quand les questions sociétales mobilisent les catholiques’, in B. Béthouart and M. Launay (eds.), ‘Les religions dans la rue’, Les Cahiers du Littoral, 2, no. 14 (2015), 299–350; and C. Béraud and P. Portier, Métamorphoses catholiques: Acteurs, enjeux et mobilisations depuis le mariage pour tous (Paris, 2015).

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Social Justice through Taxation? Taxing the Rich in Belgium in the 1920s Simon Watteyne

Just over a hundred years ago, on 9 October 1919, Paul Wauwermans, a politically conservative figure from the Belgian Catholic Party, eloquently presented the elements of tax justice that were about to take shape in the most significant tax policies ever known in Belgium in the aftermath of the war: We may regret the past, we may feel regret about these budgets that we will never see again, these light tax charges; we may regret the past, our political institutions of yesterday, the economic and social regime, but all this is far away, other times have come; a complete transformation has taken place from an economic, social and moral point of view. A transformation has taken place, radical, complete; a new humanity needs new laws and new morals. An effort is therefore required for our tax reform. What can it be? Having received the new principles submitted to it, Parliament as a whole, without exception, recognized the need to break with the past and adopt the modern formula of income tax. It is the formula of justice; the fact is indisputable. We must return to this very clear notion of justice and equity, that, in a modern society, all citizens are in solidarity with one another, that, in good times and bad, they must share in the common joys, pains and burdens. Tax is what the word of former times characterised: a contribution. Tax is a contribution, everyone must pay it, but to the extent and in the forms that only the principle of equality can be respected: it must be supported by everyone according to their capacities.1

But what concrete tax formula did this notion of justice and equity take the form of? A century later, many questions that were asked at the time remain unanswered. Is it possible to exercise fair taxation at the national level while maintaining the confidence of national and foreign capitalists who have invested part of their wealth in the country? Is a choice between tax justice and tax competitiveness inevitable in open economies where capital can so easily cross borders? Can effective taxation be truly fair? This chapter aims to shed light on how this very contemporary problem of seeking socially just taxes dates back to the 1920s in the case of Belgium. The issue is of particular interest given that the 2008 financial crisis increased the

The author of this chapter is grateful for support from the Wiener Anspach Foundation. Parliamentary Records (PR), 9 Oct. 1919, 1959.

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public debts of every state around the world and given that the theme of tax justice at the international level entered further into the public debate with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The chapter aims to analyse how the political, economic, and budgetary realities of the aftermath of the Great War gave the term ‘tax justice’ a new meaning in Belgian political circles of power but also how it was debated and fought over for moral and economic reasons during the 1920s. The historical study of political conflicts and battles of ideas surrounding modern taxation during the twentieth century is a relatively recent field of analysis that emerged in the United States and Europe only since the 1990s. Such studies usually approach the issue of justice in taxation alongside questions specific to the history of public finances, simply because the theme of tax justice started becoming a major subject in public and political debates after the two world wars.2 The emergence of ideas about the nature of tax justice in the Belgian political and public debates during and after the First World War is slightly different from all the other belligerent countries for a simple reason: the four years of German occupation of the country. There was only one ‘Poor Little Belgium’. After the liberation of the ‘martyred’ country, all the political actors joined forces in a national union between Catholic, Liberal, and Socialist parties, which was a major new development after thirty years of Catholic government before the adoption, in 1919, of universal (male) suffrage with a single vote and proportional representation. This national union of political forces agreed that new taxes were needed but hoped that this would be only for a short period. On the left of the political spectrum, the Belgian Workers’ Party brought its own fiscal agenda to the negotiating table. That agenda entailed more taxes on the wealthy, meaning progressive income taxes in the name of fairness vis-à-vis the working class in order to shift the weight of the tax burden from taxes on consumption to taxes on income, with exemptions for the poor. On the right of the political spectrum, Liberals and Catholics disapproved of such innovations, judging them to be morally and economically wrong and harmful. Compromises were found, but the shift in the tax system was real and had an impact. 2

See, for example, the following studies: M. Daunton, Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914–1979 (Cambridge, 2002); A. Hardewyn, Tussen sociale rechtvaardigheid en economische efficiëntie: Een halve eeuw fiscaal beleid in België (1914–1962) (Brussels, 2003); J. Thorndike, Their Fair Share: Taxing the Rich in the Age of FDR (Washington, DC, 2013); N. Delalande, Les batailles de l’impôt: Consentement et résistances de 1789 à nos jours (Paris, 2014); K. Scheve and D. Stasavage, Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2016); C. Glineur, C. Husson-Rochcongar, and E. de Crouy-Chanel (eds.), La justice fiscale Xe–XXIe siècles (Brussels, 2020); M. Buggeln, Das Versprechen der Gleichheit: Steuern und soziale Ungleichheit in Deustchland von 1871 bis heute (Berlin, 2022).

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However, as the 1920s wore on, the Belgian franc suffered from a depreciation along the lines of what was happening to the French and German currencies, with capital fleeing the country. The political debate on progressive income taxes shifted from justice to injustice: the massive level of tax fraud and tax evasion was making the system unfair towards honest taxpayers. But the solutions advocated by the parties were radically different. The Conservatives and the financial elites of the banking sector were calling for an end to the exceptional tax legislation of the immediate post-war period in order to attract capital back into the country. Their view was that this would put the economy back on course towards a recovery. By contrast, the Socialists were arguing for the tax administration to increase their level of supervision over capital owners. In a third approach, Christian Democrats were, like the Socialists, seduced by the idea of fairness in terms of shifting the tax burden from consumption taxes towards income taxes, especially targeting the rich. However, they were advocating a reduction in income-tax rates to please the bourgeoisie rather than a reinforcement of tax supervision by the state. “Justice in Taxation” From 1830 to 1919, no Belgian government ever adopted progressive income taxes, while, at the beginning of the twentieth century, most other European countries were modernising their tax systems with progressive rates and new supervision mechanisms. This fiscal conservatism, which was a characteristic of Belgium (and also of Switzerland), made it an attractive haven for the fortunes of those who were afraid of new progressive taxes being adopted in their respective countries. This was especially the case for France. However, the First World War turned the entire Belgian tax system upside down. Exiled in Le Havre while the country was occupied by Germany, the Belgian government did not wait until the end of the hostilities to work on its taxation and public finances, while belligerent countries were also increasing their tax yield: Great Britain had extended its income tax in 1916 and tripled its rates since 1914,3 France had created income tax schedules in 1917,4 the Russian Empire first used loans to finance its military expenses but also increased consumption taxes after 1915,5 and the German Reich did pretty

3 4 5

Daunton, Just taxes, pp. 36–48. N. Delalande and A. Spire, Histoire sociale de l’impôt (Paris, 2010), pp. 38–41. N. Victorovna Platonova, ‘La fiscalité russe pendant la Première Guerre mondiale’, in F. Descamps and L. Quennouëlle-Corre (eds.), Une fiscalité de guerre ? Contraintes, innovations, résistances (Paris, 2018), pp. 68–9.

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much the same as Russia but also created special war taxes after 1916. The major difference for Belgium was the occupation of its territory.6 The tax reform itself came only after the end of the war. The Finance Minister Aloys van de Vyvere asked Jules Ingenbleek, a famous tax expert in Belgium, to take on the task of studying ‘the most urgent questions in order to prepare the future tax regime’.7 In 1916 and 1917, Ingenbleek wrote a monumental study, which he called ‘Justice in Taxation’. It was partially based on the tax reforms he witnessed in France as he was very much aware that Belgium would face the same budgetary problems after the war.8 His vision of justice was imbued with a visceral sense of equality and a desire for universal peace, born of the horrors of the Great War: It is for an ideal of justice that millions of men have died. When the war is over and the time comes to lay the foundations for a new life, people will thirst for justice.. . . Taxpayers will have to get used to the idea that the tax effort will necessarily have to follow the military effort and sacrifice of those heroes who escaped from Belgium to join the army and die on the Yser.. . . It is a debt we owe to our dead.9

No major tax reform had been possible in Belgium since its creation in 1830. The political domination by the bourgeoisie and the relative economic stability explain why the tax system remained so static throughout the nineteenth century.10 In 1918, the context was different. The war would serve as a justification for the upcoming tax revolution that was also secretly being prepared inside the occupied territory. Belgian bankers, lawyers, officials, and representatives from every political party had been working on new tax legislation since 1917 at the Solvay Institute of Sociology11 and at the Belgian Society of Social Economy, the latter being dominated by Catholic Conservatives only.12 After the war and Germany’s defeat, Belgium experienced rapid monetary inflation. In 1914, one pound sterling was equivalent to 25 Belgian francs (Bf ). This increased to Bf 35.7 in 1919 and Bf 47.5 in 1920.13 The depreciation of the currency was a major factor in the budget imbalance, while the occupation budgets from 1915 to 1918 had accumulated more than 6 7 8 10 11 12 13

M. Reitmayer, ‘La politique fiscal de l’Empire allemand’, in Descamps and Quennouëlle-Corre (eds.), Une fiscalité de guerre, pp. 100–6. J. Ingenbleek, La justice dans l’impôt (Paris, 1918), p. 5. 9 Delalande, Les batailles, pp. 257–60 and 269. Ingenbleek, La justice, p. 9. S. Van de Perre, ‘De lasten van de macht: Fiscaal beleid in België 1830–1914’, unpublished PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Brussels (2003). B.-S. Chelpner, L’impôt successoral (Brussels, 1919); B.-S. Chelpner, L’impôt sur les bénéfices de guerre (Brussels, 1919). F. Baudhuin, Histoire économique de la Belgique 1914–1939 (Brussels, 1946), pp. 79–80. L. Moyersoen, ‘Le drame monétaire de 1925–1926 ou l’histoire d’une stabilisation manquée’, in Comtesse Plater-Zyberk (ed.), Albert-Édouard Janssen raconté par ses amis (Brussels, 1976), vol. II, p. 60.

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Bf 2.3 billion in deficits.14 Belgium also experienced a sharp increase in its public debt following the government’s purchase of the German marks in circulation in the country but also because of the inflation of the Belgian franc. From just over Bf 3.7 billion in 1913, public debt had risen to Bf 25.5 billion by 1919 and to Bf 37 billion by 1921.15 Industry and trade had to be rebuilt, especially the railways. Belgium had indeed lost between 16 and 20 per cent of its wealth.16 Faced with such statistics, the new Prime Minister, Léon Delacroix, a member of the progressive wing of the Catholic party, introduced, in January 1919, a special tax on war profits, with progressive rates of up to 80 per cent, as in Great Britain in 1915 and France in 1916.17 While most of the population had suffered enormously, the question of taxing war profiteers became an issue about delivering justice. While the Conservatives did not openly contest the ‘opportunity for such a tax’, they feared that the measure would become a vexatious injustice to entrepreneurs and landowners.18 However, the fact that there was a government of national unity between the three parties greatly facilitated Delacroix’s task of convincing the parliamentary assembly to adopt it.19 In March 1919, Delacroix reformed the collateral inheritance tax to introduce progressive rates and the taxation of direct descendants, in response to ‘an urgent need and concern for justice’.20 However, the Catholics rebelled against the principle of progressivity, which meant, for them, the destruction of wealth and the levelling of fortunes.21 With the introduction of universal male suffrage by simple vote in the same year, the combined fear of a ‘red revolution’ and of tax reforms introducing progressivity was the perfect combination to terrorise the wealthy classes. The former Finance Minister, Julien Liebaert, had lost none of his verve despite then being seventy years old: ‘Unlike revolutionary socialists who advocate confiscation, parliamentary socialists want to achieve the same ends through progressive taxation. It is by this means that, in their conception of class war, the elimination of the capitalist class must be achieved.’22 However, the bill was widely adopted by members of the three parties. The Conservatives were no longer in control of the political game as they had been before the war.23 These first reforms made it possible to

14

15 16 17 18 20 21

F. Vrancken and E. Seulen, ‘Financement et liquidation de la Première Guerre mondiale’, in Institut Belge de Finances Publiques, Histoire des finances publiques en Belgique (Brussels, 1954), vol. II, p. 12. Budget 1925, House of Representatives (HR), no. 4. Baudhuin, Histoire économique, p. 77. Bill establishing a special tax on war profits, 16 Jan. 1919, HR, no. 32. 19 PR, 30 Jan. 1919, 179. PR, 12 Feb. 1919, 265. Bill to amend the succession and registration taxes, 20 Mar. 1919, HR, no. 109, 1. 22 23 PR, 17 Sept. 1919, 1620. PR, 17 Sept. 1919, 1621. PR, 24 Sept. 1919, 1690.

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legitimise, for the first time in Belgium’s existence, the technique of progressive rates and succession tax in cases of direct lineage. From March to October 1919, the government initiated the introduction of new income taxes, first inspired by Ingenbleek’s study.24 The idea of achieving fairness in taxation25 was the idea guiding the reform. It was urgently needed in the face of public spending resulting from occupation; the concern for equity then acquired capital importance. The main idea was to replace the old personal contribution – a tax created during the French Revolution and based on indices of wealth – with a new tax on land incomes, on salaries, and on movable property with progressive rates (2–8%) and based on a voluntary declaration of incomes (not obligatory to avoid shocking the Belgians). This included the possibility for the administration to appeal to a new fiscal tribunal in order to interrogate the taxpayers suspected of fraud. It would be the first time in Belgian history that movable capital would be globally taxed and was certainly the first major change in decades in terms of tax policies. In the 1900s, Belgium became in effect a tax haven for national and foreign movable capital, with a nearly total lack of taxation on financial wealth and complete banking secrecy. The government text was, however, thoroughly revised by the Central Section of the Finance Commission of the Parliament, which was dominated by Catholic Conservatives. Right-wing members rejected the investigative measures offered by the new tax law. The system proposed by Delacroix would constitute, according to them, ‘in reality a mask concealing the system of declaration’ of income, since in a large number of cases, taxpayers would be subjected to a ‘much more inquisitorial’ procedure emanating from the new fiscal tribunals.26 Inspired by the studies of the Belgian Society of Social Economy during the war, the members of Parliament proposed instead to have three tax schedules with small proportional rates (8% on real estate income, 4% on labour income, and 8% on financial income) that would operate alongside a complementary tax on global income with progressive rates varying between 0.5 and 2 per cent, called a supertax, which would therefore be added to each schedule to target the wealthiest citizens. To their eyes, it was a question of not forgetting what made Belgium’s fortune: its great fiscal liberalism regarding financial wealth, which must be maintained as far as possible in order to avoid an exodus of capital from the financial institutions 24 25

26

Bill to establish a global income tax, 20 Mar. 1919, HR, no. 108, 1. In this case as elsewhere in Europe, fairness in taxation, a term frequently used by those on both the political Left and Right, meant and still means putting most of the tax burden on the rich as a fair compensation for their privileges: Scheve and Stasavage, Taxing the Rich, p. 4. Regarding moral economics in history, see G. Abend, The Moral Background. An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton, NJ, 2014). Report, 13 Aug. 1919, HR, no. 320, 7–8.

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of the territory. As the supertax would simply be added to each schedule, there would be no declaration required from taxpayers. By comparison, in 1920, British income taxes rates reached up to 60 per cent.27 The same rate was also applied in Germany.28 In France, the top marginal rate even rose to 62.5 per cent.29 There were therefore two choices for the fiscal revolution to come. What concrete tax formula should this notion of justice and equity take? Conservatives, Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Socialists disagreed. The Conservative rapporteur of the Finance Commission, Paul Wauwermans, reminded the Parliament that the Central Section ‘unanimously’ rejected the government’s system of ‘disguised declaration’ and proposed another reform instead.30 But Delacroix categorically rejected the mechanism proposed by the Conservatives for the control of their supertax, describing it as being too difficult for his administration.31 For their part, Socialists were infuriated by the proposal of the Central Section to create a tax on salaries, which, in their view, would penalise the working classes and which was based on an obligatory declaration that the Catholics were refusing for their supertax on the rich.32 After weeks of debates, a final compromise was found at midnight, on 10 October 1919. Despite the opposition of the Belgian Workers’ Party, a tax of 10 per cent on real-estate properties, a tax of 10 per cent on financial income, and a progressive tax on salaries (1–10%) were to be created. The supertax was kept as well, but with progressive rates varying between 1 and 10 per cent, and based on an obligatory declaration of global incomes, including financial income. In exchange for their agreement, the Conservatives secured an agreement on absolute banking secrecy towards financial wealth in Belgium: the administration would have to trust the work of the banking institutions to collect the tax on securities, and the idea of fiscal tribunals was totally abandoned.33 Even then, some Catholic Conservatives tried to suppress the principle of a declaration of incomes, qualified by their leader Charles Woeste as a ‘tax war against individuals’,34 but without success. For example, the Catholic Eugène Standaert expressed the fear that ‘the government will face, in limine, countless difficulties. For even more than the Italian

27 28 29 30 32 33

Daunton, Just taxesTaxes, pp. 103–11. H.-P. Ullmann, Der deutsche Steuerstaat: Geschichte der öffentlichen Finanzen (Munich, 2005), pp. 88 and 103. T. Piketty, Les hauts revenus en France au XXe siècle. : Inégalités et redistributions 1901-– 1998 (Paris, 2001), pp. 259–62. 31 PR, 9 Oct. 1919, 1960–2. PR, 9 Oct. 1919, 1964–5. General Council of the Belgian Workers’ Party, 11 Oct. 1919, Émile Vandervelde Institute (EVI), Brussels. 34 PR, 10 Oct. 1919, 2047. PR, 10 Oct. 1919, 2014.

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and the Swiss, infinitely more than the Austrian and the Prussian, the Belgian is jealous of the secrecy of his business and the privacy of his home.’35 In the name of an abstract notion of tax justice, for which nobody could agree on its limits, the Belgian state therefore adopted three tax schedules and a progressive tax on global income, similar to the model defended by Joseph Caillaux since 1907 in France, but with much lower rates, while those in France and in Great Britain were exceeding 60 per cent. Nevertheless, the Socialists presented the introduction of the progressive tax as a major achievement to be put on the same footing as universal (male) suffrage because the tax reform would, in their view, contribute to the democratisation of society. However, Fernand Baudhuin, professor of economics at the University of Leuven and an influential figure, described the reform as ‘almost tax Jacobinism’.36 Certainly, Léon Delacroix’s tax policy contrasted sharply with that of his many Catholic and Liberal predecessors. But the Finance Minister was no Robespierre. Instead, he had a great sense of pragmatism. Since the war and the Bolshevik revolution, the financial and industrial elites had understood that the survival of the Belgian bourgeoisie would require social reforms and a bigger part of the tax burden falling on the rich to seduce the working-class electorate.37 Delacroix was far from being an exception: a large part of the political elite learned to appropriate a new language of social justice in taxation. Pragmatism in Taxation Tax revenues were expected to triple from 1919 to 1920, with nearly half coming from the new direct taxes. But the total revenue increases (more than Bf 3.3 billion in taxes and tolls) remained well below expenditure (Bf 8.6 billion).38 Further efforts were needed. In June 1920, supertax rates were raised to a maximum of 20 per cent.39 The Conservatives had a good time saying that this was proof that the reform was too premature.40 The same month, Delacroix adapted the tax on war profits to make it a tax on profits made in 1919. The rates were only reduced to a maximum of 50 per cent.41 Applauded by the Left, this new tax was rejected by the Right, and by commercial and industry companies, who perceived the tax as a new attack against the principle of capital accumulation, the engine of progress and driver

35 37 38 40 41

36 PR, 10 Oct. 1919, 2098. Baudhuin, Histoire économique, p. 115. E. Witte and J. Craeybeckx, La Belgique politique de 1830 à nos jours: Les tensions d’une démocratie bourgeoise (Brussels, 1987), p. 175. 39 Budget 1920, HR, no. 56. Bill to amend the income tax, 17 Feb. 1920, HR, n no. 104, 1. PR, 12 May 1920, 1125. Bill establishing a special tax on extraordinary profits, 9 Mar. 1920, HR, no. 147, 1–3.

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of the expansion of capitalist society.42 The Brussels Chamber of Commerce referred to the disappointing Bolshevik model of famine and commercial isolation as evidence of the failure of this kind of policy.43 For employers, the government was going too far. The bill was adopted but had divided the parties more than the previous reforms.44 While Delacroix still had the support of Socialists and Liberals, he was increasingly challenged within his own party, where his moderation tended to be perceived as weakness. A political crisis finally defeated the government in August 1920.45 The national-unity government, which was led by the Catholic Henry Carton de Wiart, initially seemed to have been saved. The Finance Ministry was handed over to a ‘technician’ from outside Parliament, Georges Theunis, a prosperous Liège industrialist, who was close to the political Right. Coming up with a balanced budget was at the core of the new government’s programme. A special effort had to be made to significantly slow down the growth of public spending.46 Theunis focused on improving the state of the public finances, starting with the fiscal problem. Indeed, the revenue from the 1921 budget (Bf 3.1 billion) continued to be insufficient to offset current expenditure (Bf 3.8 billion).47 On May 25, 1921, Theunis submitted a single bill to Parliament aimed at creating several new tax resources for more than Bf 400 million, essential from the point of view of ‘the security and solidity of the State’s finances’ and ‘without concern for school theories’.48 This was a time for pragmatism in taxation, meaning consumption taxes. The Finance Minister explained that he had reviewed the extensive ‘Right and Left’ literature on taxation, keeping an objective point of view, as he developed new taxes.49 He did not touch the new income taxes and the supertax because, while it was tempting to increase them, given that they had been introduced in the name of ‘an ideal of justice’, he feared that it was as yet an untried phenomenon.50 Theunis’ main asset was a new tax of 1 per cent on the commercial transfer of goods, known as the transmission tax (a predecessor of the value-added tax), similar to the French and American models, but without affecting retail sales.51 While he piously saw the progressive development of direct taxes as ‘the ultimate perfection, the tax ideal,’ of 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 50

PR, 19 May 1920, 1152. Note of the Chamber of Commerce, 1920, State Archives of Belgium (SAB), Minister of Finances. General Secretary (MF/GS), vol. 1, no. 211. PR, 3 June 1920, 1357. E. Gerard, De Katholieke Partij in crisis: Partijpolitiek leven in België 1918–1940 (Leuven, 1985), pp. 130–4. H. van der Wee and K. Tavernier, La Banque Nationale de Belgique et l’histoire monétaire entre les deux guerres mondiales (Brussels, 1975), p. 58. Budget 1921, HR, no. 101. 49 Bill on the creation of new taxes, 25 May 1921, HR, no. 296, 2. PR, 29 July 1921, 2410. 51 PR, 29 July 1921, 2412. Thorndike, Their Fair Share, p. 14.

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budgetary efficiency and social justice combined, Theunis aimed above all to be pragmatic. Consumption taxes were essential to bring about a rapid recovery in public finances.52 The transmission tax attracted opposition from the Socialists, who criticised the use of ‘this very bad consumption tax’ on the basis that it would have a heavy impact on the working class. They complained that Theunis was trying to get out of this era of tax patriotism that had brought justice to the tax system as if it was only an interlude in history.53 Theunis was not intimidated in any way. He recalled that Parliament had imposed significant social-security contributions on the finances, such as old-age pensions, subsidies for cheap housing, unemployment insurance, and health insurance. According to him, progress in favour of the working classes had already been made since the end of the war in the name of social justice. But it was now necessary to accept the financial charges, including for the working class, since the transmission tax would affect everyone.54 But the Socialist ministers abstained from voting on the draft law.55 The transmission tax was narrowly adopted.56 Socialist ministers resigned in October 1921, leading to new elections. The way was now clear for the formation of a predominantly Conservative Catholic-Liberal coalition led by Theunis, who retained control of the Finance Ministry. Fernand Baudhuin, who was satisfied with the new fiscal orientation, wrote that with the arrival of Theunis at the Finance Ministry, the country understood ‘finally that Jacobin principles were not used to fill the State’s treasury’.57 The application of the transmission tax raised the tax pressure from 5.05 per cent of national income in 1921 to 9.58 per cent in 1923,58 while Theunis decided to introduce further changes in taxes from 1923 onwards, as the German reparations were still not forthcoming: increases in the car tax,59 succession tax, registration fees, and custom and excise duties on tobacco and sugar.60 Surprisingly enough, Theunis also raised the capital tax schedule to 15 per cent and the maximum rate of the supertax to 30 per cent.61 Probably startled by such tax policies coming from a right-wing government – the enigmatic Theunis was far from an obtuse Conservative – the Socialists tried to object that he did not take into account a minimum income free of tax for the

52 55 57 58 59 60 61

53 54 PR, 29 July 1921, 2411. PR, 29 July 1921, 2402–3. PR, 29 July 1921, 2415. 56 PR, 2 Aug. 1921, 2448. PR, 5 Aug. 1921, 2574. Baudhuin, Histoire économique, p. 115. P. Clement, De Belgische overheidsfinanciën en het ontstaan van een sociale welvaartsstaat 1830–1940: Drie benaderingen (Leuven, 1995), p. 112. Bill to amend the automobile tax, 1 Feb. 1923, HR, no. 136, 1. Bill to amend the tax regime on sugars, glucoses, and tobacco, 1 Feb. 1923, HR, no. 139, 1. Bill to amend the income tax, 1 Feb. 1923, HR, no. 137, 1–7.

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working class. ‘You are a prisoner of a majority that does not want tax justice,’ declared the Socialist Émile Carlier.62 Theunis was increasing every tax he could in order to avoid a bankruptcy of the Belgian state. Per capita and based on the gold standard, the tax burden increased by 244 per cent between 1913 and 1925.63 Faced with the same high public-debt problem, the French Conservative majority also voted for some considerable tax increases between 1920 and 1924.64 The need to remove the danger of the floating debt also pushed the British government to maintain a high level of taxation during the 1920s.65 However, in the financial sector and among Catholic Conservatives, the will to abolish the supertax was growing. In February 1922, Auguste Callens, the director of the major Belgian bank the Société Générale, already advised Theunis to abandon the supertax, estimating that 70 per cent of financial incomes were fraudulently undeclared. ‘The Belgian is rebellious to the declaration’ of their income, he wrote.66 When Theunis hoped to achieve the financial restoration of the country by adopting several new taxes in November 1924, Conservative opinion was furious against ‘the fiscal inquisition’.67 To get the approval of the Catholic Party on some new taxes, Theunis had to promise them that the supertax, which had become an unbearable burden for the Right, would be removed.68 A rich taxpayer who had to pay Bf 2,000 of personal contribution in 1913 was paying in theory several hundred thousand Belgian francs in 1925.69 It was no longer a question of tax justice in the eyes of Conservatives, but of fiscal exaggeration. However, no vote was ever held on the new taxes and the suppression of the supertax before the elections of April 1925 and the resignation of Theunis (after several political crises). The ‘Unfairness’ of the Supertax In June 1925, after winning the elections and several attempts to form a coalition with Liberals and Catholics, the Socialists, who were led by Émile Vandervelde, formed a coalition (the first and only one in Belgium) with the democratic and Flemish wing of the Catholic Party, led by the Christian Democrat Prosper Poullet, who became Prime Minister. The Finance Ministry was entrusted to a Catholic as well, in order to reassure the financial and industrial powers at a time of monetary difficulties. Former president of

62 64 66 67 69

63 PR, 19 July 1923, 2266–2267. Budget 1925, HR, no. 4, 11–12. 65 Delalande, Les batailles, pp. 278 and 294. Daunton, Just Taxes, pp. 101–2. Letter from Callens to Theunis, 6 Feb. 1922, SAB, Georges Theunis, no. 297. 68 La Libre Belgique, 18 Dec. 1924. La Libre Belgique, 19 Dec. 1924. Budget 1925, HR, no. 4, 10.

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the financial committee of the League of Nations, director of the National Bank, and professor at Leuven University, Albert-Édouard Janssen had an international reputation. The Socialists only agreed when Poullet promised them that he would make low salaries exempt from income tax and that he would fight against the fraud relating to the supertax, the scale of which was considered to be massive.70 It was estimated that, between 1919 and 1924, around Bf 7.5 billion of capital out of Bf 11 billion had escaped the supertax, in other words, a proportion of more than two thirds.71 All the other belligerent countries faced the same issue.72 The three problems faced by the new government were monetary inflation due to the conversion of the German marks into Belgian francs following the liberation, budgets imbalances, and the existence of a heavy external shortterm debt contracted during and after the war. New taxes were needed again to balance the budgets and convince a group of foreign central and private banks led by the Bank of England that the country was back on a sound basis to obtain a long-term loan and stabilise the currency at Bf 107 per pound sterling with the replenishment of a gold reserve at the National Bank of Belgium. The Conservative press were frightened at this prospect. ‘Are we going to create new taxes? Unfortunately, this is more than likely!’73 wrote the Vingtième Siècle, while La Libre Belgique talked about a Bf 800 million deficit.74 This exaggerated figure was also published by the far-right newspaper L’Action Nationale, which denounced the ‘economic anarchy’ of the Socialists.75 The parliamentary battle over the new taxes began in December 1925. During his speech, Janssen proved himself a defender of the supertax and the principle of progressive rates: taxation had to be a demonstration of social solidarity and each citizen had to pay a share of tax proportional to their ability to contribute, within the boundaries of a certain limit to avoid turning it into confiscation, which ‘would certainly give rise to serious disadvantages, including capital flight’.76 His first draft law, which gained a majority of votes in Parliament, led to an increase in registration fees, to the succession tax, and to the transmission tax. The second and third draft laws led to an increase in custom and excise duties on several products and were also easily adopted. The fourth was the most controversial. At the insistence of the Socialists, incomes below Bf 10,000 would be exempted from the supertax, which, in exchange, would be increased for the wealthiest. The Right was outraged. From almost 2.8 million people 70 71 72 73 75

General Council of the Belgian Workers’ Party, 5 June 1925, EVI. Supertax, 1925, SAB, MF/GS, vol. 2, no. 601. C. Farquet, La défense du paradis fiscal suisse avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale: Une histoire internationale (Neuchâtel, 2016), p. 204. 74 Le Vingtième Siècle, 26 Sept. 1925. La Libre Belgique, 19 Sept. 1925. 76 L’Action Nationale, 26 Sept. 1925. PR, 17 Dec. 1925, 252.

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subject to the supertax, the reform would reduce this number to nearly 200,000 taxpayers. However, the yield of the supertax would barely decrease and would even increase. Another proof of the importance of progressive rates was that the 3,364 most fortunate Belgian citizens earning between Bf 100,000 and Bf 1,000,000 were each paying between Bf 8,025 and Bf 274,125 in supertax.77 In the eyes of the financial establishment, the supertax was becoming a dangerous class tax. Nevertheless, the bill was still adopted in a vote. By shifting the weight of the supertax onto the richest, the PoulletVandervelde government achieved a major breakthrough in their vision of tax justice. However, exemptions from the supertax for the working classes were highly disapproved of by the industrial and financial circles. A new League of Public Interest, bringing together Conservative politicians, employers, and bankers, began a violent press campaign against the government78. Due to a lack of communication between Janssen and the Belgian private bankers on the foreign long-term loan, the Belgian public got wind that international negotiations were failing. There was suddenly a massive capital flight of Belgian francs in other currencies, pushing the foreign bankers to stop the negotiations. On 6 May 1926, the Belgian franc was quoted at Bf 162 per British pound.79 Normal treasury funding became impossible, forcing Janssen and the government to resign. A government of national unity, now including the Liberals and the Catholics, was formed to confront the crisis while the Belgian franc was quoted at Bf 217 per British pound on 13 July. The real power was in the hands of Émile Francqui, Vice-Governor of the Société Générale and new Treasury Minister, and of Baron Maurice Houtart, the new Finance Minister, one of the leaders of the League of Public Interest.80 New consumption taxes were decided on to raise Bf 1.5 billion and extra-parliamentary powers were given to the government to use all possible means to stabilise the currency (the internal short-term debt was exchanged by force against preference shares of the new railway company after its semi-privatisation, allowing Francqui to negotiate a foreign loan in October 1926, and to stabilise the Belgian franc at Bf 175 per British pound).81 At the same time, Conservatives began to organise the dismantling of the global income tax. Elsewhere in Europe, the monetary stabilisations of inflationary countries between 1922 and 1926, in Austria, Germany, France, or 77 78 79 80 81

Bill to amend the income tax, Dec. 1925, HR, no. 9, 1–62. R. Brion, P. Hatry, J.-L. Moreau, and T. Peeters, 1895–1995, 100 ans pour l’entreprise Fédération des entreprises de Belgique (Brussels, 1995), p. 106. Moyersoen, ‘Le drame monétaire’, pp. 88–9. V. Janssens, Le franc belge: Un siècle et demi d’histoire monétaire (Brussels, 1976), p. 194. Bill relating to delegations to be granted to the King, 13 July 1926, HR, no. 398.

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Italy, were also accompanied by a dismantling of progressive taxes on capital and their income.82 In July 1926, the Finance Minister Maurice Houtart argued that the suppression of the supertax would restore public confidence. Only the Socialist ministers openly disagreed.83 However, tax experts, meeting in two government committees, also condemned the supertax. In a Royal Commission, which was composed of several tax lawyers and tax officials and was set up in April 1926 to study the possibility to simplify the tax system, the idea that the new regime of the supertax had caused too many difficulties in its application was widespread.84 The ‘too inquisitive’ declaration of global incomes was creating a real malaise and driving capital abroad, according to the Royal Commission. A return to a system more in line with ‘Belgian morals’ and the age-old practice of wealth indices85 would be the wish of the public.86 It was also the opinion of the Financial Committee, which was created in May 1926 in order to advise the government about public finances. Its ‘experts’, all private bankers, were advocating that a top marginal rate of 30 per cent was too much, crippling the spirit of capitalist initiative and encouraging fraud. Even if the supertax was theoretically fair, they admitted, the ease with which it was avoided was making it, in fact, unfair: in 1924, for example, only Bf 703 million out of 2.11 billion were declared.87 In La Libre Belgique, it was estimated that Bf 10 billion would return to the country if the global income tax were to be abolished.88 Thus, the capital flight was presenting a political advantage for the Right: it was the perfect argument to justify the return to economic policies that were more favourable to capitalist circles. ‘One must have the courage to admit that one has gone down the wrong path,’ wrote the Conservative lawyer Carlo de Mey about the global income-tax legislation in January 1927.89 Faced with this opposition to progressive taxation, the Left no longer was advocating for a better future with more tax justice, but was only trying to defend the post-war achievements. The Socialist newspaper Le Peuple

82

83 84 85

86 87 88 89

C. Farquet, ‘Capital Flight and Tax Competition after the First World War: The Political Economy of French Tax Cuts (1922–1928)’, Contemporary European History, 27 (2018), 537–61. Council of Ministers (CM), 6 July 1926, SAB, 10–13. Taxes in Belgium, 25 Aug. 1926, SAB, MF/GS, vol. 2, no. 588. From 1830 to 1919, the closest tax to an income tax was called the personal contribution. Every supposed rich taxpayer was subject to it following a series of wealth indices: the number of doors and windows, servants and luxury horses, the property value of the taxpayer’s residency, and so on. Royal Commission: report, undated, SAB, MF/GS, vol. 1, no. 322. Financial Committee: report, undated, SAB, MF/GS, vol. 1, no. 322. La Libre Belgique, 10 Dec. 1926. C. de Mey, ‘Les erreurs de notre système fiscal’, Revue Générale, Jan. 1927, pp. 78–91.

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strongly denounced ‘bourgeois selfishness’ and ‘capitalism’s profiteers’ who were cheating the tax authorities by hiding their capital abroad in order not to pay the supertax and who now were demanding its suppression.90 Socialist members of Parliament tried to argue that the supertax yield was rising from year to year, demonstrating that the administration was increasingly in control of its fiscal tool, but without success.91 Indeed, the supertax was first reduced in April 1927.92 At the same time, from 1927 onwards, Belgium was experiencing a very strong growth in production and exports. A considerable amount of capital was flowing into the country. Income from dividends was skyrocketing.93 In 1929, as a reaction to the adoption of a tax law that was more favourable to holding companies in Luxembourg, Houtart, who was now Finance Minister of a Catholic-Liberal government from which the Socialists had been excluded since November 1927, reduced the taxation of movable assets through stamp fees to avoid ‘the trading of these securities to take place in Luxembourg, Switzerland or on the French stock exchanges’.94 Finally, at the end of 1929, a huge tax relief of Bf 1.6 billion was decided in order to compensate for the tax increase in 1926 during the monetary crisis. The collapse of the American stock exchange in October 1929 was not yet worrying the Belgian banks.95 Four legal bills were submitted to the House of Representatives in December 1929.96 In particular, the supertax and its obligatory declaration were abolished and replaced by a complementary tax on income presumed on the basis of certain wealth indices – the rental value of housing, the rental value of the furniture furnishing these properties, domestic servants, horses, motor cars, boats, and airplanes. This new system was based on old methods as it was nearly identical to the system used for the personal contribution before 1919. Only progressive rates were retained but strongly reduced to a maximum of 15 per cent for an income above Bf 340,000. The amount taxed by the administration would thus be reduced by three- or even four-fold on average while financial incomes were henceforth exempt from the new tax.97 The Socialist opposition was furious, blaming Houtart for destroying tax justice.98 They argued that the government was rewarding the rich who never had ‘a sense of patriotic duty’ since Bf 16 billion out of 39 billion had not been paid to the supertax between 1920 and 1928.99 Baron Houtart replied that the global income tax made sense between 1920 and 1926 in the name of social

90 93 94 96 98

91 92 Le Peuple, 6 Jan. 1927. PR, 16 Mar. 1927, 1008. PR, 6 Apr. 1927, 1239. A. Mommen, The Belgian Economy in the Twentieth Century (London, 1994), p. 7. 95 PR, 25 Apr. 1929, 1583-1619. CM, 8 Nov. 1929, SAB, 2. 97 PR, 9 Apr. 1930, 1356. Bill to amend the income tax, 10 Dec. 1929, HR, no. 13, 23-34. 99 PR, 9 Apr. 1930, 1367. PR, 9 Apr. 1930, 1368.

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justice when public finances were disrupted. But that time had passed and the declaration of global income was not working. Continuing with it would mean facing the dilemma between having a huge proportion of fraud, which would remove any sense of justice from the tax system, or having a tyrannical form of control that would be highly detrimental to the prosperity of the country: Since the war, and under the sign of the calamities we have suffered, we have become accustomed to a taxation system that, in the past, would have seemed monstrous. But this is the result of a difficult period, when the rich classes had to make great sacrifices, which could not have been endured by the middle class and even less by the lower class. This period has passed, there is no question of maintaining taxation at such rates: it would no longer be taxation, it would be looting.100

Socialists had only one remaining hope to stop the 1919 tax legislation from being dismantled. Indeed, Christian Democrats seemed very unsatisfied with the law bill, according to Le Peuple.101 La Libre Belgique confirmed that several Christian Democrats were very hostile to the replacement of the supertax by an index tax.102 In Parliament, Prosper Poullet confessed his profound regret at the supertax’s abolition, which was ‘of an imperious justice’. Whilst he admitted that Belgium was too close to financial centres such as Luxembourg or Switzerland to prevent capital flight if tax laws were to be tightened up, he believed that only the supertax rates should have been reduced. However, Poullet did not want to provoke a ministerial crisis. He preferred to compromise with the Catholic Conservatives and vote for the abolition of the supertax to avoid a similar scenario of governmental crisis.103 ‘In short, the supertax will be repealed in a House where there is a majority to maintain it,’ said the Socialist Émile Vandervelde in a cynical appraisal of the situation.104 And so it was that the symbol of the post-war tax justice was no more. In 1930, the new complementary tax targeted only 27,000 taxpayers (against nearly 2.8 million before the 1926 reform and more than 200,000 before the 1930 reform) with a yield nearly eight times lower than that in 1926.105 Conclusion The Great War disrupted Belgian tax traditions that had existed for more than a century and seemed to have been impossible to modify until then. The reform

100 102 104 105

101 PR, 10 Apr. 1930, 1407. Le Peuple, 3 Mar. 1930. 103 La Libre Belgique, 5 Mar. 1930. PR, 11 Apr. 1930, 1434–5. PR, 11 Apr. 1930, 1435. ‘Arrête royal modifiant la législation en matière d’impôts sur les revenus et de la taxe sur les spectacles ou divertissements, 22 Feb. 1935’, in Pasinomie: Collection complète des lois, arrêtes et règlements généraux, 6th series, vol. 2 (Brussels, 1935), pp. 132–7.

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of the old tax system was made necessary by a huge increase in spending and debt while the grave consequences of German occupation justified an approach to tax justice, agreed by those from both the political Left and Right, where a heavier burden should be put on the rich. However, almost right from the start, in the 1920s, the progressive and global income taxes seemed to have no future for several reasons. First, despite the rise to power of the Workers’ Party, Conservative political elites inside the Catholic Party and the Liberal Party remained in control of the tax apparatus. In this respect, Belgium had a Socialist Finance Minister only between 1936 and 1938. There has never been one since. Second, the administration had the greatest difficulty in implementing the tax reforms of 1919, as demonstrated by the level of fraud and the recurrent budgetary deficits during the 1920s. It could be argued that these difficulties made the Socialists’ attempts to strengthen a supervisory system that was already so complicated to implement almost illusory, which was also reflected in the lack of reformist ambition after 1920 on the part of the rather small state bureaucracy, which was not drastically expanded before 1944. Third, the influence of financial and industrial elites on the failure of Belgian tax policies was crucial. Taking advantage of the embedded role of the Belgian economy and banking system within an international financial system, which was making the country very vulnerable to international capital flows, these elites steered fiscal policy towards a return to the pre-war tax haven situation with almost disconcerting ease after 1926, defeating the vision of class tax justice of Socialists and Christian Democrats. While, after the 1930s and especially after the Second World War, progressive labour income taxes became mass taxes and formed the cornerstone of the emerging welfare state’s finances, the supertax of the 1920s remained a unique experience of tax fairness in the history of Belgian taxation. In conclusion, the development of fiscal policies in the 1920s teaches us several points on the theme of social justice in taxation. The increase in the tax burden and the first progressive taxes in Europe in the years following the First World War could be seen as a first stage in the emergence of a more constrained capitalism that characterised the rise of welfare states after the Second World War. However, this historical analysis must be tempered. Fiscal changes in the name of social justice have proven to be rather limited in the total weight of taxation, in Belgium but also in France or in Germany, for example. In the end, it was above all the counter-revolution against progressive taxation that marked the beginning of the development of modern taxation across Europe. During this period, the idea of tax justice was first seen by all as an objective that needed to be achieved in the near future – all agreed that the system then in force had too many flaws – but was proving to be very difficult to implement. The political actors never managed to agree on the limits between tax fairness

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and excessive tax inquisition, which would then damage the economy by pushing wealth to flee abroad. At the end of the decade, tax policies made in the name of social justice became an achievement to be defended for some and an excessive ideal to be attenuated for others. While political leaders from the Left and the Right had never been able to agree on the limits of tax fairness, the dream of a just and efficient tax system was harshly confronted with the reality of tax fraud and tax evasion reaching unprecedented and massive proportions in every belligerent European country. Historians have recently started to take a look at these phenomena, which characterised the twentieth century and are still a plague on societies in the twenty-first century.106 It is not very surprising that the ideals of social justice underpinning tax policies aimed at redistributing the tax burden were not shared by those primarily concerned: the rich targeted by higher income taxes. What is remarkable in the Belgian case is how the financial and industrial elites were able to organise themselves in 1926 to counter the Socialist approach to social justice in taxation, opening the door to the dismantling of post-war tax legislation. Within the Catholic and Liberal parties, the Belgian bourgeoisie was indeed able to maintain its ascendancy in politics during the inter-war period, while appropriating the language of fairness in taxation and what it could possibly mean in Belgian society.

106

See, for example, S. Guex and H. Buclin (eds.), Tax Evasion and Tax Havens since the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2023).

5

A Fascist Social Justice? Hierarchy, Order, and Equity in Southern European Corporatism Pedro Ramos Pinto Introduction

Histories of social justice have often focused on the relationship between democracy, welfare, and rights. In Europe, this has placed the continent’s long-lasting undemocratic polities outside such accounts. The statement that fascism articulated an idea of social justice may at first sight appear contradictory. While there has been considerable work done on fascism’s social institutions – from maternity hospitals to leisure camps – these have most often been seen through the lens of totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian subject-making efforts. Yet, if social control and mass education were key aspects of fascism’s social intervention, it can also be argued that underpinning them was a set of ideas about society, merit and desert, that constitute a form of social justice. Justice is a historical concept the parameters, logics, and justifications of which are shaped by their temporal contexts. Such notions of social justice need not relate to a transcendental ideal of ‘justice’, nor to our own contemporary understandings, yet may have appeared to some in their own time as just. This chapter is a first attempt at synthesising this fascist ideal of social justice. It argues that, while we cannot speak of a homogenous or systematically developed system of thought, the fascist idea of ‘social justice’ was important in articulating a series of guiding lines that allowed fascists to present the coercive, repressive, and often violent actions of the state as ‘just’ and necessary, even desirable. It was also part of a debate and competition with other contemporaneous framings of social justice, at a time when the nature of social order, of mutual responsibility, of rights, and of the role of the state were all pressing questions. The historiography of European fascisms had until recently neglected the question of social intervention. By the late twentieth century the welfare systems of Italy, as well as Spain and Portugal – the other Southern European countries which in the 1930s and 1940s had modelled themselves on Italian Fascism – were clearly less generous, equitable, and universal than I am grateful to Emma Prevignano and Paco Ruzzante for valuable research assistance.

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the various ‘welfare regimes’ of Northern Europe. Comparativists accounted for these differences by highlighting issues of state capacity, levels of economic development, or the nature of the left since democratisation.1 In the last two decades, however, increasing attention has been paid to ‘fascist’ welfare and its long-term impact. In part this arose as an overspill from debates about the totalitarian ambitions of the regimes, and especially their efforts to shape society around the fascist ‘new man’. In Italy this was reinforced by the debate around ‘consent’ and the extent of popular support for the regime, raising questions about whether welfare had been one of Fascism’s instruments of legitimation, or at least acquiescence.2 This growing body of work on fascist welfare has sketched the lineages of a social intervention that was more fundamental and long-lasting than has often been assumed. Southern European fascism may no longer be regarded as the institutional and political caesura that it claimed to be, and historians have emphasised the continuities with social policies from the previous liberal era, as well as the enduring importance of the Catholic Church as a welfare institution. But at the same time, this work shows how the ‘New Order’ regimes in Southern Europe embraced welfare policies and ideas characteristic of the interwar period, from new forms of social insurance to maternal and neonatal care, influenced by widespread concerns for demographic growth, population health, and eugenics. This work may not have overturned earlier accounts that interpreted fascist social policy as limited, controlling, corrupt, and often driven more by political expedience than grand vision. Nonetheless, the new histories of welfare in fascist states also show that there was a significant expansion of public welfare in the 1930s and 1940s, which reached ever wider sectors of the population (even if significant elements remained excluded), and in so doing brought about a radical transformation in the role of the state. Such shifts were not unique to these countries, but fascism moulded the welfare landscape in ways that endured beyond the regimes themselves. Moreover, much of this state action was unprecedented. In contrast with Germany, where Nazism seized power in a country already in possession of a well-established welfare system, in Southern Europe the liberal state had done little to tackle poverty and social issues. Regulation was sporadic and ambitious plans were rarely followed 1

2

G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge, 1990); M. Ferrera, ‘The “Southern Model” of Welfare in Social Europe’, Journal of European Social Policy, 6 (1996), 17–37. For a survey of Italian debates, see R. Pergher and G. Albanese, ‘Historians, Fascism, and Italian Society: Mapping the Limits of Consent’, in R. Pergher and G. Albanese (eds.), In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence, and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy (New York, 2012), pp. 1–28. On parallel debates on Nazi Germany, see M. Steber and B. Gotto (eds.), Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford, 2014).

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through or implemented, and welfare provision was mostly left in the hands of local and charitable authorities, which lacked the resources to meet growing needs, especially as the region became increasingly urban and industrialised.3 The welfare interventions of the Southern European fascist regimes were in this respect new departures, even if they relied more on prior institutions than they liked to admit. Alongside expansion in coverage, they brought a reorganisation and new structures of provision, notably through establishing corporatist work-based forms of social insurance and healthcare. Moreover, fascist states – and more especially the social-policy experts of the regimes – actively sought to build transnational networks and links with like-minded actors across borders, thereby creating a channel of policy diffusion as an alternative to the liberal welfare model.4 While our understanding of the nature and trajectory of welfare in the fascist era has grown, the same cannot be said for the ideas and principles underpinning fascist policies. Most attention has been devoted to welfare interventions carried out through the lens of ideas of the family and pro-natalist interventions.5 However, such concerns were shared by many interwar parliamentary regimes, and the question remains as to whether there was anything specifically ‘fascist’ about the social policies of Mussolini’s Italy and of the other authoritarian regimes. Was there a specifically fascist concept of ‘social justice’, or were these simply twentieth-century welfare systems, but created by authoritarian regimes? The distinction matters when we consider welfare as not merely a means to address specific needs, but also as tools that make and shape societies. Welfare systems define population categories – who is included and who is excluded – through narratives of eligibility, merit, and responsibility; and they embody and sanction particular gender norms, as well as notions of status. Thus, to understand the interplay between ideology and politics that underpinned fascist welfare policies, it is necessary to look behind the institutions and explore the rules and expectations that were encoded in each system: who was entitled to what, on what terms, and to what purpose.

3

4

5

M. Halpern Pereira, ‘As origens do Estado-Providência em Portugal: As novas fronteiras entre público e privado’, in N. Severiano Teixeira and António Costa Pinto (eds.), A primeira républica portuguesa: Entre o liberalismo e o autoritarismo (Lisbon, 2000), pp. 47–76; M. S. Quine, Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism (Basingstoke, 2002). M. Pasetti, ‘The Fascist Labour Charter and Its Transnational Spread’, in A. Costa Pinto (ed.), Corporatism and Fascism: The Corporatist Wave in Europe (London, 2017), pp. 60–77; S. Kott and K. K. Patel (eds.), Nazism across Borders: The Social Policies of the Third Reich and Their Global Appeal (Oxford, 2018); G. Marín, ‘Seguros sociales y confluencias doctrinales en España e Italia (1938–1944/47)’, Historia Contemporánea, 61 (2019), 775–96; D. Brydan, Franco’s Internationalists: Social Experts and Spain’s Search for Legitimacy (Oxford, 2019). See, e.g., M. S. Quine, Population Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe: Fascist Dictatorships and Liberal Democracies (London, 1996).

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This chapter highlights how core fascist ideas about society, the state, and the individual informed thinking and practice on social policy. In doing so, it demonstrates how these ideas contributed to shaping society, and left legacies that still reverberate today. A number of countries could have been chosen to illustrate this point, but the chapter focuses on Fascist Italy as the root of many (but not all) of the ideas instituted across Southern Europe, and on Portugal’s Estado Novo (‘New State’). In Portugal, Salazar, an ultra-conservative Catholic professor of economics, gradually gained pre-eminence in the military dictatorship instituted in 1926 and, by the early 1930s, was drawing heavily on Italian Fascism to build a corporatist authoritarian regime that would outlive him and last until 1974. Italy, but also Portugal, would provide models for other right-wing authoritarianisms of the interwar period, including Franco’s Spain after the Civil War or, across the Atlantic, the Brazilian and Argentinian regimes that embraced many of its nationalist, productivist, and corporatist ideas.6 Roots of Fascist ‘Social Justice’ Summarising fascist social thought is not an easy task. Fascism was a diverse and changing ideology – it lacked a strict canon; followers would gloss and interpret from speeches of national leaders to piece together syntheses of what it stood for, even if some intellectuals and ideologues attempted to codify and advance their own views. Attempts to arrive at a core definition of fascist thought have therefore fallen out of scholarly favour in recent years and have been replaced by approaches emphasising the relational, cross-border borrowing of ideas, models, and institutional forms across a range of antiliberal and anti-socialist authoritarian regimes.7 The fascist approach to the social question and therefore its concept of social justice reflected this diversity by drawing on a wide range of intellectual traditions whose weight and interpretation differed from country to country. Foremost amongst these were different strands of nationalism and forms of Christian social thought, 6

7

C. Molinero, La captación de las masas: Política social y propaganda en el régimen Franquista (Madrid, 2005); R. Levine, Father of the Poor? Vargas and His Era (Cambridge, 1998); F. Finchelstein, ‘Corporatism, Dictatorship and Populism in Argentina’, in A. Costa Pinto and F. Finchelstein (eds.), Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Europe and Latin America: Crossing Borders (London, 2019), pp. 237–53. R. Griffin, ‘Introduction: God’s Counterfeiters? Investigating the Triad of Fascism, Totalitarianism and (Political) Religion’, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 5 (2004), 291–325, 299. For a statement and review of the transnational approach, see A. Kallis, ‘The ‘Fascist Effect’: On the Dynamics of Political Hybridization in Inter-War Europe’, in A. Costa Pinto and A. Kallis (eds.), Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 13–41; and A. Alcalde, ‘The Transnational Consensus: Fascism and Nazism in Current Research’, Contemporary European History, 29 (2020), 243–52.

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including personalism and corporatism, to which fascism gave an authoritarian (or even totalitarian) bent. This mélange of ideas appeared in the context of the crisis of the liberal system, shaken by the rise of mass society, war, and the intensification of social conflict across Europe during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Fascists, or those who influenced them, attributed the crisis to the twin evils of liberalism and socialism. The first, they claimed, had overprivileged the individual conceived as an atomized pursuer of individual material interests. Supported by a parliamentarism in thrall to particular rather than common interests, liberalism was seen as the cause of the dissolution of bonds of family and community. Socialism, in contrast, created class divisions and rejected the higher ‘spiritual’ truth of the nation through a misplaced internationalism. Confronted by these twin evils, fascism presented itself as a ‘third way’, advocating an alternative mode of social organisation and representation that would bring order, overcome class conflict, reconcile conflicting interests, and direct social action towards the higher goal of national regeneration. At the heart of the fascist view of the new order was the much discussed (but patchily enacted) model of corporatism. This model of society had emerged first in Catholic thought in the late nineteenth century as a critique and reaction to industrial modernity, socialism, and anti-clericalism. Initially harking back to an imagined past of medieval guilds, it defended the association of producers as the bulwark against the atomization and secularisation of society generated by liberal capitalism.8 Following Costa Pinto we can distinguish between two forms of corporatism. ‘Social corporatism’ advocated the channelling of interest representation through corporations that integrated both trade unions and business associations in a given trade or sector of production, thereby involving labour and capital in the regulation and management of that sector. This social definition of corporatism was not of itself incompatible with representative democracy – many post-1945 European democracies in one way or other adopted elements of corporatism that mediated between labour, capital, and the state.9 In ‘political corporatism’, however, the model of democracy based on individual suffrage for a parliamentary chamber would be replaced by a legislative or consultative body composed of representatives of corporations.10 Fascism sought to create authoritarian versions of both forms of corporatism. Labour representation was coercively organised into 8

9 10

See Chapter 3 in this volume. Cf. also J. Pollard, ‘Corporatism and Political Catholicism: The Impact of Catholic Corporatism in Inter-War Europe’, in Costa Pinto (ed.), Corporatism and Fascism, pp. 42–59. M. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968 (Princeton, NJ, 2020), pp. 138–42. A. Costa Pinto, ‘Fascism, Corporatism and the Crafting of Authoritarian Institutions in InterWar European Dictatorships’, in Costa Pinto and Kallis (eds.), Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship, p. 89.

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sectoral or ‘vertical’ trade unions and workers’ freedom of association was rescinded, as was the right to strike. Business associations faced little coercion, but often willingly joined institutions within which they had the upper hand. While in most cases a full model of political corporatism never came into existence, fascist regimes crushed parliamentary pluralism, monopolised access to power, and often, as was the case in Italy, assumed control of corporatist institutions at multiple levels.11 The fascist idea and practice of corporatism led to a particular approach to the social question. In general, corporatism regarded class conflict and unbridled competition as the roots of poverty. The channelling of class conflict through regulatory bodies was intended to reduce it by giving corporate bodies responsibility over wages, working conditions, and the welfare of those who, directly or indirectly, were linked to it. Seeing the world in such terms had implications for locating the subject of justice. ‘Society’ ceased to be a coming together of rights-bearing individuals, but was conceived of in an organicist way as a network of collective bodies, such as family, community, and craft associations.12 The individual did not disappear altogether – in fact, the criticism levelled by fascist corporatists at Communism was its subsumption of the individual into the ‘class’ – but was seen in relation to their membership of these social groups. In the Catholic tradition, this was articulated through the notion of the ‘human person’, a fully socially embedded entity, opposed to the liberal conception of the atomised ‘individual’ of liberalism. Originally outlined by the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, personalism found a home in the far-right circles associated with the movement Action Française, although through the 1930s and 1940s Maritain himself and many of his followers pivoted to seeing personalism as a bulwark against both Communism and fascism.13 The role of the nation was central to the fascist worldview. The marriage of nationalism with the corporatist idea catalysed the identification of society with the nation, and the ‘national interest’ became synonymous with the collective good. This organicist view of society was used to build a logic of social justice where the interests of society took precedence, and where ‘personhood’ provided little protection, since the state as the incarnation of the collective

11

12

13

For an introduction to corporativism in Italy and Portugal, and transnationally, see Costa Pinto (ed.), Corporatism and Fascism; A. Gagliardi, Il corporativismo fascista (Rome, 2010); F. Rosas, ‘O corporativismo enquanto regime’, in F. Rosas and A. Garrido (eds.), Corporativismo, fascismos, Estado Novo (Coimbra, 2012), pp. 17–47. I. Stolzi, ‘Idealism and the Fascist Corporative State’, in J. Walker (ed.), The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, vol. 2: Historical, Social and Political Thought (Cambridge, 2013), p. 263. S. Moyn, ‘Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights’, in S.-L. Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 85–106.

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could intervene in society to mould the person to best fulfil national goals. The nation was imbued with a spiritual dimension, a destiny that gave meaning and direction to the collective effort of its members and through which they would find their self-realisation. This view of the nation, and a concern with its regeneration, underpinned the way in which fascism both articulated its responsibilities towards individuals and defined what its sons and daughters ‘owed’ to the nation – in the words of the leader of the Portuguese Estado Novo, ‘everything for the nation, nothing against the nation’.14 In this view the nation became the highest form of association and it justified almost any kind of intervention, including the use of violence, in the name of its defence and regeneration. Fascist ‘social justice‘ was, therefore, the antithesis of theories of rights based on the individual. The interests of the nation took precedence, while the state was the emanation of the national interests expressed by a people organised into natural corporations. As Salazar argued in 1930, dictatorships are showing themselves to be singularly active in the development of legislation and institutions that elevate the living conditions of the working masses, due to the greater ease with which, on the basis of order and discipline, they can face such problems without a spirit of partisanship or class, but only in total subordination to the larger national interest.15

This justified a concerted attack on workers’ organisations and parties, and recasting the social contract by expanding the power of the state and extending its intervention in the social question. At the same time, the preoccupation with the regeneration of the nation and the creation of a well-ordered society was reflected in a much more ‘pedagogical’ function for welfare than in contemporary democracies, aimed at creating new men and women who would serve the interests of the nation. A Functionalist Understanding of ‘Social Justice’ In contrast to understandings of ‘social justice’ as arrangements that facilitated, protected, or realised the social rights of individuals, the term took on a functional meaning in fascist discourse. A particular institution or form of distribution was deemed to be just not simply because it raised the living standards of individuals, but first and foremost if it contributed to the broader aims of national regeneration and aggrandisement. Although the emerging language of rights was not entirely absent, fascist intellectuals tended to 14 15

A. de Oliveira Salazar, ‘Política de verdade, política de sacrifício, política nacional [1929]’, in Discursos e notas políticas, 1928–1966 (Coimbra, 2015), p. 50. A. de Oliveira Salazar, ‘Ditadura administrativa e revolução política’ [1930], in Discursos e notas políticas, p. 60.

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side-step it or link it to the concept of obligation to the nation. Reinstating the sovereignty of the state over society would channel the actions of all social actors through common goals, and end the inequities created by competition and class struggle. Yet the implication was that other inequalities could be justified. The ‘primacy of the political’ in this sense could serve as a justification to prioritise the national interest over the welfare and rights of the individuals who composed the nation.16 In a major speech in Milan on 6 October 1934, Mussolini explicitly referred to this hierarchy of aims. In his words, the aim of delivering ‘social justice’ for the Italian people was a goal in itself, ‘since a people who does not find within the nation living conditions worthy of these European, Italian and fascist times is a people who at the hour of need cannot perform adequately’.17 Corporatist intellectuals and officials echoed these ideas. Gino Arias, a Fascist economist involved in the design of key corporatist legislation, stated that the aim of the national economy should be to protect the ‘economic independence’ of the nation. To this end, Arias sought to reform economic theory itself, replacing the assumption of the utility-maximising homo economicus by the notion of ‘affectio societatis’ – the merging of wills into a common endeavour.18 Similarly, for Giuseppe Bottai, a leading architect of Italian corporatism, ‘corporatist social justice’ entailed transcending the capitalist logic with a moral principle: solidarity between the classes and the subordination of particular interests to ‘the superior interests of production’ and the moral, economic, and political unity of the nation.19 Bottai also asserted that the state had no duties towards the citizen, perhaps other than the duty to frame the citizen’s participation in the community.20 For Ugo Spirito, perhaps the leading Italian corporatist theorist, liberal private rights of contract and property, although helpful as generally the most expedient way to increase prosperity and productivity, were not absolute but subject to the higher aims of the nation.21 In Portugal the writings of corporatist intellectuals were received enthusiastically. Marcelo Caetano, Portugal’s leading corporatist intellectual and Salazar’s eventual successor, argued that private initiative and property rights were acceptable only to the extent that they would not

16 17 18 19 20 21

Salazar, ‘Ditadura administrativa’, pp. 260–5. Benito Mussolini, ‘Dicorso agli Operai di Milano’, in Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini: Dal gennaio 1934 al 4 novembre 1935, vol. 9 (Milano, 1935), pp. 132–3. O. Ottonelli, ‘Dealing with a Dangerous Golem: Gino Arias’s Corporative Proposal’, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 20 (2013), 1052–3. G. Bottai, ‘Giustizia sociale corporativa [1934]’, in Esperienza corporativa (1929–1934) (Florence, 1934), pp. 135–6. I. Stolzi, ‘Politica sociale e regime fascista: Un’ipotesi di lettura’, Quaderni Fiorentini per la Storia del Pensiero Giuridico Moderno, 46 (2017), 269–70. Stolzi, ‘Idealism and the Fascist Corporative State’, p. 268.

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‘harm, but favour the common good’.22 Manuel Anselmo, a former opponent who turned into a prolific pamphleteer for Salazar’s Estado Novo, echoed these views with a convert’s zeal. For Anselmo, individuals were but ‘particles’ of a nation and, contrary to Rousseau, neither preceded nor were superior to the state, but ‘rather [were] the subject of its ethical and legal determinations’.23 Seen through this prism, social provision arose not from the rights of people, but as concessions from the state in return for – and measured by – the individual’s contribution to the collective good.24 Productivism, or the aim of increasing labour efficiency and output, was also a feature of other welfare regimes being developed at this time, and later.25 But in the fascist approach, this instrumental character was placed prominently to the fore, and Italian Fascism often presented itself as a ‘civilization of work’ (civiltà del lavoro).26 Writing in 1930, Bottai contrasted the ‘pure’ citizen of liberalism and the ‘pure’ worker of socialism with the ‘concrete’, ‘total and complete’ fascist man – a ‘citizen-producer, an ethical and political entity which encompasses its economic and social substance’. The ‘citizenproducer’, for Bottai, ‘always subordinates himself to the national interest’, either ‘spontaneously’ or through the ‘ever watchful intervention of the political authority’.27 The sacralisation of work was not, however, free from ambiguities and contradictions, some of which pitted different conceptions of corporatism against each other. But it is also clear that the grand vision of ‘civilizing’ labour most often translated into its coercive repression. Gagliardi identifies two main visions of the corporativist state in Italy personified in two leading figures: Rocco and Bottai. Alfredo Rocco, rooted in the Italian Nationalist movement, defended a more ambitious and organicist harnessing of property and production in the national interest, a ‘totalitarian corporatism’ where the fascist party was only a transitional instrument towards a fully ‘organic state’ where its functions would be subsumed into the corporations. This vision was in the ascendancy during the early years of the regime, when as Minister of Justice Rocco drafted the 1926 labour laws giving the state full control over labour unions, and swept aside workers’ political rights.28 Soon after, however, the lead would pass to Bottai as under-secretary to Mussolini in the 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

M. Caetano, Problemas na revolução corporativa (Lisbon, 1941), p. 23. M. Anselmo, As ideas sociais e filosóficas do Estado Novo (Porto, 1934), p. 26. C. Giorgi, ‘Le politiche sociali del fascismo’, Studi Storici, 55 (2014), 97. On productivism, see the essays in C. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge, 1988). L. Cerasi, ‘Corporazione e lavoro: Un campo di tensione nel fascismo degli anni trenta’, Studi Storici, 59 (2018), 941–62. G. Bottai, ‘Il regime corporativo: Superamento del regime democratico’ [1930], in Esperienza corporativa, pp. 91–2. Gagliardi, Il corporativismo fascista, pp. 15–16, 35–40.

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Ministry of Corporations. Under Bottai’s leadership the repression of labour continued; but the vision of a state centred around work and the corporations receded, and the aim of coercing capital into the corporatist framework was abandoned. Instead, Bottai focused his efforts on absorbing and shaping labour through propaganda and the expansion of social-welfare institutions.29 Aside from its productivity, population size and ‘quality’, understood in a racialized and eugenicist manner, were also an aim shaping the Italian Fascist welfare intervention. But, at least until the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935, it was less concerned with racial purity than the Third Reich. In Italy, as in Portugal, the new science of eugenics was interpreted mostly (but not exclusively) through the lens of social hygiene and population health, with a lesser emphasis on heredity.30 Alongside a defence of traditional gender hierarchies, these concerns informed an expansion of the state’s family policy, including maternal and infant health. In Italy, the creation in 1925 of the Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia (ONMI, National Agency for Maternity and Infancy) aimed at supporting mothers, particularly the poor and unwed, and providing assistance for infants.31 Portugal followed this model with the creation, in 1936, of the Obra das Mães pela Educação Nacional (OMEN), as well as family allowances and some benefits for large families in 1942.32 In both cases, these institutions were more significant as propaganda gestures than anything else. In Portugal, OMEN retained an essentially educative function, and provided little direct assistance.33 Instead, both regimes sought to redirect women’s efforts and attention to the domestic sphere, and to discourage and relegate women’s paid work to a subordinate position. While there was protective legislation on working conditions for women in industry, until later on (if at all), there was no regulation of working conditions or hours in the agricultural and domestic-service sector, both of which employed the largest number of working women.34 If the fascist logic of justice privileged the modernisation and regeneration of the nation, the fascist state as the conduit of the collective will could decide to allocate rights and distribute resources accordingly. Thus, fascist social 29 30

31 32 33 34

Gagliardi, Il corporativismo fascista, pp. 55–6. V. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, 1992), pp. 53–4; R. Cleminson, Catholicism, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Portugal, 1900–1950 (Budapest, 2014), pp. 251–2. Other authors have argued that racial thinking was more engrained in Italian fascism. See, e.g., F. Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy (Budapest, 2011). De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, pp. 60–1. I. Flunser Pimentel, ‘A assistência social e familiar do Estado Novo nos anos 30 e 40’, Análise Social, 34 (2000), 493–5. Pimentel, ‘A assistência’, 497–8. I. Pavan, ‘Lo stato sociale del fascismo: Continuità, fratture, mediazioni’, in G. Albanese (ed.), Il fascismo italiano: Storia e interpretazioni (Rome, 2021), pp. 221–8.

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legislation compartmentalised populations and directed resources towards the more modern and strategic sectors of the economy and excluded the rural world from many measures. As Pavan has shown, Italian Fascism reinforced and extended the urban-rural inequalities inherited from liberalism, cancelling the entitlement of most rural workers to old-age and disability pensions in 1923. Over the coming years agricultural workers were repeatedly excluded from legislation extending provision, or, when new programmes did apply to the rural world, they were rarely enforced.35 In Portugal, despite the creation of a network of rural ‘People’s Houses’, by the early 1940s only around 10 per cent of these had created mutual insurance funds as intended.36 The strategy of privileging higher productivity sectors was implemented in tandem with a more tactical goal of social pacification, which would reduce social conflict by ‘buying’ the consent of the working class.37 This formed a central plank of fascist propaganda; but in reality, the establishment of compulsory state-controlled unions and collective contracts served primarily to reduce production costs by forcefully lowering industrial wages, outlawing strikes, and making labour mobilisation against the regime nearly impossible.38 This was not compensated for by the redistribution of wealth towards the nation’s worse off in a sustained way, whatever the claims made by the propagandists of both the Italian and Portuguese regimes. If the coverage of social-insurance schemes gradually expanded through the 1930s, these were fully contributory and received minimal or no state funding. In essence, they were enforced savings schemes that did not compensate workers for the suppression of their incomes. Corporatist pension bodies in Portugal were legally obliged to ensure that disbursements were met from subscriptions, meaning that subsidies were meagre, and funds accumulated large surpluses that served as a cheap source of capital for government-led schemes. Such funds were directed towards public debt and low-yielding loans for public projects ranging from railroads to house building, land-reclamation programmes, and even (in the Italian case), overseas colonisation. In addition,

35 36

37

38

Pavan, ‘Lo stato sociale’, pp. 213–15. D. Freire, ‘Estado corporativo em acção: Sociedade rural e construção da rede de Casas do Povo’, in F. Rosas and A. Garrido (eds.), Corporativismo, fascismos, Estado Novo (Coimbra, 2012); A. Garrido, ‘A institucionalização do “social” no Estado Novo português: Previdência corporativa e seguros sociais voluntários’, Estudos Históricos, 31 (2018), 213. See the survey of debates on this issue in C. Giorgi, ‘Politiche sociali e fascismo nel dibattito storiografico’, in P. Mattera (ed.), Momenti del welfare in Italia: Storiografia e percorsi di ricerca (Rome, 2012), pp. 55–64. C. Giorgi, ‘Social Policies in Italian Fascism: Authoritarian Strategies and Social Integration’, Historia Contemporánea, 61 (2019), 913–14; Garrido, ‘A institucionalização’; Stolzi, ‘Politica sociale’, 258.

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existing services consistently underpaid or obstructed claimants.39 With no investment in social insurance, and very limited spending on direct assistance, state expenditure on social transfers remained extremely low in comparative terms until the end of the Second World War.40 The result was a decrease in living standards and an increase in material inequality in both countries. In Portugal, income inequality increased significantly between 1926 and 1942, bringing about a ‘dramatically regressive’ redistribution from wage earners to the owners of capital.41 A survey of recent work in Italy similarly shows a consistent pattern of growing inequality through the Fascist period, accompanied by growing poverty and a worsening of other social indicators of disadvantage, such as malnutrition and infant mortality.42 A Well-Ordered Society A second central feature of the fascist concept of social justice was its essentially anti-egalitarian nature. Fascism was explicitly elitist and hierarchical. The ‘people’ of fascism, for all the apparatus of mobilisation and revolutionary rhetoric, appeared not as the force that was to drive change but as an object to be educated, steered, and integrated.43 Italian Fascists portrayed them as virtuous but disorganised, and as courageous but in need of the order and direction, which was to be provided by Fascist elites and the corporatist state.44 In Portugal, Salazar and the elites of the ‘New State’ repeatedly justified their actions with reference to the ‘demoralisation’ and degeneration of the people, reinforcing the idea of a ‘childlike’ people who needed re-education, moral guidance, and the ‘good governance’ of benevolent elites.45 The regime’s prominent articulation of Portugal’s ‘imperial vocation’ also provided a language that easily slid across colonial and metropolitan boundaries, and the 39

40

41 42 43 44 45

C. Giorgi and I. Pavan, Storia dello stato sociale in Italia (Bologna, 2021), pp. 119–21; J. L. Cardoso and M. M. Rocha, ‘Corporativismo e previdência social (1933–1962)’, Ler História, 45 (2003), 122; Quine, Italy’s Social Revolution, pp. 112, 114. Garrido, ‘A institucionalização’, 213; D. F. Carolo and J. A. Pereirinha, ‘The Development of the Welfare State in Portugal: Trends in Social Expenditure between 1938 and 2003’, Revista de Historia Economica – Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 28 (2010), 469–501. J. Guilera, ‘Income Inequality in Historical Perspective: Portugal (1890–2006)’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Barcelona (2013), pp. 130, 135. G. Gabbuti, ‘“When we were worse off”: The Economy, Living Standards and Inequality in Fascist Italy’, Rivista di Storia Economica, 36 (2020), 287. R. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London, 1993), p. 41. L. Cerasi, ‘They, the People: Italian Fascism and the Ambivalences of Corporative Populism’, Modern Italy, 27 (2022), 19–34. F. Rosas, ‘O salazarismo e o homem novo: Ensaio sobre e Estado Novo e a questão do totalitarismo’, Análise Social, 35 (2001), 1038.

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state’s ‘civilizing mission’ vis-à-vis the Portuguese population became a common reference in the 1930s.46 In Italy this vision could assume an even more explicit racial tinge, especially in debates about the nature of the Italian ‘race’ and how Southern Italians might relate to it.47 This hierarchical view of society implied that justice called for ‘natural’ inequalities to play out by allowing ‘natural’ ability to express itself through the fostering of elites. As Anselmo argued in justifying corporatism in Portugal: ‘Society is a hierarchy.. . . It is that hierarchisation that will create a true elite of workers, industrialists, producers and even of consumers.’48 The great task of national affirmation required that the best minds and the most able leaders assumed the leading role in society.49 This elitism was also reflected in fascism’s concern with renewal through modernisation, and the role of a particular kind of expert: ambitious, nationalist, and virile, creating through sheer force of will and intellect the new nation.50 As Salazar put it, in an eulogy to his Minister of Public Works, ‘woe betide peoples who cannot stand the superiority of their great men!’51 Within this hierarchical framework, fascist social justice exhibited an ambiguous attitude towards equality. Several fascist authors emphasised that fascism or corporatism was based on a substantive equality of citizenship, that is, equality before the law.52 Yet this was never extended to an idea of equality of status, of outcomes, or of living standards. Instead, the term ‘equitable’ (in Italian equo) provided the logic behind distribution, since justice was guided by the degree and importance of the contribution to the common good. This was stated explicitly by Mussolini in a speech to Milan workers in 1934: ‘What does this highest form of social justice mean? It means guaranteed work, an equitable salary, a decent house, it means the possibility of evolving and improving oneself incessantly. That is not enough: it means that the workers must get to know more intimately the production process and to participate in

46 47

48 49 50

51 52

See, e.g., R. M. de Arriaga, Assistência (Lisbon, 1935), p. 210. S. Donati, A Political History of National Citizenship and Identity in Italy, 1861–1950 (Stanford, CA, 2013), p. 175. For an overview, see A. Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London, 2002). Anselmo, As ideas sociais e filosóficas, p. 41. A. J. Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ, 2009), pp. 121–3. A growing literature explores the relationship between fascism and technological modernisation, e.g., L. Camprubí, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (Cambridge, MA, 2014); T. Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (Cambridge, MA, 2016); M. Moraglio, Driving Modernity: Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922–1943 (New York, 2017). Salazar, ‘Na morte de Duarte Pacheco’ [1943], in Discursos e notas políticas, p. 518. See, e.g., Bottai, ‘Giustizia sociale corporativa’ [1934], in Esperienza corporativa, p. 135.

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its necessary discipline.’53 In one of his major speeches laying out the foundations of the regime, Salazar had stated that an obsession with equality had caused a ‘downward levelling’, contrary to ‘the fact of natural inequalities, and to the legitimate and necessary hierarchy of a well-ordered society’.54 Caetano expanded on the question in an essay in 1941: while socialism preached equality, ‘since men have different aptitudes, and if these could develop freely, it is clear that soon great inequalities will appear’. The Communist answer to this was a ‘forced equality, which disregards natural differences’. The corporatist response, by contrast, ‘would ensure the equitable distribution of earnings between those who contribute to production, and the fair price of products’.55 The Estado Novo consequently claimed that natural hierarchies would be fair (and productive) if education and advancement was equally open to all.56 Spirito summarised this perspective when defending hierarchy as the synthesis between the principles of aristocracy and democracy: ‘in a hierarchy, effectively, all govern, but the better more so and the worse less so, each according to their capacity and in their sphere, strictly linked to others within a single organism’. As such, ‘equality loses all its materialistic character’, instead being governed by correspondence to a function.57 Order, organisation, and hierarchy were therefore the motto of the corporatist state, where ‘everyone has his place, every social category has its function recognised and guaranteed’, wrote Bottai.58 Social justice meant a ‘more equitable and rational distribution’ of the products of land and labour, ‘proportional to the political, spiritual, civic and economic potential of each individual’.59 Even in sectors covered by welfare legislation, entitlement tended to reflect status rather than need, and the aim was more one of differentiation than redistribution. As the preamble to the regulation of social-insurance bodies in Portugal made clear, the regime rejected ‘egalitarian solutions for the whole of the population’ that did not take into account ‘the economic and social differences that so profoundly distinguish the real life of the nation from the statistical aggregation of individuals’. Instead, it defended an intervention adapted to

53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Mussolini, ‘Discorso agli operai di Milano’ [1934], in Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini, p. 129. Salazar, ‘Princípios fundamentais da revolução corporativa’ [1930], in Discursos e notas políticas, p. 73. Caetano, Problemas da revolução corporativa, pp. 14, 16–17. Salazar, ‘Prefácio à 4a edição’ [1948], in Discursos e notas políticas, p. 16. U. Spirito, Capitalismo e corporativismo, 3rd ed. (Florence, 1934), p. 57. Bottai, ‘Il regime corporativo: Superamento del regime democratico’ [1930], in Esperienza corporativa, pp. 92–3. G. E. Pistolese, cited in F. Amore Bianco, ‘Il mito della “civiltà del lavoro” nel dibattito culturale del fascismo durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale’, Rivista Formazione Lavoro Persona, 6 (2016), 12.

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‘natural groupings, with needs, living conditions and economic potential that are clearly distinct’.60 Pedagogy and Exclusion Given a nationalistic understanding of ‘social justice’, welfare institutions were also tools to mould the citizen and remake the nation. In both Italy and Portugal, fascists acknowledged that the ‘organic state’ was still under construction. Until this task was complete, the state – reformed but not yet reborn – would have to carry out a comprehensive pedagogical function, willing ‘natural’ corporations into being, executing a ceaseless propaganda, and, if necessary, exerting coercion in order to bring about the fascist ‘new man’.61 Welfare institutions were therefore part of the renewal and regeneration of the nation – economically, morally, and physically.62 They would reach into the heart of the nation, creating order where previously had been only ‘disorder’, raising the worker ‘spiritually’, as well as showing through deeds of the superiority of the regime – indeed, manufacturing consent. In his writings in the 1930s, Bottai repeatedly invoked this pedagogical function: the question of distribution could be resolved not by simply addressing the material conditions of a worker but only by ‘bringing to the highest level his moral tone’, which would be achieved by his full participation ‘in the Nation, the firm, the union, the corporation, in the State’.63 Echoing an emphasis on the health of the physical body, Bottai called this a gimnastica sindicale (‘union gymnastics’), through which workers would come to understand that corporatism was not just a means to appease social conflict, but a ‘new economic order’ to be embraced with a ‘free spirit and a sincere heart’.64 Such social ‘gymnastics’ were ingrained in a system where work and the other spheres of life would become a ‘public experience’: joining a union, carrying and displaying the membership card, and submitting oneself to the questions and inspections of officials was to be part of the life of a state with totalising ambitions. But, aside from the relationship to the nation mediated by the state, the ‘natural’ associations and bonds that these initiatives sought to foster in the (male) worker were those of family, his work, and his economic sector. The worker should look across to his immediate comrades – fishermen, metal workers, for example – and upwards, to managers, the firm, and 60 61 62 63 64

Presidência do Conselho, ‘Decreto no. 25:935’, Diário do Governo, I Série, 237, 12 Oct. 1935, 1466. Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals, p. 121; Stolzi, ‘Idealism and the Fascist Corporative State’, p. 265; Rosas, ‘O salazarismo e o homem novo’, 1031–54. Stolzi, ‘Politica sociale e regime fascista’, p. 258. Bottai, ‘Giustizia sociale corporativa’, in Esperienza corporativa, p. 136. Bottai, ‘Ai lavoratori’ [1931] in Esperienza corporativa, pp. 509–10.

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ultimately the state for support and solidarity. He was not, however, meant to look to the ‘working class’ as a whole, and the way in which fascist unions and their welfare institutions were segregated by occupation can be seen as a form of fostering segmented identities and solidarities, instead of the more threatening horizontal ones of class.65 The ambition of fostering new, loyal identities was also the aim of the organisations developed by both states to administer workers’ leisure time. Just as the corporatist unions separated the worker from the dangers of free labour, so the Fascist regime’s Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (National Afterwork Club) and the Portuguese Fundação Nacional para a Alegria no Trabalho (FNAT, National Foundation for Joy in Work) attempted to supplant working-class sociabilities by organising holidays, sports events, and youth activities.66 Similar ambitions to reform heart and mind were behind the creation of organisations aimed at youth and women. Thus, the Estado Novo’s Minister for National Education, Carneiro Pacheco, sought to create an ‘integrated educational system’, which would encompass religious, civic, nationalist, aesthetic, and physical education with the aim of fostering a ‘new mentality’.67 While similar pedagogical functions were not absent from social policy in non-authoritarian countries in the interwar period, the fascist regimes were distinctive in this ambition to establish a monopoly over the organisation of social life.68 Fascist welfare had to suppress the autonomy and viability of preexisting welfare organisations and was especially brutal towards workers’ autonomous welfare organisations. Prior to Salazar’s Estado Novo, the limitations of public welfare in Portugal had to some extent been compensated for by a network of mutual societies in the country’s largest cities. Focusing on medical insurance, and often small and undercapitalised, these were nonetheless for many the best hope of accessing health services in times of need. By 1931 gross membership rates in these mutual societies stood at around half of the urban population, including a surprising proportion of women, especially in working-class neighbourhoods.69 By 1934, however, Salazar’s regime had begun to exercise political control over the mutual societies by integrating them into the corporativist social-insurance system, which contributed to their 65 66

67 68 69

Gagliardi, Il corporativismo fascista, p. 49. V. De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organisation of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981), p. 10; N. Domingos, ‘Desproletarizar: A FNAT como instrumento de mediação ideológica no Estado Novo’, in V. Pereira (ed.), O Estado Novo em questão (Lisbon, 2010), pp. 165–96. I. Flunser Pimentel, A cada um o seu lugar: A política feminina do Estado Novo (Lisbon, 2011), p. 210. De Grazia, The Culture of Consent, p. 23. Pereira, ‘As Origens’, pp. 52–7; V. Baptista, ‘Participação feminina no movimento mutualista: Do final da monarquia ao Estado Novo’, Ler História, 62 (2012), 31–51.

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decline.70 In Fascist Italy, the national federation of independent mutual-aid societies was forcefully merged into the corporativist framework in 1925. Autonomous mutual-aid societies consequently declined in number, even if paternalistic schemes operated by employers were tolerated, while new schemes run by approved unions surged in number, resulting in a highly segmented, inefficient, and limited system of health insurance.71 Dismantling workers’ mutual associations fulfilled several functions. Alongside the repression of political opposition and free trade unionism, it was also intended to steer the population towards the new state-controlled institutions. Paul Corner has called this a ‘carrot and stick’ game: benefits were provided to those who conformed and followed the rules, excluding those who were considered difficult, suspicious, or contrary.72 In this way, many were confronted by a non-choice: submitting to the state’s control or being left with little or no support. Exclusion was therefore one of the operative modes of fascist welfare intervention. In some respects, it was also a pedagogical tool, guiding the population more or less forcefully towards approved behaviours. In others it could take a darker hue of excision from society. In the first mode, the exclusion of women from various welfare entitlements and professions went hand in hand with the creation of women’s organisations and allowances reinforcing women’s domestic and familial role. Both Mussolini and Salazar declared that work defeminised women and threatened the institution of the family.73 While some protective legislation was passed for women who did work, limiting hours and setting minimum wages, these were patchily enforced, and wage floors for women were lower than those for men.74 Where benefits were extended, such as maternity leave and allowances, they again tended to reinforce the maternal role.75 In the empires controlled by both countries, exclusion was the norm. Colonial subjects were largely excluded from social security and other welfare institutions that were, at best, open only to European settlers and officials.76 The racial dimension of fascist corporatist welfare was also evident, of course, in the anti-Semitic legislation brought in by the Italian state in the latter half of the 1930s: even before the forced deportations of Italian Jews during the war, 70

71 72 73 74 75 76

P. Guibentif, ‘Génese da previdência social: Elementos sobre as origens da segurança social portuguesa e suas ligações com o corporativismo’, Ler História, 5 (1985), 27–58; Garrido, ‘A institucionalização do “social”’, 209. Giorgi and Pavan, Storia dello stato sociale, pp. 149, 155. P. Corner, ‘Fascismo e controllo sociale’, Italia Contemporanea, 228 (2002), 399. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, p. 173; Pimentel, A cada um, pp. 33–6. Pavan, ‘Lo stato sociale del fascismo’, p. 221. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, p. 178. Pavan, ‘Lo stato sociale del fascismo’, pp. 228–32; S. Coghe, Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (Cambridge, 2022).

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the 1938 race laws barring Jews from public employment and other professions cut off many from insurance and benefits. Pensions were given only to those with more than ten years of service, and, from 1939, Jews were excluded from new marriage and maternity allowances.77 Others, including the Roma people, ‘vagrants’, and often simply the unemployed, were increasingly excluded or channelled into carceral institutions as subjects whose reeducation required a firmer hand.78 Many others, oppositionists or simply undesirables, were subject to deportations, violence, and assassinations. Violence was used more sparingly in Portugal and Italy than in Franco’s Spain or Hitler’s Germany; yet its selective and targeted use should be interpreted as an integral element of the fascist system of rule. Violence was the other face of a conception of ‘social justice’ that was built not on the rights and dignity of the individual but on the channelling of collective energies towards the nation. Part pedagogical, it was also surgical: those deemed to be irretrievable became the objects of the harshest, even annihilating, violence.79 That said, the control exercised by corporatist welfare institutions was never total. As a number of studies have shown, they could be circumvented, manipulated, and even subverted by those whom they sought to mould.80 There were infrastructural limits checking the totalising ambitions of both regimes, including a shortage of finance and personnel, which curbed the reach and effectiveness of the state. But there were also political limits, and both regimes found ways to accommodate the interests and autonomy of business elites and institutions such as the Catholic Church.81 Conclusions Understanding fascist corporatist ‘social justice’ not only helps us understand these regimes, but also begins to ask how these institutions shaped the later evolution of welfare provision in Southern Europe up to the present day. Moreover, as many of these countries experience a resurgence of nationalist

77 78

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Giorgi and Pavan, Storia dello stato sociale, p. 187. P. Trevisan, ‘“Gypsies” in Fascist Italy: From Expelled Foreigners to Dangerous Italians’, Social History, 42 (2017), 342–64; S. Pereira Bastos, O Estado Novo e os seus vadios: Contribuições para o estudo das identidades marginais e a sua repressão (Lisbon, 1997). M. R. Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (Cambridge, 2011), p. 265; J. Madeira, L. Farinha, and I. Flunser Pimentel (eds.), Vítimas de Salazar: Estado Novo e violência política (Lisbon, 2007). See, for instance, P. Corner, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford, 2012); P. Ramos Pinto, ‘“Everyday Citizenship” under Authoritarianism: The Cases of Spain and Portugal’, in F. Cavatorta (ed.), Civil Society Activism under Authoritarian Rule: A Comparative Perspective (Abingdon, 2012), pp. 13–33. M. Tenconi, ‘Il mondo cattolico e la politica sociale del fascismo’, Nuova Storia Contemporanea, 15 (2011), 36–7.

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far-right movements and parties, echoes of the notions of nationalism, order, and community that underpinned fascist ‘social justice’ have resurfaced in political rhetoric. The sheer longevity of the Portuguese dictatorship from the 1920s to the 1970s meant that, even as it evolved, the welfare system retained many of the traits inscribed in the foundational period of the 1930s and 1940s. Even as Salazar’s successor Marcelo Caetano embarked on an extensive reform of the welfare system in the late 1960s, attempting to re-legitimise the regime by creating a ‘social state’, the underlying corporatist structure was not erased. And while the Portuguese Revolution of 1974–5 brought about a fundamental overhaul of political principles, the more egalitarian and democratic welfare system it ushered in supplemented rather than replaced the arrangements inherited from the former regime.82 In Italy, too, the post-war Republic retained the architecture and many of the institutions of the deposed regime, while Italian Christian Democracy ensured the continuity of corporatist ideas, now repackaged in more democratic form.83 In addition, the differentiated, hierarchised systems inherited from the fascist regimes were hard to erase. Sectors that had been privileged for economic or political reasons continued to enjoy expensive entitlements subsidised by the state, sometimes protected by labour unions wary of losing the support of workers in those sectors.84 In contrast, more general social-security provision remained limited, contributing to a dualized or tiered system that disadvantages less skilled and precarious workers. Similarly, the family has endured as a key part of the welfare system. These features are part of what, from the 1990s, social-policy scholars have come to define as the ‘Mediterranean model of welfare’. Initially attributed to a particular Southern European ‘culture’ or stage of development, such characteristics are increasingly recognised as the long-lasting legacies of authoritarian welfare systems.85 Finally, since the end of the twentieth century Europe has seen the reemergence of populist ideologies of the far right. Many such parties have genealogies than can be traced back to fascist or neo-fascist movements. It is 82

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M. Lucena, ‘Transformações do estado português nas suas relações com a sociedade civil’, Análise Social, 17 (1982), 897–926; P. Ramos Pinto, ‘The Estado Novo and the Making of Portugal’s Unequal Modernity’, in F. Bethencourt (ed.), Inequality in the Portuguese-Speaking World: Global and Historical Perspectives (Brighton, 2018), pp. 112–13. Giorgi and Pavan, Storia dello stato sociale, p. 209. A. Cherubini, Dalla libertà all’obbligo: La previdenza sociale fra Giolitti e Mussolini (Milano, 1998), pp. 452–3. M. García and N. Karakatsanis, ‘Social Policy, Democracy, and Citizenship in Southern Europe’, in R. Gunther, P. N. Diamandouros, and D. A. Sotiropoulos (eds.), Democracy and the State in the New Southern Europe (Oxford, 2006), pp. 87–137; V. Fargion, M. Jessoula, and M. Ferrera, Alle radici del welfare all’italiana: Origini e futuro di un modello sociale squilibrato (Venice, 2012).

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noticeable that following a long period when the far-right, especially when reduced to ultra-violent groupuscles, tended to put forward a libertarian and individualist critique of welfare, the new European populist right of recent decades has embraced a welfarist rhetoric.86 This turn to welfare is, however, deeply enmeshed within a strong nationalist ideology reminiscent of interwar fascism that sees social policy as a tool of national regeneration, allied to xenophobic and racist worldviews to produce what political scientists have called ‘welfare chauvinism’.87 Like fascist corporatism, far-right populism draws on the idea of a supposed homogenous national community, as well as catastrophist narratives of demographic ‘replacement’, articulating welfare as both a right for ‘true’ citizens and a tool to restore their dominance. Abhorrent as it might be, we ignore the appeal of this alternative framing of ‘social justice’ at our peril.

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A. Afonso and L. Rennwald, ‘Social Class and the Changing Welfare State Agenda of Radical Right Parties in Europe’, in P. Manow, B. Palier, and H. Schwander (eds.), Welfare Democracies and Party Politics: Explaining Electoral Dynamics in Times of Changing Welfare Capitalism (Oxford, 2018), p. 172. For an overview of the debate on ‘welfare chauvinism’, see R. Careja and E. Harris, ‘Thirty Years of Welfare Chauvinism Research: Findings and Challenges’, Journal of European Social Policy, 32 (2022), 212–24. See also Chapter 8 in this volume.

6

Social Justice in Authoritarian Central Europe Czechoslovakia under Nazism and Communism Radka Šustrová

Throughout the twentieth century, conceptions of social justice took shape within particular national histories of state development. This chapter’s starting point is the observation that notions of social justice in Europe were not confined to democracies. People who lived under authoritarian regimes also expressed needs, hopes, and expectations of social justice. Although not everyone was able to or wanted to articulate their views openly, many believed in the legitimacy of their claims and developed various strategies to defend individual and collective interests, often in response to the ideological promises made by authoritarian states. As Samuel Moyn has argued, ‘today few would countenance authoritarian welfare – even though authoritarians helped birth the welfare state’.1 They not only stood at the advent of the welfare state, but they also demonstrated how the provision of welfare could be combined with the restriction of political rights.2 Apart from their profoundly unequal policies of racial and political persecution, both National Socialism and Communism consciously sought to distribute social rights among particular social groups and in doing so create a cohesive community. For a large section of the population, discourses and policies of social justice were, therefore, not simply propaganda, but often evidence of the serious intent of these regimes to transform society. The reality was, of course, more complex. Already in the Weimar Republic, National Socialists had advocated redistributive policies as a strategy to incorporate workers into a solidaristic national society.3 Similarly, the adoption by New Order movements in inter-war and wartime Europe of a discourse of social

This study was conducted as a part of the project entitled ‘Women’s Labour Activism in Authoritarian Regimes: Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria, 1938–1968,’ funded by the British Academy Newton International Fellowship. I would especially like to thank the editors of this volume, who helped improve this essay. 1 S. Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, 2019), p. 10. 2 B. Deacon, ‘Social Justice and Citizenship in Eastern Europe’, in Bob Deacon (ed.), Social Policy, Social Justice and Citizenship in Eastern Europe (Aldershot, 1992), p. 6. 3 A. Kedar, ‘National Socialism before Nazism: From Friedrich Naumann to the “Ideas of 1914”’, History of Political Thought, 34 (2013), 326.

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justice has often been dismissed as an opportunistic tactic, deployed to attract supporters and seize power.4 Movements of the political Left were also ambiguous in their usage of conceptions of social justice. Karl Marx, for example, rarely used the term ‘justice’ and never developed it in theory or in practice.5 Once National Socialist and Communist regimes came into power, however, they maintained or introduced instruments that suggested an intention to bring about a particular conception of social justice. Rather than exploring the internal coherence of the ideologies of authoritarian regimes, this chapter seeks to illustrate from the bottom up the role that social justice played in establishing and maintaining authoritarian rule in twentieth-century Europe. In what follows I shall therefore explore how notions of social justice that encompassed both the ‘social question’ and labour relations in a wider sense were included in the social practice of the regimes, and how the working population responded to these policies. The forms and practices of authoritarian regimes in Europe varied significantly from territory to territory. This chapter will concentrate on Czechoslovakia under National Socialism and state socialism, where the institutions of the welfare state, broadly defined as bodies dealing with the provision of social services and with labour relations, operated without significant breaks throughout the twentieth century, including during the six years of German occupation of Czech lands from 1939 to 1945. The Nazi ‘supervisory administration’ discovered that it could not create an order based solely on their radical nationalist and racist ideas. As a consequence, they allowed the local non-German populations who were not Jewish or Roma in origin to participate in and benefit from social-welfare provisions.6 After 1945, with the establishment of state socialism, socialist ideals were transformed into state doctrine, placing social equality at the very centre of a radical socialist transformation. Whereas the Nazis made efforts to gain public support by strengthening social-welfare provisions for selected national and ethnic groups, the Communists granted social rights to society at large while restricting political and civic rights. In both cases, the authoritarian governments created such a dense social safety net that, for the most part, even opponents, critics, and dissidents did not fall through it. By analysing legal disputes, this chapter explores the critical space between rulers and ruled to assess when and how notions of social justice were articulated in Czechoslovakia. The working population believed that their

4 5 6

See Chapter 5 in this volume. G. E. McCarthy, Marx and Social Justice: Ethics and Natural Law in the Critique of Political Economy (Leiden, 2018), p. 7. Elaborated in R. Šustrová, Zastřené počátky sociálního státu: Sociální politika a nacionalismus v Protektorátu Čechy a Morava (Prague, 2020).

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expectations from those in power to deliver social justice would be met regardless of whether they were supporters of the regime. Therefore, unlike ‘criminal’ cases, which were very much linked to the persecution of Jews, Roma, and political opponents, and which sought to bring about the social and economic exclusion or physical destruction of these groups, the analysis of labour relationships and employment disputes provides insights into the process of what one might describe as ‘social justice in the making’. Both the Nazi and Communist regimes relied on the legal and judicial system, and retained many institutions that defended and provided employees’ rights, including trade unions and public insurance companies. In doing so, they led the population to believe that it was possible to obtain justice, even if the reality was often different. Authoritarian governments did not adopt policies of social justice out of simple generosity. Social welfare served as an instrument for the Nazi and Communist regimes to exercise social control. Participation in the system was meant to educate and discipline the population through adopting the language and argumentative structures of the official institutions. But this was a two-way process. When citizens sought to assert their rights through the existing institutions, the state had to articulate what justice and merit meant. In this chapter, social justice is therefore not understood as having a fixed meaning but rather approached as a highly malleable notion that was continuously re-negotiated between the state and the people. Building on Alf Lüdtke’s notion of Eigensinn (self-assertion), which centres on exploring an individual’s own self, including their assumptions, thoughts, behaviours, practices, actions, and omissions in a particular historical situation, this chapter investigates workers’ visions of social justice and their adaptability to authoritarian order.7 The chapter has three sections. First, I will outline the welfare-state principles and the institutions that were meant to implement different conceptions of social justice under Nazism and Communism. The second section focuses on the National Socialist regime in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, discussing the limits of welfare justice and its institutionalisation through trade unions, social insurance, and labour courts. The third section, finally, deals with the strategies people utilised to claim social justice when faced with employment discrimination in state-socialist Czechoslovakia, while also placing the Czechoslovak case within the broader transnational framework of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe.

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A. Lüdtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg, 1993); Eigensinn und Altagsgeschichte: Ein Gespräch von Kornelia Kończal mit Alf Lüdtke und Thomas Lindenberger (2018), available at eigensinn.hypotheses.org/ 69.

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Social Justice through Authoritarian Welfare The continuing existence of a legal framework within authoritarian regimes is not surprising. In his famous analysis of the ‘dual state’ (Doppelstaat), Ernst Fraenkel distinguished between normative and prerogative measures in Nazi Germany, pointing out how the legal structure remained in place after the Nazis seized power.8 Existing regulations remained valid, but the state introduced purpose-oriented rules that were unrestrained by the law. Fraenkel’s concept of a dual structure is not limited to Nazi Germany and has also been applied to the Soviet Union.9 Michal Kopeček, for example, has demonstrated the existence of ‘rudiments’ of the socialist rule of law, much as National Socialism was characterised by ‘remnants’ of the normative state (Rechtsstaat).10 Study of social justice therefore requires attention to both sides of this phenomenon: law and executive practice. Both the German occupiers and the state-socialist regime put labour front and centre in response to the failures of the previous regimes. The revaluation of manual labour and the significance attached to industrial workers in the public discourse of these regimes were characteristic features of this. The right as well as the obligation to work were embedded in everyday practices to achieve full employment and build well-ordered societies. While National Socialism based its policies on racist and nationalist norms, Communist ideals promoted the notion of social egalitarianism. However, despite their significant differences in terms of objectives, practices, and the levels of violence that accompanied their policies, both regimes were products of their time. They both responded to the shortcomings of inter-war liberalism and to the high levels of social inequality in Europe. Accordingly, they used a language of social justice to appeal to the people, though they rooted this language within different understandings of who was entitled to such justice. Both regimes therefore promoted a model of distributive justice, but they differed markedly in how they conceived of it. National Socialism was characterised by its highly exclusionary policies that led to social redistribution only among members of the national-racial community, defined by the notion of Volksgemeinschaft (national community). Instead of drawing on the notion that individuals possessed ‘rights’, the Nazis favoured the idea of ‘entitlement’ 8

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E. Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (New York, 1941); further elaborated in J. Meierhenrich, The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law (Oxford, 2018). R. Sharlet, ‘Stalinism and Soviet Legal Culture’, in R. C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York, 1977), pp. 155–79. M. Kopeček, ‘Was There a Socialist Rechtsstaat in Late Communist East Central Europe? The Czechoslovak Case in a Regional Context’, Journal of Modern European History, 18 (2020), 296.

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to a better life within the national community.11 They did so because the language of entitlements shielded them from the legal enforcement of social rights. The guiding ideal was consequently one of social harmony between employers and employees. Richard Bargel, a Nazi theoretician and head of the Information Office of the Labour Research Institute, for example, emphasised the ‘application of flexible management methods’ that were intended to achieve agreement between employer and employee for the benefit of the German nation.12 While this corporatist arrangement was supposed to be based on equality between the different parties, in practice this equality was subverted by the ‘leadership principle’, which created a strict hierarchy of leaders. At the same time, the regime sought to remove social tensions through the establishment of the German Labour Front, which replaced both the preexisting trade unions as well as the employers’ associations. With the passing of the Act on the Regulation of National Labour in 1934, freely negotiated collective labour agreements were replaced by government regulation.13 Membership of the Volksgemeinschaft depended on race, nationality, and work performance. ‘The obligation to work is the precondition to belonging to a national community’, German Labour Front experts concluded during a conference that took place in March 1944 in Bad Salzbrunn (SzczawnoZdrój), located in German-occupied Poland. ‘On the other hand, the right to work allows every member of the nation to free himself from constant existential insecurity.. . . An individual’s entitlement to social security arises from his fulfilled obligation regardless of independent or non-independent employment, social status, income, and benefits system. The right to a fair wage for all work also corresponds to the obligation to work.’14 This remained, however, largely wishful thinking. The German Labour Front, which championed radical social reforms, including egalitarian old-age pensions, was simply not in a position throughout the war to bring about such a regime.15 In its place, other understandings of social justice came to the fore. In their search for a model that would interlink their notions of national and social justice, the National Socialists deployed the term ‘social honour’ (soziale Ehre), which they placed at the centre of national-socialist thinking. When an employment contract was subject to a dispute, the Social Court of Honour

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All-Union Archive of the Czech-Moravian Confederation of Trade Unions (ČMKOS), National Employee’s Trade Union Collection (NOÚZ Coll.), Carton 236. R. Bargel, Neue deutsche Sozialpolitik (Berlin, 1944), p. 51. Reich Law Bulletin I (RGBl. I), 1934, p. 45ff. Federal Archives Berlin, German Labour Front – Institute of Labour Science Collection, Sign NS 5-VI, Archive Number 30988. R. Smelser, ‘Die Sozialplannung der Deutschen Arbeitsfront’, in M. Prinz and R. Zitelmann (eds.), Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt, 1991), p. 74.

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(Soziales Ehrengericht) was responsible for ruling on the case. In Nazi Germany, Social Courts of Honour existed alongside traditional Labour Courts, which were partially deprived of their influence.16 The regime portrayed the Social Court of Honour as an expression of a more advanced stage of the laws governing labour relations because it was supposed to enforce not only the ‘written’ but also the ‘unwritten’ laws of National Socialism by applying the principles of Nazi doctrine to individual cases.17 To restore harmony in a workplace community (Betriebsgemeinschaft) within which there had been a dispute, a so-called Trustee of Labour was expected to institute a court case and chair the proceedings.18 Social Courts of Honour could remove the leader of an enterprise from the work community for violating the principle of ‘social honour’.19 Both managers and employees were keen to emphasise the extent to which they followed this basic principle to eliminate either an ‘abuse of their position of power’ or ‘carelessly unfounded complaints or requests’.20 As a result, managers were at least in theory threatened with the prospect of losing control over their plant and their employees, while workers with grievances started to depend heavily on the Trustee of Labour’s decision. The Nazis therefore exercised a strict control over labour relations, and there was little that an employee could do beyond turning to the labour court as a last resort in case of unfair treatment. Here too, however, political intervention by the regime was the rule rather than the exception. By contrast, left-socialist political forces in inter-war Europe leaned towards establishing a new order through the abolition of pre-existing social hierarchies. Developing across Europe since the late nineteenth century, they varied in their political goals, but their ideal of a socially just society was similar. In Central Europe, the Austrian Social Democratic Party played a key role in contesting the social inequality within the Habsburg Empire. In the Hainfeld Programme of 1888/9, Social Democrats stated that they strove for ‘liberation from the chains of economic dependency, eliminating political lawlessness and elevation from mental deprivation for the entire population, regardless of nationality, race or sex’.21 However, after 1918, the paths of the various national social democratic parties within the former Austro-Hungarian

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K. Falk, Soziale Ehrengerichtsbarkeit (Berlin, 1936); W. Nagel, Soziale und ständische Ehrengerichtsbarkeit: Ein Beitrag zum deutschen Ehrenrecht (Berlin, 1938). Bargel, Neue deutsche Sozialpolitik, p. 65. H. U. Thamer, ‘Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft unterm Hakenkreuz’, www.bpb.de/geschichte/ nationalsozialismus/dossier-nationalsozialismus/39551/wirtschaft-und-gesellschaft. E. Hamburger, ‘The German Labour Front’, Monthly Labor Review, 59 (November 1944), 939. RGBl. I, 1934, p. 50, here §36. See the programmatic principles of the Hainfeld Party Congress 1888/9, available at rotbewegt. at/#/epoche/einst-jetzt/artikel/das-programm-von-hainfeld-1888-1889.

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Empire diverged, and their political power decreased when Communist parties started to spread around Europe after the Russian Revolution. While social democrats transformed into parties that supported the existing constitutional order, Communists replaced them as a revolutionary political force. In the spirit of Marx’s radical humanism and egalitarianism, the Communists’ notion of justice always contained at its core a claim to social justice. This found its expression at the legal level too. After the First World War, ‘Comrades’ Courts’, also known as workers’ or disciplinary courts, were introduced in some industries in Soviet Russia. Headed by workers without formal legal training, the courts assessed strikes, cases of theft in the workplace, and instances of absenteeism. These courts became more popular among workers than the pre-existing coercive organs of the state. As Lewis H. Sieglebaum has observed, defendants and plaintiffs appeared before the courts as people with individual cases and life stories.22 Later, as part of the Soviet criminal law reform in 1959, Comrades’ Courts took on some judicial functions as non-professional tribunals. They were intended to be an instrument of persuasion, rather than coercion. The hearings were consequently informal and aimed to show the offender the error of their ways and to strengthen Communist morality.23 The closest to this institutional form of justice in Czechoslovakia were ‘local people’s courts’, which existed only between 1961 and 1970. Dealing with misdemeanours, minor offences, and selected civil-law matters, they were an expression of the ways in which the regime sought to include the population within its judicial structures.24 Authoritarian, Communist welfare states emerged both in Soviet Russia as well as in the Central and Eastern European countries that belonged to its sphere of influence. After the Stalinization of the local Communist parties, the state became effectively the only employer in post-war Eastern and Central Europe: its dominance grew and labour relations were used as a means of coercion. At the same time, this process of state expansion also meant that the state took on an increasing number of obligations, most notably by promising to deliver social-status equality and fair wages. The achievement of full equality was regarded as a gradual process that would, over time, result in

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L. H. Sieglebaum, ‘Defining and Ignoring Labor Discipline in the Early Soviet Period: The Comrades Disciplinary Courts, 1918–1922’, Slavic Review, 51 (1992), 716. H. J. Berman and J. W. Spindler, ‘Soviet Comrades’ Courts’, Washington Law Review, 38 (1963), 847. On the employment of Comrade Courts in Bulgaria, see U. Brunnbauer, ‘Making Bulgarians Socialist: The Fatherland Front in Communist Bulgaria, 1944–1989’, East European Politics and Societies, 22 (2008), 44–79. Collection of Czechoslovak Law and Regulations, Act No. 38/1961 Coll. on local people’s courts (18 Apr. 1961). Further analysed in J. Špergl, ‘Místní lidové soudy jako fenomén doby v teorii a praxi’, Právněhistorické studie, 49 (2019), 189–210.

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the distribution of resources ‘according to need’.25 To bring this about was not, however, a straightforward process. Unlike in capitalism, socialist legal labour relationships were supposed to eliminate the antagonism between employer and employee. That, however, did not mean eliminating all labour disputes. Legal theorists believed that conflicts could be overcome only once citizens’ material and cultural needs were completely fulfilled. Until then, it was necessary to tolerate the efforts of both individuals and groups to satisfy their respective needs, which might run counter to socialist principles.26 Labour disputes brought to the courts by individual citizens based on a claim to entitlement to pay, leave, or compensation or to contest the termination of their employment contract were therefore deemed to be acceptable. Collective labour disputes, on the contrary, were less common and could exist only between two different state organisations, such as between two trade unions. Consequently, the pre-existing labour courts in Eastern Bloc countries were transformed into various types of conciliation bodies, even though they were still formally considered to be judicial institutions. National Welfare and Labour Relations Social welfare was a powerful instrument of Nazi dominance in Germanoccupied Europe. It consisted of various forms of material support for members of the Volksgemeinschaft, based on their employment or family status. In some occupied societies, however, the provision of welfare was not limited to the German population only. The Nazis promised the prospect of national and ethnic homogenisation in different countries within the German sphere of influence, and they often linked that project to notions of social redistribution. In Czechoslovakia, they therefore maintained in operation the pre-existing social welfare and social-insurance institutions as well as labour and social-insurance courts. In return, the German occupation authorities expanded their influence over these institutions, controlled employment policy, and organised policies of material redistribution based on national and racial principles. Hence, non-Jewish and non-Roma Czechs and Slovaks remained recipients of public welfare as members of their respective ‘national communities’ as defined by the German occupiers. After the Anschluss of March 1938, the Reich legal code, along with the Social Court of Honour for labour disputes, was extended to Austrian

25 26

N. Rogers, ‘Lenin’s Misreading of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme’, Journal of Global Faultlines, 4 (2018), 95–109. K. Witz, Československé pracovní právo: Vysokoškolská učebnice (Prague, 1967), p. 373.

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territory.27 This gave those Austrians considered to be members of the ‘Aryan race’ the opportunity to claim social benefits and allowances that were only available for Volksgemeinschaft members.28 This was never extended in an equivalent way to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, set up by the Nazis following the German invasion of March 1939 and the crushing of the Czechoslovak Republic, as well as in the German satellite state of Slovakia. The Czech and Slovak authorities, however, strove to copy the existing Nazi institutions, for instance, by creating national and labour communities of their own, but without direct German support.29 This was accompanied by a deepening sense of mutual Czech-Slovak animosity and the creation of two separate national units. This hostility found its expression in the way in which both entities sought to amplify the protection of the rights of their own citizens, especially in the field of labour law. For instance, in June 1940, the Czech industrial plant in Dubnica nad Váhom, in Western Slovakia, a part of Škoda Group, was put under pressure by the Slovak government when they refused to expel the Czech workers who represented the majority of employed skilled workers. In this way, creating new jobs for Slovak employees offered a mechanism for demonstrating the government’s newly gained responsibility for their citizens. After twenty years of shared Czechoslovak statehood, the two new regimes needed to put together quickly a fully functional national network of welfare institutions to gain popular legitimacy.30 Both the Czech and Slovak authorities – whose position depended on the goodwill of the Germans – were willing to contribute to the German war effort by making local workers available. In practical terms, this meant the introduction of Nazi tools to control the workforce and the distribution of labour, including the establishment of ‘labour offices’ and the use of ‘workbooks’ (Arbeitsbücher), containing records of a worker’s employment. In Slovakia, the labour offices, which were part of the Ministry of the Interior, fully replaced trade-union activities.31 After the economic depression of the 1930s, an employment contract had great value and the population regarded it as a ticket for accessing the social-insurance system. This also applied to those who left for work in Nazi Germany, for whom fixed-term employment contracts ran ‘until the end of the war’. Each Czech worker got a brochure on ‘social-political lessons’ that provided a departure checklist and summarised 27 28

29 30 31

Collection of Law for the Land of Austria 1938–1940, Act No. 58/1938 Coll., p. 107, and Act No. 572/1938 Coll., p. 3004. H. Obinger, ‘War Preparation, Warfare, and the Welfare State in Austria’, in H. Obinger, K. Petersen, and P. Starke (eds.), Warfare and Welfare: Military Conflict and Welfare State Development in Western Countries (Oxford, 2018), pp. 87–91. E.g., Slovak Code, Act No. 70/1942 Sl. Z. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office Berlin, Sign. R 103596. L. Vojáček and K. Schelle, Právní dějiny Slovenska (Ostrava, 2007), p. 301.

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all major legal and employment issues, including answering questions on taxation and social-security rights. Although propaganda played an important role in this scheme intended to attract Czech labour, at least for some time there was a real attempt to offer a positive motivation by providing good working and living conditions. This was just as important as coercion, which consisted of punishment for behaviour that was ‘incompatible’ with what the Germans deemed to be a satisfactory job performance. Welfare, therefore, was also a means to strong-arm workers into compliance: the authorities were allowed to deny health insurance and suspend all benefits provided to family members if a worker refused to perform a task that they were ordered to carry out outside the Protectorate or if they left their workplace without the consent of the labour office. In addition, the threat of being fined or imprisoned was intended to discourage ill-disciplined behaviour on the job.32 Unlike workers deployed to work for the Reich who were subject to special regulations, those who stayed in the country continued to work under the preexisting legal framework. Since the Social Court of Honour was established only in annexed Austria, the labour court practices of the former Czechoslovak Republic continued to be in operation in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and quasi-independent Slovakia. Labour courts dealt exclusively with disputes that fell under employment law, and cases could be brought forward by both employers and employees. An example of the opportunities that this could offer to disgruntled employees is provided by the legal case brought in 1943 against the National Employees’ Trade Union (Národní odborová ústředna zaměstnanecká) by Miloslava Grimichová, a Vienna-born journalist, feminist, and former left-wing activist and politician. This official Czech institution during the Nazi occupation had dismissed Grimichová in August 1943 after working less than three months as an editor in its press office. Moreover, after her dismissal, she had been charged for socialinsurance premiums even though she was no longer a trade-union employee. The reasons for her dismissal were plainly political: trade-union officials were concerned about Grimichová’s involvement in left-wing groups. She had started her professional life as editor of the Rovnost (Equality) journal published by the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party, and from 1921 by the Communist Party, but had left the editorial board by 1925. She then re-joined the Social Democratic Party and was engaged in promoting gender equality within the party and internationally. After the German Army entered the Czech lands in March 1939, she worked for the press agency of the National Partnership (Národní souručenství), the only Czech political party that existed officially within the Nazi Protectorate, before taking up her role within the 32

National Archives Prague (NA Prague), Reich Protector’s Office Collection (ÚŘP Coll.), Carton 988: Sociálně-politické poučení (1942), pp. 5 and 9.

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trade union. Grimichová did not accept her dismissal and flatly denied the rumours about her Communist Party membership as well as her alleged link to a ‘secret English organisation’. Citing her record of responsible work and her qualifications, including her language skills and extensive experience as a journalist, she sued the trade unions for unfair dismissal. The court ultimately ruled that the dismissal was valid, but that the unions had to pay Grimichová a salary and half of her social insurance contributions until December 1943.33 More than Grimichová’s success in court, what is surprising is that she was not sanctioned for her known left-wing political links. This was also not the first time she had complained about a public institution’s procedures. A few months earlier, while unemployed, she had written a letter to the head of the Czech Journalists’ Association and had complained about unequal treatment. While another male Czech journalist and colleague had received unemployment benefits and had been granted an interest-free loan, Grimichová had been left without support and unable to claim a reduction of her trade-union membership fee. Most significantly, she referred to her previous loyalty and diligent work within the official Protectorate institutions and based her argument on the notion that her national and professional affiliation brought with it an entitlement to social rights, regardless of her political sympathies. Thus, in her letter to the Czech Journalists’ Association, she argued, ‘I am not asking for support to be provided out of kindness but a right that I have gained through many years of activity and, therefore, I must insist that I should get what is given to my colleagues who have contributed less to the professional organisation [of journalists].’34 Bringing this case forward required considerable courage. Grimichová was, however, not the only woman who had the courage to fight for her rights. For instance, the inventory of disputes before the Labour Court in Prague in 1941 contained 386 cases, 36 per cent of which were claims by female employees.35 Grimichová, a headstrong woman who was experienced in political negotiations,36 seemed to fulfil the notion propagated by the Czech trade unions that ‘women should have a sense of justice’, even though she demonstrated it in a way that they probably did not like.37 Her determination to claim her rights can be read as an example of Eigensinn and as an act of self-affirmation. During the Nazi occupation, Grimichová continued working as a freelance journalist, 33 34 35 36 37

NA Prague, M. Grimichová Collection (Grimichová Coll.), Carton 6: A letter to a ministerial officer, 20 Nov. 1943. NA Prague, Grimichová Coll., Carton 6: A letter to J. Krychtálek, 15 Apr. 1943 (emphasis in the original). Prague City Archives, Labour Court Prague Collection (PSP Coll.), Sign. Cpr VI237–41. Except for her wartime activities, Grimichová’s life is summarized in V. Rýznarová, ‘Miroslava Grimichová (1891–1957)’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Hradec Králové (2017). ČMKOS, NOÚZ Coll., Carton 236.

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contributing to various women’s journals, but earned less than she needed to maintain a decent standard of living and had to run up debts to get by. Grimichová’s case was no exception, however, as the records of the Labour Court in Prague show, and there are many cases in which employees sued the National Partnership, which was supposed to be one of the guarantors of the new order established in the wake of the German occupation. These cases ultimately demonstrate that, despite the severe political restrictions imposed on Czech society and the gradual Nazification of the local judicial system, the preexisting labour law framework remained in force and was publicly advertised by the authorities as the main pillar regulating employment.38 Moreover, Protectorate newspapers regularly contained a section that provided legal advice on employment matters, presenting practical examples of the violation of labour laws and of social injustice, and describing ways in which readers could defend themselves against unfair treatment.39 Unlike labour courts, which often ruled on disputes that had a political dimension, social-insurance courts ruled on disputes over social-insurance benefits and premiums. If an employee disagreed with a benefit assessment, they had sixty days to bring legal action against the insurance company.40 These courts consisted not only of professional judges but also of representatives of employees and employers.41 A unique collection of legal actions brought against the Central Social Insurance Company to contest its assessment of invalidity and old-age insurance claims is preserved in Pilsen in Western Bohemia. It demonstrates the institutional continuity that prevailed from 1929 to 1949, as well as the unbroken sequence of claims made by Czech employees. The number of paid judges remained stable, and although one can see a decrease in the number of cases in 1939 and 1940, four years later, in 1944, they had doubled. This was the consequence of the total mobilisation of the entire workforce for the German war industry, which led to many cases on the inability to work due to disability. This also had an impact on the success rate of employees in court. The courts ruled more often in favour of employees in 1941 than they did in 1944, when a 50 per cent disability was not considered an obstacle to returning to work. This attitude continued well into the post-war

38 39 40 41

J. Kučera and J. Balcar, Rüstkammer des Reiches or Maschienwerk des Sozialismus: Wirtschaftslenkung in Böhmen und Mähren 1938 bis 1953 (Göttingen, 2013), p. 97. See, for example, the ‘Social Policy and Economy’ section of the daily Národní politika (National Politics). ČMKOS, NOÚZ Coll., Carton 236: On workers’ health insurance according to the new governmental regulation no. 2/1944. Government Regulation No. 76/1941 Sb. z. a n.; Decree of the Minister of Economy and Labour No. 12/1945 Sb. z. a n., V. Prášil, Příručka pojištěnce: Co má každý pojištěnec věděti o sociálním pojištění, zejména o svých nárocích v pojištění nemocenském, invalidním a starobním vzhledem k nové úpravě platné od 1. března 1940 (Prague, 1940).

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era, when the new regime emphasised the need to work as part of its broader narrative of ‘building of a people’s republic’.42 Throughout the 1940s, employees primarily litigated over decisions regarding their physical ability to work or the level of the pensions that they had been awarded. In most cases, claimants declared they lived in poverty, which allowed them to be relieved of all legal fees. This was indicative of the segment of the population that approached this court, most of whom came from the industrial working class. They often demanded a recognition of their ‘rights’, and they considered lay judges (literally ‘judges of the people’) a greater guarantee of a fair verdict than putting their hopes in professional judges. An emphasis on ‘rights’ was, for instance, the approach taken by František Moutelík, a metal grinder who sued the Central Social Insurance Company for an invalidity pension at the beginning of 1945. In a handwritten statement from September 1945, Moutelík contended that ‘I, therefore, claim my right to sue and ask the famous Insurance Court to rule on it’.43 At the heart of the dispute was the level of Moutelík’s disability, which according to the plaintiff was 70 per cent, while according to the insurance company, it was, at most, 50 per cent, not yet qualifying him for a disability pension. During the last months of the German occupation, the judge dismissed the plaintiff’s claim regarding the relevant legal standards.44 Most significantly, however, this ruling was subsequently upheld by a post-liberation court, despite the regime change. Similarly, Moutelík continued using the language of individual rights, which did not fit in easily within the new post-war atmosphere that prioritised the needs of society as a whole. The extent of continuity between the wartime and post-war period was therefore greater than often assumed. Communist Ideals and the Limits of Social Equality Under pressure from the Soviet Union, Communist ideals spread rapidly in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. The reasons for the broader appeal of such ideals were, of course, complex and not simply the result of Soviet imposition. Post-war attitudes towards Communism in Czechoslovakia reflected the legacies of the Great Depression, the weakness of inter-war democratic liberalism, and the prestige enjoyed by the Soviet Union after it had liberated the country from German rule.45 If the Nazi 42 43 44 45

State Regional Archive Pilsen (SOA Pilsen), Social Insurance Court Pilsen 1929–1949 (1950) Coll. (SPS Coll.). SOA Pilsen, SPS Coll., Carton 56, Sign. Cp138/45: Moutelík’s handwritten claim against the Central Social Insurance Company sent to the Social Insurance Court in Prague, 22 Sept. 1945. Here §§ 109–114 of the Act No. 221/1924 Coll. Cf. I. Deák, J. T. Gross, and T. Judt (eds.), The Politics of Retribution in Europe World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ, 2000); B. Apor, P. Apor, and E. A. Rees (eds.), The

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occupation was most frequently associated with different forms of racial, social, and economic injustice, post-war Czechoslovakia was supposed to be the antithesis. As Christiane Brenner has pointed out, the establishment of a ‘people’s democracy’ after the war implied a special closeness between rulers and the people through two terms that became central to the discourse of the regime: social ‘progress’ and ‘justice’.46 Social justice was therefore at the heart of the political programme of the Communist party and its realisation was widely expected by the population. Significant limits were, of course, placed from the start on implementing a maximalist understanding of social justice. This was reflected in the differential treatment of various ethnic groups within Czechoslovak society. This could be seen, for instance, in the ways in which the authorities dealt with ethnic Germans, three million of whom were displaced from Czech lands in 1945 and 1946. From the late 1930s to the 1940s, there had been plenty of cases showing mutual animosity between Czechs and Germans at the workplace. For instance, the family company Fr. Odkolek a.s., formerly the largest bakery in the Czech lands under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was sued several times for unfair treatment of their employees. This started in 1939 with the dismissal of Emil Bothe, the chief miller, who had worked for the company for twenty-seven years. His German origin caused several years of dispute. During the war, and backed by the German occupation authorities, Bothe received an out-of-court settlement of 50,000 Protectorate koruna in 1940, a huge sum that amounted to almost a well-paid worker’s annual salary. The company was also forced to pay him a supplementary old-age pension insurance contribution of 108,000 koruna in 1944.47 In the summer of 1946, under entirely different political circumstances, however, the Odkolek company demanded a ruling from the Czechoslovak authorities on what they thought was the unjust assessment of the compensation that had been due to ‘our former employee, the German Bothe’.48 According to post-war legislation, which annulled certain property-law acts from the German occupation period,

46 47

48

Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period (Washington, DC, 2008); B. F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD, 2004); B. Frommer, ‘Retribution as Legitimation: The Uses of Political Justice in Postwar Czechoslovakia’, Contemporary European History, 13 (2004), 477–92. C. Brenner, Zwischen Ost und West: Tschechische politische Diskurse, 1945–1948 (Munich, 2009), p. 95. State regional archives in Prague (SOA Prague), Fr. Odkolek a.s. Collection (Odkolek Coll.), Carton 13: Josef Hruška, director of Fr. Odkolek a. s. company to JUDr. Josef Trčka, director of Central Unity of Economic Cooperatives, 3 Jan. 1940. SOA Prague, Odkolek Coll., Carton 13: Josef Hruška, director of Fr. Odkolek a. s. company to JUDr. Josef Trčka, director of Central Unity of Economic Cooperatives, 3 Jan. 1940, Fr. Odkolek s. a. Prague-Vysočany to JUDr Antonín Schauer, advocate, 8 July 1946.

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the company had the law on its side.49 However, Emil Bothe had disappeared, and the company most likely never got its money back. Bothe’s case therefore demonstrates the ways in which claims to social justice were always embedded within a broader political framework and conditional on the shifting understandings of those in power about who was entitled to such justice. As regimes shifted in Czechoslovakia, so demands for social justice emerged in novel ways, such as in the newly established revolutionary institutions. This was most visible within so-called revolutionary councils. These were re-established worker councils that operated at the level of factories and enterprises and were founded in the first few days after the war.50 They were headed by workers, and gave employees the power to interfere in personnel matters at their workplaces. As an examination of the situation at the Odkolek company in 1945 shows, workers sought redress for their previous experiences of social injustice and, without regard for the pre-existing labour law, arranged ad-hoc solutions by dismissing those in positions of authority. This uncompromising treatment was experienced first-hand by the former director, Bohdan Auersperg, who was duly fired.51 In the aftermath of the war, workers’ understandings of social justice were based on moral dispositions that echoed their personal experiences of discrimination and inequality in the past, and their direct and often abrupt ways of addressing such grievances reflected their newly acquired positions of power, collectively shared within the Council. This new experience of collectivism was key in the further post-war development of state socialism. The mood in post-war Czechoslovakia was, however, not exclusively revolutionary. While the immediate post-war period was characterised by extrajudicial violence, mostly against Germans and German-speaking Jews, liberated Czechoslovakia retained the legal status quo and sought to channel any revolutionary passions into an orderly framework. Most notably, political leaders translated widespread notions of social justice into the broader terms of social equality and ‘people’s democracy’ that were subsequently codified in law. In doing so, they moulded the conceptions of social justice that were current within post-war Czechoslovak society, especially amongst those who accepted or supported the radical egalitarianism of the new political regime. The National Social Insurance Act, for instance, drafted by experts before the Communists seized power in 1948, was a complex and ambitious plan. It was more generous than Beveridge’s vision of social security in Great Britain,

49 50 51

Collection of Law and Regulation of Czechoslovak Republic, Act No. 18/1946 Coll. Czechoslovak Presidential Decree no. 47. SOA Prague, Odkolek Coll, Carton 13: Minutes of the meeting of the commission in charge of investigating the affairs of Mr Auersperg held on 15 Oct. 1945.

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which had served as an example to the Czechoslovak government in exile in London, when it was planning reform of the social-welfare system.52 As in many other state-socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the new Czechoslovakian constitution of 1948 guaranteed the right to work, healthcare, social insurance, annual leave, maternity care, and free education. This, in theory, equalised citizens’ social and economic conditions. But, in reality, as Todor Hristov has suggested, these rights were a set of rather diffuse and not always enforceable obligations because the command economy was often simply unable to create the material conditions that would allow the state to implement these general principles adequately.53 As the regime stabilised, it gradually began to develop different formal and informal mechanisms for realising its idea of a socially just society. Social and gender rights were further advanced through a number of laws and regulations, while the centralisation of institutions was used as a tool to implement the state’s vision of social equality.54 Through the formation of agricultural cooperatives as well as the nationalisation of both industry and socialinsurance companies, the Communists sought to realise their egalitarian visions and transfer the role of principal employer and caregiver to the state. While coercion was integral to the ways in which state-socialist regimes tried to carry out their egalitarian projects, many social groups within Czechoslovak society, most notably the rural population, seem to have supported at least some elements of these practices, not least because they brought social change and upward mobility. Workers were, of course, at the heart of such conceptions of social justice. The ‘worker councils’ in industrial companies had already existed since 1918 but in the immediate post-war period they were boosted by the new regime. They gave employees the right to negotiate with management, as well as to participate in the making of company policy and in broader questions of wealth distribution with a view to removing social injustice at the workplace. Eventually, this led to the introduction of a rigid egalitarian wage and social policy. This undoubtedly shaped popular attitudes. Many workers felt empowered, as Padraic Kenney has pointed out for the case of Poland, because they could assert their claims in the name of democracy and equality.55 Thus,

52

53 54 55

J. Rákosník, ‘Czechoslovak Social Politics and Its Representatives in the London Exile during Second World War’, Prague Papers on the History of International Relations, 1 (2009), 429–43. T. Hristov, ‘Rights to Weapons: Rights as a Resource in Workplace Conflicts in Late Socialist Bulgaria,’ East Central Europe, 46 (2019), 245. For instance, B. Havelková, Gender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism (London, 2017). P. Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY, 2012), p. 27.

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working-class communities developed emphatically egalitarian and solidaristic attitudes, heavily contrasting with the inter-war period in which they often had not felt able to voice such views. The initial, bottom-up structures of the liberation period did not, however, endure. Worker councils were subsequently replaced by trade unions, whose policies were coordinated from above by the state. This process of institutionalisation demotivated workers by blurring their perception of social change and their sense of being included in the process of creating a fair society. The notion of ‘socialist competition’, for instance, which was a tool deployed by the regime to improve the performance of workers and achieve the ambitious targets set out in the economic plan, probably enabled a form of upward mobility by rewarding hard work. At the same time, however, the relentless emphasis on economic reconstruction clashed with people’s expectations and their sense of solidarity. In theory, there could be only one winner of this socialist competition, namely, the highest performing employee at a workplace. This, however, clashed with the workers’ sense of fairness. The case of the Škoda branch plant in Prague-Smíchov shows that workers tried to remedy the situation by distributing the title equally to every worker. The best worker in the competition was announced in a ceremony in which the title was, ultimately, awarded to every worker and all of them received a common bonus payment. The Škoda workers practised this particular form of workplace solidarity until 1953, but the broader collective pressure for equal treatment was common in industrial enterprises in Czechoslovakia during the entire decade, attesting to the workers’ well-developed Eigensinn.56 The daily realities of state socialism therefore stood at some remove from the lofty ideals of ‘people’s democracy’ that the regime propagated and that industrial workers expected to see implemented. This could lead to animosity, disputes, and protests at the workplace. As Jakub Šlouf has, for example, shown in his study of the protests at the Prague engineering and metallurgical group ČKD Stalingrad after the radical currency reform of spring 1953, workers used official channels of communication and drew on the regime’s own language of social justice to articulate their demands. This not only created a better bargaining position for themselves vis-à-vis the state, but also made subsequent persecution by the regime more difficult.57 This suggests that the state’s language of social justice had major consequences as it created popular expectations that those in power ought to deliver

56

57

P. Heumos, ‘State Socialism, Egalitarianism, Collectivism: On the Social Context of Socialist Work Movements in Czechoslovak Industrial and Mining Enterprises, 1945–1965’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 68 (2005), 50, 63. J. Šlouf, Praha v červnu 1953: Dělnická revolta proti měnové reformě, vyjednávání v továrnách a strukturální proměna dělnické třídy (Prague, 2021), p. 70.

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on their promises of social fairness. References to what one might describe as the regime-led discourse of social justice therefore became an important tool for ordinary citizens in their attempts to demand redress of their grievances. This can again be well observed in court proceedings. Some claimants justified their legal action by referring to their need for ‘social protection’, while others emphasised the broader ‘interests of justice’ that were tied to their social rights. For instance, in her plea to the Social Insurance Court in 1949, auxiliary worker Marie Heindlová argued, ‘I do not want to steal from the Republic, but I really cannot hold any job in industry.’58 After large-scale nationalisation, the state had become the primary owner of industrial companies. However, at a symbolical level, it was the working class and society as a whole that owned the means of production. The accusation of stealing from the state, raised by Heindlová herself, was one of the worst offences one could commit against socialist society. Her testimony therefore demonstrates how she sought to defend herself by consciously or unconsciously referring to the principles of socialist collectivism. The consolidation of Communist power brought a new institutional structure to most Eastern Bloc countries. Special commissions, usually known as commissions for labour disputes or labelled as conciliation or arbitration commissions, were established in companies and replaced labour courts.59 Consisting of an equal number of employees and employer representatives, the commissions sought to enforce discipline and educate employees on the meaning of socialist principles, rather than hand out punishment. Already in 1945, Czechoslovak workers had established ‘investigation commissions’ that were supposed to restore enterprises through internal social ‘cleansing’. At the beginning, these commissions dealt with Nazi collaboration cases, but they quickly took on a new focus by concentrating on social disputes between employers and employees.60 Pre-existing labour and social-insurance courts, by contrast, were dissolved in the late 1940s due to the centralisation of the judiciary and the creation of a society-wide ‘National Social Insurance’ scheme.61 In the 1950s, labour commissions, which were often described as labour or social ‘courts’ at the time, were solidified across Eastern and Central Europe. Stephen Baister, who has explored the East German case, has described social courts as ‘one of the most advanced and successful forms of lay justice available in the communist world’. The origins of East German labour courts 58 59 60 61

SOA Pilsen, Social Insurance Court Pilsen 1929–1949 (1950) Coll., Carton 90, Sign. Cp 791/ 49. Witz, Československé pracovní právo, p. 377. J. Šlouf, ‘Poválečná očista průmyslových závodů’, in D. Janák and S. Kokoška (eds.), Průmyslové dělnictvo v českých zemích v letech 1938–1948 (Prague, 2019), p. 464. L. Vojáček, ‘Československé pracovní soudy’, Právněhistorické studie, 46 (2016), 85.

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are similar to those of Czechoslovakia. After previous historical experience with labour courts, the establishment of ‘informal disputes commissions’ (Konfliktkommissionen) or ‘employment disputes commissions’ (Arbeitskonfliktkommissionen) followed soon after 1945. By 1948, they were transformed into arbitration commissions or arbitration courts (Schiedskommissionen and Schiedsgerichte). As part of this transformation, people’s judges (Volksrichter), considered ‘pillars of democratic justice’, replaced professional judges. Rather than meting out judgement, their main task was a form of reconciliation between the parties concerned.62 The function of these courts in the Eastern Bloc was therefore often to assuage conflicts and contribute to the maintenance of social peace. For instance, after a wave of protests in connection with currency reform in Czechoslovakia in 1953, disciplinary commissions sought to resolve labour disputes in the workplace by summoning workers.63 The existence of these various bodies had implications for the ways in which workers tried to enforce their rights. There were two central strategies that they could pursue: forms of informal protest and working through the existing legal system. Most conflicts were ultimately handled by commissions set up by trade unions. For Władysław Gomułka, first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, trade unions were the builders of socialism, and were therefore the essential instruments to safeguard workers’ rights.64 Polish workers, however, came to see trade unions as simply another organ of the state that was unsuitable for resolving their grievances. Strikes, which for the Communist leadership were symbolic of ‘anarchy’, were therefore a common strategy chosen by Polish workers. Czechoslovak unionists, by contrast, were seemingly much more successful than their Polish counterparts in achieving reconciliation. From 1956 to 1957, conflicts in Czechoslovak enterprises consequently lost their intensity and ideological character. As Peter Heumos has observed, this was due to the successful ‘bargaining competence’ of union leaders and the higher flexibility demonstrated in dealing with labour disputes within enterprises.65 Submitting complaints to various government bodies, from local state authorities to the president, was another widespread phenomenon. While some complaints can be read as denunciations of individuals, many others had 62 63 64

65

S. Baister, ‘The Social Courts System of the German Democratic Republic’, unpublished PhD thesis, University College London (1992), quote at p. 13; pp. 30, 35. P. Heumos, ‘Vyhrňme si rukávy než se kola zastaví!’ Dělníci a státní socialismus v Československu, 1945–1968 (Prague, 2006), p. 25. ILO A, RL 50-3-2, Polish Trade Unions 1940s–1980s, A. C. Ghatak’s report on mission to represent the office at 4th Congress of the Federation of Polish Trade Unions, Warsaw, 14–19 Apr. 1958. Heumos, ‘Vyhrňme si rukávy než se kola zastaví!’, p. 26.

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substantive content and aimed at improving the situation in the enterprises. Basing their demands on the right of citizens to voice constructive criticism, which the regime emphasised as an integral part of ‘socialist democracy’, workers complained about their own situation or about general conditions at the workplace. In theory, state authorities had to investigate complaints of unfair treatment, discrimination, or misappropriation of state property, and decide whether they were reasonable. The reality was, however, much less satisfying. A citizen’s complaint was often handled by the same body that was the subject of the protest.66 The ČKD group, for instance, collected plenty of employees’ complaints delivered to their company headquarters. The letters submitted in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s demonstrate that workers rarely referred to individual rights in their complaints. Instead, drawing on the state-sponsored language of social justice current in post-war Czechoslovak society, male and female workers asked for a ‘fair reward’ or a ‘remedy’, based on the promise of equal treatment. In doing so, they referred to the basic principles of the socialist regime, such as work ethic, zeal, and sense of duty, or criticised someone for not being a model worker. They demanded social justice through a general claim based on the equal conditions that were to apply in society, and not through a claim against the state as the guarantor of their rights. For instance, in December 1972, Milada Böhmová submitted a complaint to the ČKD Prague regarding a ‘comrade’, a manager of an enterprise, who had sacked her from her job. Her statement that ‘I call and wait for your JUSTICE’ expressed both scepticism and indignation at the system.67 At the same time, however, the letter contained all the linguistic turns of phrase that workers had to adopt if they sought to speak the regime’s language. Choosing the legal path to sue an employer in the courts was another possibility for workers, but it carried several risks given the chance of a politicised trial. It was not uncommon for civil courts to rule on cases that were legal labour disputes at their core but had an apparent political background. This applied to the majority of such trials in Czechoslovakia after August 1968, and this hardly reassured people’s faith in the rule of law. Milan Šimečka, who witnessed a proceeding in Bratislava in 1972, could not have been more explicit about his feelings: ‘I emerged from it all with a totally nihilistic attitude towards the law.’68 Forcing people out of work was 66

67

68

J. Pažout and T. Vilímek, Barometr nálad, studnice informací: Dopisy občanů vedoucím představitelům a orgánům Komunistické strany Československa v letech 1988–1989 (Prague, 2020), p. 9. State Regional Archive Prague, ČKD Praha – Headquaters Collection, Carton 360: Milada Böhmová’s letter addressed to ČKD Prague, Control and audit Body, Prague-Vysočany, 25 December 1972 (emphasis in the original). M. Šimečka, The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia, 1969–1976 (London, 1984), p. 102.

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ultimately part of the regime’s toolbox. Thus, the individuals who participated in the 1968 reform movement were excluded from public life through the loss of their jobs. Moreover, those who stood up for their rights by initiating lawsuits based on the Labour Code risked subjecting their workplace to a form of collective punishment, often depriving their colleagues of a salary increase. This was the practice of social and economic degradation and isolation that Šimečka famously labelled the policy of ‘civilised violence’.69 Exercising such control over political opponents through taking away their work or forcing them to work in jobs that were well below their professional qualifications could not go unnoticed. After January 1977, when the Charter 77 Manifesto was released, forty-six participants were brought to justice and lost their jobs. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, based in Brussels, complained about this procedure and backed the dissidents. Jiří Hájek, one of the founders and spokespersons of Charter 77, contributed to the Free Trade Unions’ subsequent submission with a detailed statement that concluded as follows: ‘most who have lost their jobs cannot find other work. The state is the only employer and the only institution directing the operations of justice.’70 In 1978, the Czechoslovak government consequently found itself targeted by international media for violating the International Labour Organisations’ Convention 111, which states that no one can be dismissed from their job for their political beliefs.71 The Czechoslovak government’s response emphasised that the Constitution guaranteed equality of opportunity and freedom of speech.72 But they also referred to the 1975 Labour Code, which, while prohibiting dismissal without notice, allowed it in cases where the security of the state or labour discipline was threatened.73 The result of this case, in which the ILO organised the most decisive action against a statesocialist country in the post-war era, was ultimately disappointing. The state, bound by the socialist ideal of the right to work that was enshrined in the constitution, simply assigned unskilled jobs to the dissidents, thereby meeting the legal requirements but also preventing them from taking on a prominent public role.

69 70

71 72 73

Šimečka, The Restoration of Order, ch. 8. ILO Archive (ILO A), LBO 3-7-25-4 London Branch Office Dissidents, ‘Czechs Face ILO Criticism’, Morning Star, 5 June 1978; ‘ILO to Publish Czech Dossier’, The Guardian, 16 Nov. 1978; ‘Czechoslovakia and the Right to Work’, The Times, 17 Nov. 1978; ‘ILO Move on Charter 77 Complaints’, Morning Star, 17 Nov. 1978. Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention No. 111 (1958), www.ilo.org/dyn/ normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C111. Czechoslovak Constitution of 1968, section 28. Czechoslovak Labour Code of 1975, §53 on immediate termination of the employment contract. The provision regarding the state’s security and labour discipline was included in 1975, in the amendment of the 1965 Labour Code.

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State-socialist regimes ultimately struggled to attain the high social standards that they had proclaimed at their moment of birth. All of them faced material difficulties that had an impact on the range of benefits and social services that they could provide, though there were significant differences between them. For instance, the Czechoslovak housing shortage was a constant problem, but the living standard remained higher and more stable than in Poland or Hungary. Common to them all, however, was the way in which putting a language of social justice at the centre of their public discourse created an expectation among the population that such justice would be delivered. As Todor Hristov has argued for the case of Bulgaria, the codification of social rights became, in fact, a problem for state-socialist governments because instead of issuing a vague promise to a better life, these regimes had recognised social rights as legal rights.74 References to social justice, then, became a tool by which governments could be held to account, opening the door for citizens to make claims using the very language that those in power used to legitimise their rule. Conclusion In a speech delivered on 16 May 1945 in Prague, just a few days after liberation from German occupation, Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš presented his interpretation of the previous years and his vision for the near future. Emphasising the ‘correctness of our common policy with the Soviet Union’, he called for ‘building national life’ in line with the ‘popular, democratic and social ideals of the revolutionary era’.75 This built on his long-held views that he had articulated in previous works, such as in his book Democracy Today and Tomorrow, first published in 1939. Here, Beneš had stated that he was ‘consistently favouring a policy of social justice – radical, if necessary – but carried out by development and gradually and not by the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat’.76 Now, in 1945, Beneš observed how the Communists’ radical quest for social and economic justice had marginalised liberalism in the course of the Second World War.77 For most of his listeners gathering in the square, Beneš’s call for a new departure after six years of German occupation signalled hope for a better, fairer, and above all a socially just future. Authoritarian regimes can hardly be described as socially just. However, in their opposition to the ‘injustices’ of past governments, such as those wrought

74 75 76 77

Hristov, ‘Rights to Weapons’, 255. Projev presidenta republiky Dr. Edvarda Beneše v Praze 16. května 1945 (Josef Hladký v Hranicích, 1946). E. Beneš, Demokracie dnes a zítra (Prague, 1946), p. 83 (emphasis in the original). Beneš, Demokracie dnes a zítra, p. 61.

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by social inequality and economic suffering, both National Socialists and Communists drew on a language of social justice to articulate their own visions of a new order. Their respective notions of social justice, however, differed radically. For the Nazis and other New Order movements of the time, social justice was defined in racial terms, and was to be available only to those who were seen as legitimate members of the Volksgemeinschaft. Conversely, for Communists, social justice was delimited by social class, and was a goal to be attained for all members of the ‘socialist working society’. Such conceptions of social justice were not developed and implemented in isolation, but subject to forms of negotiation with the population in a wide range of institutions dealing with questions of labour and social welfare. Both regimes emphasised the educational dimension of the conciliation and litigation process, aiming to use such opportunities to impart lessons to the population on the principles that they promoted. The existence of social labour and social insurance courts in Nazi-occupied Czech lands demonstrates that socialjustice institutions remained functioning in order to create social stability by addressing some of the local population’s social grievances. Subsequently, in Communist Czechoslovakia, through various types of labour courts and commissions, a form of ‘participatory justice’ was developed based on the involvement of lay people. At the same time, the working population often chose to seek a correction of what they regarded as unjust practices by drawing on informal strategies and channels within the workplace. The main difference that emerged from the transition from the Nazi to the post-war Communist regime was a shift from the language of individual rights to a language related to the collective, to society, and to the state. The vision of socialist collectivism that fundamentally permeated all social and economic interactions in post-war Czechoslovakia suppressed the importance of individual rights and reinforced the prominence of the nation and society vis-à-vis the individual. However, during the forty years of Communist rule, the attitudes and hopes of workers shifted: from enthusiastic aspirations of selfmanagement in the early post-war period to the adoption of informal strategies outside formal trade-union structures in late socialism. At the same time, the state became a prisoner of its own discourse of social justice, as the population referred to the very notions of social justice propagated by the regime as a yardstick to measure the degree to which it was living up to its promise of building a just society. This came to haunt state-socialist regimes at moments when the population felt that the gap between official discourse and social reality had become too wide. Social justice, then, was never only a propagandistic tool that could be used indiscriminately by those in power, but rather a farreaching promise with significant consequences for the legitimacy of statesocialist regimes.

7

Social Justice in a Socialist Society Understandings of Social Justice and Social Policy in Hungary after 1945 Sándor Horváth

‘Communist power today is seizing not only the earth but also the sky. Happy is the generation living today, because it can fight and work for the victory of the greatest social justice, the idea of communism, for the true happiness of mankind.’ These words were uttered by György Marosán, a former Social Democratic leader in Hungary and, at the end of October 1959 when he made this proud claim, one of the first deputies of Communist party leader János Kádár.1 Marosán’s confident statement implied that social justice and Communism were one and the same, so anyone who fought for Communism was fighting, quite simply, for social justice. It also implied that in a fully developed Communist state, a universal regime of social justice would have been attained. Six months later, on 7 April 1960, residents of the temporary shelter in Dobozi Street in Budapest decided that they had had enough of the anonymity and virtual invisibility that, in the early years of the Kádár era (1956–88), had been their lot. They decided to go to the Budapest City Council building to submit a petition to the Social Welfare Group, which dealt with workers’ welfare complaints as part of the Health Department, demanding that they be allowed to keep the temporary accommodation they had been given. They justified their request by arguing that they were ‘people who for a long time have lived continuously off honest work at companies and in factories, hospitals, etc., people whose work is building the country and socialism’, and for whom ‘accommodation is an issue of vital importance’. The other reason they cited in support of their request was that it was inconceivable that, after a hard day’s work, someone would be forced to spend the cold night outside in the streets, with nowhere to sleep other than a bench.2 To find oneself in such a 1

2

The official title of the party was the Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt or Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party: Budapest Főváros Levéltára (BFL [Budapest City Archives]), f. XXXV. 1.a.2. Budapest party meetings of MSZMP (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt [Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party]), 31 Oct. 1959, 2. ö.e. (preservation unit), 1959_PE 2/278. BFL. f. XXIII-115c. VB (Budapest Főváros Tanácsa Végrehajtó Bizottsága [Budapest City Council Executive Committee]), Health Department, Social Welfare Group, box (b.) 43, 203090, 7 Apr. 1960.

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situation was, however, quite conceivable given the social and economic realities of the time. When the City Council examined the petition, it ended up writing more about this request and the people who had submitted it than it had ever done before in such cases. The Council added the signatories’ workplaces next to their names, and one particularly attentive Council employee also wrote down the reasons for which the petition was being rejected for each individual name: ‘a drunk’ or ‘TB’.3 The nickname for the workers’ accommodation in Dobozi Street, an institution maintained by the City Council (and at the time, the shelter with the worst reputation), was ‘House of Lords’. It probably had been given this ironic name because in the eyes of the people who knew about the institution, its residents were the poorest elements of the Budapest population. Less than one decade earlier, just before Christmas 1951, all vagrants who had been found or ‘tracked down’ on the streets of Budapest were detained and taken to the VIII District police station, not far from Dobozi Street.4 Why, then, did homeless workers have the courage, less than a decade later, to submit a signed petition to the authorities, and why did the Council react to this petition with such zealous opposition? After all, the signatories to the document were, for the most part, homeless adults, many of whom had grown up as orphans and had already served time in prison. They were therefore fully aware of the authorities’ usual repressive response. What this episode therefore demonstrates is how the attitude of the people towards the regime had changed, including that of the homeless, who perceived and described themselves emphatically as members of the working class. Indeed, one might go so far as to suggest that by the early 1960s it had become possible in Hungary to make demands or at least claims concerning social justice and injustice. This points to how the image of the Communist regime itself had undergone transformation. Though the petition submitted by the residents of the institution in Dobozi Street was ultimately rejected by the Social Welfare Group and the signatories did not really get to enjoy the benefits of the ‘welfare communism’ described by Marosán, a significant segment of society did. Yet in contrast to the bold souls who submitted this request, very few people actually took any kind of collective action to claim protection and support within the framework of the socialist system of welfare. Instead, it would seem that much of the population recognised that less direct strategies were more effective. Thus, instead of making direct demands, many Hungarian citizens sought to couch their demands within the regime’s language of social justice, 3 4

The Hungarian text here is a misspelled shorthand term for tuberculosis. BFL. f. XXIII-115c. VB, Health Department, Social Welfare Group, b. 1, 3060/6-155/50-51, Report on increased support for those caught begging; The continued resolution of the beggar question.

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thereby allowing them some measure of access to the benefits of the system. Most people made such compromises as a matter of daily practice to get accommodation, a better job, retirement payments, or some other form of state support. After the upheaval of 1956, the population started to see the regime differently. Rather than challenging it directly, they pursued new opportunities for some forms of social security and welfare, by adopting strategies that seemed to be acceptable to the regime. What kinds of compromises did people make in order to become eligible for the various benefits offered by the state? How did the state bureaucracy use its power to determine when (and with whom) it needed to be ‘just’ and when it did not? And what did ‘social justice’ and ‘social injustice’ mean for the people and the state bureaucracy? After 1956, the Communist regime in Hungary did not rely exclusively on force to assert its legitimacy and win some degree of popular support. It also strove to create (and to some degree created) a paternalistic state that resembled the welfare states of Western Europe. This was, of course, still a different type of regime, since it placed significant limitations on individual freedoms and rights, leading to the almost complete absence of an open public sphere. Yet the expansion in welfare services was considerable. In the Kádár era, the number of social benefits provided by the state grew to such an extent that by the 1980s these benefits constituted more than a third of the average individual’s income. This ‘refrigerator socialism’ or ‘welfare dictatorship’, to use a phrase popularised by Konrad Jarausch,5 was, therefore, in many respects successful, not least in its attempt to generate popular legitimacy.6 Eastern European states instituted a wide-ranging system of national insurance (social security), guaranteed full employment (which admittedly was a misleading formula used for internal and external propaganda purposes, but which nonetheless to some extent reflected a social reality), and provided citizens with housing. The welfare states of Western and Eastern Europe, therefore, came quite close during this period. In Hungary, the ruling party characterized the establishment of this comprehensive welfare system as a shift that strengthened the ‘socialist nature’ of Hungarian society.7 As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, however, the more these ‘social benefits’ grew (both in number and as a proportion of people’s incomes), paradoxically or perhaps predictably, the greater the discursive space became to address social inequalities and refer to what at the time was described as ‘socialist justice’ (used as a synonym for social justice).

5 6 7

K. H. Jarausch, ‘Realer Sozialismus als Fürsorgediktatur: Zur begrifflichen Einordnung der DDR’, Aus Politik und Zeitschgeschichte, 20 (1998), 6. M. Pittaway, ‘The Politics of Legitimacy and Hungary’s Postwar Transition’, Contemporary European History, 13 (2004), 453–75. BFL. f. BFL. XXXV. 1.a.2. Budapest Meetings of MSZMP, 8. ő. e., 9 Mar. 1985. II/239.

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In particular, it became increasingly frequent for Hungarian citizens to talk of ‘social justice’ and ‘injustice’ regarding the second economy (economic production in the private sector in addition to people’s main, official jobs in the state-planned sector) and the black market, as these came to play more important roles in people’s lives. This chapter takes as its point of departure the observation that the growing acceptance of the market in state-socialist Hungary and the evolution of a language of social justice are intertwined.8 It argues that in the case of socialist countries, notions of social justice, the second economy, and the black market developed in parallel. As references to the second economy and the black market became increasingly frequent in official public discourses, so did references to social justice and to its socialist-era synonyms (e.g., ‘socialist justice’), especially during late socialism. Paradoxically perhaps, the strengthening of the socialist nature of Hungarian society and the increasing role of the state in the (re-)distribution of resources and capital had in effect increased and perhaps even nurtured rather than diminished the public visibility of social inequalities. In exploring the gestation of the language of social justice in a state-socialist country, the chapter draws on the work of sociologist Júlia Szalai to analyse how ‘beneath the burden of the plethora of daily compromises reached with power’ social fabrics became frayed even as the state put increasingly greater emphasis in its rhetoric and its institutional structures on ‘social justice’.9 How was the Kádár regime able to depict itself as successful, in spite of the circumstances under which it rose to power in the wake of the repression of the Revolution of 1956? Indeed, how was it able to achieve some level of broader social acceptance? This acceptance (and even popular support) of the regime seems to have been particularly strong at times when social benefits were growing as a proportion of the average citizen’s income. What made the system more ‘promising’, to use the phraseology of János M. Rainer to characterise the 1960s and, apparently, more just on the everyday level, even though most people remembered the violent circumstances of the regime’s rise to power after 1956?10 I contend that the system was able to secure and maintain a significant degree of popular consent in no small part because social groups who were drifting away from supporting the state became in fact the largest recipients of the novel redistribution of wealth and in the process turned into the favoured

8 9 10

See Chapter 2 in this book. J. Szalai, Nincs két ország . . .? Társadalmi küzdelmek az állami (túl)elosztásért a rendszerváltás utáni Magyarországon (Budapest, 2007), p. 208. J. M. Rainer, ‘A ‘hatvanas évek’ Magyarországon: (Politika)történeti közelítések’, in J. M. Rainer (ed.), “Hatvanas évek” Magyarországon. Tanulmányok (Budapest, 2004), pp. 11–30, 16.

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beneficiaries of the ‘welfare dictatorship’. Additionally, the regime was able to provide a higher standard of living because it gave people opportunities to earn more in a limited private sector (in the second economy), even if those who wanted to gain access to these extra earnings had to do a disproportionate amount of work that, in the end, reduced their life expectancy.11 The broad provision of national insurance and the shift in the system according to which apartments were allotted created a deep sense of security for people who were able to complement incomes earned on the black market with benefits provided by the state. The social policy of the Kádár era, thus, can be characterized as both a political tool and a discursive mode that was used to increase social support for the regime by referring continually to ‘social justice’. Its primary function was to strengthen the stability of the system itself. Thus, paradoxically perhaps, the increasingly pronounced ‘social inequalities’ in the socialist era, and the public discourse about them, did not weaken support for the system. On the contrary, they strengthened it. Ironically, it was precisely the persistence of the market as a ‘second economy’ or as a ‘black market’ that partly enabled welfare spending by state institutions as a means of counteracting the inequalities officially created by the market. This further strengthened perceptions of social inequalities, which in turn increased the importance of the second economy. This in turn encouraged further spending on welfare as well as embedding the importance of the second economy. All of this resulted in the public abandonment of the original aims of socialist ideology, as well as an erosion of rhetoric that rested on appeals to social rights and benefits. It was therefore no coincidence that from the early 1960s onwards regime propagandists started to refer with greater frequency to the goal of combating social inequalities. Most notably, over the course of the post-war era, the differences in standard of living between the ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ countries were becoming apparent. Furthermore, most of the states of Western Europe, which had increasingly complex institutional systems to further the development of the welfare state, constituted a continual challenge to the statesocialist states, which sought to reshape society with an almost engineeringstyle precision.12 From the Khrushchev period (1953–64) onwards, therefore, social policy and the growth of a broad infrastructure of institutions that provided social care and addressed social inequalities provided Eastern European regimes with an effective means to legitimate their existence vis-àvis the population.13 The legitimisation of the regime, the rhetorical successes 11

12 13

C. Dupcsik, ‘Visszapillantva: A késő Kádár-kori második gazdaság jelenségének újraértelmezési kísérlete’, in A. Bozóki and K. Füzér (eds.), Lépték és irónia: Szociológiai kalandozások (Budapest, 2018), pp. 37–54. S. Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford, 2001), p. 20. M. Schmidt, Sozialpolitik in Deutschland: Historische Entwicklung und internationaler Vergleich (Wiesbaden, 2005), pp. 139–40; B. Deacon, ‘Eastern European Welfare States: The

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of welfare policy, and the abandonment of the original socialist objectives, however contradictory, went hand in hand. This chapter is based on an analysis of documents created by municipal administrative bodies. These records offer significant insights into the shifting relationship between citizens seeking assistance by submitting petitions and the clerical worker/bureaucrat representing the state. In exploring this interaction, this chapter also takes into consideration the expansion of the institutional system of national insurance, which the state justified through appeals to social justice. Budapest, I contend, provides an excellent lens through which to study this dynamic because the municipal administration was so extensively developed that almost every type of institution involved in social policy could be found in the country’s capital. The following sections therefore use the case of Budapest to explore the broader evolution of a language of social justice from 1956 onwards, tracing both its changing uses and its consequences for the gestation of state projects established to deliver social welfare. As the chapter shows, one of the most important functions of social policy, and the references to social justice on which this policy was allegedly based, was the legitimization of state institutions. With its social policy, the state did not simply provide care for members of society who were considered in need. It also determined “socialist norms” that were to be adhered to, and it created relationships of dependence. In exchange, it was able to keep a large part of Hungarian society under surveillance. It also transformed society’s image of itself, and in doing so crafted and shaped social identities. As a result, the very citizens who were the targets of state welfare policy were able to exert a limited influence on understandings and uses of the terms ‘social justice’ and ‘social policy’. Socialism: No Market, No Social Injustice, No Need for Social Policy Can one speak of social justice or social policy at a time when there was no free market and no freedom of speech? Indeed, what did social justice mean in an era when it was used to refer to a wide range of actions, incorporating paternalistic state welfare, redistribution, and ‘social services’? According to the established understandings of social policy among Hungarian scholars, the Impact of the Politics of Globalization’, Journal of European Social Policy, 10 (2000), 146–61; M. Schmidt and G. A. Ritter, The Rise and Fall of a Socialist Welfare State: The German Democratic Republic (1949–1990) and German Unification (1989–1994) (Berlin, 2013); B. Tomka, Trendek, típusok, teljesítmények: Jóléti államok a 20. században (Budapest, 2009); R. Archer, I. Duda, and P. Stubbs (eds.), Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism (London, 2016); I. P. McManus, The Repoliticization of the Welfare State (Ann Arbor, MI, 2022).

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primary purpose of policies of social justice is to address the inequalities in income and wealth resulting from free market competition, to further social integration, and to strengthen a sense of social solidarity.14 When seen from this perspective, one cannot speak of a social policy in the socialist era, since there was no free market with the exception of the black market. The paternalistic care provided by the socialist state, such as by allocating apartments or guaranteeing employment, should not be confused with ideological languages of social justice or with social policies that targeted particular social groups.15 In the Kádár era, the institutions dealing with social policy often encountered this divergence between rhetoric and reality when attempting to define their responsibilities and tasks. The term ‘social policy’ was used more and more frequently in the Kádár era, though it became increasingly difficult to say what exactly this term meant. After 1956, the question was not simply whether the Communist party would be able to retain its hold on power, but whether it might also be able to win some support among its citizens. According to Gøsta Esping-Andersen, one of the most influential scholars on the comparative study of welfare systems, the extent to which these systems enjoy popular support depends first and foremost on the extent to which the redistribution of wealth is determined by the principle of need. Esping-Andersen argues that a system based on the redistribution of wealth will enjoy much broader popular support if fewer people from the lower social strata (i.e., those on lower incomes) enjoy the advantages of this redistribution.16 Though this might seem not to apply to the socialist era in Hungary, given the absence of social rights, from the 1960s onwards, the employed middle and upper classes profited most from the policies of state redistribution; and the net effect of these policies was that they strengthened popular support for the regime.17 Indeed, Hungarian society seemed to become increasingly discontented when the state started to play a smaller and smaller role in the redistribution of goods, the most valuable of which was housing. From the 1980s onwards, it found itself compelled, because of the ‘debt trap’ plaguing Eastern European countries,18 to decrease 14

15

16 17 18

Kovrig examines classical understandings of this term. See B. Kovrig, Szociálpolitika (Budapest, 1936), pp. 3–14. On understandings of social policy and criticisms of these understandings, see R. M. Titmuss, Social Policy: An Introduction (London, 1974), pp. 23–32. Given the very limited nature of social rights, the term ‘welfare state’, which is closely tied to concepts of social policy, also cannot be applied to the era. See Szalai, Nincs két ország . . .?, p. 23. G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ, 1990), pp. 29–33. See Szalai, Nincs két ország . . .? G. A. Potts, ‘The Political Consequences of External Debt in Eastern Europe’, in S. P. Riley (ed.), The Politics of Global Debt (London, 1993), pp. 151–88; B. Tomka, Austerities and

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the scale of state redistribution. This shift, which took place in the 1980s in the practice of providing ‘social benefits’, a practice that had evolved over the course of the preceding two decades, undermined the system’s legitimacy, though it should not be seen as the main cause for the collapse of the regime in 1989.19 Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, the concept of social policy was used in a very broad sense. In 1949, however, it seemed that there no longer would be a need for ‘social policy’ or for ‘social movements’. Since the establishment of a socialist state was equated with the achievement of social equality and justice, these terms had seemingly become superfluous within the political lexicon of post-war Hungary. That year, the Social Policy Institute associated with Rezső Hilscher, one of the most significant figures involved in discussions on social policy during the interwar period, was consequently closed. The only explanation given for this drastic step was that ‘under socialism, there will not be any social problems, so there is no further need for the Institute’. Hilscher, who wrote a great deal on social policy, published his last written work in 1947.20 If anything, therefore, by the end of the 1940s the use of the term ‘social policy’ within the state bureaucracy seemed to conjure up bad memories of the previous era. According to the draft of an action plan for the creation of Greater Budapest that was introduced at a March 1949 sitting of the Budapest Headquarters of the Hungarian Workers’ Party,21 ‘in the past, the nature and content of social policy was the provision of support and distribution of alms. Following the liberation, in 1946–47, we set aside 62.5 million forints and in 1947–48 75 million forints for a social policy which was different in its essence from the social policy of the past’. The ‘invention’ of the concept of unemployment at the beginning of the twentieth century provided a highly useful tool for a wide variety of political forces in the second half of the twentieth century, and this was true in Hungary as much as it was in the so-called West.22 Thus, in a characteristic passage, the authors of the action plan maintained that ‘with regards to the protection of adults, our social policy is aimed at providing work opportunities for anyone

19 20 21

22

Aspirations: A Comparative History of Growth, Consumption, and Quality of Life in East Central Europe since 1945 (Budapest, 2020), p. 201. See Tomka, Trendek, típusok, teljesítmények, pp. 20–42. G. Hegyesi, ‘Egy szociálpolitikus életműve (Dr. Hilscher Rezső: 1890–1957)’, Esély, 2 (1990), 21–30. Greater Budapest was created on 1 January 1950, when several smaller industrial towns and settlements were attached administratively to the city. J. Szekeres, ‘Nagy-Budapest kialakulásának előzményei’, Tanulmányok Budapest Múltjából, 25 (1996), 269–315. On the invention of the term ‘unemployment’ and the history of its initial uses in Hungary, see L. Ulicska, ‘A munkanélküliség feltalálása Magyarországon’, Korall, 2 (2001), 37–47.

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who receives social benefits but is also fit for work of some kind’.23 Similarly, in September 1950, Sándor Noll, a member of the Budapest City Council, could confidently explain in a council meeting that the eradication of unemployment was the most important accomplishment amongst the measures taken to support the poor.24 In 1949–50, the creation under socialism of a state that guaranteed full employment after the experience of mass unemployment before and after the war in many respects therefore came to stand for the realisation of social justice. The notion that there was no need for social policy in a socialist state survived until Stalin’s death. In 1950, the People’s Welfare Ministry (Népjóléti Minisztérium) was closed, as were the local organs of social policy, which until then had dealt with questions concerning social justice. This termination of an institution intended to defend social-policy interests was closely tied to a change that took place that year, when the state entrusted the oversight and management of national insurance to the trade unions.25 After it had nationalised the National Social Security Institute (Országos Társadalombiztosító Intézet, OTI),26 the state created the Trade Union Social Security Centre (Szakszervezeti Társadalombiztosítási Központ, SZTK). This was not an autonomous body, but a bureau that was formally under the supervision of the trade unions and that was responsible for the administration of social security. Anna Ratkó, who was the Minister of Health and who was also responsible for social security, offered the following pithy characterization of the prevailing attitude: ‘every act and measure of the whole social and economic system of our people’s democracy is a form of social policy’.27 Thus, terms such as ‘social situation’ and ‘social problems’ were replaced, according to the Stalinist language of the time, by the notion of improving the ‘social composition’ and delivering ‘social benefits’.28 In other words, in this new language, social problems could be solved through distributing social benefits on the basis of assessing the broader ‘class situation’.

23 24 25 26 27 28

BFL. f. XXXV. 95.a. 135. ö. e MDP Budapest Secretariat meetings, 8 Mar. 1949, 163, Agitation plan for the creation of Greater Budapest. BFL. f. XXIII. 101.a. Budapest City Council, 13 Sept. 1950, Report on the financial administration of the capital in 1949, 69. 1950. 39. tvr. [Law Decree No. 39 of 1950]; M. Seres, A szociálpolitika főbb kérdései (Budapest, 1976), p. 14. The OTI was the largest state welfare institution. It controlled commercial insurance funds, branch offices, pharmacies, and many public hospitals. Cited by Z. Ferge, Fejezetek a magyar szegénypolitika történetéből (Budapest, 1998), p. 99. Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [Hungarian National Archive] (MNL OL), Magyar Dolgozók Pártja (MDP [Hungarian Workers’ Party]), PB (Politikai Bizottság [Political Committee]) f. 276. 53. cs. (csomó [bundle]) 7. ő. e., 26 1948, 2, Proposal to regulate the social composition of the party, 2–3; 5–20.

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This distinctive ideological language excluded the possibility of efforts from below to assert interests. Between 1949 and 1953, most of the summaries produced by the state administration for the party leadership examined not the social situation of the population but the extent to which the make-up of Hungarian society had become more egalitarian.29 This reflected the seemingly rational reasoning that the better the social make-up of the party membership (i.e., the more ‘workers’ and ‘peasants’ among the party members), the more effective the construction of socialism and, thus, the more effective the efforts to address social problems. The new state investments and full employment, thus, definitively solved ‘social problems’ and put an end to the debate on social justice. Henceforth, questions concerning issues of social welfare could only be raised before the Budapest City Council in an indirect manner, for instance, in discussions on the health-care situation and on the related allocation of resources. For the most part, when such questions arose, they ended up being turned into propagandistic statements that merely trumpeted the success of state efforts. ‘Failures’ to meet goals or quotas, it seems, could only be mentioned in connection with factory facilities, installations, and projects that were considered important from the perspective of industrial investments, such as during the discussion on the amelioration of the housing conditions of workers in January 1953.30 After Stalin’s death in 1953, the term ‘social situation’ became an acceptable subject that could be discussed in terms other than the ‘social make-up’ of Hungarian society. A report on the ‘situation of the working class’, produced in September 1953 by a committee created by the Political Committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party, demonstrates the resurgence of this particular notion. The report considered the investigation of ‘infringements of the law’ and of ‘complaints’ justifiably raised by ‘workers’, and it examined first and foremost the working conditions, wages, and housing of factory workers.31 Similarly, in the same year, the Executive Committee of the Budapest City Council also discussed to which department the Social Policy Group should belong, which dealt with the problem of beggars (who officially did not exist in the socialist system). However, this group ultimately remained part of the Department of Health, which meant that it continued to function in a manner that was concealed.32 29 30 31 32

MNL OL. f. 276, MDP PB, 53. cs., 60. ő. e., 7 Sept. 1950, 2. Report on the social composition of party membership, 2–4, 17–32. BFL. f. XXIII. 101. a. Budapest City Council, 28 Jan. 1953, Report on the healthcare situation in Budapest, 34. MNL OL. f. 276, MDP PB, 53. cs., 145. ő. e., 5 Nov. 1953, 2, Report on the working conditions and social and cultural situation of industrial workers, 2–4, 10–51. BFL. f. XXIII. 102a. VB, 19 Nov. 1953, Organisational affiliation of the Social Policy Group, 160–2.

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Attitudes towards social policy were, however, slowly shifting. In March 1953, Gábor Erős, a member of the Social Policy Permanent Committee of the Executive Committee of the Budapest City Council, contended, in connection with the 1953 state budget, that it would be worth dealing with other ‘social policy tasks’, in addition to the questions pertaining to homes for the socially disadvantaged and for workers: ‘in this programme, the importance of youth protection has not been given adequate recognition, considering its importance’.33 And, although significant financial resources were ultimately not set aside for youth protection for the following year (in total, the only change was that 40 per cent more could be spent on clothing for children in foster homes in 195434), his objection was important because it constituted an assessment of the budget of the Council from the perspective of social policy and referred openly to the ‘social situation’. Thus, a discourse of social justice that incorporated notions of ‘social policy’ gradually came to the fore again after 1953.35 A New Hope: Reinventing Social Policy and Social Justice The 1956 revolution and the political realignment that followed changed the party leadership and their means of legitimation. While the uprising had failed, the regime realised that to ensure its long-term survival it needed to respond to some degree to popular demands. The pressure originating from below could be felt strongly at the local level. After 1956, the offices of the Budapest City Council had to respond to new expectations. They were supposed to act not only as the executors of the state’s will but also as representatives of the citizens of Budapest and assume the role of local trustees in a new type of power relationship between the people and their rulers. The best way to do so, it seemed, was to give a new significance to social equality, rehabilitate the notion of social policy, and put it to use again. Council officials, who with only a few exceptions were the same people who had been in office prior to 1956, invested the term with new meanings. In the capital city, social policy became an acceptable term again in 1957, when the Budapest City Council put the duties of the Permanent Committee for Social Policy on the agenda. The Committee had previously dealt almost exclusively with the problem of urban beggars by expelling them and moving homes for the socially marginalized to rural areas. The 1957 report revived the notion of social policy by recalling

33 34 35

BFL. f. XXIII. 101.a. 11 Mar. 1953, Discussion of the City Council’s Unified Plan for 1953, 52. Ibid., 5 Mar. 1954, Presentation of the final accounts for 1953, budget, and plan for 1954, 11. Erős even dared speak of the marginalization of social policy at a sitting of the Budapest City Council. BFL. f. XXIII. 101.a. 20 Oct. 1954, Report on the four-year work and tasks of the City Council, 25.

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several practices used before the war, ranging from family protection to the provision of aid for war orphans. Social policy therefore increasingly gained ground after 1957, as is clearly illustrated by a comment made by Jenő Nádas at a Budapest City Council meeting: When the Executive Committee of the Budapest City Council put the discussion of the social-policy situation of the capital city on the agenda, it put a spotlight on an extremely serious and significant issue. The entire population of the capital and, of course, particularly those concerned are paying special attention to and are intensely interested in our meeting today, and they expect us to advance and improve the welfare system we currently have, which, we can admit, is not entirely satisfactory.36

Accordingly, during the de-Stalinization campaigns, which sought to draw a sharp distinction between the socialism of the early 1950s and the ‘human face of socialism’ after 1956, a discursive space was created to talk about issues related to welfare, social inequalities, and social justice understood as redistribution of wealth. The simple mention of social policy allowed the regime to emphasize the discontinuity between the Kádár era and the Rákosi regime prior to 1956. Budapest’s social policy in the socialist era seems to have been born at this moment, and the notion of social policy was rehabilitated once and for all. The authors of the September 1957 report on social policy in the capital were struggling primarily with the task of defining the objectives of social policy and establishing the institutions that were to deal with it. Yet even the officials concerned with the subject were unable to define precisely what social policy meant and demarcate its remit, since the term had hardly ever been used in the previous decade. Thus, in their report, they observed that ‘the care provided for society by a state which is building a socialist system is rather complex, and activities involving social policy in a broader sense are carried out by several organizations, since every ministry, national supreme authority, and other organization does social work of some sort’.37 This statement implied that building a socialist society should itself be considered a kind of social policy. That argument, however, pointed to a fundamental tension in the discourse on social justice within state-socialist regimes: if every institution was somehow contributing to the implementation of social policy, then why would there be a need for dedicated officials and institutions dealing exclusively with social policy?

36 37

’BFL. f. XXIII. 101.a., 27 Sept. 1957, Report on the work of the Permanent Social Policy Committee, 146–7. BFL. f. XXIII-102a, 13 Sept. 1957, 75. Permanent Committee for Social Policy of the Budapest City Council, Report on the social policy situation in the capital.

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The main objective of the report was to develop social-policy tasks and orders at the municipal level. For this reason, the authors divided social policy into narrow and broad definitions. By doing so, they sought to separate social policy and the broader goal of the socialist planned economy.38 The narrow definition of social policy included the provision of support for families, the protection of children and youth, and assistance for those unable to work. The task of social policy in this narrow understanding was to provide financial support. One of the issues listed among the unsolved public service tasks in 1957 was that of eliminating begging, which the author of the report believed could be solved ‘only by implementing efficient enforcement measures as well’, which meant the need for much stronger action against begging in the interests of ‘public order’.39 The broader definition of social policy covered a wider area, from health care to education and access to housing. The authors of the report separated state and local social policy in a manner that implicitly devolved the provision of financial support for ‘the deprived’ to municipal institutions. This separation of the management of municipal social policy and national social security persisted throughout the era and remained pivotal for the implementation of social policy. Like most reports made in the period, the report of 1957 also gave an account of how those working in this field were overburdened. The Social Policy Sub-department of the Health Care Department of the Executive Committee of the Budapest City Council (the complicated name itself indicates the ways in which social policy had to remain concealed) worked with a staff of eight people and dealt with ‘tasks concerning the provision of protection for adults’. As evidenced by the documents, in 1957, this meant that the sub-department’s work was almost entirely confined to assessing and remitting social benefits, due to the work overload faced by office staff. For the same task, district councils employed fifty workers altogether, which meant that there were districts with approximately 100,000 inhabitants and a social subdepartment of one official. With such few people on hand, the social-policy objectives that could be addressed were far too limited to enhance the image of the regime as a system that was able to deliver social justice. The Return of the Notion of Social Justice in Housing Policy If these initial measures to combat problems of social inequality at the local level evidently fell short of their ambitious objectives, the steps taken to 38 39

Similar issues arose in other socialist countries. See Schmidt, Sozialpolitik in Deutschland, pp. 125–6. BFL. f. XXIII-102a. VB, 13 Sept. 1957, 76.

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address the issue of housing were arguably more successful in demonstrating to the population that state employees were at the forefront of the fight for social justice. This was an area of social policy that the leading political figures of the time considered to be of key importance. Thus, at a meeting of the Political Committee of the Communist party on 7 October 1958, János Kádár, first secretary of the Communist party, proclaimed that ‘the housing question is one of the country’s central social issues’. No one present voiced any disagreement with this assertion.40 Kádár seemed to be paraphrasing a classic work of interwar social policy literature by Rezső Hilscher, who had argued that ‘the starting point of all social policy is the human home: the apartment’.41 The regime that had assumed power in Hungary after 1957 therefore used the issue of housing as a means of asserting its legitimacy. It treated housing distribution as, fundamentally, an issue of social justice, thus reviving a practice of the interwar period. The term ‘social justice’ itself, which was used very rarely in the 1960s and 1970s and then increasingly from the 1980s onwards, was mostly used in connection with social policy regarding housing distribution. Social justice referred, essentially, to practices of (re-)distribution that determined who would get what from the state. These practices, of course, were dictated by the state. Accordingly, at a meeting of the Communist party’s Political Committee in early October 1958, the participants engaged in a heated debate on the housing issue, behaving as if the party’s hold on power depended on its policy concerning housing distribution. The party developed an ambitious plan to build one million homes over the course of the next decade and a half. While this housing policy did not guarantee the party’s hold on power, it unquestionably met with popular support and acceptance. At the same time, however, speakers at the meeting argued that the distribution of public housing would be seen as unfair by those who did not benefit from it, as it would give those who received public housing a much higher level of state subsidies than those who did not.42 References to social justice, and more precisely to its local variant of ‘socialist’ justice, were also invoked to criticise the mechanisms behind the provision of socialist welfare, such as when people were given housing not on the basis of alleged ‘need’ but on the basis of having the right connections. This was noted at a party meeting in 1965, in which one of the participants contended that ‘in countless cases, it is not socialist justice that prevails, but acquaintance, friendship’.43 That he alluded to the notion of ‘socialist justice’ 40 41 42 43

MOL. f. 288. 5/97-98. ő. e., 62. R. Hilscher, Bevezetés a szociálpolitikába (Budapest, 1928), p. 19. MNL OL. f. 288, 5/97-98. ő. e. 53. MSZMP. PB., 7 Oct. 1958. MNL OL. f. XXXV.1.c., Somogy County Archive. Minutes of the county (capital) executive meetings of the MKP, MDP, and MSZMP, 1945–1989. MSZMP Somogy County Executive Committee meetings 1965-49. ő. e., 26 Oct. 1965, 193–231, Experience of negotiating ideological guidelines. Information report, 195–201.

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points to the ways in which the government had introduced the concept of eligibility (igényjogosultság) as a means of framing its decisions and portraying them as attempts to ensure social justice by providing some public benefit such as housing. A government decree in 1960 stipulated that every family was ‘potentially eligible’ for state housing, because the aim of the decree was to ensure that ‘every eligible family has access to separate accommodation’.44 The precise meaning of ‘eligibility’ was closely linked to understandings of social justice, but it was also constantly changing. The concept of eligibility for housing is therefore best understood from the practice of housing allocation: the allocation of housing to state and municipal administration workers was considered a major task; in addition, some district councils were criticised for not allocating sufficient housing to manual workers. The majority of administrative workers, however, were not manual workers, but it was becoming increasingly common to count as many as possible as manual workers in order to comply with statistical expectations. By 1972, the eligibility-based housing distribution system was being referred to by the Budapest City Council bureaucracy as synonymous with the realisation of social justice for broad sectors of the population, although in reality it was members of the bureaucracy itself who benefited most from the state housing. According to the Council, the ‘new housing distribution system’ would enforce the party’s and the government’s objectives of ‘housing for manual workers and young married people, thus the creation of social justice’.45 Meanwhile, within the state bureaucracy, officials were increasingly concerned that the fair distribution of housing was being hampered by the fact that ‘there is a market in which apartments are actually exchanged at market prices, which we call the black market. We cannot compete with it. Those who have large rental properties do not hand them over to the Council. Rather, they sell them in other ways to get an undeserved financial advantage.’ This was because the ’housing exchange is not officially solved’.46 In other words, according to this interpretation, the market grew in part as a response to and as a form of opposition to state efforts of redistribution: if the state sought to deliver social justice, it therefore had to act against this market. Thus, by this logic, if the state did not arrange successfully the exchange of housing through official channels, then the black market would fill that void and force it to do so. Appeals to notions of social justice and eligibility made by the bureaucracy to justify its fight against the black market provided an excellent opportunity

44 45 46

Government Decree No 1002/1960 (I. 10.) BFL. f. XXIII. 102.a.1., Minutes of the meetings of the Executive Committee of the Budapest City Council, 5 July 1972. BFL f. XXXV.1.a.4., MSZMP Meetings of the Budapest Executive Committee, 10 Mar. 1967, 245. öe. 1967_VB 245/6.

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for members of the bureaucracy as well as for citizens to justify their claims and obtain apartments despite the housing shortage. For example, each district in Budapest had an immediate material interest in demonstrating that it was home to a higher proportion of manual workers than the average. The members of the bureaucracy were personally motivated to make these claims because they themselves were able to obtain housing from the same allocations that were made to provide housing for manual workers. Thus, it was very much in the interest of those who were responsible for identifying the allegedly ‘disadvantaged’ to find as many people as possible who could plausibly fit under this label.47 The increasing number of eligibility claims led to a discursive battle over who had the right to complain about deprivation. Partly as a result of state propaganda that emphasised the success in providing the population with housing, it became common knowledge that some of the inhabitants of the old slums were able to move into new state housing. In reality, however, the principles that were publicly proclaimed were rarely put into practice, and the inhabitants of the old slums only seldom benefitted from new housing.48 This did not, however, discourage the increasingly widespread perception among the public that plenty of state-administered housing was available. Consequently, at Council meetings officials often complained about the high number of ‘immoral housing applicants’ that included those who were not ‘eligible’ and thus were committing a form of social injustice by seeking state housing. Some groups, who were presumed to be unduly benefitting from public housing schemes, were morally stigmatised in the state’s social policy, and this practice of stigmatisation served the interests of other social groups. In one official report, the contention was made that ‘socially worthless people, vagabonds, hooligans, prostitutes, etc. are thus given public housing, which is in no way fair and does not meet the sense of justice of the working class or of the people in general’. Thus, a concept of virtuous living, however vaguely defined, was among the principles of equitable distribution, which was described as ‘giving new housing to deserving workers’. In other words, claims of social justice within socialism were also a means of social control, as specific groups could be punitively excluded from the benefits provided by the state as a form of punishment or social disciplining.49 Evolving notions of justice and injustice were, therefore, always part of a wider amalgam of attitudes and policies within state-socialist regimes. These 47 48 49

BFL. f. VB. XXIII-102a., 4 Sept. 1963, Report on the work of the Housing Department, 237–8. Á. Nagy-Csere, ‘Nyomortelepből mintalakótelep. Szocialista városrehabilitáció vagy a szegények fegyelmezése?’, Korall, 11 (2010), 40, 45–67. BFL. f. XXIII-102a. VB., Report on the distribution of council and cooperative housing built in 1964 and proposal for the distribution of council and cooperative housing built in 1965 and the regulation of the housing allocation procedure, 14 Apr. 1965, 117–8; 121.

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were highly flexible categories, and those in power could mould them in a manner that served their own ends, often creating a lop-sided hierarchy of justice that officials sometimes struggled to justify. Thus, while the ’injustice’ of the provision of housing for people who were considered ‘socially worthless’ had to be eliminated, the bureaucracy identified other social injustices that it was willing to tolerate. As one report stipulated, ‘[i]t is also a social injustice that, for example, a ministry hires a deputy minister or head of department who has only been in Budapest for a transit trip; and because he gets a senior position, he gets a two-room or three-room apartment, but the ministerial staff member who has been living in Budapest for 30 years, he runs until his feet ache and he still doesn’t get an apartment. In short, there are social injustices of this kind which we have to accept for the time being.’50 The Second Economy Strikes Back: The Competition between Socialism and Capitalism By the 1960s, it was generally accepted that because social injustices could exist even under socialism, the development of a social policy was possible and even necessary. Consequently, the use of the term became increasingly widespread. Most notably, with the extension of the national insurance system, there was a massive increase in the number of pensioners. As a result, in the 1960s, care for the elderly became one of the main responsibilities of institutions dealing with social policy explicitly or implicitly, and new forms of care for the elderly emerged. Social policy also gained increasing acceptance because those who used the term wrote more frequently in official documents about the serious social inequalities that persisted even though private ownership had been almost entirely abolished. When individual institutions (such as the municipal administration, the trade unions, or the factories) tried to obtain central funds to implement their paternalistic policies, they therefore now often described their work by mobilising the terms ‘social policy’, ‘family policy’, ‘labour policy’, or ‘population growth policy’. The primary reason for the solidification of this new language of social justice was that authors of the reports sought to conform with official public discourse and align their requests with the range of policies that had been designed to solve social problems. In the early 1970s, ‘social care for the elderly’ had become the primary area of social policy and featured prominently in the discourse of the institutions of the city council.51 This was, however, not the sole field targeted by the state, 50 51

BFL f. XXIII-102.a.1. VB, 1 Apr. 1964, 217. BFL. f. XXIII–101a., 10 Dec. 1973, Report on the social policy activities of the city and district councils, 58.

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and welfare provision expanded considerably in other areas too. When it came to providing benefits for workers, for example, the Social Policy Committee of the Budapest Committee of Trade Unions supervised access to housing, child services, social institutions dealing with welfare, and workers’ hostels. Due to the extension of the national insurance system, another duty of the Social Policy Committee of the Budapest Committee of Trade Unions was the ‘social supervision’ of national insurance work (health care, public health institutions, financial aid), as well as the arrangement and supervision of organized holidays.52 Since the 1960s, the council institutions responsible for social policy matters had been supervising old people’s homes, the number of which further increased in the 1970s. New forms of care for the elderly also emerged. As the number of old-age pensioners grew, so did the cost of pensions, and the gap between the incomes of pensioners and the incomes of wage earners increased.53 At this point, social-policy supervision involved not only visiting old people’s homes, but also supervising new forms of care for the elderly and assessing the differences in the living conditions of pensioners. By the late 1970s, the term ‘social policy’ was officially used for policies ‘addressing the financial, health, etc. circumstances of individual social strata’.54 Thus, alongside smaller forms of financial aid and the large state institutions, a paternalistic way of thinking accompanied the implementation of social policy. As council documents suggest, for instance, bureaucrats were convinced that subsidies could result in a more rigorous supervision of consumption while promoting social justice. This led to the development and growth of a system of subsidies based on social as well as more moral arguments. This system could involve anything from subsidies for children’s clothing to any form of benefit, including the allocation of housing.55 The ideological background for subsidies was the notion that ‘the more such products individuals purchase, the higher state allowances they may get’.56

52

53

54 55 56

Politikatörténeti és Szakszervezeti Levéltár [Political History and Trade Union Archives]. (= PTI – SZKL) XII. 14. Szakszervezetek Budapesti Tanácsa (= SZBT [Budapest Trade Union Council]) f. 9. Social Insurance Department]. 107. ő. e. 1–3. Operational guidelines of the Social Policy Committee, 25 July 1961. The number of retirees in Hungary in 1960 was 637,000. By 1970, this figure had grown to 1,380,000. In 1977, it was 1,870,000. The annual cost of pension payments (including payments to offset housing costs in 1971) was 4.4 million forints in 1960, 13 million forints in 1970, and 32 million forints in 1977. MÜM Számti Munkaügyi Információs Főoszt, Szociálpolitika: Adatgyűjtemény (Budapest, 1978), p. 68. J. Berényi, Életszínvonal és szociálpolitika (Budapest, 1974), p. 28. Berényi, Életszínvonal és szociálpolitika, p. 11. Berényi, Életszínvonal és szociálpolitika, p. 39. The subsidies provided for infants’ and children’s clothing and school materials reached 30 or 40 per cent. J. Rózsa, Szociálpolitika Magyarországon (Budapest, 1978), p. 77.

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Thus, support for consumption became an objective of social policy in a state in which the distribution of wealth was theoretically supervised by the state. The 1970s marked the breakthrough of a new conception of social justice within state-socialist regimes that reflected the broader international context. This found its expressions at different levels. The long-term objectives drawn up by the Social Policy Department of the Hungarian Ministry of Labour in 1973–4, for example, indicate that notions of social justice and social policy had departed significantly from understandings that were current among officials in 1960. Most notably, according to this new conception, it was ‘necessary to increase the appeal of socialism on the level of international politics against capitalism in circumstances in which the level of economic development in socialist countries (including Hungary) falls considerably behind that of capitalist countries’. Social policy thus became a tool in an ongoing competition between socialist and capitalist countries: ‘Even in our national social policy, we are looking for areas of provision, in which our socialist society could give more to its workers than capitalist societies to theirs and be at the forefront, even though we may be at a lower level of economic development. This is what socialism is really about.’57 The fact that the mere existence of social inequalities was acknowledged in 1973 was of key importance, because it made it possible for the notion of social policy to regain its pre-existing meaning as a tool to reduce such inequalities. The problem for officials, however, lay in explaining how social inequality could exist in the first place in a socialist society in which the distribution of wealth was the sole responsibility of the state. This could clearly be seen in the argument according to which every problem with social policy derived from the internal system of distribution. The creators of the concept of ‘social policy’ then argued in the early 1970s that ‘the most general solution to social policy tasks may be to accelerate the rate of social distribution of public goods and continue the process until an optimal ratio of distribution according to work and social distribution is achieved’.58 This foreshadowed the developments of the following decade, when the share of social benefits as a proportion of individual incomes increased to such an extent that it was met, eventually, with disapproval by party leaders, including Kádár.59 In the 1970s, the centre of gravity of social policy also shifted. Instead of focusing on the provision of social care, national insurance and financial assistance and benefits came to the fore as the tools of social policy. As the 57 58 59

MNL OL, f. XIX-C-5., Ministry of Employment. b. 708. Submission by the Social Policy Department on the outline of a long-term social policy concept, 2 Apr. 1973. Ibid., 5. MNL OL. f. 288. MSZMP. PB. 5/908. ő. e., 25 Apr. 1984, 1, Improving social policy. Statistics prepared by the Central Statistics Office on social incomes (társadalmi jövedelmek) also support this. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, Statisztikai évkönyv 1985 (Budapest, 1986), p. 262.

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official documents indicate, the extension of the system of pensions at the time and the introduction and increase of childcare allowances were considered the most important achievements of social policy in the fight against social inequalities.60 Social policy and the struggle for social justice were no longer defined as abstract concepts with noble goals. Rather, they were gradually seen as undertakings linked to specific institutions.61 In addition, social policy was seen as synonymous with a standard of living policy aimed at ‘the permanent raising of the standard of living of workers’.62 As a tool with which to cultivate ‘the socialist personality’, it served pedagogical purposes too.63 This was in line with pre-existing approaches towards social policy that linked particular benefits to normative expectations, be these centred around Christian, nationalist, or Communist ideals.64 The regime portrayed the second economy as the main adversary of social justice. There were, according to the bureaucracy responsible for policy, two reasons for this. The first was that ‘a considerable proportion of the population has a significant share in the income and lifestyle of non-socially organised work, the so-called second economy’. The second was that ‘different groups of the population have unequal opportunities to engage in this kind of work’.65 State officials therefore saw the growth of the second economy as a major impediment to the levelling of social inequalities. Usually, behind this argument and the concomitant appeal to the high ideals of social justice lay a decline in the commitment of the state towards delivering real material benefits. The room to manoeuvre to distribute such benefits was gradually shrinking, as the economic difficulties faced by state-socialist countries increased in the 1980s. In 1982, for example, the Budapest City Council used the language of social justice as a means of justifying raising rents, because inequalities in access to housing are greater than justified, and the burden of building and maintaining housing is disproportionately shared by the state and the population, or by different groups of the population. The modernisation of the housing distribution system is primarily aimed at improving equality of access to housing for families of different social and income status, increasing the proportionality of the financial burden between the State and the population, and strengthening social justice.66 60 61 62 63 65 66

MNL. OL. f. XIX-C-5., Ministry of Employment. b. 708. Proposal from the Social Policy Department, 10 Apr. 1973. E.g.: ‘social policy means specific social action and the legal and institutional framework that supports its implementation’. Seres, A szociálpolitika, p. 44. BFL. f. XXXV.1.a.3., MSZMP Budapest Party Committee meetings, 114. ő.e., 20 Apr. 1973, PB 114/44. 64 Seres, A szociálpolitika, p. 52. See Kovrig, Szociálpolitika, pp. 8–14. MNL OL. f. 288. 5/754. ő. e. MSZMP. PB., 5 Sept. 1978, Distributions and their development, 22. BFL. f. XXIII. 101. a., 29 Oct. 1982, 9, 12.

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Public acceptance of the rent increase was considered such a sensitive issue that a public opinion poll was carried out to determine how fair the inhabitants of Budapest considered the rent increase. Unsurprisingly, those who lived in public rented housing did not approve, while those who did not benefit from low-wage public rented housing considered it fair.67 A new conception of social justice therefore began to emerge in the 1980s, as state involvement in issues such as housing declined. This gravitated around the notion that market processes better served the cause of social justice than state redistribution. Accordingly, in 1986, the City Council was pleased to note that ‘the engagement of the population in the construction and purchase of private housing has increased. In accordance with social policy objectives, the burden of housing acquisition had become more proportionate between the state and the population and between the various groups of the population’.68 In other words, housing distribution became less of a state responsibility as the second economy took over, and the resources that were available to fund public housing were steadily declining as the country fell into debt in the 1980s.69 Thus, paradoxically, perhaps, the state found a way of casting its waning commitment to providing housing as evidence of its commitment to social justice. State bodies began to argue publicly, on the basis of the experiences of previous decades, that it was fairer to let the market and the financial resources of the population determine who could get a home than for the state to intervene, although the real reason for the decline in state involvement in housing was simply dwindling state finances.70 By the second half of the 1980s, the biggest enemy of state redistribution was no longer officially the market or the second economy, but public debt and low economic productivity. The regime had thus abandoned the redistribution of housing as a means of achieving social justice, the alleged goal of Communism, long before its fall. Conclusion: The Market Awakens By the end of the 1970s, the Communist party, which in the 1950s had set the achievement of social justice as the ultimate goal of Communism, had identified the rise of the second economy as one of the main sources of social

67 68 69 70

L. Kulcsár and J. Timár, Vélemények az új lakásügyi rendeletről: 1982. október (Budapest, 1983). BFL. f. XXIII. 101. a., 22 Apr. 1986. Proposal for housing policy guidelines for the VII FiveYear Plan, 4. For the history of indebtedness of Hungary in the 1980s, see A. Mong, Kádár hitele: A magyar államadósság története: 1956–1990 (Budapest, 2012). BFL. f. XXXV.1.a.4. MSZMP, Meetings of the Budapest Executive Committee, 19 Aug. 1987, 764. ö.e . 1987, VB 764/47.

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injustice and inequality.71 Until then, numerous members and strata of society had been able to benefit from state redistribution, even if this required some compromise. Although it was not ‘those in need’ who received the major share of the policies and practices of state redistribution in the Kádár era, this fact did not weaken support for the system. Rather, it strengthened it. Consequently, the use of the notion of social justice became increasingly vital at a time when the ‘original’ objectives of socialism were less and less mentioned in official public discourse. By no means did this mean, though, that the pragmatic implementation of social justice had replaced a more comprehensive solution. However, the more frequent use of the notion indicated that not everyone would enjoy a fair share of the benefits given by the welfare dictatorship. Changes in the meaning and use of the term also served as a means of asserting the legitimacy of the system. Thus, the notion of social justice became dependent on economic growth, the primary task of which was not to posit social rights but to distribute state benefits. The redistribution of state assets in state-socialist states resulted in novel inequalities that resembled the inequalities found in free-market economies. In the institutions responsible for redistribution, decision makers favoured the privileged social groups that were closest to them and to the ideological objectives of the regime, whether it came to access to housing or the distribution of family allowances.72 This was therefore a paternalistic social policy modelled at least in part on the welfare system of countries in the West and which sought to create the illusion that the regime cared for its population. The system of social policy in the Kádár era not only led numerous members and strata of society to believe that social welfare was possible; it also helped certain individuals live comfortable lives without having to assert their interests vis-à-vis the state. As a result, it enabled them to enjoy a comfortable standard of living without the need to assert their interests as part of everyday social practice and as a form of public political engagement. On the whole, therefore, access to welfare was heavily dependent on the power structures that maintained the ruling regime. The inhabitants of the shelter in Dobozi Street, for example, went to the council collectively because they had nothing to lose. They had no jobs, no permanent workplaces, and no permanent address, so the possibility of being stigmatized and excluded (which is what eventually happened to them) did not change their situation much. In contrast, had someone from a social group that had a secure workplace (such as a job 71 72

MOL. f. 288. 5/754. ő. e. MSZMP., PB. 5 Sept. 1978, Distributions and their development, 22. This view, which enjoyed widespread acceptance, finds support in the secondary literature, for instance, in I. Szelényi and R. Manchin, ‘Social Policy under State Socialism: Market Redistribution and Social Inequalities in East European Socialist Societies’, in M. Rein, G. Esping-Andersen, and L. Rainwater (eds.), Stagnation and Renewal in Social Policy: The Rise and Fall of Policy Regimes (Armonk, NY, 1987), pp. 102–39.

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provided by the state), housing, and the entitlement to a pension, perhaps complemented with an additional income from the second economy that they could spend on the black market, acted similarly, they could have lost these benefits as well as, more broadly, a whole identity built on the effort to obtain them. In this way, the implementation of a particular notion of social justice through the establishment of a welfare dictatorship functioned as an effective mechanism of social control. Anyone who did not know the rules of the game, such as whom one should talk to, whom to write petitions to, and what exactly one should say to those in power, could easily find themselves excluded from the world of secure employment and access to housing.73 Acquiring this knowledge was facilitated by an increasingly expanding network of institutions that developed alongside the municipal councils and state offices responsible for national insurance after 1956. The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak has argued that the authors of late Soviet ideological texts, which in principle followed strict rules, increasingly borrowed from one another, minimizing personal responsibility and individual style. This is also true of the language used in texts dealing with social justice. The language of ideological texts became increasingly normalized, cumbersome, self-referential, and circular, as did texts about wealth and inequality.74 Though societies within state-socialist regimes underwent significant, but gradual transformation during the post-war period, the official language changed very little. As a consequence, the essential terms on which the regimes built their public discourse became increasingly devoid of substantive meaning, with terms such as ‘class struggle’, ‘welfare’, ‘socialism’, and ‘social justice’ being the usual ingredients of official statements. This allowed those using the official language to mould these terms in such a manner that they responded to their own needs, for example, in the discussion of the ‘socially just’ distribution of housing. In adopting the language of the regime, they could both parrot the jargon to express their loyalty to the system while at the same time using it express their own interests and goals. As a result, the performative aspects of authoritarian discourse became increasingly important. What mattered was not what was said, but how it was said, what it achieved, and what its impact was.

73

74

A ‘tramp’ or ‘odd-jobs worker’ said to Gábor Demszky in 1979: ‘I don’t know what is where, what I should do, what I should say, who I should talk to.’ Demszky, the major of Budapest after 1990, was one of the first people to do interviews with the homeless at the time. G. Demszky, ‘Peremvidéken: Csövesek és alkalmiak’, in J. Pelle (ed.), Írószemmel: 1980 (Budapest, 1981), pp. 238–64, 238. A. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ, 2005), pp. 27, 75.

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The self-perception and image of society shifted in Hungary after the revolution of 1956 in parallel with other de-Stalinisation campaigns in the wider Soviet bloc. As János M. Rainer has observed, Kádárism and other late socialist regimes marked a break with classical Stalinism in their perceptions of social reality.75 But this break was slow and painful, and took many years. The first step was to change the ideological and bureaucratic language used to express (and construct) experience, including the language used to fight against social inequalities or for social justice. In this sense, the discourse of social justice became less and less a means to call for or legitimise the expansion of state redistribution, which had been one of the primary tools through which the ideology of Communism was put into practice, and more and more about the free use by the population of its income accumulated through participation in the second economy. Thus, by the end of the socialist era, the market and social justice had lost their mutually exclusive and contradictory meanings. Conversely, references to the second economy and the market as a tool better suited to address social inequalities than redistribution became synonymous with the assertion of social justice. At the end of the 1980s, social justice was no longer seen by the state as a persuasive pretext for attempts to limit market expansion and exchange. The movements in support of social reforms thus had to reassess the concepts of the market and of social justice by reinventing and popularizing the notion of a ‘social market economy’ during the process of regime change in 1989. As a result of this recalibration of public discourse, this concept became a cornerstone of the programme of the first democratically elected government in Hungary in 1990.76 In this interpretation, the struggle for regime change was therefore also a return to the struggle over the conflicting understandings of the relationship between the market and social justice.

75 76

J. M. Rainer, Bevezetés a kádárizmusba (Budapest, 2011), p. 144. See A nemzeti megújhodás programja: A Köztársaság első három éve (Budapest, 1990), p. 13.

8

Immigrants and Social Justice in Western Europe since the 1960s Daniel A. Gordon

Democracy in Western Europe, even after 1945, was not a regime of equality. As recent work has strongly emphasised, lineages of inequality were inherent to the post-war regimes of Western Europe. The cautiously conservative, conformist, and hierarchical instigators of democracy in prosperous post-war societies chose to marginalise or exclude many from the apparently inclusive democratic process.1 This chapter seeks to explain one element of this inequality by focusing on the treatment of the immigrant communities who moved across borders in Western Europe, or indeed arrived from beyond the frontiers of Europe. In doing so, it will focus on how attitudes towards immigrants – and the conception of them within a broader framework of social justice – evolved in the years following 1968. One of the many significant ways that the ‘long 1968’ challenged the complacency of post-war Western Europe was to present the cause of immigrants as a cause of social justice: immigrants were an oppressed and exploited group of workers whose rights any movement committed to social justice should seek to enhance. By contrast, in Europe today, immigrants are often depicted as antithetical to social justice. What some have dubbed ‘Schrödinger’s immigrant’2 simultaneously steals your job and is too lazy to work. In the popular imagination, immigrants are, at best, a privileged yet alien group, whose hard work and consequent relative economic success is itself proof of unfair competition for the beleaguered native worker, and, at worst, a drain on the generosity of the native taxpayer. Consequently, many commentators have attempted to argue that a fundamental tension exists between ethnic diversity and social equality, and depict mass migration as undermining social justice. But where did such ‘welfare chauvinism’ originate I would like to thank, for very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter, Mary Horbury and all the participants in the Social Justice workshop series, especially Camilo Erlichman, as well as Martin Conway for generous support and understanding during my convalescence from complications of COVID-19. 1 M. Conway, Europe’s Democratic Age 1945–1968 (Princeton, NJ, 2020). 2 R. Rowthorn and D. Růžička, ‘Schrödinger’s Immigrant’, Social Europe, 14 Sept. 2017, www .socialeurope.eu/schrodingers-immigrant.

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from, and how did these ideas manage to entrench themselves within public discourse? In other words, how did we get from social justice for immigrants to immigrants as the antithesis of social justice? A conventional answer to this question might focus on the loss of confidence of left-wing political projects towards the end of the twentieth century, and the concomitant rise of the radical right and its hostility to mass immigration. This chapter, however, interrogates tensions within social-justice discourses of the left and centre-left, and, in doing so, complicates the story of 1968 and its legacy, paying attention to emancipatory and exclusionary aspects. In particular, it explores the origins of a strand of thinking that could be termed ‘Goodhartism’, after its leading contemporary exponent David Goodhart, but which has deeper and broader roots transcending Goodhart’s British context and his twenty-first-century prominence. This is, therefore, both a history of national exclusions and a transnational history of a Western European convergence of discourses on immigrants and social justice across the last three decades of the twentieth century. Goodhart’s controversial article ‘Too Diverse?’, published in 2004 in Prospect, the magazine he then edited, set him up as one of the most influential public intellectuals in UK migration debates. The welfare state, Goodhart suggested, will no longer be sustainable the more that its beneficiaries cease to be culturally or ethnically similar to those whose taxes fund it.3 Goodhart’s ‘progressive dilemma’, in which solidarity and diversity are antithetical values, is a form of welfare chauvinism, in many ways presaging the post-liberal or even anti-liberal turn that the United Kingdom later appeared to take with the Brexit referendum in 2016.4 Yet Goodhart was no putative spokesman for the populist right. Goodhart framed his argument as a family disagreement within what he terms his ‘tribe’ of North London liberals.5 Prospect was close to the New Labour project of Tony Blair, and Goodhart’s measured technocratic prose pre-emptively attempts to disarm charges of racism, whilst advocating policy solutions that indeed amounted to exclusion, and envisaged fewer rights for fewer people.6 However, while ‘Goodhartism’ seeks to celebrate Britishness, his ideas were no British exception. Most obviously, they could be regarded as an import from the United States, where the theme of much diversity but little solidarity 3 4 5 6

D. Goodhart, ‘Too Diverse?’, Prospect, Feb. 2004. D. Goodhart and C. Kjelstrup, ‘Questioning Diversity’, Eurozine, 6 July 2018, www.eurozine .com/questioning-diversity. D. Goodhart, ‘Why I Left My London Liberal Tribe’, Financial Times, 17 Mar. 2017. D. Goodhart, ‘Immigration after Brexit: What Should Post-Brexit Immigration Policy Look Like?’, Policy Exchange pamphlet, Jan. 2018, policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/ 01/Immigration-after-Brexit.pdf. On this context, see M. Goodfellow, Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (London, 2020), pp. 92–128.

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has become a staple of political debate. Goodhart’s source for the ‘progressive dilemma’ was a 1998 speech by the British Conservative politician David Willetts, in turn influenced by the American political scientist Robert Putnam.7 In addition, however, it also formed part of a broader Western European context. The rhetoric of the ‘progressive dilemma’ is in some respects very similar to the themes of the ‘neo-republicanism’ that emerged on the centre-left in France in the late 1980s, most prominently associated with thinkers such as Alain Finkielkraut and Pierre-André Taguieff.8 One leading analyst of antiracism, Alana Lentin, has pointed out that the argument now often heard in the anglophone world, that the excesses of identity politics on the cosmopolitan left are responsible for the rise of the ‘alt-right’, is not particularly original, for theorists such as Taguieff were making very similar arguments in 1991, identifying the cultural relativism of the anti-racist left as responsible for the rise of the Front National in France.9 The parallel can be pursued further. Like the French neo-republicans, Goodhart takes issue with what became termed in France as le droit à la différence: if only ‘immigrants’ – a selective construct applied to many people born in France, yet not to some actual immigrants – would rally around the Republic and abandon their demands for ‘the right to be different’, then social solidarity would be restored. From the late 1980s onwards, there was much talk in Parisian circles of a so-called national-republicanism, of which Taguieff – alongside other former 68ers, notably Régis Debray – was one of the most distinguished exponents. Like Goodhart, these thinkers advocated a reassertion of the nation state as the means for bringing about a revival of social solidarity.10 Neo-republicanism has often been viewed as a particularly French phenomenon. The extent to which French discourses of social solidarity both resisted the apparent triumph of neoliberalism elsewhere and were sometimes combined with an equally strident rejection of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ multiculturalism indeed appeared distinctive at the time.11 Taguieff was strongly critical of free-market economics, presenting what one exposition of his work describes 7 8

9

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Goodhart, ‘Too Diverse?’ D. Goodhart, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration (London, 2013); D. Gordon, ‘Integration, Again: The Frenchness of a British Nationalist’, Political Quarterly, 84 (2013), 551–3. A. Lentin, ‘Fault on Both Sides? Racism, Anti-Racism and the Persistence of White Supremacy’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 27 Feb. 2018, www.abc.net.au/religion/ fault-on-both-sides-racism-anti-racism-and-the-persistence-of-wh/10094946. C. Flood, ‘National Republican Politics, Intellectuals and the Case of Pierre-André Taguieff’, Modern and Contemporary France, 12 (2004), 364–5. C. Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Theory (Oxford, 2008); E. Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge, 2015).

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as ‘a nightmarish picture of the destructive effects of global hypercapitalism in every sphere of social existence’.12 This in turn reflected the way that France experienced no moment equivalent to Thatcherism of assault on the post-war consensus. National-republicanism found political expression in the 2002 presidential campaign of former Defence and Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement, an ultra-Jacobin renegade from the François Mitterrand–era Socialists. Chevènement’s attempt to transcend the left/right divide was not especially successful at the ballot box, but it set the ideological terms of reference for the future, with echoes of his themes evident in the rhetoric of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Marine Le Pen, and many others. A similar and unmistakeably French tone dominates the editorial line of the left-of-centre weekly Marianne, founded in 1997 by the campaigning journalist Jean-François Kahn with a classically neo-republican combination of vociferous critiques of multiculturalism with opposition to neoliberalism and American imperialism, a successful formula that by the mid-2000s was claiming a readership as high as 1.3 million.13 In retrospect, however, this looks less a French exception and more reflective of a broader European trend. In West Berlin in 1985, some four years before the more internationally notorious French affaire du foulard concerning whether Islamic headscarves should be banned in French schools, a male SPD city-council member objected to a teaching assistant wearing a headscarf, while the same year the Netherlands too witnessed an early ‘headscarf affair’.14 In the decades since 1989, some variant of this ‘headscarf affair’ has emerged almost everywhere in Europe, but this rejection of diversity on cultural grounds – often focusing on Muslim women – has served as a vehicle for a much wider rejection of diversity that resonates on parts of both right and left. Placed in this context, Goodhartism seems less a distinctive product of British political culture than one manifestation of ideas that surfaced across Europe.15 Perhaps the most striking example of an apparently sudden backlash against multiculturalism took place in the early 2000s in the hitherto supposedly ultra-tolerant Netherlands, with the rapid succession of the Pim 12 13 14

15

Flood, ‘National Republican Politics’, 362. Open Source Center, ‘France – Media Guide 2008’, 16 July 2008, irp.fas.org/dni/osc/francemedia.pdf. R. Chin, ‘Guest Worker Migration and the Unexpected Return of Race’, in R. Chin, H. Fehrenbach, G. Eley, and A. Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor, MI, 2009), pp. 97–8; D. Lettinga and S. Saharso, ‘Outsiders Within: Framing and Regulation of Headscarves in France, Germany and the Netherlands’, Social Inclusion, 2 (2014), 33. I will refer most extensively to France and the United Kingdom, but we shall see that what Davide Però calls the ‘neo-assimilationist turn’ finds parallel expression elsewhere: D. Però, Inclusionary Rhetoric/Exclusionary Practices: Left-Wing Politics and Migration in Italy (New York, 2007), pp. 142–3.

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Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Geert Wilders affairs. In part, the Dutch backlash came from conservative neo-nationalists such as Wilders, no friends of the welfare state.16 Yet, as Leo and Jan Lucassen suggest, it also had roots on the left, pointing to the pivotal role of leading immigration critic and Labour Party member Paul Scheffer, who had a background in extremeleft activism in the 1970s – as did Fortuyn, for whom Muslim immigrants had to be rejected in the name of defending Dutch liberalism and gay rights.17 Thus individual national cases form part of a wider convergence in Western European discourses on multiculturalism.18 As Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf have observed, ‘beginning around the turn of the millennium, sporadic critical voices seemingly became harmonized into a chorus’.19 Throughout Europe, a wide range of political voices asserted the virtues of ‘integration’ and ‘community cohesion’.20 From Tony Blair’s 2006 speech on the ‘duty to integrate’ via David Cameron’s 2011 claim that ‘we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism’21 to the 2021 Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities’ critique of ‘well organised single-issue identity lobby groups’,22 British leaders have queued up to bury, rather than praise, the doctrine of multiculturalism that had found an early expression in the 1966 speech on ‘equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity’ by Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. This was part of a continent-wide turn against the perceived relativism of multiculturalism, which intensified in the wake of 9/11 and the 2003 Iraq War, exemplified by the rapid rise and fall of multiculturalism in German political discourse, cemented by Angela Merkel’s stark claim in 2010 that multiculturalism has ‘utterly failed’.23

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B. Prins and S. Saharso, ‘From Tolerance to Repression: The Dutch Backlash against Multiculturalism’, in S. Vertovec and S. Wessendorf (eds.), The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Policies, Discourses and Practices (London, 2010), pp. 72–91. L. Lucassen and J. Lucassen, ‘The Strange Death of Dutch Tolerance: The Timing and Nature of the Pessimist Turn in the Dutch Migration Debate’, Journal of Modern History, 87 (2015), 72–101; R. Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History (Princeton, NJ, 2017), pp. 274–5. On this larger theme, see Chin, Crisis of Multiculturalism. S. Vertovec and S. Wessendorf, ‘Introduction: Assessing the Backlash against Multiculturalism in Europe’, in Vertovec and Wessendorf (eds.), The Multiculturalism Backlash, p. 4; see also S. Sharma, Postcolonial Minorities in Britain and France: In the Hyphen of the Nation-State (Manchester, 2016), pp. 104–46. V. Latour, ‘Converging at Last? France, Britain and Their Minorities’, in G. Raymond and T. Modood (eds.), The Construction of Minority Identities in France and Britain (Basingstoke, 2007), 98–116. V. Latour, ‘“Muscular Liberalism”: Surviving Multiculturalism? A Historical and Political Contextualisation of David Cameron’s Munich Speech’, Observatoire de la société britannique, 12 (2012), 199–216. 23 The Guardian, 1 Apr. 2021. Chin, Crisis of Multiculturalism, pp. 237–8.

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As reflected in the ‘war on woke’ waged by Boris Johnson’s government in post-Brexit Britain and the efforts of certain of Emmanuel Macron’s ministers to denounce the spectres of islamogauchisme and les thèses intersectionnelles,24 from the vantage point of the 2020s multiculturalism looks less a distinctive national model than a window in time, swept aside by yet another of the national-protectionist backlashes that periodically haunt modern Europe. If visions of a tolerant and open society also have a profound resonance for many citizens, shared transnationally within and beyond the constituent parts of ‘Old Europe’, it was the exclusionary side of the argument – what Robert Gildea terms ‘the retreat to monocultural nationalism’25 or, to put it more bluntly, in the words of the late Ambalavaner Sivanandan, ‘xenoracism’26 – that came to the fore in much political rhetoric across Europe in the 2010s. This draws strength from a blurring of ideological dividing lines, reflected in a workerist turn on the populist right and extreme right. Most notably, this has been the case in France, where the phenomenon has been dubbed gaucholépenisme, reflecting the electoral success of the Front National amongst working-class communities.27 It has also been a main feature of politics in Italy, where one of the mainsprings of the success of the Lega Nord/Lega has been to present itself as neither right nor left, but defending the territory of the Italian working class.28 This was also evident in the Northern European former heartlands of social democracy: as the extreme right Norwegian Progress Party put it in 1997, ‘We are the caretakers of the working class.. . . Labour has deserted the welfare state.’29 This phenomenon has also risen to prominence in the United Kingdom, which as recently as the turn of the millennium saw itself as somehow immune to extremism. Particularly in England, the right and far right have attempted, relatively successfully, to speak the plebeian-democratic language long associated with the left, while some left thinkers and activists have proffered their own main tendue to variants of xenophobic nationalism.30 National-protectionist modes of thinking even influenced the Euroscepticism 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 Oct. 2020. R. Gildea, Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present (Cambridge, 2019), p. 158. In Sivanandan’s usage, the term ‘xeno-racism’ designates ‘racism that is meted out to impoverished strangers even if they are white’: L. Fekete, ‘The Emergence of Xeno-racism’, Institute of Race Relations, 28 Sept. 2001, www.irr.org.uk/news/the-emergence-of-xeno-racism. J. Evans, ‘Le vote gaucho-lépeniste: Le masque extrême d’une dynamique normale’, Revue française de science politique, 50 (2000), 21–52. See M. Avanza, ‘The Northern League and Its “Innocuous” Xenophobia’, in A. Mammone and G. Vettori (eds.), Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe (London, 2010), pp. 131–42. L. Fekete, A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe (London, 2009), p. 3. BobFromBrockley, ‘Left Nationalism and Brexit Bolshevism’, 6 Apr. 2019, brockley.blogspot. com/2019/04/left-nationalism-and-brexit-bolshevism.html; SDP, ‘New Declaration’, Nov. 2018, sdp.org.uk/new-declaration.

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of the radical left Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, in ways that resembled Mélenchon’s erratic veering in France between internationalism and nationalism.31 In Germany, the SPD’s former Berlin finance minister Thilo Sarrazin has espoused open Islamophobia in provocative books such as Feindliche Übernahme (Hostile Takeover) and Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Abolishes Itself ), accusing Turkish and Arab Germans of an unwillingness to integrate and reliance on welfare.32 Sahra Wagenknecht, former chair of Die Linke’s group in the Bundestag and founder in 2018 of the left-wing crossparty movement Aufstehen, considers immigrants responsible for the decline of unions. Wagenknecht is severely critical of refugee rights and the ‘leftliberal cosmopolitanism’ of the ‘self-righteous’ university-educated classes who ‘see a brother in every human being’ and advocate ‘a society without membership’ – in spite of her background in Marxist philosophy and economics obtained in part from student mobility to a Dutch university, and her origins as the daughter of an Iranian student and an East German state employee.33 Critics have rightly pointed out that arguments of this kind underestimate the degree of diversity to be found in nation states prior to post-1945 mass immigration – including earlier periods of migration perceived as threatening at the time.34 And while anti-migrant attitudes have become a prominent feature of contemporary political discourse in Europe, there is nothing new

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M. Bolton and F. H. Pitts, Corbynism: A Critical Approach (Brighton, 2018); J. Salingue, ‘On Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Europe, and Especially Migrants’, International Viewpoint, 27 Sept. 2018, internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article5722; ‘In Conversation with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’, talk at The World Transformed, Liverpool, 24 Sept. 2018. M. Meng, ‘Silences about Sarrazin’s Racism in Contemporary Germany’, Journal of Modern History, 87 (2015), 102–35. D. Adler, ‘Meet Europe’s Left Nationalists’, The Nation, 28 Jan. 2019; University of Groningen, ‘Alumna in Germany: Sahra Wagenknecht’, www.rug.nl/about-ug/latest-news/ news/newsletters/international/2019/alumna-in-germany-sahra-wagenknecht?lang=en; P. Schwarz, ‘The Nationalist Diatribe of a Left Party Leader – A Review of the New Book by Sahra Wagenknecht’, World Socialist Website, 13 July 2021, www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/ 07/14/wag1-j14.html. Cf. L. Lucassen, The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 (Urbana, IL, 2006). Initial criticisms of Goodhart were published in ‘Too Diverse?’, Prospect, Mar. 2004. For social-science critiques, see P. Pathak, The Future of Multicultural Britain: Confronting the Progressive Dilemma (Edinburgh, 2008), pp. 33–61; W. Kymlicka, ‘Solidarity in Diverse Societies: Beyond Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Welfare Chauvinism’, Comparative Migration Studies, 17 (2015), 1–19; B. Rogaly, ‘Brexit Writings and the War of Position over Migration, “Race” and Class’, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37 (2019), 28–40; J. Bloomfield, ‘Progressive Politics in a Changing World: Challenging the Fallacies of Blue Labour’, Political Quarterly, 91 (2020), 89–97; on Sweden, C. Schall, The Rise and Fall of the Miraculous Welfare Machine: Immigration and Social Democracy in Twentieth Century Sweden (Ithaca, NY, 2016); and on France, ‘Le maintien de l’État providence est-il compatible avec l’accueil des migrants?’, De Facto 4 (2019), www .icmigrations.cnrs.fr/defacto/defacto-004.

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about anti-migration leftism in its various guises. Visions of social justice from which minorities are excluded have a long history.35 There has always been a certain nationalist logic to social democracy’s practical implementation that can be traced back as early as the Gotha Programme of 1875.36 To present social justice through the prism of a state-centred nostalgia for what retrospectively became known as les trente glorieuses from 1945 to its perceived end in 1973 therefore risks presenting too simple a vision. Instead, tracing an alternative history of social justice in its entanglement with migration requires transcending such conventional periodisation breaks, or indeed 1989.37 To that end, the remainder of this chapter seeks to explore the ways in which today’s anti-migration leftism had antecedents in the world of post-war Europe, and how they were until recently eclipsed by other, more generous, conceptions of the relationship between social justice and migration. As it seeks to demonstrate, the history of social justice in Europe is not simply a progressive story of ever-expanding equality and rights.38 Instead, it was marked by fundamental ruptures and bifurcations that call into question linear accounts of twentieth-century European history. Welfare chauvinism has a distinctive history. Arguably, it is as old as welfare itself, predating both the welfare state and the centralised modern nation state of which the former is an outgrowth. In the case of the United Kingdom, David Feldman has suggested structural continuities between the local chauvinism of the pre-1834 Poor Law’s exclusion of the poor from other parishes and later attempts to deny welfare to Jewish or Caribbean migrants: fear of the ‘stranger’ often operated on a local rather than strictly national level. Feldman’s findings bear considerable similarity to those of Mary Lewis on France. At times and places of controversy over migration, from early 1930s Lyon to the West Midlands of the 1960s, local authorities, with one eye on their local tax base, were often distinctly more mean-spirited towards immigrants than national government.39 Welfare chauvinism was thus, as Lewis puts it, ‘an intensely local affair’, where ‘belt-tightening at the expense of foreigners’ was often motivated less by ideology than parsimony.40 Authorities approached migrant welfare, though, with marked assumptions about 35 36 37 38 39

40

See, for example, Chapter 5 in this volume. K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ download/Marx_Critque_of_the_Gotha_Programme.pdf. See Chapter 1 in this volume. See, for example, G. Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford, 2002). D. Feldman, ‘Migrants, Immigrants and Welfare from the Old Poor Law to the Welfare State’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 13 (2003), 79–104; M. Lewis, The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918–1940 (Stanford, CA, 2006), pp. 69–72. Lewis, Boundaries of the Republic, pp. 70–1.

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difference and hierarchy. In the case of Algerians in France, welfare and housing services developed in the colonial era, with all the attitudes of paternalism and fear that shaped them, continued after independence in 1962, with an emphasis on adaption to ‘European norms’. However, in some cases, such as in Marseilles, these even extended to certain families of French origin who were deemed to be ‘asocial’. This implied that the boundary between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, in the context of a deeply clientelist system run by the city’s Socialist mayor, Gaston Defferre, was based not only on national origin but also on the ways in which local governance encouraged forms of inclusion and exclusion as a way of distributing material resources and enforcing visions of normality.41 Likewise in West Germany, it was the regional governments of the Länder and local authorities who tended to be harsher than the federal government.42 Yet at the national level, even in the United Kingdom, universalist conceptions of entitlement usually prevailed within the structures of the national state until the 1980s, generally constituting an improvement on earlier, more coercive and discriminatory local schemes.43 As the Department of Health and Social Security stated in 1970, ‘health and welfare services and social security benefits are available to all people in this country regardless of race, colour or origin’.44 Popular understandings of entitlement to a share in the social justice dispensed by the welfare state did not, however, always concur with such theoretical universalism, shaped as they were by the long history of colonialism from which Europe was only just emerging. In relation to Britain, Anna Marie Smith has argued that ‘On the question of race . . . the “middle ground” consensus was actually right-wing, rather than centrist.’45 Much the same could be said for other countries in Western Europe. Immigrants from British Commonwealth states (notwithstanding their theoretically greater political rights), Gastarbeiter, and travailleurs immigrés alike were conceived of primarily as a labour force, living alongside but for most practical purposes treated as external to the host society. Their presence was justified in strictly economic terms and conceived of, not least by most migrants themselves, as a temporary arrangement based on the so-called myth of return.

41

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F. de Barros, ‘Des “français musulmans d’Algérie” aux “immigrés”: L’importations des classifications coloniales dans les politiques de logement en France (1950–1970)’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 159 (2005), 26–53; E. Naylor, ‘Un âne dans l’ascenseur: Late Colonial Welfare Services and Social Housing in Marseille’, French History, 27 (2013), 422–47. B. Marshall, The New Germany and Migration in Europe (Manchester, 2000), p. 17. D. Renton, The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right (London, 2019), p. 87. Feldman, ‘Migrants, Immigrants and Welfare’, 97. A. M. Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain 1968–1990 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 137.

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It followed, therefore, that the great questions of distribution of wealth within the post-war consensus were not typically understood as something in which migrant workers had any great stake. Guest workers were not usually banned outright from accessing welfare systems – in West Germany, for example, they had the right to up to 312 days of unemployment benefits.46 In a context of near-full employment, however, they were not typically expected to be large claimants on them. Migrant workers had been invited in the long boom preceding the 1973 oil crisis precisely because they were seen as predominantly young, male, hard-working, and frugal, making minimal claims on the host country. When, say, French trade unions talked about pensions, young migrant workers wondered what relevance it had to them, as they would be long gone from France by the time any such pension arrived, but still agreed altruistically to strike for the benefit of their French colleagues.47 It still took a long process of rethinking before most migrant workers reached the stage of seeing themselves, in the words of the Tunisian migrant-rights activist Saïd Bouziri, ‘as belonging here, and that they shouldn’t put up with things’.48 Migrants’ assumptions around their future were shaped in important ways by the economic boom and the optimistic set of political compromises that created the conditions of their arrival in Western Europe yet circumscribed their second-class status within it. Once the post-war consensus started its long unravelling, initially under the impact of the upheavals of the late 1960s, immigrants were, however, not the beneficiaries. The most obvious example was Powellism in the United Kingdom, where there was a significant class dimension to popular support for Enoch Powell’s moment of articulation of nativist identity.49 This was also the case with the Schwarzenbach Initiative in Switzerland, much debated between 1968 and 1970, which would have limited the foreign population to a maximum of 10 per cent and thereby forced many existing guest workers to leave. It was therefore symptomatic of these attitudes that a trade-union pamphlet against this proposal could be entitled Are Foreigners Superfluous?, but still be denounced for being too pro-foreigner.50 Of course, solidarity between native and migrant workers did occur. The French events of May–June 1968 provided a time-limited example of a set of 46 47 48 49 50

Craig Whitney, ‘Foreign Workers Quitting West Germany’, New York Times, 25 Oct. 1975. D. Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals: May ’68 and the Rise of Anti-Racism in France (Pontypool, 2012), p. 65. S. Bouziri, interview with Daniel Gordon, Paris, 6 Nov. 2004. A. Whipple, ‘Revisiting the “Rivers of Blood” Controversy: Letters to Enoch Powell’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), 717–35. B. Schmitter Heisler, ‘Trapped in the Consociational Cage: Trade Unions and Immigration in Switzerland’, in R. Penninx and J. Roosblad (eds.), Trade Unions, Immigration and Immigrants in Europe 1960–1993 (New York, 2000), p. 30; D. Landwehr, ‘The Schwarzenbach Initiative’, June 2020, blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2020/06/schwarzenbach-initiative.

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movements characterised by solidarity between immigrants and citizens. Many young intellectuals came to see immigrants as a particularly heavily exploited fraction of the working class, victims of cruel capitalist dispossession. For the young intellectuals, anti-racism was not only a matter of solidarity, but was also a kind of identity performance, involving as it did a crossing of class boundaries and a meeting of worlds that did not in the normal course of things interact with one another. Visions of mutual solidarity between immigrant and French workers were most pronounced at exceptional moments such as the great general strike of 1968, when the catchphrase was ‘Travailleurs, Français, Immigrés, Unis’. It is also true that the solidarities of the post-’68 era were more developed in workplaces than in residential areas, and that the phenomenon was stronger in some places, notably, in France, than others. Nevertheless, left solidarity with migrants was real enough, at crucial moments such as the hunger strikes of 1972–3, which effectively invented the tradition of political mobilisations for the regularisation of the migration status of socalled sans-papiers in contemporary France.51 Significant currents of opinion within European society, notably left Catholicism, were strongly committed to solidarity with migrants, in part as a legacy of anti-colonial struggles.52 New social rights were not just demanded but achieved, such as the right for foreign nationals to be elected union delegates in France. This history of left-migrant solidarity, and the post-’68 era more generally, is a necessary context for understanding the origins of the subsequent reassertion of ideas of solidarity based on national integration. For example, Alain Finkielkraut, one of the most prominent public intellectuals in contemporary France, has sometimes developed his thought in critical dialogue with his younger self, when as a student in 1968 he was startled to find his nonJewish comrades chanting ‘We Are All German Jews!’ Finkielkraut’s later neo-republican ideas thus involve a certain reckoning with what he described as ‘the gaudy garb of revolution’.53 It is also significant that Pierre-André Taguieff studied at Nanterre University, cradle of May ’68, rubbing shoulders with Daniel Cohn-Bendit and auditioning for membership of the Situationist International. In the early 1980s, Taguieff was active in mainstream anti-racist organisations such as the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples, and the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme. This appears a far cry from the Taguieff of the 2000s, a leading critic of

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Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals. See Chapter 3 in this volume; G. Panvini, ‘The Christian Worker Movement in the Face of the Immigration Phenomenon of the Fifties and Sixties: The Case of Mediterranean Europe’, seminar paper, Sciences Po Paris, Dec. 2018. A. Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln, 1994), p. 18.

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anti-racism. Yet, as early as 1968, Taguieff was already becoming critical of the ideological assumptions and modes of operation of the radical left.54 In some ways this might seem a familiar story of the revolutionary youth on a journey of disillusionment to becoming a contrarian reactionary later in life. But it also expresses a fundamental tension in Western European democracies that was coming to the fore by the 1960s. Gradually, the reality was exposed that others’ post-war prosperity was built on the backs of the scarred bodies of migrant workers. This realisation was the result of both the struggles of migrant workers themselves for recognition, and exposés by European progressives: two of the best-known examples were Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 film Fear Eats the Soul and John Berger and Jean Mohr’s 1975 book A Seventh Man.55 Yet it is striking how anti-racist representations of immigrant experience were dominated by a kind of one-dimensional miserabilism. The diversity of immigrant experiences was reduced to the exploitation of a single male construction or car worker whose worldly goods could be fitted into one suitcase. The battered suitcase motif became a widely recognisable metaphor for migration in a variety of national contexts.56 It could also apply in some circumstances to internal migrants: Italian operaismo romanticised the Southern Italian migrant to the factories of the Genoa-Turin-Milan triangle as the ‘wretched of the earth’, embodying suffering and resistance, every bit as much as French tiersmondisme idealised ex-colonial migrants.57 One of the inherent problems in many Marxists’ views of migration in the 1970s was a failure to see that the aspirations of migrant workers were often rather capitalistic, and that their attitudes were not necessarily ones of class struggle. Many migrants, rather than trying to effect sociopolitical change, concentrated on saving money to build a home or start a small business back home. As the Canadian anthropologist Caroline Brettell put it in 1979, ‘The emigrant is a travailleur in France to be petit-bourgeois in Portugal.’58 And not only did victim-centred and stereotypical representations reduce the possibility for agency of guest workers, such as Fassbinder’s Moroccan ‘Ali’, but this reading made other migrant experiences all but invisible. Women migrant workers from Spain, Portugal, or Yugoslavia; female pieceworkers in the 54

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‘Le pianiste furtif de l’IS: Entretien avec Pierre-André Taguieff’, Archives et documents situationnistes, 1 (2001), 79–117; J.-F. Savang, ‘Sur Pierre-André Taguieff’, 24 Jan. 2008, polartnet.free.fr/textes/dossiers_polart/Taguieff-JFS.doc. J. Berger and J. Mohr, A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experiences of Migrant Workers in Europe (Harmondsworth, 1975). S. Fischer and M. McGowan, ‘From Pappkoffer to Pluralism: On the Development of Migrant Writing in the Federal Republic of Germany’, in D. Horrocks and E. Kolinsky (eds.), Turkish Culture in German Society Today (Providence, RI, 1996), pp. 1–23. R. Lumley, States of Emergency (London, 1990), pp. 209–20. C. Brettell, ‘Emigration and Its Implications for the Revolution in Northern Portugal’, in L. Graham and H. Makler (eds.), Contemporary Portugal (Austin, TX, 1979), p. 294.

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Paris fashion industry organised by Turkish revolutionaries; Algerian mothers in France’s shantytowns; their children who grew up into the margins of urban existence and international youth culture – by the end of the 1970s all of them would make social justice–based claims on the public political or cultural sphere in ways that did not fit easily within the paradigm of men with battered suitcases.59 Behind such representations lay certain theoretical assumptions. One of the most influential analyses of migrant labour in Western Europe was the Marxist work of Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack. Writing in the New Left Review in 1972 and drawing on such orthodox foundations as Marx and Engels’ theory of the industrial reserve army and Lenin’s analysis of the labour aristocracy, Castles and Kosack argued that ‘the presence of immigrant workers is one of the principal factors contributing to the lack of class consciousness among large sections of the working class’.60 In other words, for businesses the whole point of employing foreign labour was to divide the workers so as to exploit them more severely.61 This was irrespective of the fact that guest workers ‘make contributions to health, unemployment and pension insurance far in excess of their demands on such schemes’: given their age at the time and intention to return home, guest workers would not see any benefits from their pension contributions.62 The point that Turkish workers were subsidising West Germans’ pensions was also not lost on pro-business economists of the time such as Heinz Salowsky, source of some of the statistics cited by Castles and Kosack.63 This was, then, another variant of ‘Schrödinger’s immigrant’: even when migrants were very clearly net contributors to the welfare state, they were still accused, even by Marxists, of dividing the working class. If Castles and Kosack’s analysis seems to foreshadow present-day attitudes towards migrants, their political prescription certainly did not: they called on socialists to bring immigrant workers into the labour movement to fight for equality on all fronts. Thus when some left populists today present free movement of labour as a conspiracy by capitalists, eliding the ‘real human action or desire’ of workers 59

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L. Zanoun (ed.), ‘Les femmes de l’immigration, XIX–XXe siècles’, Special Issue of Migrance, 42 (2014); C. Fauroux and F. Çingi Kodacost, ‘Alliances politiques et mobilisations des travailleurs immigrés: La grève des ouvriers turcs du Sentier (Paris 1980)’, paper for online seminar, Sciences Po Paris, 1 Apr. 2021; B. Le Normand, Citizens without Borders: Yugoslavia and Its Migrant Workers in Western Europe (Toronto, 2021). S. Castles and G. Kosack, ‘The Function of Labour Immigration in Western European Capitalism’, New Left Review, 73 (1972), 3–21. See also S. Castles and G. Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (London, 1973); M. Miller, Foreign Workers in Western Europe (New York, 1981), pp. 1–7. Castles and Kosack, ‘Function of Labour Immigration’. Castles and Kosack, ‘Function of Labour Immigration’, n. 29; H. Salowsky, ‘Economic Impact of Foreign Labour’, Intereconomics, 8 (1973), 59–62.

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to seek a better existence by moving,64 they are returning to arguments held on the left during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. Left discourses on migration were not without their own exclusionary tendencies, and orthodox Communists were among the most vociferous in expressing these views. To be sure, the broader world of Western Communism also contained activists strongly committed to the practice of migrant solidarity,65 and in some cases they succeeded in recruiting significant numbers of immigrant workers.66 There were, however, paradoxical tendencies at work. Even when Communists advocated solidarity between indigenous and migrant workers, this was often on the basis of a rather simplistic economic miserabilism that equated migration with poverty and illiteracy.67 The bourgeoisie, claimed Benoit Frâchon, Secretary-General of the French Communists’ CGT union confederation in 1964, were hypocrites in using migration to bring down wages and create a more easily exploitable workforce, but then create xenophobic propaganda against them on the basis of the misery they had created68 – which rather implied that the xenophobic propaganda had a certain basis in truth. At best, the Communists of the 1970s remained wedded to an outdated vision of migrant solidarity framed by the ‘myth of return’: bilingual teaching was to be supported and solidarity emphasised with home country movements. The heroes of this discourse were thus Communist migrant militants of the past such as Ho Chi Minh or Zhou Enlai, who had returned to continue the struggle back home.69 At worst, not only did the Communist Party condemn those on the extreme left who favoured the abolition of immigration controls, but they sometimes even demanded more immigration controls. As L’Immigré d’Afrique du Nord, the French Communist Party’s official organ for North African immigrants promised in 1972, a Communist government would ensure that the immigrant workforce would be used not against French workers, but for the benefit of the French economy,70 and called for what it presented as France’s policy of mass uncontrolled immigration to be replaced by planned quotas whereby only an official government agency would be allowed to recruit immigrants. Though the French Communists’ pill was to some extent sugared by promises of equal economic, social, and political rights for immigrants, there were clear resemblances to the British Labour-Conservative

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Bolton and Pitts, Corbynism, p. 67. See, for example, M. Apostolo, Traces de luttes 1924–2007 (Paris, 2008). Archives départementales de la Seine Saint-Denis, Bobigny, 4 AV/2235, ‘Enregistrement sonore des séances du comité central’, 31 Mar.–1 Apr. 1977. For example, B. Frâchon, ‘Prolétaires de tous les pays’, L’Humanité, 15 Apr. 1964; G. Séguy, ‘Un travailleur immigré sur deux ne sait pas lire’, L’Humanité, 9 Sept. 1969. Frâchon, ‘Prolétaires de tous le pays’. R. Pronier, Les municipalités communistes (Paris, 1983), pp. 264–5. L’Immigré d’Afrique du Nord, Jan. 1972.

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consensus that good race relations would be achieved through strict controls on immigration, a consensus only partially challenged by the much smaller Communist Party of Great Britain.71 Such Communist equivocations provided rich pickings for polemics by rivals on the left of European politics, such as in the ‘bulldozer affair’ of Vitry-sur-Seine in 1980–1 when, in the presence of the local mayor, Communist activists drove a bulldozer into a hostel being built for Malian workers in the suburbs of Paris.72 At the same time, Communists’ social democratic foes were far from universally welcoming of immigration, especially when in power at national level, with the possible exception of the first three years of the Mitterrand government in France. Until 1979, for example, the British Labour government of James Callaghan carried out abusive ‘virginity-testing’ examinations on women from India and Pakistan seeking to move to the United Kingdom for marriage.73 As Lauren Stokes has revealed, in West Germany in 1974 an SPDled coalition introduced a two-tier system of child benefit to ensure that workers in Germany with children living abroad received lower rates of benefit, thereby creating the misleading impression that if guest workers were to bring their children to Germany, they were ‘welfare migrants’.74 As late as 1982, Helmut Schmidt’s government declared that ‘There is unity [in the government] that the Federal Republic is not a country of immigration and that it should not become one.’75 To some extent this reflected the views of significant portions of social democrats’ electoral base, evident in many trade unions. Racial prejudices among British trade unionists, if increasingly challenged during the 1970s, died hard.76 In West Germany the DGB union confederation advocated priority for Germans in job vacancies, and often disowned strikes by migrant workers, such as at the Ford factory in Cologne in 1973.77 Indeed, as Rita Chin has shown, after 1982 West German social

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Marx Memorial Library, London, ‘Statement of the Executive Committee of the CPGB on the Commonwealth Immigration White Paper’, 12 Sept. 1965; V. Sharma, No Racist Immigration Laws, Communist Party pamphlet, 1979; E. Smith, British Communism and the Politics of Race (Leiden, 2018). R. Bernard, ‘“L’affaire de bulldozer de Vitry (1980-1981)”: La banlieue rouge face au phénomène migratoire’, unpublished master’s thesis, Université de Paris (2020). E. Smith and M. Marmo, ‘Uncovering the “Virginity Testing” Controversy in the National Archives: The Intersectionality of Discrimination in British Immigration History’, Gender and History, 23 (2011), 147–65. Lauren Stokes, ‘“An Invasion of Guest Worker Children”: Welfare Reform and the Stigmatisation of Family Migration in West Germany’, Contemporary European History, 28 (2019), 372–89. Marshall, New Germany, p. 13. S. Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Basingstoke, 2014). P. Kühne, ‘The Federal Republic of Germany: Ambivalent Promotion of Immigrants’ Interests’, in Penninx and Roosblad (eds.), Trade Unions, p. 46; J. Miller, Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s–1980 (Toronto, 2018).

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democrats and feminists shifted away from relatively progressive positions on the country’s ‘guest worker’ minorities towards a more negative discourse fixated on the alleged backwardness of Turkish women.78 The shift in focus towards representations of women and girls illustrated how migration debates were moving away from the classic image of first-generation male manual workers. Ethnic minority women were now to be condemned for not participating in the labour market sufficiently, whereas ethnic minority men were traditionally condemned for participating in it rather too much. A characteristic element of migration discourses in France, however, was the extent to which immigration was presented by a powerful Communist Party as a conspiracy by nefarious capitalists and right-wingers. Already in 1969, some sixty-nine Communist mayors from across the Paris region jointly blamed ‘Les responsabilités du pouvoir et du grand patronat’ (those in power and the major employers) for dumping immigrants in working-class areas, calling for a more equitable dispersal across the region.79 Such fears led Communist-run authorities to embrace a pseudo-scientific theory known as the seuil de tolérance (threshold of tolerance). Drawing on both American sociology80 and aspects of nineteenth-century colonialist knowledge and practice, the seuil de tolérance theory held that coexistence was possible only ‘as long as one ethnicity doesn’t overwhelm the other’.81 The tipping point beyond which racism would be an inevitable response was variously estimated at 10–15 per cent for housing, 20 per cent for primary schools, and 30 per cent for hospitals. Tolerance thus became, as the sociologist Véronique de Rudder put it, a favour granted to the dominated by the dominant, while intolerance was normalised.82 The consequences of this theory could be acute, as when the Communist mayor of Vénissieux, a riot-prone suburb of Lyon, admitted in 1982 that he would rather leave apartments empty than let them to foreign families, so as not to create a ‘vast ghetto’.83 Significantly, the seuil de tolérance was not applied to workplaces: Neil MacMaster has thus suggested that its adoption represented the state beginning to realise that the social costs of migration could no longer be avoided. But it was Communist-run councils who made most widespread use of the principle, in part because they had the

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R. Chin, ‘Guest Worker Migration and the Unexpected Return of Race’, in Chin, Fehrenbach, Eley, and Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State, pp. 94–9. M.-C. Blanc-Chaléard, En finir avec les bidonvilles: Immigration et politique du logement dans la France des Trente Glorieuses (Paris, 2016), pp. 283–6, 382–3. V. de Rudder, ‘“Seuil de tolerance” et cohabitation pluriethnique’, in P.-A. Taguieff (ed.), Face au racisme, vol. 2 (Paris, 1991), pp. 155–7. A. Hajjat, ‘Colonial Legacies: Housing Policy and Riot Prevention Strategies in the Minguettes District of Vénissieux’, in E. Naylor (ed.), France’s Modernising Mission: Citizenship, Welfare and the Ends of Empire (London, 2018), p. 233. 83 De Rudder, Seuil de tolérance, pp. 161–2. Hajjat, ‘Colonial Legacies’, p. 231.

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largest stocks of public housing.84 They had a point in complaining that rightwing authorities in richer areas were happy to use the migrants’ labour while not building social housing to accommodate them: the Communist Party argued that the ‘Vitry affair’ in the Paris suburbs should really be called the ‘St Maur affair’, after the neighbouring right-wing authority who had sought to transfer the Malians to Vitry.85 Arguments providing an apparently objective and technical basis for discrimination, thereby protecting the user from charges of racism,86 thus became more prominent among left-wing circles in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is no coincidence that Christophe Guilluy, the influential geographer who has taken very similar positions in recent French debates to those of Goodhart in Britain, born in 1964 in the classic ‘red belt’ working-class suburb of Montreuil, has stated that ‘his real education was in the French Communist Party, which he joined when he was 20’, contrasting such ‘men and women who were hard nuts and believed in class warfare’ to ‘the cringing leftism of nowadays’.87 In 2018 Guilluy wrote approvingly of the position of Georges Marchais, the Communist candidate in the 1981 presidential election, who called for a halt to immigration.88 Despite latter-day nostalgia for such figures, at the time this electoral strategy was not noticeably crowned with success: Marchais won only a disappointing 15 per cent of the vote. While some red-belt mayors, such as Robert Hue in Montigny-les-Cormeilles in 1981, sought to appeal to working-class social conservatism by playing on fears of immigrants, crime, and drugs, this did not necessarily pay off, because the section of the working class that voted Communist generally held more socially liberal views than the average voter.89 Though by no means uncontested within the Communist Party, immigrant-blaming was nevertheless an appealing strategy for leading party elites in France following the breakdown of the Socialist-Communist Union de Gauche in 1977, as it enabled the Communists to differentiate themselves from the social liberalism associated with the Socialist party.90 84 85 87

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N. MacMaster, ‘The “seuil de tolérance”: The Uses of a Scientific Racist Concept’, in M. Silverman (ed.), Race, Discourse and Power in France (Aldershot, 1991), pp. 14–28. 86 Morning Star, 15 Jan. 1981. MacMaster, ‘Seuil de tolérance’, p. 15. C. Guilluy and D. Goodhart, ‘Peut-on reconcilier monde d’en haut et monde d’en bas?’, Le Figaro, 9 Nov. 2018; A. Hussey, ‘The French Elites against the Working Class’, New Statesman, 24 July 2019. À Gauche.org, ‘Christophe Guilluy à propos de la gauche et de l’immigration’, 4 Nov. 2018, agauche.org/2018/11/04/christophe-guilluy-a-propos-de-la-gauche-et-de-limmigration/. Pronier, Municipalités communistes, p. 398; R. Martelli, ‘La gauche dans la piège de Guilluy’, Regards, 21 Nov. 2014; C. Luxembourg, ‘Une lecture critique de La France péripherique de Christophe Guilluy’, La Revue du projet, 49 (2015). On the broader politics of the PCF at this time, see R. W. Johnson, The Long March of the French Left (London, 1981); J. Jenson and G. Ross, The View from Inside: A French Communist Cell in Crisis (Berkeley, 1984).

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The early 1980s were thus a time when differing visions of the relationship between social justice and migration were coming into conflict. It would be wrong, however, to take the subjective perception amongst elites of a tension between the two as conclusive evidence for the realities of the time. Whereas the heyday of the welfare-state consensus from around 1945 to 1970 was precisely at the height of the post-war immigrant worker boom, the onset of the crisis of the welfare state coincided with a period of low immigration, notably in the United Kingdom, a country of net emigration during the 1980s. This suggests that rather than ‘too much diversity’, other factors, such as the end of Fordism, are more convincing as explanations for the corrosion of mutual trust that fuelled a sharp decline in social solidarity.91 Far from favouring separation from fellow citizens, ethnic minorities were often very prominent in collective attempts to resist the tide of individualism, persisting with ‘an implicit larger message about social justice’.92 Anti-racist activists within Britain’s emergent ethnic minorities, from the Race Today Collective to the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent to Southall Black Sisters to the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, typically saw themselves as part of, or at least in dialogue with, a wider radical left struggle against capitalism and/or other post-1968 social movements, not least second-wave feminism.93 As Chin suggests, many activists on the left produced critiques of state multiculturalism that were far more sophisticated than the sweeping claims of its failure pronounced by politicians.94 For the activists of the 1970s, immigrants were not just immigrants; they were workers, as was clear from the titles and practices of groups that flourished in the immigrant-left galaxy of the period, from France’s Mouvement des travailleurs arabes to Britain’s Indian Workers’ Association. As Don Flynn recalls, ‘the rather loud voices of tens of thousands of African Caribbean and Asian car-plant workers, postal workers, NHS staff, as well as those from the iconic sweatshop struggles at Grunwicks and other places, were amongst the most prominent features of those times’.95 The way that the

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D. Flynn, ‘Values, Trust, Loss: The Dubious Case of Migration and the “Progressive Dilemma”, 9 Mar. 2017, migrantsrights.org.uk/blog/2017/03/09/values-trust-loss-the-dubiouscase-of-migration-and-the-progressive-dilemma. See Chapter 1 in this volume. Z. Cooper, J. White, and K. Pimblott, contributions to Antiracism in Britain: Histories and Trajectories, online conference, University College London/University of Warwick/Durham University, 20 Feb. 2021; H. Carby, A. Elliot-Cooper, L. Palmer, S. Scott, and P. Gilroy, contributions to The Black People’s Day of Action 40 Years On, online panel discussion, University College London, 2 Mar. 2021. Chin, Crisis of Multiculturalism, pp. 265–70; Pragna Patel, interview with Daniel Gordon for Lived Experiences of Anti-Racist Activism in Europe seminar series, Edge Hill University, 3 May 2017. Flynn, ‘Values, Trust, Loss’.

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1976–8 dispute at the Grunwicks photo-processing plant in suburban London is remembered points to how one of the most important heroines of workingclass mobilisation in immediately pre-Thatcherite Britain was an Asian woman, Jayaben Desai. Her life odyssey from Gujarat to Tanzania, back again to India and thence to North-West London illustrates the centrality of migration to understanding late modern global social and labour history, notwithstanding the place of Grunwicks in the pantheon of the British labour movement’s history of heroic defeats. While one important background to the strike was racist bullying and pay discrimination experienced by the largely Asian and female workforce, more crucial was the assault on workers’ dignity by the ever more rapid intensification of production. The strikers’ key demands for union recognition, the right to organise, and respect and dignity for workers still spoke, even at the twilight of Fordism, a broadly applicable and universalist language of social justice.96 Ironically, the picketers at Grunwicks included a young David Goodhart, then a Marxist.97 This biographical detail is rather typical for intellectuals who cut their teeth at a time when the immigrant-left crossover was still fertile, helping forge within popular urban society what Hassan Mahamdallie calls ‘multiculturalism from below’.98 It is thus clear that tensions within ideas of social justice for migrants predated the rise of the extreme right in Europe over the last three decades, and cannot be seen simply as consequences of it. Anti-racism was one side of the coin; the other was a considerable amount of scapegoating of migration.99 The advent of the so-called second generation of the European-raised daughters and sons of the migrant workers of the post-war boom, whose emergence we might date to somewhere between the Notting Hill Carnival riot of 1976 and France’s March for Equality in 1983, raised questions not only about cultural diversity but also about social welfare. As Marxists of the 1970s had noted, the guest-worker paradigm was implicitly dependent on the costs of reproducing labour – the schooling and upbringing of the next generation – being borne not by Western European states but by the exporting countries on the periphery of global capitalism: to European eyes the migrant worker came cheap, because they arrived apparently fully formed as young adults. 96

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R. Pearson, S. Anitha, and L. McDowell, ‘Striking Issues: From Labour Process to Industrial Dispute at Grunwick and Gate Gourmet’, Industrial Relations Journal, 41 (2010), 408–28; S. Anitha, R. Pearson, and L. McDowell, ‘From Grunwick to Gate Gourmet: South Asian Women’s Industrial Activism and the Role of Trade Unions’, Revue française de civilisation britannique, 23 (2018), 1–23. Goodhart, British Dream, p. 184. H. Mahamdallie, ‘Digging Up the Arts Garden’, Learning Lab Editions, learninglabeditions. org/index.php/2013/09/08/edition-5-digging-up-the-arts-garden/; H. Mahamdallie, interview with Daniel Gordon for Lived Experiences of Anti-Racist Activism in Europe seminar series, Edge Hill University, 5 Apr. 2017. P. Fysh and J. Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France (New York, 2003).

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Now, however, as communities originating in migration became ‘new’ ethnic minorities clearly forming part of the social dynamics of Western Europe, visible minorities became predictable targets. In the French case, the breakdown of anti-racist worker solidarity was probably the first Front National electoral breakthrough of 1983–4. An examination of this turning point suggests that this was far from being a case of migrant workers somehow opting out of a struggle for social justice fought valiantly by native-born workers. What was noteworthy about industrial relations in the French car industry, one of the most crucial employers of migrant labour during the post-war boom, was that the bitter struggles of 1982–4 against redundancies and for workers’ dignity were overwhelmingly carried by what at the time were still often labelled ‘foreign workers’. This was the case at Renault’s factory at Flins, Citroën’s at Aulnay, and Talbot’s at Poissy, where fighting broke out between Maghrebi and African strikers on one side and white non-strikers on the other.100 The pattern here was not dissimilar from earlier immigrant workers’ strikes in Britain, such as at Courtauld’s in Preston in 1965, where one of the key motivations was collaboration with management by white workers and unions, often colluding with discriminatory practices at the expense of their Asian colleagues.101 By 1982, both Indian and Afro-Caribbean workers came to have somewhat higher rates of unionisation than their white British fellow workers.102 Yet what was distinctive about the new world of the 1980s was that labour struggles were no longer fashionable, and were instead subjected to what Xavier Vigna has termed ‘une lecture ethnicisée des relations sociales’ (an ethnicised reading of social relations)103 by the media and politicians. Significantly, this newly culturalised way of understanding, or misunderstanding, social conflict often came from the centre-left, such as the Socialist Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy and Gaston Defferre, by then Interior Minister, who at the time of the car strikes famously blamed ‘Shi’ite fundamentalists’. As Vincent Gay has suggested, although the provision of Islamic prayer rooms was one demand amongst others in the Citroën strike, the broader issues of dignity in the workplace that formed the principal grievances of the striking workers were obscured by this misleading dominant representation.104 A move was thus underway in the language of public debate from ‘the social question’ to ‘the 100 101

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Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals, p. 212. J. Wrench, ‘British Unions and Racism: Organisational Dilemmas in an Unsympathetic Climate’, in Penninx and Roosblad (eds.), Trade Unions, Immigration and Immigrants, p. 136. Wrench, ‘British Unions’, p. 137. X. Vigna, Histoire des ouvriers en France au XXe siècle (Paris, 2012), p. 285. V. Gay, Pour la dignité: Ouvriers immigrés et conflits sociaux dans les années 1980 (Lyon, 2021).

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racial question’,105 with significant consequences for the future. People previously seen as workers were now subjected to one-dimensional labelling based on their ethnic, religious, or cultural background. The second-generation anti-racist movements of the 1980s also expressed demands for rights-based inclusion in a spirit that was arguably more authentically republican than the arguments advanced by the neo-republicans. In a manifesto of which more than 100,000 copies were circulated, participants in one such anti-racist initiative, Convergences 84, counterposed the repli (retreat) that they observed as the dominant tendency in an age of political demobilisation to what they presented as its opposite, égalité. They went on to argue: ‘We are a category of citizens who have been placed in the basement of society, and of which people did not want to hear our voice or our soul. We therefore demand our rights: rights which will assure us the status of recognised citizens.’106 In campaigning for these demands, they related how they had encountered other disadvantaged groups, and in that way had come to recognise that their struggle was part of a much wider struggle to achieve an equal society. The manifesto was republished in a pamphlet entitled La ruée vers l’Egalité (The surge towards equality), which also included interviews with participants – one of whom, a young man named Souliman, used the word Egalité with a capital E five times in his first paragraph, under a headline provocatively worded ‘L’égalité un idéal ringard’ (‘Equality – an outdated ideal’).107 Here, perhaps, were the last egalitarians. As time went on, and new patterns of migration started to emerge in fin-desiècle Europe, so debates about migration and social justice moved on from the language considered in the bulk of this chapter. The world of neoliberal hypercapitalism today differs in important ways from the tail-end of the post-war compromise that shaped many of the debates we have considered. Yet elements of the old were present in the new. By the 1990s, it was the radical right rather than the radical left that was employing a miserabilist discourse about migration. In Italy in 1990, for example, the Lega Nord used a poster proclaiming that ‘To bring blacks here is slavery’108 – a metaphor that had also been used by Caribbean migrant activists in Paris in May 1968.109 Social-justice arguments in defence of migrants were easy to make at the height of the post-war guest-worker era precisely because immigrants were so clearly exploited. The dividing line between social-justice arguments for 105 106

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D. Fassin and E. Fassin (eds.), De la question sociale à la question raciale? (Paris, 2006). ‘Texte d’appel: L’étranger c’est celui qui n’habite pas en France’, in N. Rodrigues, J. Chapelle, O. Nageborn, and J. Viera, La ruée vers l’egalité, supplement to Expression Français Immigrés, 30 (1985), 7–12. ‘L’égalité un idéal ringard’, in Rodrigues, Chapelle, Nageborn, and Viera, La ruée vers l’egalité, 17–21. 109 Avanza, ‘Northern League’, p. 134. Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals, p. 81.

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and against migration is not, however, an absolute one, with certain tropes of discourse tending to repeat themselves or be reformulated according to circumstances. The language of social justice was, therefore, a highly malleable one in Western Europe between the 1960s and 1990s. It could be deployed by those advocating the protection and fair treatment of migrants, while it was also used effectively by those who wanted to restrict migration. The common denominator was the way in which social justice as a higher ideal had become so entrenched in Western European discourses that political groups of different political persuasions felt the need to use a language suffused with references to it. Talk of social justice, then, had become a major legitimising device within political discourse. As the case of post-war migration suggests, its durability in twentieth-century Europe was at least in part due to its innate flexibility and the enduring popular appeal it exerted, functioning as a screen onto which different political projects could be projected. In a sense, we have come full circle since the end of the guest-worker system circa 1973. The danger today is that a combination of social-justice arguments against migration, nationalprotectionist backlashes, and the continuing realities of Western Europe’s economic dependence on migration are used once more to reproduce guestworker systems: disposable, revolving-door workers without rights, who are supposed to be neither seen nor heard. Recent history suggests this is an unsustainable proposition: if one treats people as mere economic units, at some point they will probably demand rights as workers, residents, or citizens – and their children certainly will.

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Reimagining Peace through Social Justice in Mid- to Late Twentieth-Century Europe Simon Reid-Henry

Introduction The history of peace research provides a window onto understandings of social justice in twentieth-century Europe. Peace and social justice have long been connected in history and political philosophy; but in the aftermath of the Second World War they fused in a new trans-Atlantic language of political order.1 In Europe, where efforts to define and pursue a vision of ‘peace’ have long been part of the socio-economic and geopolitical development of the continent, the legacies of the mass violence of the Second World War saw pacifism welded into some of the most pressing political debates of the time: be it democratization, European unification, or the coming Cold War.2 Over subsequent decades, discourses of social justice and peace would be severed geographically and assigned to different institutional tracks within the workings of modern European democracies: social justice would come to be more closely associated with the domestic territorial welfare state and the social movements that clustered within states and transnationally, while discourses of peace would become increasingly professionalised within the post–Cold War international domain of ‘peace-keeping’, ‘international development’, and ‘human security’. For a brief period in the 1960s and 1970s, however, peace and social justice fused together more explicitly. This chapter analyses the emergence of the form of critical thinking on peace this fusion took: one that was driven in part by the geopolitical encroachments of the Cold War, as Europeans became increasingly aware of being caught up in a wider superpower struggle, and in part by changing social dynamics within Western European societies.3 Historically located both after the post-war pursuit of European peace through economic growth and regional integration and before the emergence of Euromissile peace movements of the 1 2

3

J. Elster, ‘Justice, Truth, Peace’, Nomos, 51 (2012), 78–97. M. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945–1968 (Princeton, NJ, 2020); B. Stråth, Europe’s Utopias of Peace: 1815, 1919, 1951 (London, 2016); M. Gilbert, European Integration: A Concise History (Lanham, MD, 2021). M. L. Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2009), p. 12.

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1980s, these visions of peace provided a key vocabulary and arena of public and political deliberation.4 One aspect of this new thinking stands out in light of the themes of this book: namely, how peace came to be understood in Europe in these years not simply as the absence of conflict (‘negative’ peace) but as a form of social justice (‘positive’ peace) writ large. Positive peace was variously institutionalised and elaborated across the continent during these years. It was articulated (not uniquely and not always with uniform support) through peace institutes, beginning with the Peace Research Institute, Oslo PRIO (1959) in Norway, as well as via the publication and reception across the continent of influential peace journals, which disseminated the more politicised thinking about peace. But ideas of positive peace also influenced new social networks and, less directly, movements such as European Nuclear Disarmament (END) that came later, in the 1980s, as well as placing their imprint on popular philosophies of culture, the environment, and (non-Western) cosmologies. Through each of these channels, positive peace mingled with emergent understandings of society. In particular, ideas about positive peace were influenced by a new discourse of structural violence, and, in certain respects, they found their genesis within the cultural and political landscape of Scandinavian social democracy. Positive peace therefore had a geography, as much as a history.5 But that geography was not simply a ‘regional’ one. Ideas of positive peace took shape at the increasingly fluid intersection of national and international politics, and many of the more radical (if not utopian) visions that resulted demonstrated an openness to ideas coming from outside Europe, including the Global South.6 Positive peace was the defining element of a ‘second wave’ of peace research, located between the first wave (focused on international politics) of the interwar period and a third (more professionalised and quantitative) wave of the 1980s. The radicalisation and democratisation of peace studies that took place from the 1960s to the 1980s, by contrast, provided an arena in which ideas of social justice were problematized alongside, and in relation to, wider political concerns, notably, the expansion of the Cold War into the Global South and consequent awareness of socio-economic injustices.7

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H. Wiberg, ‘JPR 1964–1980: What Have We Learned about Peace?’, Journal of Peace Research, 2 (1981), 111–48. J. G Vailancourt, ‘Peace: A Sociologists View’, Peace Research, 23 (1991), 65–74, 67. A. Bonisch, ‘Elements of the Modern Concept of Peace’, Journal of Peace Research, 18 (1981), 165–73; S. Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010). M. J Heale, ‘The Sixties as History: Review of the Political Historiography’, Reviews in American History, 33 (2005), 133–52; A. Marwick, ‘The Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties: Voices of Reaction, Protest and Permeation’, The International History Review, 27 (2005), 780–806. See also S. Reid-Henry, Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West since the Cold War (New York, 2019).

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Lineages: The Making of Positive Peace as a Discourse of Social Justice Positive peace, as a concept, emerges within a long history of thinking about war and peace in the twentieth century. In the early to mid-twentieth century, the dominant approach to thinking on peace was articulated through the emergent discipline of International Relations (IR). The primary concern of international-relations scholars was the role of the state in matters of war and peace. What would come to be known as ‘peace studies’ gradually emerged in the post-war years as a more holistic branch of intellectual enquiry, in part a counteraction to mainstream IR, focused on enabling peaceful international relations as much as avoiding, managing, or containing conflict between states. In peace studies, IR’s emphasis on positivist methodologies was sometimes retained – as in Lentz’s influential Towards a Science of Peace (1955) – but insights from other disciplines, such as psychology and economics – as in Boulding’s Conflict and Defense (1962) – became more prominent. Positive peace itself emerged as a more radical form of peace studies: one that took seriously Boulding’s insight that ‘just as war is too important to leave to the generals, so is peace too important to leave to the pacifists’, but carried it in a different direction.8 Positive-peace theorists instead rooted their work in an analysis of structural violence, wherein the causes of preventable violence stemmed not from the agency of any one individual or state but from a prior uneven allocation of power and resources.9 In place of mainstream IR’s ‘negative’ understanding of peace as the absence of war or violence, or the (counter) emphasis in peace studies on studying the conditions for peace, ‘positive’ peace focused as much on social justice as on peace itself, marking out a more holistic concern – in some senses new, in others much older – with the ‘integration of human society as a whole’.10 Positive peace emerged, in other words, not only against the backdrop of both liberal and Marxisant accounts of the necessity of force and order in the struggle against evil, but equally as a more radical counterpart to mainstream peace studies. For positive peace thinkers, peace was no longer in the gift of individuals or states to bestow; it was something that needed building socially and intellectually. Above all, peace should not be taken for granted as a state of being; it demanded constant scrutiny and work to secure and maintain. In the context of peace thinking this was perhaps not as new as it was thought to be. Augustine termed peace ‘the tranquility of order’ and Thomas 8 9 10

K. Boulding, Conflict and Defence: A General Theory (New York, 1962), p. 334. See K. M. Weigert, ‘Structural Violence’, in L. Kurtz (ed.), Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam, 2008), pp. 2004–11. J. Galtung, ‘An Editorial’, Journal of Peace Research, 1 (1964), 2.

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Aquinas conceptualised peace as ‘living virtuously together’.11 More notably, feminist scholars have shown that far from ‘emerging’ in the 1960s, the conceptual tenets of positive peace can be traced back to figures such as Jane Addams half a century before. Similarly, the predecessor of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), issued an anti-war statement on the occasion of its founding at The Hague in 1915 on a recognisably ‘positive’ platform. As Catia Confortini notes, the ICWPP’s statement called for an immediate end to the war and for the warring parties to ‘negotiate a “peace based on principles of justice” (among which was political equality for women and men)’.12 Nonetheless, there is a need to explain why positive peace suddenly did break through as a concept in a particular time and place – Northern Europe, and especially Scandinavia in the 1960s – and to account for the consequences of this breakthrough in light of the larger concerns of this volume. In what follows I therefore attempt to place positive peace in a larger series of intellectual trajectories with which it was in dialogue. These trajectories – concerning alternative, more pacific visions of European order, and of the role of liberalism in securing that order – provided the necessary elements for positive peace to be articulated as a distinctive political doctrine, shorn of the methodologies of IR and primed for the new era of mass mobilisation in the 1960s. Intellectual Lineages The cessation of hostilities in Europe in 1945 brought with it a resurgence of political and intellectual attempts to institutionalise peace, domestically and internationally: from new constitutional safeguards built into the architecture of post-war democracies to new commitments to overseas reconstruction and development aid, and economic treaties such as the European Coal and Steel Community. Scholars working on issues of peace and war were part of these political and institutional developments. The 1950s saw efforts to enrol European intellectuals into one of two very different Cold War visions of a

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Augustine, The City of God, bk. 19, ch. 13, line 11. On Thomas Aquinas’s conception of peace, see G. M. Reichberg, ‘Human Nature, Peace, and War’, in W. P. Simons (ed.), A Cultural History of Peace in the Medieval Age, 800–1450 (London, 2020), p. 39. C. C. Confortini, ‘Feminist Contributions and Challenges to Peace Studies’, in N. Sandal (ed.), The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, online ed. ([Oxford], 2017), available at doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.47. As Confortini notes, for much of the twentieth century, women remained ‘overshadowed by peace organizations’ primarily male leadership’. Addams emphasised both feminist and pragmatist values in her own praxis, which could be considered a forerunner to positive peace.

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‘peaceful’ world order. Already at the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace in Wroclaw in October 1948, for example, the Soviet Union had tried to co-opt parts of the Western peace movement. In response, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was founded in Berlin in 1950, with a clear anti-Communist agenda and less transparent financial backing from the CIA.13 Thinkers on peace had their own political recipes too, and not all of them were focused on peace movements per se. One thinker to engage in these more intellectual struggles for peace was the Swiss Protestant and personalist Denis de Rougemont, whose convictions had been moulded through his experience organising personalist youth movements in the inter-war period.14 For Rougemont, to give political expression to the human value of love and responsibility towards others required, in particular, countering the nation state as modernity’s dominant political form. It was Europe that had bequeathed this form to the world in the past, and Europe’s responsibility to resolve the nation state’s capacity for violence in the present, he argued. Rougemont saw federalism as the preferred political order, based upon a vision of communities cooperating directly. States were both too small and too large at the same time: the solution was to federate both internally and externally. Seen in this light, individualism and collectivism, as the dominant alternative visions of the time, were each deviations from what true peace demanded.15 Peace, therefore, required a locally rooted social justice, and that was best delivered through community. In the immediate post-war period, the drift away from Rougemont’s preferred future of a European culturalist federalism to the alliance of sovereign states envisaged and ultimately enacted by the likes of Paul-Henri Spaak further convinced Rougemont, as he argued in his famous closing address to

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M. Andren, ‘Atomic War or World Peace Order? Karl Jaspers, Denis de Rougemont, Bertrand Russell’, Global Intellectual History, 7 (2020), 787. There is a Catholic body of European thinking on peace and social justice too, well exemplified by the philosopher Jacques Maritain, whose writings in the 1940s saw his thinking evolve from affirming the justice of war against Nazi aggression to a focus on the need for European unification and social transformation in the post-war period. See G. Reichberg, ‘Jacques Maritain: Christian Theorist of Non-Violence and Just War’, Journal of Military Ethics, 16 (2017), 220–38. Rougemont is useful to explore here, however, for the way he more explicitly linked peace to the question of Europe in the context of global relations. See, for example, D. de Rougemont, The Meaning of Europe (New York, 1965 [1963]), pp. 11–32. ‘[L]a tradition centrale de l’Occident . . . et l’individualisme et le collectivisme ne sont que des déviations complémentaires et périodiques de cette ligne de plus grande efficacité’ (The central tradition of the West . . . and individualism and collectivism are both mutually complementary periodical deviations from this line of greatest efficacy), in D. de Rougemont, ‘Réponse’, Suisse romande, 1 (1938), cited in E. H. Dubreuil, ‘The Personalism of Denis de Rougemont: Spirituality and Politics in 1930s Europe’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (2005), p. 178.

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the May 1948 Congress of Europe at The Hague, that sovereignty was a weakness that needed to be overcome before either peace or social justice could flourish. ‘Europe is threatened, Europe is divided, and the greatest danger comes from her divisions,’ he observed.16 He thought largely the same two decades later when he insisted that European peace would be achieved not through either supranational integration (the Common Market, or maximalist, position) or an alliance of nation states (l’Europe des patries, or the minimalist position) but through a federal Europe of ‘unity in diversity’ modelled on the Swiss prototype.17 In a move foreshadowing the position subsequently taken by positive peace theorists, Rougemont now framed his arguments more broadly, looking to the scale of the globe and drawing attention to ‘the material and moral need to respond to the appeals which the world makes to us, on account of its hunger, on account of its fear, and even on account of its hatred’.18 Rougemont drew the conclusion that Europe needed to rediscover the torch of civilisation and hold it aloft via the tools of federalisation. Positive peace theorists would later draw a very different conclusion; but they would draw it from the same basic insight that peace had both local and interpersonal as well as global dimensions. From the standpoint of positive peace, a further conceptually illuminating vision of peace to emerge during the Cold War years was that articulated by Raymond Aron. A contemporary of Rougemont, Aron was concerned less with the fate of the European continent as a polity than with protecting the basic tenets of its underlying liberalism. Like Rougemont, Aron’s understanding of peace embodied certain traits that positive peace theorists would later also adopt, for all that his political stance was quite different from that of the peace radicals of the 1960s. Aron was a philosopher by training, a sociologist by institutional position, and, in his magnum opus, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (1966 [1961]), an analyst of the history of international relations in the nuclear age. Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Aron was also always a staunch supporter of the Western bloc in the Cold War contest.19 What Aron (like Rougemont) grasped particularly well, however, and what would be explicitly examined by many of those who, in the 1960s, converged around the idea of positive peace, was the interrelation of post-colonial upheavals, international affairs, and domestic politics and ideology. Unlike Rougemont, Aron did see states as central actors in the formation of pacific 16 17 18 19

Cited in S. Ghervas, Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Cambridge, MA, 2021), p. 247. D. de Rougemont, The Idea of Europe (London, 1966), p. 65. Rougemont, The Idea of Europe, p. 93. See T. Judt, ‘Introduction’, in R. Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century (New York, 2008), p. xxiii.

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societies and he was sympathetic to the need for Realpolitik. He was also critical of the left’s approach to social justice: as he observed in The Opium of the Intellectuals, ‘everywhere the slowness of parliamentary action and the impatience of the mass threaten the Left with a dissociation between political and social values’.20 But a commitment to just societies is visible nonetheless in his insistence that it was necessary to be ‘vigilant’ to be ‘free’. It was this shared common capacity to be vigilant that would determine whether European societies could sustain the post-war settlement of domestic and international peace amidst the political tensions of the Cold War. For Aron, then, what was required was not the erasure of Cold War conflict through a definitive peace, outright victory, nuclear stalemate, or even pre-conceived schemes of justice, but the management of conflict via perpetual vigilance.21 As noted, Aron’s cautious liberal politics makes him a rather unlikely candidate to have paved the way for the emergence of the idea of positive peace. But his conviction that international peace and social peace could not be separated was central to his critique of International Relations and is recognisably a part of what defined positive peace.22 At the same time, however, as Shils has argued, Aron’s commitment to what Max Weber called the ‘ethics of responsibility’ (Verantwortungsethik) stood in stark contrast to the more polemical intellectual style of the ‘ethics of conscience’ (Gesinnungshetik) that would mark out most scholars of positive peace.23 The reanimation of some of his ideas in the emergence of positive peace as an influential concept in intellectual debates thus represented in some ways the victory of the latter over the former. Imagining a Different Peace: Positive Peace as ‘Event’ Rougemont and Aron each exemplified an approach to thinking about peace that would become explicit in the emergence of positive peace. But it would take the work of a free-thinking intellectual in Norway, Johan Galtung, to bring together these various elements in a more deliberate manner amidst what seemed to many observers a more fragile post-war European peace by the mid1960s. In so doing, positive peace would become more explicitly a part of 20 21 22

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R. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, 9th ed. (New Brunswick, NJ, 2011 [1957]), p. 24. Judt, ‘Introduction’. This was, moreover, a peculiarly American trait. Aron’s account in his Guerre et paix entre les nations of 1962 pre-empted what, in the 1970s, would be called a ‘trans-national’ approach, cf. R. Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (Garden City, NY, 1966). On this theme, see, e.g., C. Stephenson, ‘Peace Research/Peace Studies: A Twentieth Century Intellectual History’, in N. Sandal (ed.), The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, online ed. ([Oxford], 2017), available at doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626 .013.273. E. Shils, ‘Raymond Aron’, The American Scholar, 54 (1985), 161–78.

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Europe’s languages of social justice as well, responding to emergent concerns that liberalism and Marxism alike were unable to secure international peace at the same time as respecting social justice within societies. Johan Galtung was born in Oslo in 1930 and came of age during the years of the German occupation of Norway, during which time his father was held in the Grini internment camp just outside the city. After the war Galtung studied first mathematics and then sociology at the University of Oslo, before taking up a post as lecturer in sociology at Columbia University in New York. Galtung returned to Norway in 1959, the same year that he co-founded the Peace Research Institute, which he would lead until 1969. While he never explicitly responded to the articulation of the problems outlined by Aron and Rougemont, Galtung was nonetheless wrestling with similar concerns throughout the 1950s and 1960s. His personal breakthrough came in three landmark articles that he published between 1964 and 1971 in the Journal of Peace Research: ‘An Editorial’ (1964), ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’ (1969), and ‘A Structural Theory of Imperialism’ (1971). In these articles, Galtung set out a radical vision for peace that was remarkable not because the vision itself was fundamentally new but because through it Galtung erased the divide between the domestic and the international as spheres of intervention while rejecting the ideologically binary choices of the Cold War that reinforced that divide. Galtung made this leap through several intellectual moves. First, he distinguished between negative peace (the absence of war and violence) and positive peace, which ‘is the integration of human society’, and which included a whole ‘avalanche of proposals . . . from efforts to change the “minds of men” [to] . . . improved communication’.24 Galtung drew not simply on social science or philosophy to inform this critique, but also on his reading of medical science, where what mattered was the active promotion of bodily health as much as the absence of disease or pathology: ‘the building of a healthy body capable of resisting diseases, relying on its own health forces or health sources’.25 Framed thus, ‘peace research should also be peace search, an audacious application of science in order to generate visions of new worlds’.26 The idea of positive peace had begun to take shape in this 1964 formulation but was countered both by liberals who preferred to focus still on peace as the absence of war and by Marxists who found it ‘devoid of meaning of its own’ and too easy to co-opt for any purpose.27 In response, Galtung sought to clarify

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Galtung, ‘An Editorial’, 2. J. Galtung, ‘Twenty-Five Years of Peace Research: Challenges and Some Responses’, Journal of Peace Research, 22 (1985), 145. Galtung, ‘An Editorial’, 4. H. Schmid, ‘Peace Research and Politics’, Journal of Peace Research, 5 (1968), 217–305.

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the methodological content of the idea. He did so by revising the definition of violence to which positive peace was a counter. Drawing on current socialscientific research and his own experience of visiting Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) shortly after its unilateral declaration of independence, Galtung proposed the idea of what he termed ‘structural violence’, in which it was the conditions for violence, such as racial inequality driven by imperialism, and not the agents of it that mattered most.28 The result was both a geographically and sociologically expanded account of violence, in which social justice could be defined as the absence of structural violence: as positive peace.29 What made this critique so compelling for many and accounted for its rapid dissemination as an idea – indeed, an intellectual ‘event’ in the manner I am styling it here – was the fact that, by the end of the decade, its expanded vision of peace (as social justice, achieved through the removal of structural injustice) offered an analytical framework for activists and intellectuals making calls for social justice in a wide range of spheres, including transnationally. The concept of positive peace provided their calls not only with greater methodological rigour. It also furnished them with an alternative vocabulary through which arguments for peace could avoid simultaneously being used to promote a vision of ‘order’, and thereby pressed into the service of repression and ‘pacification’ – even hegemony.30 Amidst the utopian politics of the activism of the late 1960s, the demands of peace and social justice thus fused via these new insights of the social sciences and the pathway forward that appeared to be opening up.31 Galtung differed from Aron here. What Aron saw as a value (liberalism) needing vigilance, Galtung saw as a process (emancipation) requiring intellectual and political mobilisation. Moreover, the political tactic that Galtung instinctively turned to in order to achieve that mobilisation was, in the manner

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Galtung, ‘Twenty-Five Years of Peace Research’, 145. J. Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research, 6 (1969), 183. Here Galtung was ‘in a sense anti-Marxist’, he later wrote, and he therefore stood apart from communist peace researchers such as the Swede Herman Schmid. See J. Galtung, ‘Is There a New Germany Coming?’, in V. Harle (ed.), European Values in International Relations (London, 2016), p. 195. Galtung, in fact, was against all forms of antagonistic social struggle. He sought to orientate attention away from the Geneva Conventions, arms controls, and notions of the balance of power, and towards a world of education, preventive peacebuilding, and cooperative practice. See B. S. Grewal, ‘Johan Galtung: Positive and Negative Peace’, unpublished manuscript [2003], pp. 1–2. B. Guggenberger, ‘The Ostensible End of the Protest Movement’, pp. 4–5, originally published as ‘Rückkehr in die Wirklichkeit’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 Mar. 1975, reproduced in German Historical Institute Washington (ed.), German History in Documents and Images, available at ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1126; R. Vinen, The Long ’68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies (London, 2018).

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of Rougemont, to look beyond borders altogether.32 Galtung shared Rougemont’s underlying conviction that neither the individual nor the collective could be the basis for social harmony. He also shared Rougemont’s anti-systemic, culturalist, and ecological biases such that the content of the ‘social justice’ envisaged by positive peace was similarly normatively grounded in calls for social harmony and cultural dialogue. Whereas for Rougemont this led to federalism, for Galtung, and by implication for many supporters of positive peace, it led to the need to better understand the nature of international forces. Hence while Rougemont remained focused on the nature of European integration, with the world as political backdrop, Galtung cast his eyes more firmly to the global scale. Elaborating on Positive Peace ‘Imagine a world’, Galtung wrote in his initial articulation of positive peace in 1964, ‘which we can call “general and complete war” (GCW). Under GCW the Hobbesian condition reigns: there is bellum omnium contra omnes.’ The antithesis of this vision – one for which ‘nuclear physics has perfected the means’ – was ‘GCP, or “general and complete peace”, where there is pax omnium cum omnibus’. Peace research required understanding the conditions of moving from GCW to GCP, and that in turn required positive as well as negative approaches.33 As these quotations demonstrate, positive peace was strongly influenced by the threat of global nuclear confrontation. But it was influenced by other transnational concerns too, including the environment. Indeed, the more that Galtung elaborated on the idea of positive peace, the more that he drew – consciously or not – upon current environmental thinking in addition to that of the medical sciences – for his vision was, in effect, also an ecological one of ‘mutual aid’ and social harmony.34 What positive peace helped articulate, in other words, was the growing desire for a new international social and political order. As Georg Picht, the German philosopher, educational reformer, and director of the Protestant Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Heidelberg, wrote in 1975 in terms that were characteristic of the new style: ‘Those who want to create peace have to change the world and seek a new political order.’35 Picht and Galtung had 32

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It is unclear what of Rougemont’s work Galtung had read at this stage. Some citations exist in work from the later 1970s but the thrust of Rougemont’s political commitments is not registered there. Galtung, ‘An Editorial’, 1. Looking back, in the 1980s, Galtung explicitly references the natural world as something that forms a central part of the structures needing consideration as part of peace. Cited in A. Bönisch, ‘Elements of the Modern Concept of Peace’, Journal of Peace Research, 2 (1981), 166.

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both attended that year a United Nations Environment Programme/United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNEP/UNCTAD) symposium in Mexico – part of the broad move associated with calls for a New International Economic Order and the Mexican government’s recent call for a Charter on the Economic Rights and Duties of States – and they were cosignatories to the resulting Cocoyoc Declaration. The declaration gives a sense of the political order envisaged by advocates of positive peace. Written in response to the food price crisis of the early 1970s, it called for a new international system ‘more capable of meeting the “inner” limits of basic human needs for all the world’s people without violating the “outer” limits of the planet’s resources and environment’.36 As it went on, ‘We have spoken of the minimum satisfaction of human needs, but there is also a maximum level, there are ceilings as well as floors.’37 Underpinning its critique of international and domestic inequality, the Cocoyoc Declaration demonstrated an overriding commitment to social justice through the subordination of the powers of the state and the market to the principle of equality of rights for all. The political implications of this were well surmised by Picht in a piece in Social Research published that same year: ‘The science of war has reached its culminating point, but a science of peace hardly exists,’ he wrote. Now, however, ‘a few small groups’ had set themselves to addressing this and to bringing new concepts forward in what was otherwise a ‘political vacuum’.38 Positive peace sought to fill this vacuum with a vision that was radical, antiauthoritarian, and anti-imperialist in its tone; but it was equally centred upon what, with hindsight, seems close to a personalist ethics. For Picht this was expressed in a keen sense of responsibility to the wider world.39 For Galtung, however, who had been strongly influenced by Gandhi and Paulo Freire, it was about initiating changes in one’s own practice first.40 Galtung had thus by now taken the earlier insights embodied by the likes of Aron and Rougemont and forged them into a more radical, but similarly politically non-aligned vision that sought to erase the conditions of social and political injustice. Applied to the European context this strategy looked to new fora of cooperation such as the European Conference on Security and Cooperation (ECSC), to intensifying dialogues between scientists and scholars, and for some (such as Gunnar Matthiessen) to détente as a potential pacific opening. By the mid-1970s, Galtung’s ideas had achieved real influence. But he was not without his critics. The Anglo-American economist and peace scholar, and 36 37 38 39 40

‘The Declaration of Cocoyoc’, World Development, 3 (1975), 142. ‘The Declaration of Cocoyoc’, 143. See G. Picht, ‘On the Concept of Peace’, Social Research, 42 (1975), 101–2. See, e.g., G. Picht, Theologie, was ist das? (Stuttgart, 1977). What John Paul Lederach would later call ‘conflict transformation’: J. P. Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation across Cultures (Syracuse, NY, 1996).

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former student of Schumpeter, Kenneth Boulding, was one among several who took issue with what we might call today the ‘heterodox’ range of his ideas. In a friendly yet firm critique, he portrayed Galtung as overly normative in his account of structural conditions. Positive peace, Boulding argued, had very little to do with actual peace. ‘Refraining from producing a bad . . . is a very different thing from producing a good,’ and the two were not helpfully combined.41 Positive peace was in danger of undermining the focus and relevance of mainstream peace research. Perhaps most tellingly, as we shall see, Boulding took Galtung to task for over-emphasising equality to the detriment of liberty.42 Placing Positive Peace From the 1960s onwards there was, however, a ‘growing community of scholars’ of peace among whom the ideas of positive peace circulated.43 Partly to accommodate this increasingly heterodox thinking, there was also an expansion in the number of peace research networks and institutes in the 1960s and early 1970s, which incorporated and institutionalised the discourse of positive peace.44 Perhaps the most significant was PRIO in Norway, which Galtung himself had been instrumental in establishing in 1959 and where, by 1970, its ‘Research Committee’ had concluded that ‘the demand that peace research should be relevant to “peace and social justice” should be stressed more’.45 PRIO set the model for other institutions. In 1964 the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) was founded in Germany with Bert Röling as its first secretary general. It was supported by UNESCO (providing grants to Eastern European scholars to attend) and held its first General Conference in Groningen in the Netherlands (1965) and its second in Tållberg in Sweden (1967).46 IPRA was criticised by some, such as American peace research pioneer Walter Isard, for being too influenced by positive peace.47 But as if 41

42 43 44

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K. Boulding, ‘Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung’, Journal of Peace Research, 14 (1977), 76, 79. Specifically, Boulding placed Galtung alongside Walras, Weber, Pareto, and Talcott Parsons as a ‘static’ structuralist. J. Eichler, War, Peace and International Security: From Sarajevo to Crimea (London, 2017), p. 1. E. Krippendorff, ‘Peace: An Introduction’, Journal of Peace Research, 18 (1981), 109. The establishment of peace research institutes, to house the new thinking, was in fact called for in Galtung’s first pacifist manifesto, published in 1959 in Norwegian by War Resisters International. See N. P. Gledditsch, J. Nordkvelle, and H. Strand, ‘Peace Research: Just the Study of War?’, Journal of Peace Research, 51 (2014), 145–58. PRIO Archives, Abd 1, RC, 1970-1981, Memorandum of the Secretary, PRIO Research Committee, 27 Oct. 1970. J. Galtung, ‘Theories of Peace: A Synthetic Approach to Peace Thinking’, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, unpublished manuscript (Sept. 1967). Gledditsch, Nordkvelle, and Strand, ‘Peace Research’, 148.

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to then confirm the Nordic commitment to positive peace, the Peace and Conflict Research Institute in Tampere (TAPRI) was established by the Finnish parliament in 1969, also with a positive peace orientation. To some extent, however, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI, founded in 1966) bucked this trend. The impetus behind what would become the second major institute home for peace studies was a little different from PRIO – and perhaps a more revealing sign of the times to come. The idea for SIPRI was put forward by Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander in 1964, but it was the brainchild of social democrat and sociologist Alva Myrdal. The aim was clearly more than just to ‘commemorate Sweden’s 150 years of unbroken peace’. The organisation was given a more specific mandate than PRIO. This included, for example, to work on issues of armaments and arms reduction. There were differences in intellectual styles too: as Galtung describes it, ‘SIPRI was very important, but they had a completely different orientation. Gunnar Myrdal and Robert O’Neill believed in peace through numbers and data, the thought being that if you could just document how much money we waste on armaments, people would lose the taste for them. I was far more interested in whether this hypothesis was right or wrong, and my view was that it was wrong.’48 These differences did not initially prevent further peace research institutes from being founded, and networks consolidated, to work on the new approach to peace. In 1970 the Hessische Stiftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (HSFK) was founded in Frankfurt with a ‘positive peace’ focus: ‘The institute’s research is not limited to the analysis of the conditions of conflict, but, on the basis of such investigation, it aims to develop innovative transformation and solution concepts, in which abating violence, increasing social fairness and political freedom can be combined with the international system and individual societies,’ the founding committee declared in 1970. A year later a second German Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH) was founded in Hamburg, at the suggestion of the Federal President Gustav Heinemann.49 From this growing institutional base emerged new networks and journals of peace research. PRIO developed its own journal, the Journal of Peace Research (JPR) which, by the end of the 1970s, was considered to be ‘the central agent of theoretical, scientific research for Scandinavia and Europe’.50 It was a place where not only a ‘critique of hegemonic state power but . . . a radical critique of peace studies itself’ took place in the 1960s and early

48 49 50

H. Urdal, ‘Inspiration from a Father’, interview with Johan Galtung, available at blogs.prio.org/ 2019/05/inspiration-from-a-father-johan-galtung-interviewed-by-henrik-urdal. While institutes were founded across the Atlantic at this time, such as the Canadian Peace Research Institute in 1961, Northern Europe was the dominant home. Wiberg, ‘JPR 1964-1980’, 113.

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1970s.51 Most of its more prominent authors were Scandinavian. Between 1966 and 1980, of the twenty-three authors to publish more than three articles, half were Norwegian, with Finns and Swedes making up a good portion of the other half (along with British scholars, Canadians, Americans, Indians, and West Germans). The substance of these articles was distinctive as well. Articles were routinely critical of ‘older’ theories of peace such as the ‘balance of power’ and promoted a critical take on the doctrine of mutually assured destruction and the economy of the arms trade, which maintained the momentum of the (global) Cold War.52 In addition, and more radically, JPR published and disseminated critiques of capitalism, the treatment of minorities, and police violence. It is hard to imagine much of this more radical scholarship without the influence of Galtung and the concept of positive peace. The claims of positive peace were not limited to the academic world, however. In 1967, at the behest of Nicholas Sombart at the Council of Europe, Galtung was asked to undertake a study of how different countries viewed the future of the Cold War. Galtung approached the task by interviewing diplomats and politicians in thirty-two states, including almost all of Europe. This positioned him at the centre of a vast network spanning East and West Europe alike; and the conclusions he reached were in step with the new thinking on positive peace, albeit packaged for the emergent European bureaucratic elite. Even at the level of high diplomacy, space could be made for social justice through dialogue. Perhaps not surprisingly, when the report was discussed at the Council the following year, it provoked a hostile response by a French politician, who commented that ‘A Mr. Galtung suggests that we should sit together with Communists and discuss the problems. I have the following comment: – Anybody who suggests anything like that is himself a Communist!’53 The report was sent to capitals in Eastern and Western Europe, but the diplomatic value of positive peace proved limited and it never really caught on in mainstream political debate. The claims of positive peace travelled more influentially through new social networks, such as the annual Vienna seminars (from 1970) run by the International Peace Institute (IPI), and in transnational movements such as Women Strike for Peace (established in 1961). In the case of the latter, this laid the foundation for later European peace movements, such as Women for Peace (founded in Denmark in 1980 and soon spreading to the other states of Scandinavia). Women for Peace organised a series of marches for peace across European borders in the early 1980s. The first was from Copenhagen to Paris in 1981, where Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme and Johan Galtung were 51 53

52 Stephenson, ‘Peace Research/Peace Studies’. Wiberg, ‘JPR 1964-1980’, 114–18. D. Fischer, ‘A Brief History of Transcend’, 13 Nov. 2013, available at www.transcend.org/ history.

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waiting to greet them. The second was from Stockholm to Minsk in 1982.54 Following the demise of the World Peace Council in the aftermath of the Prague Spring in 1968, these nascent non-governmental networks became a critical means for peace activists to share ideas. For a while this convergence of scholars and civil-society activists proved fertile and mutually reinforcing: as noted, the claims of the activists were legitimised through their affiliation to critical social science, while scholarship on positive peace enjoyed a real-world application.55 Positive peace thus played an important role in nourishing the wider counter-cultural ‘subculture’ of the time. To be sure, the object of that subculture’s concern changed across the decades and from one precipitating factor to the next. As Kim Salomon explained at the time: ‘In the 1960s, the complaint was about Vietnam; during the 1970s it was about the environment; during the early 1980s it concerned nuclear weapons.’56 But that scholars and activists could think about each of these problems as related both to peace and to underlying questions of social justice is important, because the effect was to open an intellectual space in which the national and the international, the political and the economic, and the social and the cultural came together around a more capacious and pacific notion of social justice that was, in turn, applied to some of the key challenges faced in Europe at the time. Legacies: The Outcomes of Positive Peace For a few years in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, this broader and more intersectional discourse of peace-as-social-justice, strongly informed as it was by positive peace, had provided a new means for scholars and activists to engage with Europe’s politically volatile past. Positive peace flowered briefly in these spaces of activism. Yet relations between the activists and the scholars eventually soured.57 This applied both to the student revolutionaries coming out of Western universities and later also to Central and Eastern European intellectuals such as Adam Michnik, who found the doctrine of ‘peace through peaceful means’ toothless in the face of overt oppression.58 Arguing for peace as social justice, in other words, appeared to fellow activists from the East to be 54 55 56 57 58

A. Wilmers, ‘International Women’s Peace Movements’, in Encyclopédie d’histoire numérique de l’Europe (online), 9 July 2018, available at ehne.fr/en/node/1322. L. Nuti, ‘On recule pour mieux sauter, or “What Needs to Be Done” (to Understand the 1970s)’, in S. Pons and F. Romero (eds.), Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War (London, 2005), p. 44. K. Salomon, ‘The Peace Movement: An Anti-Establishment Movement’, Journal of Peace Research, 23 (1986), 126. Gledditsch, Nordkvelle, and Strand, ‘Peace Research’, 147. I. Goddeeris and M. Swider, ‘Peace or Solidarity? Poland, the Euromissile Crisis and the 1980s Peace Movement’, in L. Nuti et al. (eds.), The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War (Stanford, CA, 2015), p. 294.

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a position that reflected the privileged circumstances and living conditions of Western Europeans. As Goddeeris and Swider comment, a number of contributors to the progressive (and free) Polish exile journal in Paris, Kultura, were stressing in 1983 that ‘the peace movement rested on Western European youth who had grown up in peace, with democracy, and with welfare’.59 This was indeed the critical weakness in positive peace: a problem identified, as we have seen, by centrist progressives such as Kenneth Boulding as well as by activists from the Soviet bloc. A form of social justice that prioritised (if it did not take for granted) equality but not liberty was ultimately not a workable model of social justice and would prove to be at odds with the increasing focus on freedom in European accounts of social justice. Moreover, to the extent that strategies of pacifism informed by positive peace, such as the Stockholm-Minsk march, could be used by the USSR to wage a form of intellectual war against the West – by deploying peace activists as intellectual Trojan horses – they might also, ultimately, fail upon their own terms.60 Yet by the early 1980s, although positive peace was in abeyance as an intellectual and socio-political force, it had already contributed to an expanded cultural understanding of peace, and in this sense its legacy can be glimpsed across a number of significant late Cold War developments. Domestic Legacies The so-called Euromissile crisis (c. 1977–87) provides a first juncture when positive peace was put to work through a more holistic notion of peace-associal-justice. The controversy, which concerned the decision to site US shortrange and cruise missiles on European soil, centred primarily on negative peace and the hard reality of inter-bloc relations. But, as noted above, ideas of positive peace provided activists with the language they needed to mobilise a broad-based resistance to the Euromissiles. As the historian E. P. Thompson observed, in articulating an early case for the movement European Nuclear Disarmament (END): We envisage a European-wide campaign, in which every kind of exchange takes place; in which representatives of different nations and opinions confer and co-ordinate their activities; and in which less formal exchanges, between universities, churches, women’s organisations, trade unions, youth organisations, professional groups and individuals, take place with the object of promoting a common object: to free all of Europe from nuclear weapons.61 59 60 61

Goddeeris and Swider, ‘Peace or Solidarity?’, p. 295. See also H. Nehring, ‘The Last Battle of the Cold War: Peace Movements and German Politics in the 1980s’, in Nuti et al. (eds.), The Euromissile Crisis, p. 310. E. P. Thompson, Protest and Survive, Pamphlet No 71, CND and Bertrand Russel Peace Foundation, 2nd ed. (1980), p. 17, available at digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/protest-and-survive (emphasis added).

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Many of positive peace’s leading practitioners supported END and disseminated its message among their own networks. Among the signatories of the END approach to ‘a nuclear-free zone in Europe’ was Ulrich Albrecht, professor of Peace Studies at the Free University of Berlin; Rudolf Bahro, the East German dissident who had been expelled to West Germany in 1979; and West European Communists such as Lucio Lombardo Radice and Manuel Azcarate, along with Alva Myrdal, a force for European disarmament in her own right. As Thompson himself would later articulate, his own involvement in the Peace Movement was as somebody seeking not the end of Cold War through victory for one side or the other, but its displacement through a changed international system. This too was at the heart of positive peace, by changing the underlying terms and ‘building peace in’. As Thompson argued, ‘it was the non-aligned peace movement in the West entering into dialogue and certain common actions with the human-rights movement in the East which gave rise to the “ideological moment” when the Cold War lock was broken . . . in the first half of the [1980s] decade, the NATO establishments had the fright of their lives’.62 International Legacies The legacy of positive peace can also be traced within numerous international developments, perhaps most significantly in the formation of a distinctive model of Scandinavian humanitarianism in the late Cold War and post–Cold War era: a Scandinavian ‘brand’ of international assistance driving the emergence of Sweden and Norway in particular as humanitarian superpowers. The development of such a brand contributed to these countries’ self-defined role as ‘humane internationalists’63 in everything from the leadership of international processes (such as the Brundtland Commission, 1983–7) by Norwegian politicians to the increasingly public role of the Nobel Peace Prize and Norway’s role in securing the Oslo Accords between Israelis and Palestinians in the mid-1990s as well as the wider Oslo Process that followed. Norway, in particular, came to self-identify as a ‘peace nation’.64 Of course, to the extent that positive peace was important here, this was less the result of the direct influence of Galtung’s original conceptualisation, and owed more to the expanded notion of peace-as-social-justice that positive peace had by then helped to bring about. It is unlikely, in fact, that Galtung himself would see each and every one of these political and diplomatic attempts to secure a more just world as

62 63 64

E. P. Thompson, ‘The Ends of Cold War’, New Left Review, 1, no. 182 (1990), 141–3. O. Stokke (ed.), Western Middle Powers and Global Poverty: The Determinants of the Aid Policies of Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden (Uppsala, 1989), p. 10. K. Bjørkdahl and A. de Bengy Puyvallée, Do-Gooders at the End of Aid: Branding Nordic Humanitarianism in the 21st Century (Cambridge, 2021), p. 1.

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sufficiently rooted in either the theory or the practice of ‘peace by peaceful means’ to be considered a true expression of positive peace. With his influence waning, alongside that of explicit commitments to positive peace by scholars, activists, diplomats, and politicians, Galtung himself pursued a very different path as the Cold War came to an end: one that severed links with the Scandinavian context that had been so central to the development of positive peace in the first place. He had left PRIO in 1969 to take up a chair in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Oslo and grew increasingly estranged from the work taking place at PRIO, the institute he had co-founded. He resigned in turn from his university chair in 1977 to pursue a string of visiting and other positions around the world. Along with the Swiss scientist and peace advocate Dietrich Fischer and his second wife and former PRIO researcher, Fumiko Nishimura, in 1993 Galtung founded Transcend International as a networked organisation committed to peace-building along explicitly positive lines. Transcend International sought positive peace via commitments to empathy, non-violence, and creative accommodation between parties at conflict. But it did so largely on the edges of mainstream political and intellectual debate as well as of peace-building practices. This marginalization well conveys the fact that positive peace has proven hard to put into practice directly or as an explicit part of any major political or diplomatic programme. Intellectual Legacies Yet the relative obscurity of positive peace today ought not to disguise the fact that positive peace was an important intellectual event: a European counterpart, albeit much less influential, to the Rawlsian ideas of social justice emanating from the United States at the same time. Rawls offered a vision of social justice tied to a model of political stasis and order and constrained by the liberal starting point of its assumptions. As Brian Barry wrote in a letter to Rawls, prior to the publication of A Theory of Justice, the problem with the veil of ignorance – the thought experiment at the heart of Rawls’ theory that asks readers to assume they do not know where in the social hierarchy they might be born into – is that one cannot not choose a utilitarian society as the outcome.65 Rawlsian theory provided a two-dimensional model of social justice. It conceived of political life as social-institutional when it is also informed by peoples’ relationship to the environment, by their biological good health and capability, and by the functioning of market as well as political

65

J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971); Rawls Archive, Pusey Library, Harvard University, B19/F17 correspondence, Barry to Rawls, Nov. 1967, p. 3.

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inequalities. As Perry Anderson later wrote, what was needed at the time was a theory of injustice as much as of justice.66 In many ways this was precisely what positive peace sought to be. The fact that this alternative, almost cosmological, language of social justice was developed, became briefly influential, and then retreated into obscurity once again raises important questions regarding both how and why this era’s arguments for ‘positive’ peace were much more explicitly focused on the mitigation of injustice than were those more Atlantic-centred debates that gird such mainstream liberal accounts of social justice as those articulated by Rawls. The version of positive peace as articulated and most successfully evangelised upon by Galtung was not, as we have seen, Marxist in its rejection of social struggle; yet in its anti-imperialism it was certainly not liberal either. Perhaps it is best seen as a form of social-democratic radicalism. For where positive peace drew on the egalitarian aspirations of the Scandinavian societies to turn older arguments about war and peace into new arguments for empathy and cooperation, it eschewed a strongly juridical model of justice. Instead, it put forward a more holistic vision of social justice – one demanding socioeconomic and political ‘accommodations’ and compromise in the name of wider social (and ecological) harmony. This last concept was not about justice as redress or even ‘fairness’ in the Rawlsian sense; instead, it was a more practical, ‘preventive’ model of social relations and a new way of articulating individual responsibilities to the world looking forward. Conclusion Positive peace as a historical force was short lived. Already by the time of the anti-missile demonstrations of the 1980s it had dissipated within other visions. Though it made important contributions to the tenor of thought on social justice in the 1960s and 1970s, not least by setting European debates on social justice in a wider global context, it would live on only in academic discourse and in marginal projects such as Transcend, which directed its energies at lower- and middle-income countries and away from mainstream politics and academia in the West. Positive peace therefore proved not to outlive the Cold War context that gave rise to it in the mid- to late 1960s, while its post–Cold War history is mostly a story of decline. For peace researchers themselves, while the concept brought important anti-colonial arguments and a self-critical stance, it missed the bigger picture of the rapidly changing ‘war-making capacities’ of other societies, as the political scientist Ekkehart Krippendorff bemoaned in 1981. When confronted with the full drama of the late Cold War

66

P. Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (London, 2007), p. 112.

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era – of the break-up of détente, of the Iran-Iraq War, of the Euro missile crisis – peace research seemed ‘helpless’. It was, he commented, ‘in a way, outdated, bypassed by the[se] events’.67 But perhaps, too, positive peace was a victim of the more general turn away from equality and towards freedom from the 1970s in a great many discussions on social justice. Thereafter ‘peace research’ became more professionalised, less radical, and ultimately further removed from a structural understanding of social justice. It became increasingly about the study of the conditions of war, arms, territory, and regional conflicts and their consequences. Positive peace, by contrast, had a very different genealogy: more global and aspirational than it ever was successfully grounded, and more closely bound up with emergent currents of radical sociology and civic struggle than developments in militarism and diplomacy. Nonetheless, it had shone brightly for a short period in the cultural and institutional milieu of Northern European peace research in the long 1960s. In this sense its vision of social justice was a geographically locatable one; and, with hindsight, a historically time-bound one as well.

67

Krippendorff, ‘Peace’, 109.

10

Social Justice or Sexual Justice? Social Justice and the Problem of Women in Twentieth-Century Europe Celia Donert

‘We wanted justice and we got the rule of law.’1 In the early 1990s, East German artist and civil-rights activist Bärbel Bohley spoke both as a former political dissident disillusioned by the transition to democracy and free markets in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe and as a woman who was acutely conscious of the gendered impact of that transformation. Dissidents had made social justice central to their struggles against Communism before 1989, on the grounds that this was what Communism had promised but had failed to deliver.2 Women had played a particularly important role in dissident struggles for justice, Bohley argued, because they were less implicated in the structures of Communist power than men, who occupied most of the leading positions in party, state, and economic institutions.3 During the 1980s, Bohley herself had led numerous unofficial initiatives, such as establishing an anti-authoritarian crèche and a branch of Women for Peace in East Berlin, that challenged the paternalist, authoritarian, and increasingly militaristic rule of the East German Socialist Unity Party.4 Yet women of Bohley’s generation – born after the Second World War and coming of age during the boom years of the East European ‘welfare

1

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‘Wir wollten Gerechtigkeit und bekamen den Rechtsstaat.’ This much-cited phrase is ‘probably the most famous expression of dissident disappointment’, according to J.-W. Müller, ‘East Germany: Incorporation, Tainted Truth, and the Double Division’, in A. Barahona de Brito, C. Gonzalez-Enriquez, and P. Aguilar (eds.), The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (Oxford, 2001), p. 262. A. Michnik, ‘Three Kinds of Fundamentalism: For Jonathan Schell’, in I. Grudzińska-Gross (ed.), Adam Michnik: Letters from Freedom: Post–Cold War Realities and Perspectives (Berkeley, 1998), p. 181. Social justice was increasingly associated with the creation of authentic communities. See P. Apor, ‘Authentic Community and Autonomous Individual: Making Sense of Socialism in Late Socialist Hungary’, in C. Donert, A. Kladnik, and M. Sabrow (eds.), Making Sense of Dictatorship: Domination and Everyday Life in East Central Europe after 1945 (Budapest, 2022), pp. 203–20. B. Bohley, G. Praschl, and R. Rosenthal, Mut: Frauen in der DDR. Mit Fotos und Dokumenten (Munich, 1995). C. Donert, ‘Since Makarenko the Time for Experiments Has Passed: Gender, Peace and Human Rights in East Berlin in the 1980s’, in Donert, Kladnik, and Sabrow (eds.), Making Sense of Dictatorship, pp. 153–76.

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dictatorships’ – were among the biggest losers of the post-socialist transformation, as access to abortion, childcare, pensions, healthcare, housing, and job security all came under attack.5 Nonetheless, Bohley’s critical views on social justice for women in state-socialist and post-socialist Germany were not imported from a putative ‘Western’ liberal democratic tradition; rather, they were products of an intense conflict between feminist and socialist perspectives on social justice during a century of struggles between Communism and capitalism in twentieth-century Central Europe. Women have been perceived as a ‘problem’ for visions of social justice since the emergence of the ‘social question’ in the nineteenth century, prompting feminist debates about whether social justice for women is best pursued on the basis of their equality with, or difference from, men. This chapter reconstructs those debates with a focus on Central Europe, the heartland of the late nineteenth-century European socialist and sexual-reform movements and – as Chapter 6 in this volume also demonstrates – the site of conflicts between fascist, state-socialist, and liberal-democratic regimes of social justice. But these conflicts also have a strongly contemporary character. The transition to a capitalist economy in the former socialist states of Central Europe since 1989 has inserted the regime of the market into debates about social justice. As feminist theorists of international political economy continue to remind us, the global capitalist order is made possible by the sexual division of labour.6 This is reflected in persistent wage inequalities between women and men, and has been further exacerbated by the shift toward low-paid, temporary, part-time, and flexible work. Yet this productive economy is dependent on reproductive labour: unpaid, informal work that includes domestic caring, and sexual labour.7 Feminists have pointed out that these hierarchies are sustained by the failure to recognise reproductive labour as labour at all.8 Reproductive labour is relegated to the sphere of informal, unpaid work, and thus rendered invisible. Since the end of the Cold War, this process has been exacerbated by what the philosopher Nancy Fraser identified as the replacement of a politics of

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On the concept of ‘welfare dictatorship’, see K. H. Jarausch, ‘Care and Coercion: The GDR as Welfare Dictatorship’, in K. H. Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a SocioCultural History of the GDR (New York, 1999), 47–69. On state-socialist regimes as welfare states, see T. Inglot, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 1919–2004 (Cambridge, 2008), and on social citizenship, see C. Donert, The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge, 2017). K. Bezanson, Gender, the State and Social Reproduction: Household Insecurity in Neo-Liberal Times (Toronto, 2006); N. Fraser, T. Bhattacharya, and C. Arruzza, ‘Notes for a Feminist Manifesto’, New Left Review, 114 (2018), 113–34. I. Bakker and R. Silvey, Beyond States and Markets: The Challenges of Social Reproduction (Abingdon, 2012); S. M. Rai, C. Hoskyns, and D. Thomas, ‘Depletion: The Cost of Social Reproduction’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16 (2014), 86–105. S. Federici, Wages against Housework (London, 1975), p. 7.

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redistribution – one that took account of material needs – by a politics of recognition, which focuses on recognising the differences between various groups, but ignores the material basis of inequality and thus fails to challenge the gendered hierarchy that underpins global capitalism.9 This wider tension between feminist and socialist understandings of social justice was particularly salient in the history of Central Europe. As historians have long demonstrated, socialist theorists in Germany and elsewhere had since the late nineteenth century developed understandings of ‘the women’s question’, rooted in their Marxist interpretation of capitalist society, which they defined in opposition to what they regarded as the liberal principles of bourgeois feminism.10 This socialist feminism was a durable force throughout the twentieth century, driving campaigns for social justice in the transatlantic networks of socialist and labour women who lobbied governments and international organisations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO).11 However, it always co-existed alongside a language of social-justice feminism that emerged in Central Europe from the late nineteenth century as part of a moral and religious discourse that middle-class feminists embraced in opposition to the revolutionary or scientific language used by socialist women. This social-justice feminism, moreover, was often entwined with movements for sexual justice – supporting women’s rights to abortion, contraception, and wider sexual freedoms, often with a strongly eugenicist bent – in associations striving to bring about political, social, and moral reform in Central Europe during the age of mass politics. Yet these complicated histories of feminist social justice are frequently absent from contemporary sociological or

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N. Fraser, ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’, New Left Review 56 (2009), 97–117. On the history of arguments presenting feminism as antithetical to socialism, see M. Boxer, ‘Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept “Bourgeois Feminism”’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), 131–58, and F. Picq, ‘“Bourgeois Feminism” in France: A Theory Developed by Socialist Women before World War I’, in J. Friedlander, B. Wiesen Cook, A. Kessler-Harris, and C. Smith-Rosenberg (eds.), Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change (Bloomington, IN, 1986), pp. 330–43; R. J. Evans, Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism, and Pacifism in Europe, 1870–1945 (Brighton, 1987); M. J. Boxer and J. H. Quataert (eds.), Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1978); H. Gruber and P. Graves (eds.), Women and Socialism/Socialism and Women: Europe between the Two World Wars (New York, 1998); J. H. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1979); K. Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question, 1884–1911 (Cambridge, 1996). C. Riegelman Lubin and A. Winslow, Social Justice for Women: The International Labor Organization and Women (Durham, NC, 1990); D. S. Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality (Princeton, NJ, 2021); E. Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labour and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 (New York, 2019).

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philosophical theories of social justice feminism, which tend to equate social justice with socialist feminism.12 Socialist and subsequently Communist movements had often tended to employ the language of social revolution rather than that of social justice before the Second World War. But in the mid-twentieth century, social justice for women became a concept that was increasingly adopted – and celebrated – by the new state-socialist regimes established in the region after the Second World War to articulate the new social order they were seeking to achieve. In effect, the socialist welfare dictatorships of Eastern Europe reinterpreted the Catholic notion of iustitia socialis13 in line with their Marxist-Leninist ideology. This was, however, an understanding of social justice that operated within ethno-centric and national frameworks. As the globalisation of Communist movements in the era of decolonisation demonstrated, these socialist concepts of social and sexual justice remained heavily influenced by notions of national social progress that often served to exclude or marginalise minorities and immigrants.14 This chapter will analyse the interplay of socialist and feminist understandings of social justice for women in Central Europe across the twentieth century. It begins with an analysis of the emergence of these discourses and campaigns in the region in the first half of the twentieth century. It then turns to look at the era of state-socialist rule, before concluding with a discussion of how these ideological and political frontiers changed under the impact of processes of globalisation and capitalist transformation since 1989. It is, however, important to bear in mind that these two traditions were not the only ones present in the region. Throughout the period, conservative, religious, pacifist, and Communist women also mobilized around ideas of social justice in twentieth-century Europe, without necessarily embracing the term ‘feminism’; and they too marked the experience of women. Social-Justice Feminism, Socialism, and Communism Bärbel Bohley’s vision of an authentic social justice derived from her disillusionment with the paternalism of state socialism in the German Democratic Republic, which was typical of Communist regimes in presenting equality between women and men as a central pillar of the socialist conception of social justice that had originated with the Russian Revolution of 1917. Such

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See M. A. McLaren, Women’s Activism, Feminism, and Social Justice (Oxford, 2019); M. Gray, K. Agllias, and K. Davies, ‘Social Justice Feminism’, in M. Reisch (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Social Justice (London, 2014), pp. 173–87. On Catholic conceptions of social justice, see Chapter 3 in this volume. Donert, The Rights of the Roma.

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narratives have recently been resurrected by feminist scholars seeking to reassess both the impact of socialist rule on women’s emancipation during the twentieth century as well as the negative effect of post-socialism on women in Europe since 1989.15 However, in reality, the relationship between social justice, socialism, and feminism was much more complicated during the first half of the twentieth century than binary constructions as to whether socialism was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women would allow. Most notably, at the turn of the twentieth century, social-justice feminism in Central Europe emerged in opposition to Marxist socialism, rather than as a synonym for it. The first campaigners for social justice for women were active within Christian social groups, who were responding to rapid and disruptive economic changes that reshaped labour markets and deepened social inequalities, and had a harmful impact on many working women. Their moral discourse of social justice, which was related to the ‘social gospel’ and the importance of the social question, therefore appealed to middle-class constituencies who rejected the revolutionary rhetoric of Marxian socialism.16 For these campaigners and activists, women were seen as particularly vulnerable: as workers in need of special protection, as mothers, and as political subjects lacking citizenship rights, including, above all, the right to vote. By the 1890s, middle-class women reformers in Germany had appropriated the language of social justice (soziale Gerechtigkeit) to support their calls for a wide range of reforms, including protective labour legislation and widows’ pensions. Social justice was a malleable term that gained in popularity before the First World War because it offered an alternative to charity as a justification for public policies that might ameliorate the effects of capitalism by redistributing resources ‘on the basis of fairness rather than pity or fear’.17 The concrete nature of these campaigns contrasted markedly with the much vaguer understandings of social justice evident in socialist ranks at the end of the nineteenth century. In socialist discourse of the time, ‘justice’ carried multiple meanings, linked to the pursuit of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ for the working classes, which reflected the growing influence of Marxism within social democracy and, more broadly, the transition from a religiously inflected political language to one based on science and notions of social Darwinism.18

15 16 17 18

K. Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism, and Other Arguments for Economic Independence (London, 2018). K. K. Sklar, A. Schüler, and S. Strasser (eds.), Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885–1933 (Ithaca, NY, 1998). K. K. Sklar, A. Schüler, and S. Strasser, ‘Introduction’, in Sklar, Schüler, and Strasser, Social Justice Feminists, p. 6. See, for example, references to Darwinism in A. Bebel, Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften, Band 10: Die Frau und der Sozialismus: Beilagen, Anmerkungen und Register (Berlin and Boston, 1996 [1879]), p. 254.

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In contrast, social-justice feminism in early twentieth-century Central Europe was connected to broader social movements for sexual and ethical reform, such as the German League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual Reform (Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform), established by the liberal progressive feminist Helene Stöcker in 1905.19 In addition to Stöcker, the German League included among its members feminists as well as sexologists, sociologists, and the Social Democratic Party leader August Bebel, all of whom shared the view that sex should be approached as subject not to Christian morality but to the laws of evolution. Feminism, maternalism, and eugenic ideals were all central to the League’s politics. It drew on the efforts of male sexual reformers and radicals within the bourgeois women’s movement in Imperial Germany, supporting women’s right to abortion, contraception, and extramarital sexuality.20 As Kirsten Leng has shown, however, this worldview also situated the League firmly within the broader context of German imperialism, as racial hierarchy and cultural othering were intrinsic to its members’ conceptualisation of progressive sexual politics in Europe.21 Social justice for women was never therefore for these campaigners a solely national project, and the impact of the First World War led both middle-class social-justice feminists as well as socialist feminists to conceptualise their work in more emphatically international terms. Lacking the right to vote or to organise politically, women looked to international women’s organisations such as the International Council of Women (ICW) as a space for social-justice feminism to develop outside the constraints of national politics. Transatlantic connections had been particularly important since the late nineteenth century for Central European women such as the German social reformer Alice Salomon, who joined the ICW after finding herself – in common with other middle-class social-justice feminists – caught between the Marxist socialism of the Left and the right-wing conservative women’s movement.22 When European socialist parties abandoned their pacifist principles to support 19

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T. Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 2008). In France, by contrast, calls for women’s sexual liberation emerged from socialists, such as Nelly Roussel, who were close to anarchism and sympathetic to NeoMalthusianism. See the ongoing work of Mirjam Janett, University of Bern, and for further discussion, see E. Accampo, Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (Baltimore, 2006); U. Ferdinand, Das Malthusische Erbe: Entwicklungsstränge der Bevölkerungstheorie im 19. Jahrhundert und deren Einfluss auf die radikale Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Münster, 1999). A. Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York, 1997). K. Leng, ‘Culture, Difference, and Sexual Progress in Turn-of-the-Century Europe: Cultural Othering and the German League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform, 1905–1914’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 25 (2016), 62–82. A. Salomon, Character Is Destiny: The Autobiography of Alice Salomon, ed. Andrew Lees (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004).

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military conflict in 1914, anti-war feminists responded by reconfiguring their quest for social peace at home as a campaign for international peace around the world. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), established at The Hague in 1915, was the product of this internationalist turn in transatlantic social-justice feminism, and offered a structure within which middle-class feminists as well as socialists, pacifists, and liberals could collaborate.23 Similarly, the newly established League of Nations in 1919, and particularly its tripartite organisation, the International Labour Organisation, created a focal point for transatlantic campaigns for social justice for women – including equal pay, and the regulation of night work, working hours, and maternity protection – even if the ideal worker in the eyes of the ILO remained the male, industrial wage earner.24 The issue of women’s rights became more central to projects of social justice as state intervention into the private lives of Europeans intensified after the First World War. As workers, wives, mothers, and citizens, women became increasingly visible as both the agents and the victims of modernity. The constitutions of post-war states promised a greater range of rights to social welfare, as well as offering some women the right to vote. In some cases, such as the movement for sex reform in the Weimar Republic, which brought together Social Democrats, Communists, independent feminists, intellectuals, and professionals, social justice and sexual justice continued to be seen as complementary.25 But, with the splintering of the European Left after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, as well as the emergence of fascist movements across Europe, women increasingly gained visibility as the central symbols and objects of both exclusionary and inclusionary understandings of social justice. Communist parties in interwar Central Europe stressed the importance of socialist revolution for the liberation of women, a tactic that largely failed to attract women as either party members or voters during the 1920s.26 With the advent of National Socialism in Germany, meanwhile, women became the targets of a vision of distributive justice within a rigid 23

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L. Beers, ‘Bridging the Ideological Divide: Liberal and Socialist Collaboration in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1919–1945’, Journal of Women’s History, 33 (2021), 111–35. Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for Women; E. Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 (New York, 2019); E. Boris, D. Hoehtker, and S. Zimmermann, Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present (Leiden, 2018). Grossmann, Reforming Sex; K. Canning, K. Barndt, and K. McGuire (eds.), Weimar Publics/ Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (New York, 2010); but also E. Harvey, ‘The Failure of Feminism? Young Women and the Bourgeois Feminist Movement in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933’, Central European History, 28 (1995), 1–28. E. Weitz, ‘The Heroic Man and the Ever-Changing Woman: Gender and Politics in European Communism, 1917–1950’, in L. L. Frader and S. O. Rose (eds.), Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1996), pp. 311–52.

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racial hierarchy that assigned non-Jewish women an important, if strongly circumscribed, role in the functioning of the Volksgemeinschaft by emphasising motherhood as essential for the survival and aggrandisement of the nation. During the 1930s, international Communism retreated from its initial radical approach to gender equality. This was reflected in Soviet campaigns that rolled back the social policies of the 1920s, exemplified by a renewed prohibition on abortion in June 1936 and accompanied by populist campaigns appealing for social order and the stabilisation of the family.27 In Central Europe, Communists were driven into exile or underground, while in France and elsewhere a more conservative approach to gender roles became one of the hallmarks of Communist appeals to women as part of a broadly based strategy of anti-fascism.28 Martha Arendsee, a former German Communist Party (KPD) parliamentary deputy and member of the international Secretariat for Social Policy of the International Workers’ Relief (Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, IAH), wrote about the Nazi attack on women’s rights not so much as an attack on social justice as on the equal rights (Gleichberechtigung) and liberation (Befreiung) of women.29 The IAH, which was established by the Comintern’s clandestine West European Secretariat in Berlin in response to the famine in the Volga region of the Soviet Union in 1921, itself exemplified a shifting focus in international Communist solidarity campaigns from a politics of revolution to one of humanitarianism.30 Popular Front–era organisations such as the World Committee of Women against War and Fascism, headed by the French syndicalist and pacifist Gabriele Duchêne, played an important role in bringing revolutionary socialism into dialogue with humanitarianism.31 This had a limited impact in the short term, but would prove to be increasingly important as socialist and Communist organisations developed their global connections during the subsequent era of decolonisation.32

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W. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge, 1993). C. Bard and J.-L. Robert, ‘The French Communist Party and Women 1920–1939: From “Feminism” to “Familialism”’, in H. Gruber and P. Graves (eds.), Women and Socialism – Socialism and Women: Europe between the World Wars (New York, 1998); S. B. Whitney, Mobilizing Youth: Catholics and Communists in Interwar France (Durham, NC, 2009). Bundesarchiv SAPMO, NY 4017/21: ‘Besondere Mitteilungen an die Sekretariate, die sozialpolitischen Kommissionen und Frauenabteilungen der IAH. (Betrifft die Kampagnen für Mutter – und Kinderschutz), 1934’. K. Brasken, The International Workers’ Relief, Communism and Transnational Solidarity: Willi Münzenberg in Weimar Germany (Basingstoke, 2015). J. Calver, ‘“Warphans” and “Quiet” Heroines: Depictions of Chinese Women and Children in the Comité Mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme’s Campaigns during the Second Sino-Japanese War’, International Review of Social History, 67 (2022), 23–47. C. Donert, ‘From Communist Internationalism to Human Rights: Gender, Violence and International Law in the Women’s International Democratic Federation’s Mission to North Korea, 1951’, Contemporary European History, 25 (2016), 313–33; C. Donert, ‘Women’s

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Social Justice, Sexual Justice, and the Post-War Welfare States After the Second World War, the meaning of social justice for women changed again, as socialists as well as conservatives and Catholics began to include equality between women and men within their definitions of social justice. In some ways, this reflected the opening up of political space for discussions about women’s rights after 1945, in ways that often transgressed older ideological divides between right and left.33 It was also a consequence of the expansion of political rights to women, above all, suffrage, and the regaining of those rights by women who had been denied them under fascist rule. Importantly, this new, more capacious definition of social justice appeared in the socialist welfare dictatorships of Eastern Europe as well as the Christian Democratic welfare states of the West. In the West it became a sub-category of a broader set of Christian-derived principles of a society of reciprocal obligations and rights, while in the East it became part of a ‘socialist concept of justice’ (sozialistischer Gerechtigkeitsbegriff).34 Social justice (soziale Gerechtigkeit) was consequently accorded a prominent position in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as a Marxist-Leninist principle promising all working citizens, regardless of their gender, the same political and social rights, as well as equal opportunities for education and training. Differing conceptions of social justice for women in Eastern and Western Germany were made visible through the post-war German states’ divergent approaches to their shared history of social policy and social rights since the late nineteenth century. The ‘housework day’ (Hausarbeitstag), as Carola Sachse has shown, was one example of the ways in which social justice for women was conceptualised differently in the GDR and the Federal Republic. Introduced in Nazi Germany during the Second World War as part of a drive to get more non-Jewish women to work in factories to support the war effort, the ‘housework day’ entitled women to one day off work per month. Employed women in the GDR retained a right to a paid housework day in the post-war period, whereas this was the case in only a small number of West German states within the Federal Republic; the housework day was eventually abolished in re-unified Germany by a reform of the labour law in 1994. Debates about the housework day, as Sachse has shown, reveal how women interpreted abstract notions of social justice in both German states, west and east, through

33 34

Rights and Global Socialism: Gendering Socialist Internationalism during the Cold War’, International Review of Social History, 67 (2022), 1–22. For a brilliant discussion of this in the case of Italy, see M. Tambor, The Lost Wave: Women and Democracy in Postwar Italy (New York, 2014). C. Sachse, Der Hausarbeitstag: Gerechtigkeit und Gleichberechtigung in Ost und West, 1939– 1994 (Göttingen, 2002), p. 323.

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their experiences of paid and domestic labour, marital status, motherhood, or childlessness. The ‘housework day’ was just one example of how social justice for women became caught up in political and ideological rivalries between capitalist and Communist states during the Cold War. In West Germany, for example, the Social Democratic Party abandoned its commitment to full ‘political, economic, legal, and social equality’ for women by emphasising in its 1957 women’s programme that ‘being a housewife and mother’ was women’s natural calling.35 During the early years of the Federal Republic, officials across the political spectrum saw the ‘traditional’ nuclear family, with a male breadwinner and female homemaker, as a symbol of authentic German values in opposition to both the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic.36 However, national and international developments over the post-war decades also served to reshape women’s rights. At a national level, the West German Left became more attentive to women’s demands for equality and the politics of the family, partly in response to developments in the Communist East and the newly powerful Christian Democrats in the West. At the same time, Catholic left-wing politics – associated with the Second Vatican Council – now exerted a greater influence in social policy and trade unions. Moreover, at the international level, the new global federations of trade unions and women’s organisations played an important role in internationalising conceptions of social justice, as did the institutional structures of the United Nations and its specialised agencies. Women activists in both the Western-oriented International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the proSoviet World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) campaigned for equal pay and the rights of working women.37 Moreover, the longer-established women’s organisations, such as the International Council of Women, were confronted with the emergence of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, an umbrella organisation for national women’s associations in the Eastern Bloc as well as Communist-affiliated women’s organisations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. As a consequence, transatlantic campaigns 35 36

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Sachse, Der Hausarbeitstag, p. 28. R. G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley, 1993); A. N. Ruble, ‘Creating Postfascist Families: Reforming Family Law and Gender Roles in Postwar East and West Germany’, Central European History, 53 (2020), 414–31; L. Rölli-Alkemper, Familie im Wiederaufbau: Katholizismus und bürgerliches Familienideal in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–1965 (Paderborn, 2000); C. Kuller, Familienpolitik im föderativen Sozialstaat: Die Formierung eines Politikfeldes in der Bundesrepublik 1949–1975 (Munich, 2004). F. F. Laot, ‘French Trade Unionists Go International: The Circulation of Ideas on the Education and Training of Women Workers in the 1950s and 1960s’, in E. Betti, L. Papastefanaki, M. Tolomelli, and S. Zimmermann (eds.), Women, Work and Activism: Chapters of an Inclusive History of Labor in the Long Twentieth Century (Budapest, 2022), pp. 255–75.

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for social justice for women were increasingly reoriented towards the Global South.38 This was especially so within Communist and socialist movements for social justice, as West European Marxist and Soviet ideas of social justice were challenged by women’s movements from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, whose support for women’s participation in armed anti-colonial struggles, or for women’s right to be landowners, clashed with Soviet foreign-policy goals or economic policies.39 Organisations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation became forums for heated debates about these competing ideals of social justice. The Cold War polarised positions within these debates, constraining the ability of transnational organisations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom to act as platforms for socialist, Communist, or liberal women who shared a broad commitment to social justice, feminism, and pacifism. Yet, despite the anti-imperialist rhetoric adopted by Communist-dominated organisations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) – an international organisation established in Paris in 1945 to connect Communist and anti-fascist women’s movements around the world – its Soviet and East European leaderships were in some cases perceived as patronising women from newly independent countries in the Global South. By the 1960s, meanwhile, some WIDF members were inclined to call even the socialist-pacifist Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom ‘fascist’.40 Women from postcolonial countries frequently took issue with the WIDF’s focus on social justice for women in industrialised economies over those working as subsistence farmers or domestic workers in the Global South.41 By the 1970s, when the United Nations launched its Decade for Women, these different conceptions of social and sexual justice would become a point of sharp division between activists from the Global South and US feminists such as Betty Friedan, whom the former saw as privileging individualistic ideas of sexual rights over collective commitments to social justice.42

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Cobble, For the Many. Y. Gradskova, ‘Women’s International Democratic Federation, the “Third World” and the Global Cold War from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s’, Women’s History Review, 29 (2020), 270–88. On the globalisation of socialism, see J. Mark and P. Betts (eds.), Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonization (Oxford, 2022). G. Sluga, ‘Women, Feminisms and Twentieth-Century Internationalisms’, in P. Clavin and G. Sluga (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2017), p. 78. Gradskova, ‘Women’s International Democratic Federation’; Y. Gradskova, ‘The WIDF’s Work for Women’s Rights in the (Post)Colonial Countries and the “Soviet Agenda”’, International Review of Social History, 67 (2022), 155–78. J. Olcott, ‘Cold War Conflicts and Cheap Cabaret: Sexual Politics at the 1975 United Nations International Women’s Year Conference,’ Gender & History, 22 (2010), 733–54.

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Yet in practice social justice and sexual justice were never separate, even in the state-socialist world. The fact that social justice was increasingly tied to new models of social citizenship during the Cold War, in both Eastern and Western welfare states, reshaped the relationship between social justice and sexual justice. The ‘problem of women’ in post-1945 Europe was magnified by the imbrication of productive and reproductive labour in demographic imbalances that followed the Second World War, as well as the needs of labour markets in an era of rapid economic growth. Communists, socialists, and Christian Democrats after 1945 all envisaged women’s role as mothers as a central element of bringing about a regime of social justice in both domestic and international politics. In Eastern Europe, moreover, the agendas of interwar sex reform movements continued in a modified form within the structures of the post-war welfare dictatorships. Abortion was legalized in many state-socialist countries in the late 1950s, although the GDR did not follow suit until 1972. The decriminalization of abortion was presented as a contribution to the liberation of women, although it was not simply motivated by a desire to respect women’s autonomy over their bodies. It was also an essential element in a drive to enable women to combine motherhood with paid work by enabling women to space births, and as a means of protecting women’s health from the risks of illegal abortions. Historians such as Katerina Lišková and Agnieszka Kościańska have argued that sexologists and sex-education experts in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland saw the development of healthy sexual relationships as being dependent on the economic and legal equality of men and women in heterosexual partnerships. Such assumptions, however, were strongly heteronormative, and they did not significantly challenge cultural assumptions about the gendered division of labour within the home. Moreover, they were challenged – especially in Poland but to a lesser extent also elsewhere – by conservative and Catholic views that reinterpreted sexual justice as subordinate to the sanctity of procreation.43 Thus, as rising debt and falling productivity caused the welfare dictatorships to falter in their ability to deliver social justice to all citizens by the late 1970s, the appeal of alternative models of sexual justice intensified. Women no longer wanted to be liberated by an inadequate state but wanted to find their own form of gendered identity, and freedom.

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K. Liskova, Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire (Cambridge, 2020); A. Kościańska, To See a Moose: The History of Polish Sex Education (New York, 2022); A. Kościańska, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland (Bloomington, IN, 2021); S. Kuźma-Markowska and A. Ignaciuk, ‘Family Planning Advice in State-Socialist Poland, 1950s–1980s: Local and Transnational Exchanges’, Medical History, 64 (2020), 240–66.

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Social Justice versus Sexual Justice? The story of social justice in Europe after the Second World War was therefore not one of women advancing steadily towards the equality already enjoyed by men. As Josie McLellan has written, ‘if women were moving towards a male norm, they were aiming for a moving target’.44 Such teleological narratives of European gender relations fail to take account of issues of sexual justice: the persistent questions of sexual difference inherent in women’s lives, which saw women consistently over-represented in part-time, low-paid employment, or carrying out the unpaid domestic labour of household management and childcare. Nor do such analyses sufficiently acknowledge how men’s experiences have been transformed by the changing nature of the global economy, including ‘the rise of the service sector, mass consumption, the global labour market, the collapse of manufacturing, the demise of the family wage’.45 By the early 1970s, these changes were undermining notions of social justice tied to territorially defined, industrial economies and championed by welfare states and trade unions within the boundaries of nation states in both East and West. The new generation of feminist and women’s movements that emerged in the 1960s in response to the New Left criticised the gendered biases of welfare states that had become the institutional expression of social justice in Western Europe. By the mid-1960s, feminist movements across Europe were growing increasingly frustrated by the failure of post-war governments to achieve social justice for women and – more fundamentally – by the paternalist assumptions that framed ‘women’s emancipation’ as a problem to be managed by interventionist welfare states.46 At the same time, as Maud Bracke has argued in her study of feminist movements in Italy since the 1960s, these same policies aimed at emancipating women through political rights and waged labour created in many women ‘new understandings of the self and new aspirations and ambitions’.47 These forms of female subjectivity, Bracke reminds us, were central to the social upheavals of the late 1960s and led to new collective identities, political methods, and a reinvention of political agency. Seen from this perspective, the sense of an unfulfilled promise of social justice mirrored the frustration with the form of democracy that was established in Western Europe after 1945, and which also excluded women along with other groups misleadingly labelled as ‘minorities’ from its promise of universal equality.48 44 45 46 47 48

J. McLellan, ‘The “Problem of Women” in Post-War Europe’, English Historical Review, 130 (2015), 934–44. McLellan, ‘The “Problem of Women”’, p.936. T. S. Brown, Sixties Europe (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 210–18. M. Bracke, Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy, 1968–1983 (London, 2014), p. 33. M. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age 1945–1968 (Princeton, NJ, 2020), pp. 237–47.

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Despite the extension of political and social rights that occurred after the Second World War, women in Western Europe were increasingly conscious of what they perceived as their ‘second-class status’. They remained small minorities within the higher status professions, were relegated to a subordinate legal status by laws on the family, or were pushed into precarious or invisible work inside or outside the home. The new languages of feminism and women’s liberation provided Western European women with a vocabulary for redefining politics to include issues such as the family, reproduction, and sexuality, while simultaneously presaging the ‘end of “woman” as a unified political subject’.49 In the Federal Republic of Germany, the ‘New Women’s Movement’ (neue Frauenbewegung) was influenced by New Left visions of creating a society based on anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist principles.50 Yet, crucially, feminist movements were also reacting to the patronising intellectualism of the male-dominated New Left. Exasperated by the sexism of the male-led Socialist German Student Association, women set up Action Councils for the Liberation of Women and demanded full autonomy for women in their reproductive choices, as well as liberation from the tyranny of the private sphere.51 Motherhood itself was reimagined as a source of bodily liberation rather than simply as a vehicle of social reproduction.52 Debates about the decriminalization of abortion in Italy, Bracke argues, cut across established political cleavages between Communists and Christian Democrats. Some of these ideas circulated across the East-West divide too, notably in socialist Yugoslavia, where grassroots feminist movements emerged in the 1970s.53 In East Germany too, feminist critiques of statecentred models of social justice were also adopted by the small grassroots feminist movements that emerged in the 1980s.54 In the East, the new dissident movements, such as the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia and the independent trade union Solidarity in Poland, called attention to the increasing divergence between the regimes’ rhetorics of social justice and the reality of people’s everyday lives, but rarely – if at all – drew attention to women as a specific group. In the era of ‘normalisation’ that followed the Warsaw Pact’s crushing of the Prague Spring in 49 50 51 52

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Bracke, Women and the Reinvention of the Political, p. 77. K. Karcher, Sisters in Arms: Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945 (New York, 2017). K. Schulz, Der lange Atem der Provokation: Die Frauenbewegung in der Bundesrepublik und in Frankreich 1968–1976 (Frankfurt, 2002). Y. Schmacks, ‘Motherhood Is Beautiful: Maternalism in the West German New Women’s Movement between Eroticization and Ecological Protest’, Central European History, 53 (2021), 811–34. Z. Lorand, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia (Basingstoke, 2018). Donert, ‘Since Makarenko the Time for Experiments Has Passed’.

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Czechoslovakia in 1968, Communist regimes continued to present equality between women and men as a central element of their vision of social justice backed up by material guarantees from the state, but these policies were tied to increasingly conservative ideas about sexual justice. In Czechoslovakia, especially, this was evident in the increased state support for working mothers and other measures designed to uphold the family as a pillar of socialist society.55 Single mothers or others who did not fit into the norm of the stable family in theory received additional support from the state, but this principle was not applied uniformly across the socialist countries. The prolonged economic and political crises in Poland during the 1970s and 1980s, for example, increased the importance of informal relations in securing scarce goods and further excluded unmarried mothers from welfare; instead, they were obliged to accept assistance from charitable Catholic centres.56 Meanwhile, the increasingly nationalist and isolationist regime in Ceausescu’s Romania took fears of demographic decline to an extreme by prohibiting abortion and instituting intrusive and punitive surveillance of women’s bodies.57 Migrant women were also seen increasingly as posing particular obstacles to the achievement of social justice for majority societies in both Western and Eastern Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. Family migration to West Germany, as Lauren Stokes has shown, was a source of anxiety for officials in the Federal Republic, reflected in their attempts to stop the payment of child allowances to ‘foreign’ workers.58 West German guest-worker programmes were envisaged as a limited form of migration that would ‘keep the national community closed to foreigners except as a source of waged labour’.59 In France, migration from Algeria to the metropole triggered similar anxieties about state welfare provision for the national community being undermined by foreigners who did not conform to culturally conditioned ideas about the 55

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B. Havelková, Gender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism (London, 2017); H. Havelková and L. Oates-Indruchová (eds.), The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice (London, 2014); C. Donert, ‘Gendering Normalisation: Citizenship in Czechoslovakia during Late Socialism’, in K. McDermott and M. Stibbe (eds.), Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe in the Era of Normalisation (Basingstoke, 2022), pp. 171–94. B. Klich-Kluczewska, ‘Single Mothers, Lonely Children: Polish Families, Socialist Modernity, and the Experience of Crisis of the Late 1970s and 1980s’, in Donert, Kladnik, and Sabrow (eds.), Making Sense of Dictatorship, pp. 129–52. G. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley, 1998); L. Anton, ‘For the Good of the Nation: Pronatalism and Abortion Ban during Ceausescu’s Romania’, in S. de Zordo, J. Mishtal, and L. Anton (eds.), A Fragmented Landscape: Abortion Governance and Protest Logics in Europe (New York, 2016), pp. 209–25. L. Stokes, Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (New York, 2022). L. Stokes, ‘An Invasion of Guest Worker Children: Welfare Reform and the Stigmatisation of Family Migration in West Germany,’ Contemporary European History, 28 (2019), 372–89.

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French family.60 In the state-socialist societies of Eastern Europe, international mobility encouraged by government-supported student exchanges, professional training, or labour recruitment also revealed the institutionalised and everyday racism that was frequently directed at non-European women. Socialist Czechoslovakia, for example, refused to allow Vietnamese contract workers who became pregnant the same access to maternity leave and allowances that was the right of Czechoslovak citizens.61 Women who belonged to minority groups were the target of interventionist assimilation campaigns across the Eastern Bloc, even if they were citizens, such as the Pomak communities of Bulgaria.62 These measures took on increasingly eugenic overtones from the 1960s, especially in the case of Romani women, who were disproportionately more likely to have their children taken into care or to be subjected to coercive sterilisation.63 Seen through the prism of gender and social justice, the human-rights ‘breakthrough’ of the late 1970s that internationalised the claims made by the East European democratic opposition movements therefore appears in a different light. As Samuel Moyn and Jan Eckel have demonstrated, human rights offered a language of moral universalism replacing an older commitment to other forms of political utopia, notably, revolutionary socialism.64 But by replacing the language of equality with that of sufficiency, Moyn has further argued, human rights acted as the handmaiden of neoliberal economic policies in dramatically increasing social inequalities around the world.65 Neoliberalism has not, however, shrunk the state, as Loïc Wacquant has famously pointed out, but rather shifted its functions in deeply gendered terms towards an enhanced and ‘remasculinized’ penal apparatus that replaced previous regimes organised around the provision of material welfare.66 This shift away from the collectivist and egalitarian ideals of social justice

60

61

62 63 64 65 66

On this subject, see Chapter 8 in this volume and A. H. Lyons, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization (Stanford, CA, 2013). A. Alamgir, ‘Recalcitrant Women: Internationalism and the Redefinition of Welfare Limits in the Czechoslovak-Vietnamese Labor Exchange Program, 1967–1989’, Slavic Review, 73 (2014), 133–55; A. Alamgir, ‘Inappropriate Behaviour: Labour Control and the Polish, Cuban and Vietnamese Workers in Czechoslovakia’, in M. Siefert and S. Zimmermann (eds.), State Socialist Europe after 1945: Contributions to Global Labour History (Budapest, 2020), pp. 99–119. M. Neuburger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY, 2004). Donert, The Rights of the Roma. J. Eckel and S. Moyn (eds.), The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia, 2014). S. Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA, 2018). L. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC, 2009).

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institutionalised in the welfare state and towards a moral utopia based on individual rights and free markets has been mirrored by the shift in feminist thought from a politics of redistribution to one based on recognition.67 In this context, it is unsurprising that the political changes of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe did not bring an end to the quest for social and sexual justice. The enhanced personal freedoms brought about by the collapse of state-socialist power were contradicted by the dismantlement of an older, universalist welfarist model of material redistribution and social support for women. This situation was not unique to the former East. The emergence of neoliberal economics, in Europe both east and west, as well as the changes implemented in regimes of social welfare, had a disproportionate impact on the lives of many women. Indeed, as some critics have suggested, the post-1968 feminist movements have contributed to this erosion. As Nancy Fraser has argued, the cultural changes jump-started by the second wave of feminist movements after 1968, though salutary in themselves, served to legitimate ‘a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society’.68 Through the emphasis placed by women’s liberation movements on consciousness-raising, sexual fulfilment, and selfexpression, this new language of feminism has inadvertently normalised a vision of society as a collection of atomised individuals that reinforces the views of libertarian neoliberals. The end of the Cold War in Europe accelerated this shift from social justice to sexual justice, while also enabling new actors to mobilise around the idea of Europe as a space of sexual freedoms in the name of ever-more exclusionary ideas about social justice. Since the end of the Cold War, Éric Fassin has argued, debates in France about sexuality, gender equality, and gay rights have been transferred from the private to the public sphere, thus ‘sexualising’ the concept of democracy, which is simultaneously defined in opposition to the presumed sexual values of migrants, and particularly Muslims.69 In a striking shift away from older nationalist discourses, Western European far-right parties of the early twenty-first century have invoked gender equality – and occasionally LGBT rights – within an otherwise xenophobic rhetoric.70

67

68 69

70

N. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London, 2013); N. Fraser and A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A PoliticalPhilosophical Exchange (London, 2003). Fraser, ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’, 99. E. Fassin, ‘Sexual Democracy and the New Racialization of Europe’, Journal of Civil Society, 8 (2012), 285–8; E. Fassin, ‘National Identities and Transnational Intimacies: Sexual Democracy and the Politics of Immigration in Europe,’ Public Culture, 22 (2010), 507–29. S. R. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Durham, NC, 2017).

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Anti-Islam agendas, in particular, have been bolstered by claims about defending women’s rights against the threat posed by Muslim males not only to women but to European societies more broadly. As Sara Farris has demonstrated, nationalists in France, the Netherlands, and Italy have found allies among neoliberals and some feminists in their attempts to advance xenophobic and racist politics under the banner of gender equality. In all these cases, mid-twentieth-century universalist notions of political and social citizenship – however imperfectly these abstract concepts corresponded with the everyday lives of ordinary citizens – have been challenged by understanding citizenship in terms that are primarily cultural and moral.71 These changes have had particular resonances in Eastern Europe. Citizenship was recast in the post-1989 era in Central and Eastern Europe in ways that allowed minorities to claim cultural rights that had been unthinkable under state socialism. This, however, also created opportunities for nationalist and populist political movements to instrumentalize anxieties about social justice vanishing in a moment of rapid political and economic transformation. This happened perhaps most visibly in the case of minorities such as the Roma, who had been defined by state socialist governments as a social group, but now gained the freedom to identify publicly as members of a cultural community.72 As many feminist observers have pointed out, these shifts were deeply gendered. Privatization and marketization in the former Eastern Bloc countries was accompanied by rhetoric about democratization and civil society that obscured the masculinization of citizenship, politics, and economic rights.73 Reproductive rights, particularly to abortion, were rolled back in the former East Germany and to a much greater degree in Poland. Moral panics about sex trafficking from post-socialist Eastern Europe to the West have bolstered international campaigns to criminalise traffic in women, an approach that critics have termed ‘carceral feminism’. Neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have resulted in forms of feminist activism that present issues such as sexual violence and sex trafficking as best dealt with by the criminal justice system, rather than through struggles for economic justice and personal liberation. This is contradicted by sex-worker activists who argue against viewing migrant sexual labour through the frame of ‘trafficking’. At the same time, nationalist and populist movements have seized upon ‘gender ideology’ as a symbol of Western cultural imperialism in post-socialist Eastern Europe,

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P. Mepschen, J. W. Duyvendack, and E. H. Tonkens, ‘Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands’, Sociology, 44 (2010), 962–79. Donert, The Rights of the Roma. P. Watson, ‘Re-thinking Transition: Globalism, Gender and Class,’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2 (2000), 185–213.

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which challenges the alleged national social consensus around stable families and ‘natural’ relations between the sexes.74 Conclusion This chapter began with a reference to East German civil-rights activist Bärbel Bohley’s observation in the early 1990s that dissidents’ pursuit of moral and material justice had been replaced after 1989 by a formalistic adherence to law. In making this argument, Bohley echoed a wider socialist feminist critique of the juridical, rights-based liberal internationalism that replaced state socialism after the end of the Cold War. However, as this chapter has sought to demonstrate, there is little that is fundamentally new about such arguments. The relationship between women and social justice was never straightforward, and socialist and feminist campaigns for social justice for women have always reflected their different understandings of what the position of women is, and what it should be. That these campaigns across the twentieth century did not culminate in emphatic success was not therefore their most surprising feature. Women achieved certain rights and freedoms over the course of the century, but the wider transition to a regime of gendered social justice has remained more illusory than ever. The absence of an agreed definition of how social justice for women might be achieved (and in which political contexts) was reinforced by the weight of embedded inequalities of gender, which have remained a defining element of Europe’s modern experience. In this way, bringing women into the story of social justice in twentieth-century Europe serves to highlight the perceived deficit of social justice that the editors of this volume identify as the hallmark of contemporary understandings of social justice in Europe today. But at the same time the splintering of ‘woman’ as a collective subject ripe for emancipation from the social injustices of the past – as both Marxist and liberal narratives understood the ‘problem of women’ in the era of the twentiethcentury welfare state – raises more profound questions about the viability of any collective concept of social justice. In a contemporary world characterised by a much more fluid sense of gender rights and justice, it is not just the reality of social justice that is absent, but also any agreed sense of what a concept of social justice for women might be. 74

M. Köttig, R. Bitzan, and A. Petö (eds.), Gender and Far Right Politics in Europe (Cham, 2017).

11

Equity Rules Social Justice on the Ruins of Socialism Adrian Grama

Three decades after the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, where should a history of post-socialist social justice start from? Intuitively, one may begin to mine for talk of social justice in those places ostensibly allergic to it: the writings of the region’s public intellectuals, many of whom had a past of dissent against the old regime. A characteristic example is Polish writer Adam Michnik, who at an early stage of the ‘transition period’ observed how ‘the market that is currently being constructed in Poland has no place for social justice as one of its key ideas. The role of the market is not to ensure justice but to force people to be efficient and creative.’1 The notion of social justice, Michnik argued, had been central to undermining the legitimacy of the Communist elite because it was a language that this elite could recognize and against which their actions could be measured. Yet, after 1989, social justice was essentially a dead language, rendered obsolete by the task at hand: building capitalism. No different were the views of former dissidents catapulted to office in the early 1990s. Czechoslovak prime minister Václav Klaus could thus claim to speak for the many when he remarked that ‘when reference is made to social justice, many people, including myself, start doubting whether this is a clear and meaningfully defined term; moreover, they ask themselves whether a free human society is capable of eliminating naturally generated inequality among people and whether – after the experience of socialism of all kinds – it is reasonable or desirable to make any effort in this direction’.2 Thus, many intellectuals in the 1990s simply praised the virtues of the free market and called for a return to Europe in the name of a European capitalist past that predated 1945.3 If public figures could simply dismiss social justice as a notion that had been obliterated by the realities of the new era, social scientists were obliged to take 1 2 3

A. Michnik, Letters from Freedom (Berkeley, 1998), p. 181. In a similar vein, see also J. Kuron, ‘Man muss träumen: Soziale Gerechtigkeit als soziale Bewegung’, Transit, 6 (1993), 6–24. Quoted in V. Rys, ‘Social Security Reform in the Czech Republic’, in P. R. de Jong and T. R. Marmor (eds.) Social Policy and the Labor Market (New York, 2018), p. 362. D. Barbu, ‘L’Europe des valeurs: Les intellectuels roumains et le pouvoir au début des années ’90’, Revue des études sud-est européennes, 31 (1993), 37–43.

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more seriously the distinctive ways in which East Europeans might approach the building of a new, post-socialist order. If social justice had indeed been a notion East Europeans were used to deploying to assess the merits and demerits of state socialism, would it not still inform how they went about the establishment of democracy and capitalism? This was the leading question guiding the International Social Justice Project (ISJP), a research centre run for two decades from Berlin. The project drew its inspiration from the work of sociologist David Mason, who had conducted research in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, mapping the structural conflicts unleashed by Gorbachev’s reforms and the tension between rising inequality and the widely shared egalitarianism of the Soviet citizenry.4 Opinion polls showed that Soviet citizens remained very much opposed to inequality, and implicitly to capitalism. Decades of ‘Communist ideology’ had instilled in them a ‘conservative’ commitment to egalitarianism and an attachment to the redistributive functions of the state. Such attitudes were not necessarily inimical to reform because for ordinary people, Mason argued, social justice was ‘instrumental in nature’: not an end in itself but rather ‘a means of achieving a higher personal standard of living’. Asked in questionnaires whether they ranked economic efficiency over egalitarianism, Soviet citizens seemed undecided, ambiguous, and even ‘schizophrenic’, sometimes privileging the first over the latter and at other times assigning more importance to the latter over the first, with no particular concern for intellectual coherence and flying in the face of the working assumptions of the sociologist. Where the Soviet citizens were agreed was in their opposition to ‘elite privilege’: ‘The basic problem for Gorbachev then becomes one of shifting popular expectations of justice from the political system to the marketplace, and then getting the market to work.’5 Successive, cross-national opinion polls conducted by ISJP in Eastern Europe in the 1990s showed similar results. Much like in the Soviet Union, here too egalitarianism reigned supreme: after decades of low-income equality and high social mobility, East Europeans now feared rising inequality and despised the new rich.6 They also looked to the state for welfare. Yet this was 4

5

6

D. S. Mason and S. Sydorenko, ‘Perestroyka, Social Justice and Soviet Public Opinion’, Problems of Communism, Nov.–Dec. (1990), 1–10, available at digitalcommons.butler.edu/ facsch_papers/123. Mason and Sydorenko, ‘Perestroyka’, 10. The origins of this revulsion against elite privilege in the Soviet Union and East Europe have received little scholarly attention. Showing how even at their most authoritarian, political regimes in the region encouraged forms of equality before the law (at least for workers in labour courts), Chapter 6 in this volume might be read as a contribution to a more sophisticated history of the rule of law. J. Kluegel, D. Mason, and B. Wegener, ‘The Legitimation of Capitalism in the Postcommunist Transition: Public Opinion about Market Justice, 1991–1996’, European Sociological Review, 15 (1999), 251–83. See also J. Kluegel, D. Mason, and B. Wegener (eds.), Social Justice and Political Change: Public Opinion in Capitalist and Post-Communist States (Berlin, 1996); and

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not merely a legacy of the socialist past. Most governments in the region actively promoted egalitarian policies after 1989. First, doing away with collective farms, the basis of socialist agriculture, was accomplished through a massive redistribution of land to the citizens. Second, public housing was sold to tenants at a fraction of its market value, transforming Eastern Europe overnight into the region with the highest homeownership rate in the world. Finally, early retirement was encouraged as a safety net against rising unemployment. Combined, all these policies conjured up an image of what might be described as ‘shallow poverty’. As Branko Milanovi
c has noted, this was still poverty, but one that had little in common with the destitution of the Global South.7 The majority of East Europeans in the 1990s owned some property, such as at least a flat, and could thus aspire to enjoy their pensions in relative comfort. Talk of social justice naturally accompanied the implementation of these policies, and was a language that was also prominent during the implementations of the other major policy of post-socialism: the privatization of industry and services. As a distinguished journalist wrote, ‘from the outset privatization in Slovenia has amounted to a redistribution of assets, with social justice taking the upper hand over economic efficiency.’8 In addition to plots of land and housing, East Europeans were now invited to own equity in formerly state-owned industry, and become capitalists in their own right. ‘One of the largest transfers of property in history’, as Vanessa Ogle called it, privatization was also one of the central pillars in the restructuring of global capitalism during the last quarter of the twentieth century.9 In July 1993, the editors of Euromoney, a popular finance and business magazine, informed their subscribers that ‘there is hardly a country in the world that does not have a major privatization plan in hand’ and went on to declare the beginning of a new epoch: ‘we believe that a once-in-a-century shift is taking place in the structure of global capital flows that will make the 1990s the decade of the equity and that will continue well into the next millennium’.10 Empirical research has confirmed this prediction. Between 1983 and 1999, total world market capitalization increased tenfold to reach $35 trillion. Outside the EuroAtlantic and Japan, the surge was even steeper. The capital markets of developing countries increased twenty-six times to reach $2.3 trillion in 1999. In addition, the total value of shares traded globally in the same time

7 8 9 10

D. Mason, J. Kluegel, and L. Khakhulina (eds.), Marketing Democracy: Changing Opinion about Inequality and Politics in East Central Europe (Lanham, MD, 2000). B. Milanovi
c, Income, Inequality, and Poverty during the Transition from Planned to Market Economy (Washington, DC, 1998), pp. 76–80. G. Gray, ‘Slovenia Opts for Social Justice’, Euromoney, Apr. 1995, 90. V. Ogle, ‘State Rights against Private Capital: The “New International Economic Order” and the Struggle over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962–1981’, Humanity, 5 (2014), 225. S. Brady, ‘Why Equities Will Dominate the 1990s’, Euromoney, July 1993, 114.

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span grew even more, totalling an estimated $37.5 trillion in 1999, with emerging markets alone accounting for $2.3 trillion, a spectacular growth from a baseline of $25 billion in 1983.11 Privatization drove this late twentiethcentury explosion of stock markets across the globe as the largest share offerings in most countries were made by companies formerly owned by the state. With so much equity up for grabs, institutional investors – pension funds, banks, life-insurance companies, and multinationals – crisscrossed borders to take advantage of states shedding their assets. In no other region was privatization so intimately related to issues of social justice as in post-socialist Eastern Europe and in no other region could politicians assert, tongue-in-cheek perhaps, that mass shareholding would turn the majority of their fellow citizens into capitalists. How did stock ownership by the many come to be seen as the embodiment of a certain vision of social justice in the late twentieth century? This chapter proceeds in two steps. In the first section, I sketch a brief genealogy of the concept of ‘popular’ or ‘people’s capitalism’, a Cold War invention that linked the idea of mass shareholding to the fairness of capitalism. I then move on to locate some of the key moments in the second half of the twentieth century when popular capitalism intersected with policies of privatization. In Ludwig Erhard’s Germany, Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, popular capitalism was invoked to justify the dispersal of shares, either among the employees of the same company undergoing privatization or among the general public looking to acquire equity in public offerings. These historical experiences, I claim in the second section, shaped the imaginary and informed the rhetoric of East Europeans after 1989. Voucher privatization as well as management and employee buyouts (MEBOs) were methods of creating societies of shareholders, bowing to a certain degree to the egalitarian expectations of the people by giving them a stake in the future social order of the market. Other, arguably more important, rationales were at play as well, but it is beyond doubt that privatization in postsocialist Eastern Europe occasioned the articulation of an entire panoply of plans and proposals for a just capitalism, supported from below by the entrepreneurial energies of millions of aspiring investors. Notwithstanding the disappointment, indeed the enduring frustration with which many East Europeans look back on the promise of privatization, their becoming shareholders in the 1990s was part of a longer story of marrying social justice and capitalism. In the concluding remarks I reflect on the implications of this regional experience for a history of social justice in the European twentieth century and beyond.

11

Data taken from W. L. Megginson and J. M. Netter, ‘From State to Market: A Survey of Empirical Studies on Privatization’, Journal of Economic Literature, 39 (2001), 375–6.

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Precedents in Popular Capitalism Opinions against or in favour of diffused shareholding are probably as old as the modern joint-stock corporation. In continental Europe of the late nineteenth century, an air of suspicion, if not rejection, surrounded the prospect of ever more small savers acquiring equity. In Die Börse, a pamphlet written for the Göttingen Library for Workers in 1894, Max Weber noted how in England it was not uncommon for workers to own shares. But this was hardly something to be replicated in the Reich: ‘among us, and with our far lesser situation of wealth, the danger precisely arises that too many stocks shares will fall into the hand of people who do not have too much to lose, but who are attracted by the occasional high dividends that they read, heard about, or saw advertised – and who think that because there is, for example “1,000 DM” written on the stock share that that amount will at some point come back to them, and that they will receive it from someone, somewhere’.12 The stock market could generate forms of reckless behaviour, promising what it could not deliver, busting lifetime savings, and kindling undue hopes of easy money, especially amongst workers. It was better left to those of sufficient income and knowledge to afford the virtue of patience, responsible enough to foresee gain and loss alike. Much of the same reasoning pervaded the fin-de-siècle debate around profitsharing or participation aux bénéfices. Here, alternative ways of remunerating employees were at stake: rewards above and beyond the wage, all geared toward boosting output, securing loyalty, and ultimately defusing the tension between labour and capital. Of all the imaginable schemes for enlisting employees to contribute to the success of a company, encouraging them to buy shares was seen at the time as the most dangerous, on account of ‘tightly binding the fate of the worker with that of his employer and potentially ruining his savings in case of bankruptcy’.13 In Britain in the 1920s, proposals for mass shareholding were part of conservative ideals of a property-owning democracy, seen as a solution to the increased appeal of socialism among the working class. Yet it was across the Atlantic that the stock market was first conceived as a vehicle for social justice. Before the Great Depression, faced with attempts by the government to regulate its operations, the New York Stock Exchange launched a vigorous PR campaign to sell an image of itself as a ‘people’s market’, and in doing so stave off any government intervention: ‘It heralded universal ownership of corporate

12 13

M. Weber, ‘Stock and Commodity Exchanges [“Die Börse” (1894)]’, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), 319–20. R. Merlin, Le contrat de travail, les salaires, la participation aux bénéfices (Paris, 1907), p. 142. For echoes of this argument on the Eastern fringes of Europe at the end of the First World War, see V. Madgearu, Participarea la beneficiu (Bucharest, 1919).

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stock – traded on unregulated securities markets – as the key to an equitable distribution of prosperity, the democratization of corporate power, and the modernization of proprietary democracy’.14 Revived in the 1950s, and rebaptised ‘people’s capitalism’, such pleas for mass shareholding served as a counterpoint to the people’s democracies sponsored by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and Asia.15 In 1957, for example General Electric could advertise proudly in the pages of the Wall Street Journal: ‘People’s Capitalism: The 376,000 owners with savings invested in General Electric are typical of America, where nearly every citizen is a capitalist.’16 This was meant to underline the superior nature of US post-war prosperity compared with the Soviet rival, where all private income from capital was abolished and workers were simply workers, with no possibility to own stocks. Much of this was, of course, Cold War rhetoric, but it did hammer home the larger argument that capitalism changed over time and that the image of a polarized economy inherited from Marx, one split between the rich and the rest, no longer adequately portrayed the post-war conjuncture. More importantly, dispersed ownership of stocks showed that capitalism was able to accommodate social justice, providing the means through which an everwider segment of the population could allow itself alternative sources of revenue and grab the chance of securing financial independence. Such were also the arguments put in circulation to justify the privatization of Volkswagen in the late 1950s: ‘Adenauer and Erhard strongly believed in shares for the people. They did not want ordinary citizens to have their money just in savings accounts and property.’17 In West Germany, Volkskapitalismus, or ‘people’s capitalism’, soon became a rallying cry, variously deployed to buttress the social market economy or, as with Axel Springer, to lambast Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, a dangerous diplomatic opening toward political regimes that stood for the inverse of a people’s capitalism – people’s democracies.18 If the Bonn Republic was an initial laboratory in which dispersed shareholding, privatization, and social justice came together, however confusingly, in the notion of a popular capitalism that sought to legitimise the political order of the time, we owe the global breakthrough of the term to Thatcher’s conservative

14 15 16 17 18

J. C. Ott, ‘“The Free and Open People’s Market”: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the New York Stock Exchange, 1913–1933’, The Journal of American History, 96 (2009), 60. R. Wiessman, ‘Toward a People’s Capitalism’, Challenge, 7 (1959), 8–12. Quoted in V. Perlo, ‘“People’s Capitalism” and Stock-Ownership’, The American Economic Review, 48 (1958), 334. Fritz Knauss quoted in Quek Peck Lim, ‘The Perils of Privatization’, Euromoney, Feb. 1986, 67. See Erhard’s interview‚ ‘Vom Volkswagen zum Volkskapitalismus’, Der Spiegel, 20 Feb. 1957, 27; A. Springer, Von Berlin aus gesehen: Zeugnisse eines engagierten Deutschen (Stuttgart, 1971), p. 102.

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revolution.19 The privatizations undertaken by West Germany in the 1950s neither altered the structure of the economy nor did they roll back public ownership to any significant degree. Conversely, the public offerings of British Telecom, Gas and Aerospace remade state and capital alike. It also remade people, as John Moore – Financial Secretary of the British Treasury between 1983 and 1986 – noted with some delight about the National Freight Corporation (NFC). There, after some 24,000 workers and managers acquired the majority of equity ‘charts went up in all the NFC depots around the country showing the movement in share prices’ with the consequence that ‘during wage negotiations the new employee-owners actually pressed their union to lower the wage demand because they were concerned about the profitability of their company’.20 The NFC was a favourite example of Thatcherite proponents of popular capitalism, widely paraded for embodying the transformative effect of mass shareholding. Indeed, employeeshareholding schemes were seminal for the privatizations of the 1980s, but they were not the only route available to British citizens to partake in the process. Of equal importance was the flotation of shares on the London Stock Exchange and the media campaign to persuade ordinary citizens – generically called ‘Sid’ in the TV advertisements to accompany the privatization of British Gas – to buy up equity. The outcome was remarkable even by Tory expectations: throughout the 1980s, the number of small investors nearly quadrupled to reach a staggering 11 million by 1991.21 The popular enthusiasm for mass shareholding, however, did not last past that decade, and by the time the Conservative government prepared to list Railtrack in 1996, boosting the ranks of popular capitalism was no longer a priority.22 More enduring was the vision of society that accompanied the Tories’ trimming of the British public sector: not simply popular capitalism, or any other glorification of entrepreneurship from below, but the outlines of a ‘property-owning democracy’. For the Conservative Party that took office in 1979, privatization was as much about politics as it was about the economy; more precisely, it aimed to rearrange the relationship between political rights 19

20 21 22

The confusion was due to the semantic instability of the term. Useful to castigate the left for Springer, popular capitalism was for Erhard part of the post-war ‘politics of productivity’, in which economic ‘growth, not the redistribution of wealth, would lead to greater social justice’. A. J. Nicholls, Freedom with Responsibility: The Social Market Economy in Germany, 1918–1963 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 357–8. For a discussion of how this post-war moment in Western Europe fits into a longer history of market-based conceptions of social justice, see Chapter 2 in this volume. J. Moore, Privatization Everywhere: The World’s Adoption of the British Experience (London, 1992), p. 14. A. Edwards, ‘Manufacturing Capitalists: The Wider Share Ownership Council and the Problem of Popular Capitalism’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), 116. Jonathan Ford, ‘Britain’s Finished Revolution’, Euromoney, Feb. 1996, 75.

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and economic entitlements, the frictions of which typically result in demands for social justice. This vision reached back to the interwar epoch when employee-shareholding and profit-sharing informed conservative agendas against socialism. After 1945 such ideas briefly migrated to the left as some Labour thinkers turned to expanding shareholding in a context in which both public ownership and progressive taxation seemed to have exhausted their appeal.23 This ideological back-and-forth ended in the 1970s when mass shareholding was repatriated, via think-tank and partisan reflection, to the Conservative Party. Formulated first as a solution to the ‘denationalization’ of the British National Oil Corporation, encouraging citizens to acquire shares in privatized companies morphed into a novel understanding of citizenship under Thatcher.24 Ownership of equity doubled ownership of privatized council housing as the twin foundation of enfranchisement, with stakes in the economy reinforcing stakes in the political system under Conservative rule: ‘more homes, more shares, more second pensions and more savings’ as Thatcher put it in the run-up for the 1987 elections.25 How suitable for export was this British model? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, journalists saw imitators of Thatcher everywhere, from Turkey’s Prime Minister Turgut Özal to Mexico’s President Carlos Salinas. Yet beyond a supposedly shared ‘passionate faith in the virtues of a free market economy’, the analogy was misleading.26 To be sure, such countries contemplated privatization as a way of transforming their mixed economies, redrawing the lines of division between the public and the private sectors. For more modest aims – social spending on education, welfare, or housing – governments could repurpose once venerable developmentalist policies and relegate them to those islands of private capital that always dotted the landscape of a mixed economy.27 Shifting large parastatals – the legacy of decades of import substitution, tariffs, and subsidies – to private owners was an altogether different matter. This order of magnitude was further amplified by the sovereign debt crisis developing countries experienced in the early 1980s. To this constellation of factors three more must be added. Across the former developing world, national capital markets were weak and citizenries insufficiently affluent to allow themselves to buy shares in privatizations via public offerings. 23 24 25

26 27

B. Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900–64 (Manchester, 2007), p. 210. I rely on M. Francis, ‘“A Crusade to Enfranchise the Many”: Thatcherism and the “PropertyOwning Democracy”’, Twentieth Century British History, 23 (2012), 283–97. Quoted in J. Lawrence and F. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Margaret Thatcher and the Decline of Class Politics’, in B. Jackson and R. Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012), p. 146. Quek Peck Lim, ‘Will New Policies Restore Investor Confidence?’, Euromoney, Aug. 1986, 87. A. C. Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental State in the Americas (Princeton, NJ, 2019).

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In addition, the accounting practices of state-owned companies were far from transparent, which made the valuation of their equity difficult. In such contexts, budgetary considerations took precedence over experiments in mass shareholding. Selling state assets had to generate revenue, and a mix of national and international institutional investors were to be preferred over the local equivalents of Joe Public. In the privatization of Latin America’s largest economies, notions of social justice were from the outset subordinated to solving the problem of endeudamiento, or indebtedness.28 The one exception was Chile where various methods of privatization were used to transfer around 14 per cent of the GDP to the private sector: direct sales to domestic and foreign investors, MEBOs, public offerings, all with the goal of moving ‘toward developing a nation of property owners, in an effort to achieve greater social stability’.29 This was a language Erhard or Thatcher would have recognized.30 Yet Chile’s privatization was portrayed a success story also for the US administration. A report issued by the Bureau of International Labor Affairs in 1989 presented MEBOs as particularly worthy of praise. At the Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (Soquimich), a nitrates producer, employees came to own 99.4 per cent of the shares, an extraordinary achievement, according to one enthusiastic economist, visible above all in how ‘workers-turned-shareholders have started asking management shareholdertype questions about the company’s investment plans and want to be kept informed about the stock’s behaviour at the Santiago stock exchange, without having to wait for the newspaper a day later’.31 This echoed the celebration of the worker-shareholder of the Thatcher government in Britain, and it was precisely this model of popular capitalism, the report implied, that the White House was eager to see prosper in Central America and the Caribbean. For ever since President Reagan took office, ‘Soviet adventurism’ in the region had to be kept at bay by a foreign policy promoting economic freedom as ‘the world’s mightiest engine for abundance and social justice’, a central feature of which now was ‘the opportunity for employees in industrial and agricultural enterprises to gain a stake in the success of their economic system’.32

28

29 30 31 32

For a succinct list of arguments by a key player in Argentina’s privatizations of the 1990s, see D. Cavallo, Pasión por crear: Un diálogo con Juan Carlos de Pablo (Buenos Aires, 2001), 154–6. C. Larroulet, ‘The Impact of Privatization on Distributional Equity: The Chilean Case, 1985–9’, in V. V. Ramanadham (ed.), Privatization and Equity (London, 1995), p. 228. M. Valenzuela Silva, ‘Reprivatización y capitalismo popular en Chile’, Revista de Estudios Públicos, 33 (1989), 176. P. Accolla, ‘Privatization in Latin America’, Foreign Labor Trends, 20 (1989), 19. High Road to Economic Justice: U.S. Encouragement of Employee Stock Ownership Plans in Central America and the Caribbean, Report to the President and the Congress by the Presidential Task Force on the Project of Economic Justice, Oct. 1986, p. 5.

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Reagan was not alone in sponsoring employee stock ownership, but he was only one of the most prominent exponents of the notion that privatisation and the turning of workers into shareholders would deliver a particular form of social justice that was dependent on the existence of free markets. In his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, Pope John Paul II endorsed a similar vision, a convenient ally to have when addressing the governments of a Catholic sub-continent: ‘In this most recent Church endorsement of expanded capital ownership in general, and employee ownership in particular, this outspoken Pope indicates that Catholic social teaching supports “proposals for joint ownership of the means of work, sharing by the workers in the management and/or profits of business, so-called shareholding by labor, etc.”’33 Chileans were less enthusiastic. In a line of thought that we will soon encounter in post-socialist Eastern Europe too, local observers undertook to expose the bogus claims of popular capitalism. Behind employees’ shares and the lofty idea of their busily following the stock market, the reality was much more prosaic: wealth accumulated heavily at the top, in the hands of those who controlled companies. Soquimich was a case in point. In his balance sheet of Pinochet in power, Carlos Huneeus, arguably voicing what by the mid-1990s had become widespread popular discontent about the legacies of popular capitalism, showed how the company had come under the control of Julio Ponce Lerou, Pinochet’s son-in-law. This former forestry engineer, after a brief stint overseeing privatization for the state agency in charge of it, moved to become president of Soquimich, amassing along the way voting rights in its board of directors.34 Personal enrichment to billionaire rank quickly ensued. East European Variations In Chapter 1 of this volume, Conway and Erlichman warn against seeing political elites concocting visions of social justice in isolation from class struggle, intellectual mood, or international context. Any denial of such checks on the self-interest and rhetoric of the powerful would produce highly simplistic narratives of social life, even for regimes – authoritarian or worse – insensitive to controls from below or from without. Such was certainly the case of social policy, the locus classicus of histories of social justice. For neither the growth of state power nor the commodification of social relationships – the two structural processes that delineated the social in the European twentieth century – can be conceived without a modicum of consent: sedimented through the redistribution of rights and goods, breached through the arbitrariness of their allocation. 33 34

High Road to Economic Justice, p. 29. For the evolution of Catholic notions of social justice in the twentieth century, see Chapter 3 in this volume. C. Huneeus, The Pinochet Regime (Boulder, 2007), p. 311.

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Privatization, however, was not social policy. In most cases, it was a simple legal reshuffling of the ownership of capital, from public to private, via a limited set of financial operations requiring no mass popular involvement: essentially, either direct sales of equity to targeted buyers or listings on the stock market, each doubled by strategic restrictions placed on investors in tenders or in case of oversubscription. In West Germany, Britain, and Chile the rationale was identical – selling state assets – but this was a goal pursued for generating revenue and for promoting social justice at the same time, involving the people as future owners of stocks. Restricted to nationals and employees, these privatizations were then praised for their fairness and equity, as well as for turning every new stock-owner into a small capitalist: kleine Sparer, Sids, pequeños accionistas. Post-socialist governments in Eastern Europe, however, added their own distinctive twist to this legacy of popular capitalism: voucher privatization – the free distribution of shares to all citizens, ‘an interesting and imaginative concept’, in the characteristic words of a British banker.35 The precedent of the National Freight Company as the paradigm for MEBO privatization and the Chilean experience, which had attracted much global attention at the time, loomed large in the imagination of East European reformers in the new dawn of 1990.36 But were the conditions in East Europe appropriate to implement these policies? After all, many observers reasoned, stock markets took time to be built, East Europeans were too impoverished to acquire shares, and the value of socialist infrastructure, in industry and services, was impossible to assess. Would this not lead to a situation in which state assets were privatized for a dime? Overlooking the ruins of the Berlin Wall in 1990, Albrecht Graf Matuschka, a somewhat eccentric Munich-based financial manager and former banker with Warburg-Brinckmann, raised a sensible set of questions:37 ‘Should everything belong to the first person who comes along and buys it? Shouldn’t we rather think about the local people who for forty years have worked for the state – who, in a sense, have been forced to save? Shouldn’t the capital gains accruing from introducing a capitalistic system belong to them?’38 Matuschka’s plan was for each citizen born in the GDR to receive one share in a holding company set up to control and manage all state assets. Each share would then be worth 250 coupons, one for each of East Germany’s large Kombinate (business conglomerates), while the sum total of the shares distributed to the citizens 35 36

37 38

D. Delamaide, ‘Now for the Acid Test’, Euromoney, Nov. 1990, 45. T. Rupprecht, ‘Formula Pinochet: Chilean Lessons for Russian Liberal Reformers during the Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000’, Journal of Contemporary History, 51 (2016), 165–86. For British MEBO, see D. Voiculescu, Din experiența mondială în privatizarea întreprinderilor de stat (Bucharest, 1990), p. 52. For a portrait of the man, see ‘Matuschka und die grosse Marie’, Der Spiegel, 49 (1989), 137–41. ‘Matuschka’s Capitalism: Industry Belongs to the People’, Euromoney, Apr. 1990, 38.

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would amount to 39 per cent of the holding company. Some other 10 per cent of shares could be sold to employees of the Kombinate and 51 per cent open to acquisition by foreign investors. Naturally, Matuschka argued, East German citizens could freely sell their shares to the highest bidder and use this start-up capital to open ‘a hair-dressing shop, an auto shop or whatever’. We might legitimately suspect Matuschka of dealing from the bottom of the deck because financiers like himself stood to gain from so many East Germans suddenly able to trade in shares. But the proposal was also addressing genuine popular concerns. Tourists roaming the streets of East Berlin in the early 1990 could overhear citizens musing over their anxiety of ‘being sold’, fearing their factories would be closed down and contemplating unemployment.39 Such were widely shared worries amongst populations in post-socialist states. In Poland in 1990, Solidarnoś
c’s leader Lech Wałęsa ran for president on a platform promising each adult Polish citizen a lump sum of money equivalent to $10,000, a much-needed start-up capital that could allow the more entrepreneurial among them to launch their own business.40 This was to be a payment that reflected their share of the socialist industry that was soon to be privatized. Wałęsa’s plan was a spin-off of a voucher privatization proposal developed by economist Janusz Lewandowski, future minister of privatization, who placed a particular conception of social justice at the core of any effort to transform the Polish economy. Once in office, Lewandowski argued his case in a language familiar to policymakers in Prague, Bucharest, and Moscow: Public property belongs to the whole society since it has been the fruit of its labour and effort. It would be unfair if a significant group of the people who contributed to the creation of this property did not have a chance to participate in its privatization. Privatization is an issue concerning the whole society and not only its more prosperous strata. Thus, the goal of the programme is to spread the ownership of property – to give to the people what they are entitled to.41

There was no shortage of similar proposals. The fairness of freely distributing shares to citizens also caught the imagination of Western economic advisors backpacking through Eastern Europe.42 39

40 41

42

‘Ask anyone in East Berlin what he thinks of the country’s economic prospects, and you will get a prophecy of doom, followed by defiance: “We do not want to be sold.”’ R. Darnton, Berlin Journal, 1989–1990 (New York, 1991), p. 78. P. Simpson, ‘The Troubled Reign of Lech Wałęsa’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 26 (1996), 325. Brochure on mass privatization issued by the Polish Ministry of Privatization in 1991, quoted and discussed in E. C. Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca, NY, 2004), pp. 37–8. See, for instance, M. Hinds, ‘Issues in the Introduction of Market Forces in Eastern European Socialist Economies’, The World Bank: Internal Discussion Paper, Apr. 1990, 47–50. Hinds points out the fairness of ‘giving away the enterprises to all citizens’ and finds two precedents: Chile under Pinochet and Canada, the latter singled out for privatizing the British Columbia

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Privatization therefore merged with a peculiar concern for a socially just transition from state socialism to capitalism. For economics professor Edgar Feige, Eastern Europe represented a unique historical conjuncture for undertaking ‘an egalitarian redistribution of the state’s custodial assets to its citizens as a prelude to the introduction of market-oriented reforms’.43 Because the state already owned the entirety of capital, the emergence of capitalism could dispense with expropriation, the primitive accumulation that historically marked its origins. In fact, according to Feige, the opposite had to happen: post-socialist capitalism would be born not from processes of dispossession and deprivation, but rather through the redistribution to each citizen of an ‘inalienable private property right to a portion of existing capital’.44 Would this then turn every citizen into a capitalist? Feige ignored the question. More important to him was that citizens would secure for themselves a safety net, a ‘real asset nest egg’ to accommodate a future of free market transactions. Jan Švejnar, who penned a similar plan for Czechoslovakia, went further still: sitting on this new-found wealth in the form of shares, women might opt to exit the labour market and devote themselves to leisure, thus avoiding joining the ranks of the unemployed and in doing so help calibrate the excess supply of labour that plagued the economy.45 The specific idea of fairness inherent in voucher privatization could, in the eyes of proponents of such programmes, solve yet another intricate legacy of Communism – the workers’ entrenched control of their factories. This was the case of Poland. ‘On grounds of social equity’, wrote two professors of economics, ‘the government should reject the workers’ claims to full ownership of the enterprises, since the industrial work force represents only 30 percent of the labour force and 15 percent of the population.’46 No matter how strong a feeling of entitlement over their place of employment industrial workers (and their managers) might have entertained at the end of a decade of mobilization led by Solidarnoś
c, in the view of these commentators their claims to own factories were unjust. It was unfair to other, non-industrial workers – office clerks or the vast multitude toiling the land – in addition to being impractical: ‘if the government becomes enmeshed in case-by-case bargaining, there will be no end in sight, given that hundreds of large

43 44 45 46

Resources Investment Corporation by distributing free shares to each Canadian citizen or resident of the province of British Columbia. E. L. Feige, ‘A Message to Gorbachev: Redistribute the Wealth’, Challenge, 33 (1990), 46. Feige, ‘A Message’. J. Švejnar, ‘A Framework for the Economic Transformation of Czechoslovakia’, East European Economics, 29 (1990), 18. D. Lipton and J. Sachs, ‘Creating a Market Economy in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1 (1990), 128.

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enterprises must be privatized’.47 The free distribution of shares to all was thus recommended as the fairest solution. But this was also a solution directed against yet another privileged social group created by decades of Communist rule, the nomenklatura, which included high-ranking party members and their cronies. For they too, more so than workers, could subvert the presumably egalitarian beginnings of the market economy by securing for themselves disproportionate amounts of capital in pre-arranged deals.48 Premised on what World Bank expert Branko Milanovi
c called ‘egalitarianism’, voucher privatization thus appeared to many as the principled route to the transformation of the socialist economies. Sketched in the late 1980s, Lewandowski’s plan contained yet another proviso. Referencing in one breath the experiences of Britain and Chile, as well as the teachings of the Church, he underlined the ‘social dimension’ of the project, namely, ‘the transformation of a society of hired hands into one of shareholders, entrepreneurs and rentiers’.49 The arrival of popular capitalism east of the Elbe was only a matter of time. Of all post-socialist countries, Czechoslovakia committed first to mass privatization, much to the disbelief of foreign journalists: ‘these are mechanisms for allowing the population to participate in privatization even though they don’t have any money. Nobody seems to understand how they will work.’50 As Prague found itself mired in a struggle between ‘the idealistic proponents of the voucher schemes and the pragmatists who want to attract as much foreign investment as possible’, Budapest gathered praise. There, the egalitarian distribution of shares among citizens was bluntly rejected as a loss for the state budget and so too was an early fascination for the British model of public offering: ‘The Hungarian public has already accepted the necessity for privatization and the need for foreign investment.’51 In retail, hospitality, or food production, the government allowed employees and managers to buy up small- and medium-sized businesses; for the larger companies, however, direct sales to foreign investors were to be privileged.52 This, as members of the local elite were keen to emphasise, was a success story, worthy of celebratory coverage, with Hungarian technocrats occasionally invited to narrate publicly 47 48 49 50 51

52

D. Lipton, J. Sachs, and L. H. Summers, ‘Privatization in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2 (1990), 297. E. Borensztein and M. S. Kumar, ‘Proposals for Privatization in Eastern Europe’, Staff Papers (International Monetary Fund), 38 (1991), 315. J. Lewandowski and J. Szomburg, ‘Property Reform as a Basis for Social and Economic Reform’, Communist Economies, 1 (1989), 264. P. Lee, ‘Glimmers amid the Gloom’, Euromoney, Sept. 1991, 34. Lajos Csepi, head of the State Property Agency, quoted in G. Humphreys, ‘Privatizers Get Back on Track’, Euromoney, Mar. 1991, 42. See also N. Ash, ‘The Privatization Dilemma’, Euromoney, Sept. 1990. One estimate puts 1.2 million Hungarians owning shares in these sectors by 1994. ‘Privatization in Hungary’, Euromoney, Sept. 1994.

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their efforts to fend off political influences, in a tightrope walk to ‘keep transactions strictly between “experts and investors”’.53 This approach differed markedly from conditions in Czechoslovakia, where worries about the undue politicization of the economy did not have much purchase. Conversely, the ‘idealistic’ government of Václav Klaus, himself a declared admirer of Thatcher, undertook a first wave of voucher privatization in 1992, turning almost six million citizens into shareholders. Journalists warmed to the idea: ‘It is difficult to go into a pub or bar in Prague without hearing conversations about which company or fund is the best investment. The idea was to offer the people a stake in economic reform and it seems to be working.’54 Surrounded by a frenzy of investment talk, an enthusiastic reporter writing in April 1992 even predicted the beginning of a ‘new Czechoslovak property-owning democracy’.55 Less fluent in the language of the British conservative revolution, exiled Czech lawyer Vratislav Pĕchota allowed himself a moment of speculation: ‘It is perhaps no accident that vouchers were invented in countries which had been exposed for decades to egalitarian ideas about wealth and its distribution in society.’56 In implementing it, Prime Minister Klaus was simply bowing to popular expectations, upholding what many understood to be ‘the most appropriate and substantial solution for the problems regarding privatization and social justice’.57 Klaus himself, by contrast, was more concerned to defend his strategy of privatization against two types of objections. The first, often issued from the ranks of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warned that such a redistribution of wealth could lead to inflation.58 The second, more serious criticism, pointed to scenarios of asset-stripping. Many shareholders would be powerless against management, and companies risked seeing their capital siphoned off to off-shore pockets: ‘I do not know where the dividing line between stripping and simply selling off an asset lies. Both serious investor

53

54 55 56 57 58

Minister of Finance László Békesi quoted in C. Mellon, ‘The Dithering-Away of the State’, Euromoney, Apr. 1995, 80. By politics, Békesi meant ‘populists and nationalists’ opposing the selling of state assets to foreigners, and trade unions defending employment. T. Whitehouse, ‘Privatizers Strive to Stay on Track’, Euromoney, Apr. 1992 (Supplement), 30. Whitehouse, ‘Privatizers’. V. Pĕchota, ‘Blessings and Pitfalls of Voucher Privatization’, in H. Smit and V. Pĕchota (eds.), Privatization in Eastern Europe: Legal, Economic, and Social Aspects (Dordrecht, 1994), p. 89. Pĕchota, ‘Blessings and Pitfalls’. ‘Using vouchers, or investment coupons as we call them here, is a fast way to transform property rights. Nothing else will happen. It’s absolutely neutral in respect to inflation.’ Vaclav Klaus quoted in ‘Progress under Pressure’, Euromoney, June 1991 (Supplement), 9. For a discussion of Klaus’s ‘Programmatic Principles of the Civic Forum’, a text from 1989 that contained references to social justice, see H. Appel, A New Capitalist Order: Privatization and Ideology in Russia and Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh, 2004), p. 43.

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and speculator would do such a transaction for profit and therefore their decisions will not differ.’59 The cynicism of this statement should be taken with a grain of salt. It was but one point of view in favour of voucher privatization. The whole range of arguments, however, varied widely, from the practical to the noble: the speed of the process and the bypassing of an initial valuation of state assets (later to be priced on the stock market) counted among the first; visions of distributive justice, fairness, and wealth sharing among the latter. Typically, Lithuanian members of parliament in the early 1990s considered voucher privatization both a method for securing ‘social equity and justice’ and diffusing social tensions and a way of safeguarding the economy of the newly independent republic from the nefarious influence of Russian capital.60 Similar considerations around ‘fairness and equality’ accompanied the passing of the first law on mass privatization by the Romanian parliament.61 Most post-socialist governments, however, combined voucher privatization with other schemes of selling state assets, occupying the middle ground between Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In some cases, these other schemes, such as MEBOs and trade sales to foreign investors, even took precedence over the free distribution of shares. Two decades since the first privatization laws heated up national parliaments in Eastern Europe, by 2007 the private sector’s share in these countries GDP stabilized above 70 per cent (Figure 11.1). This outcome prompts the larger question as to how this process affected the distribution of wealth within post-socialist societies. Statistical and anecdotal evidence collected from the Russian Federation, the site of the largest experiment in voucher privatization, is disconcerting. There, too, the goal was to create ‘a broad base of shareholders’ committed to backing up the transition to capitalism and looking forward to the emergence of a capital market that may repay their equity in newly privatized companies subjected to market discipline.62 Yet vouchers had a negligible impact on the dynamic of household financial assets during the 1990s, which the majority of Russians held in savings accounts. Depleted by rapid inflation, these savings accounts were never compensated by the wealth supposedly generated by mass shareholding.63 The initial pricing of the vouchers was too low to make any difference. 59 60

61 62 63

Whitehouse, ‘Privatizers’, 28. R. Morkûnaitë, ‘Concentration of Capital in the Process of Voucher Privatization in Lithuania’, in P. Hare, J. Batt, and S. Estrin (eds.), Reconstituting the Market: The Political Economy of Microeconomic Transformation (Amsterdam, 1999), p. 260. V. Mareș, ‘Privatizarea: o analiză instituțională’, Revista de cercetări sociale, 2 (1994), 71. A. Chubais and M. Vishnevskaya, ‘Russian Privatization in Mid-1994’, in A. Åslund (ed.), Russian Economic Reform at Risk (London, 1995), pp. 89–90. See the analysis in F. Novokmet, T. Piketty, and G. Zucman, ‘From Soviets to Oligarchs: Inequality and Property in Russia, 1905–2016’, NBER Working Paper, 23712 (Aug. 2017), available at www.nber.org/papers/w23712.

240 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Romania

Poland

Czech Republic

Hungary

1994

Bulgaria

1999

Slovenia

Slovak Republic

Russian Federation

2007

Figure 11.1 Private sector share in GDP in per cent (1994–2007). Compiled from the ERBD’s Transition Reports of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

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On the streets of Moscow, Russians reportedly traded their vouchers for two bottles of vodka.64 By the summer of 1993, millions of vouchers had been either swapped for shares in investment funds or exchanged for cash, in a process described by one fund manager as a ‘crazy stage of primary accumulation of capital’.65 On an aggregate level, the value of the entirety of vouchers distributed to the Russian people was estimated to sit at around $12 billion, a figure that essentially made ‘the equity of all of the Russian industry, including oil, gas, some transportation and most manufacturing, worth less than that of Kellogg or Anheuser-Busch’.66 For one World Bank expert who opposed the policy, it all seemed a cascade of paradoxes: ‘Voucher privatization was invented to sell assets with no owners to people who had no money for a price which nobody knew.’67 Small wonder that by the mid-2000s, under Putin, the government rolled back some of the private sector, and re-nationalized key companies (see, again, Figure 11.1). Popular disappointment inevitably set in. In retrospect it all seemed like window dressing, intended to increase the popular legitimacy of choices with large-scale social consequences made in the transition to capitalism. As one World Bank economist reasoned, ‘used cleverly, vouchers are one way – but not the only one – of generating some harmless illusions. Using vouchers may seem a more equitable approach to the public, and it helps avoid claims that the government is selling assets “too cheaply” – thereby safeguarding the difficult transition to a market economy.’68 For others, it was an illusion born out of confusion: ‘voucher supporters always affected a curious style of thought whereby wealth could only take the form of shares, and to have an “equal” distribution of wealth to the current citizenry, they pretended that vouchers tradable for shares would just have to be distributed across the citizenry’.69 The reality was much more bleak. Equity was certainly not wealth. It only represented claims on future wealth, provided the privatized companies would prove to be profitable or shareholders were bought out. But even presumably successful cases of privatization offered no reason for celebration. As one disappointed shareholder explained, ‘today I still own 2% in a factory . . . How can I – one of thousands of shareholders, none of whom I know because I was never invited to the general meeting of the shareholders – influence the

64 65 66 67 68 69

K. Krzyzak, ‘Milestones on the Capitalist Road’, Euromoney, July 1994, 35. Quoted in Craig Mellow, ‘Next, Please, a Moscow Stock Market’, Euromoney, July 1993, 84. M. Boycko, A. Shleifer, and R. Vishny, Privatizing Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 118. Quoted in J. Smalhout, ‘Keep the State out of Business’, Euromoney, Mar. 1999, 41. S. Ramachandran, ‘The Veil of Vouchers’, Viewpoint (The World Bank Group), Note 108 (Apr. 1997). D. Ellerman, ‘Lessons from Eastern Europe’s Voucher Privatization’, Challenge, 44 (2001), 20.

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management?’70 Nor were the investment funds competing for citizens’ shares more amenable to popular control. The largest such fund in Czechoslovakia, Harvard Capital and Consulting, boasting of a tenfold return on the vouchers deposited in it, stripped the companies it took hold of of their assets, making its owner, Viktor Kožený, the richest man in the country.71 With 16 million shareholders by the mid-1990s, Romania was ideally suited to produce its own millionaire trading in certificates of ownership.72 In Poland, mass privatization created a context in which, as Wiesław Rozłucki, president of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, explained, ‘ordinary people have begun to smell money’.73 Few, however, ended up tasting much cash. Conclusion Why did the language of social justice not disappear during the transition to capitalism in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, as so many distinguished intellectuals wished it would or indeed claimed it ought to? And why did notions of fairness and equity accompany a set of policies around privatization that contributed to the enrichment of elites and the consequent disenchantment of ordinary people? Two answers, already anticipated or alluded to in the body of this chapter, can be offered here. The first, and most obvious one, is that unlike intellectuals, politicians needed to earn votes, and the semblance of redistribution implied in voucher or MEBO schemes of privatization offered a legitimising device that could be used to secure re-election. This was a widely shared view of the time, with the political choices commonly denounced in both scholarly and broader public circles as a form of unabashed populism. The implication was that post-socialist elites opted against economic efficiency and deployed a specific vision of social justice just to remain in power, knowing that citizens would reward them at the ballot box. Social justice was not mere bombast, but it did couch the ploy of an initial egalitarian resource allocation slowly drifting – through mergers, takeovers, and the valuation on the stock market – into the hands of the few. Building on this observation, a second answer would be that social justice was actually never at stake. Rather, the seemingly benign notion of ‘popular capitalism’ was just the cover for a much more comprehensive policy package minted by neoliberals of 70 71

72 73

Tranzița: Primii 25 de ani. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi în dialog cu Vartan Arachelian (Iași, 2014), p. 168. Kožený later attempted to replicate this business model in Azerbaijan, buying up vouchers to acquire parts of the national oil industry; B. Beasley-Murray, ‘The Bandit of Baku’, Euromoney, Oct. 2000, 117–19. See, for instance, the case of the ‘former art dealer’ Sorin O. Vântu in ‘Our Reason to Be’, Euromoney, Sept. 1996 (Supplement), 261. Quoted in ‘A Long-Awaited Sell-Off’, Euromoney, Jan. 1995, 13.

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both local and international pedigree. Much like in Chile, it sweetened the bitter pill of radical reform, kindling hopes of mass entrepreneurship, with the crucial difference that East Europeans, owing to their distinctive post-war histories, held deeply ingrained egalitarian views and could now vote freely. The subsequent anger of the people and their sense of having been duped by the elites was to be expected. Owning stocks was not to be equated with owning wealth since the equity rules of the stock market had nothing to do with the vision of creating equitable societies of millions of shareholders.74 There is, of course, some truth in both arguments, but also the risk of misreading the historical record. Highly indebted in 1989, Hungary chose to follow the model of Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, selling its most prized state assets to the highest foreign bidder, thus bypassing any vision of mass shareholding. In Poland, voucher schemes targeted only the most uncompetitive state companies that could hardly hope to survive the transition to a market economy, let alone yield dividends for their shareholders. In Romania, the implementation of voucher privatization did not secure re-election for the social-democratic coalition of the mid-1990s that presided over its implementation. If talk of social justice was not always consequential for electoral success, why did it persist? A more sensible explanation would therefore need to start from the observation that the history of capitalism in post-socialist Eastern Europe cannot be written, as Marx would have it, mit Zügen von Blut und Feuer (in letters of blood and fire). This was not simply a history of expropriation – of extra-economic violence paving the way for the usurpation of customary rights. Quite the contrary: capitalism emerged out of a fundamental legal revolution, driven by the extension of civil, political, and social rights after decades of dictatorship. Privatization too unfolded across new branches of law, from property to bankruptcy, cementing a ‘legal module’ that transformed state-owned assets – machines, land, buildings, knowledge, skills, and so on – into capital, more precisely into ‘legal property assigned a pecuniary value in expectation of a likely future pecuniary value’.75 It is within this legal framework of the modern state that we should place histories of social justice. Historically diverse and liable to be deployed across a variety of social contexts, notions of social justice rarely stray far from the orbit of law. Indeed, all histories of social justice are by necessity histories of specific legal codifications: tax and social security law, contract and antidiscrimination law, or corporate and constitutional law. And all histories of 74

75

This argument was made by USAID experts who set up Rasdaq (the Romanian equivalent to Nasdaq): United States Agency for International Development, Developing Romania’s Capital Market (Washington, DC, 1998), p. 17. J. Levy, ‘Capital as Process and the History of Capitalism’, Business History Review, 91 (2017), 487. In suggesting this research hypothesis, I am inspired by K. Pistor, The Code of Capital: How Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton, NJ, 2019).

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social justice are histories either of inclusion under the law or of infringement of rights, especially for persons or groups possessing only human rights. This explains why talk of social justice could even penetrate the empire of property law, and graft itself onto capitalism in visions of mass shareholding in which the people could finally partake as owners of stocks, in addition to, as in labour law, them being owners of labour power. From the US East Coast of the 1920s to the Eastern Europe of the 1990s, such was the promise of popular capitalism and the people’s stock market. The outcome might have been a ‘strange kind of finance capitalism’, but at no point in history were there so many millions of people legally entitled to claim their rights of property over so many companies, shouldering insolvency while dreaming about dividends.76 More recently, as criticism of big corporations and big government made a comeback in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, so too did arguments by latter-day proponents of ‘popular capitalism’ in favour of workers supplementing ‘their wages with significant capital ownership stakes and meaningful capital income and profit shares’.77 The language of social justice lives on, informing contemporary fantasises of a just capitalism, ready to attach itself once more to property law, and reopen the stock market for those who own nothing but their labour power.

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D. Stark and L. Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (Cambridge, 1998), p. 158. J. R. Blasi, R. B. Freeman, and D. L. Kruse, The Citizen’s Share: Putting Ownership Back into Democracy (New Haven, CT, 2013), p. 10.

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Bridging the Void Social Justice in the History of the European Union Kiran Klaus Patel

The history of European integration has hitherto been written as a story in which social justice has no real place. The European Union (EU) and its predecessors did not develop a strong social policy with redistributive dimensions. Social justice never became a key concept of policy-making; instead, the EU is more commonly seen as either a peace project, a neoliberal enterprise, or a bureaucratic juggernaut. Nor did Brussels and the other sites of European integration become hotbeds of the struggle for social rights, either individual or collective. This presumed lack of engagement with social justice has led many, especially on the left, to distance themselves from the European project.1 The EU’s collective memory has no moments like the Selma to Montgomery marches, leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi, or movements such as liberation theology. Even today, a search for the keyword ‘social justice’ on the EU’s website turns up not a single result.2 Despite this absence in public discourse and most of the literature, this chapter argues that the European Community (EC),3 as the precursor of today’s EU, was already becoming an important actor in, and location of, issues of social justice from the 1950s and even more since the 1980s. Among the EC’s three original organizations, it was in particular the European Economic Community (EEC), launched in 1958, that came to play this role. But even earlier, when Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands established the first forerunner of the EU, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1952, they gave birth to an institutional framework that made important inroads in this direction.

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See, e.g., P. Anderson, Ever Closer Union? Europe in the West (London, 2021); W. Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (London, 2017). Search on the official website of the European Union, europa.eu/search/?queryText=%22social+justice% 22&query_source=EUNION&more_options_date=*&more_options_date_from=&more_options_date_to=&more_options_language=en&more_options_f_formats=*&swlang=en. Strictly speaking, the plural formula ‘European Communities’ would be more accurate. The singular is used because it was often used at the time.

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Moreover, the EC was not just a platform of exchange between governmental experts and representatives of societal organizations; it was an actor in its own right, influencing relations between the individual and society and affecting debates on the distribution of material wealth, opportunities, and social privileges. In doing so, it shaped the very ethos of the European societies that emerged by the final decades of the twentieth century. This chapter will focus on the period from the 1950s until the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, with a short epilogue on more recent developments. It identifies two main phases during the Cold War era: a first period from the 1950s until the early 1970s, and a second in which action accelerated further, chiefly from the mid-1980s onwards. In its consideration of the EC’s role, the chapter challenges the dominant state-centrism in the literature on social justice in modern Europe by exploring a key transnational site for debates on social justice. Even those existing studies that do examine entities other than states often still apply the categories of social justice first developed for modern states. In this case, the problem is not state-centrism, but a deeper methodological nationalism, in which social justice is, in a highly reductionist manner, largely equated with social policy as a remit of state activity.4 Closely connected to this methodological point, the chapter seeks to overcome the dominating perspective in the literature that reduces social policy in the context of social justice to a redistributive model centred almost exclusively around public policies that provide services and benefits which seek to protect people against market forces. Such an approach is ahistorical; and, as Chapter 1 in this volume emphasises, overlooks the ways in which notions of insuring citizens against life risks developed in conjunction with policies that sought to contribute to the consolidation of free markets.5 Accordingly, the following analysis looks beyond a well-established body of literature that simply defines EC social policies by their absence or just compiles lists of failed attempts and policy initiatives.6 In doing so, the chapter thus addresses not just an empirical void, but also fundamental conceptual questions.

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K. Fertikh and H. Wieters, ‘Harmonisierung der Sozialpolitik in Europa. Socio-histoire einer sozialpolitischen Kategorie der EWG’, in K. Fertikh, H. Wieters, and B. Zimmermann (eds.), Ein soziales Europa als Herausforderung: Von der Harmonisierung zur Koordination sozialpolitischer Kategorien (Frankfurt am Main, 2018), pp. 49–86. T. Cayet and P.-A. Rosental, ‘Politiques sociales et marché(s): Filiations et variations d’un registre transnational d’action, du BIT des années 1920 à la construction européenne et à la Chine contemporaine’, Le Mouvement Social, 244 (2013), 3–16; G. Majone, ‘The European Community between Social Policy and Social Regulation’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 31 (1993), 153–70. See, e.g., J.-C. Barbier, The Road to Social Europe: A Contemporary Approach to Political Cultures and Diversity in Europe (London, 2013); F. Denord and A. Schwartz, L’Europe sociale n’aura pas lieu (Paris, 2009); M. Kleinman, A European Welfare State? European Union Social Policy in Context (Houndmills, 2002), esp. pp. 82–92.

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In what follows, I will demonstrate that the EC already started to develop a distinct, though largely implicit approach to social issues as early as the 1950s. It sought social progress primarily through economic cooperation, rather than redistributive social policies. Productivity and growth were regarded as the best remedy for social inequality and conflict. This view emerged from discussions among policy-makers and experts, for whom the EC served as an institutional platform complementing the role of national actors, transnational forums, and other international organizations. The ideas that came to inform the EC’s approach were not original. They were part of the West’s political and economic answer to the challenge of Communism. Moreover, they built on the work of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which had already started to take root during the inter-war years. But the EC was more than just an arena for the exchange of ideas and a carrier of ILO concepts. It also developed a specific, though highly diverse set of policy instruments and legal tools with enormous implications for social justice, through its provisions on equal pay, measures to close the income gap between the agricultural and the industrial sector, and stipulations in private law. These policies remained very patchy. They resembled a piece of Swiss cheese, in which the holes – or, in the parlance of dairy production, the ‘eyes’ – were often bigger than the substance between them. The size of the eyes made it difficult to see the actual cheese, the connections between its parts, and the common formula that held it together. Still, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate, there was indeed a larger whole and overarching logic to the policies pursued by the EC in the area of social justice. An Imported Model The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950 that eventually opened the way to the European Coal and Steel Community was a speech of little more than five minutes. Master-minded by Jean Monnet and presented by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, it mentioned ‘solidarity’ twice. It pitched its idea of pooling powers and markets in the coal and steel sectors – as two industries indispensable for modern warfare – as a form of ‘de facto solidarity’. Solidarity was not described as the precondition or starting point for the intense cooperation between the Western European nations that the French government invited to join this project; rather, it was the projected outcome of political measures and ‘concrete achievements’. Schuman saw solidarity not as a goal in its own right, but rather as a vehicle for building a united Europe.7 Solidarity 7

For an English translation of the text, see Robert Schuman, ‘Declaration of 9 May’, www.robertschuman.eu/en/declaration-of-9-may-1950.

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was a means, not an end; it served to lubricate and legitimize the integration process that the French foreign minister was advocating. Why, then, was the social not more prominent? Schuman was speaking only five years after the war, when most Europeans looked first to their nation state for action on social issues.8 At the time an emphatic attempt of moving social policies or even the broader pursuit of social justice to a supranational level would have encountered staunch resistance. This was particularly the case since Schuman saw the young Federal Republic of Germany as a central partner in this endeavour. His somewhat instrumental use of solidarity demonstrates that the rhetoric of the social was not completely absent at this early moment in the history of European union, but did not stand front and centre either. For all the vagueness of this and similar documents, a recognizable approach undergirded the ECSC’s policies on social issues when it was established some two years later. Before exploring its details, however, it is key first to zoom out and put the EU’s predecessors in perspective. There has been a tendency over the past decades to characterize European integration under the banner of the ECSC and later the EC/EU as the only alternative to nation-centred policy-making in post-war Western Europe, and hence as a radically new departure. Things could not have been more different. In fact, the period featured a myriad of international organizations and platforms all trying to forge new links between societies, address the needs of international governance, and build a peaceful future. In this context, the EC was a latecomer, not a pioneer.9 It was also less different from other organizations than is often argued; conversely, it regularly built on earlier international cooperation efforts, selectively adapting ideas, governance mechanisms, and other components.10 On social issues, broadly conceived, the EC was chiefly inspired by the work of the International Labour Organization, which had begun during the inter-war years.11 Specifically, the ECSC sought to improve health and safety standards and funded training programmes for the unemployed, as well as constructing housing for miners and steelworkers. It did not, however, adopt a redistributive approach. This centrist political formula represented a compromise between business, trade unionists, and the reformist currents of socialism

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See, e.g., A. S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State, 2nd ed. (London, 2000). K. K. Patel, ‘Provincialising European Union: Co-operation and Integration in Europe in a Historical Perspective’, Contemporary European History, 22 (2013), 649–73. K. K. Patel and W. Kaiser, ‘Continuity and Change in European Cooperation during the Twentieth Century’, Contemporary European History, 27 (2018), 165–82. N. Verschueren, Fermer les mines en construisant l’Europe: Une histoire sociale de l’intégration européenne (Brussels, 2013).

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that had emerged in the ILO context.12 Having antecedents in the 1920s, it gained particular traction since the late 1930s, strongly influenced by USAmerican experts and policy-makers and by what came to be known as the ‘politics of productivity’.13 Accordingly, raising incomes and ameliorating living conditions largely depended on improving productivity and greater trade between states; market liberalization was seen as key for both economic growth and social stability. In this spirit, it was also meant to contain Communism and to come up with a capitalist answer to the socio-economic challenges of the time.14 The ideas that had developed and amalgamated in the context of the ILO had an even stronger influence on policies addressing the broader sphere of ‘the social’ in the European Economic Community, which after its establishment in 1958 soon became more important than the ECSC. The best example of the ILO’s impact on the EEC is the Ohlin Report, which was prepared in 1956 by a group of ILO experts and came to play an important role in the EEC.15 In essence, the report dealt with the question of whether welfare-state standards could be harmonized internationally and, if so, how. At the time this was a hot topic in European expert circles, especially among those close to the labour movement. The ILO rejected such an approach as largely unfeasible. Conversely, it argued that as a means to achieve social justice the establishment of comparable and competitive unit labour costs (i.e., the average cost of labour per unit of output produced) was more important than a direct harmonization of social standards. This made market integration, productivity, and economic growth the decisive instruments to shape social affairs, rather than any kind of redistributive policies. ILO representatives argued that in order to achieve growing prosperity and a concomitant equalization of social standards, a number of supportive measures were necessary, including vocational training, freedom of movement, and occupational safety.16 12

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L. Mechi, ‘Managing the Labour Market in an Open Economy: From the International Labour Organisation to the European Communities’, Contemporary European History, 27 (2018), 221–38; T. Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford, 2017); L. Mechi, ‘Du BIT à la politique sociale européenne: Les origines d’un modèle’, Le Mouvement Social, 244 (2013), 17–300; S. Kott, ‘Un modèle international de protection sociale est-il possible? L’OIT entre assurance et sécurité sociale (1919–1952)’, Revue d’histoire de la protection sociale, 10 (2017), 62–83. C. S. Maier, ‘The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II’, International Organization, 31 (1977), 607–33. On actors who had a more explicit social policy agenda at the time but did not prevail, see, most recently, L. Mechi, ‘From Recurring Reference to Identity Trait: The Emergence of Social Justice in the Political Discourse of the European Communities (1950–1986)’, Journal of European Integration History, 27 (2021), 263–84. Summary in Group of Experts, ‘Social Aspects of European Economic Co-operation’, International Labour Review, 74 (1956), 99–123. Mechi, ‘Managing the Labour Market’; Mechi, ‘Du BIT à la politique sociale européenne’.

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The EEC Treaty of 1957, which came into effect in 1958, breathed this very spirit. Article 117 stated that living conditions were to be improved and harmonized essentially through ‘the functioning of the common market, which will favour the harmonization of social systems’. Redistributive social policy and protection against life risks and market failures remained primarily national responsibilities.17 Conversely, growth lay at the heart of the EC’s approach to social justice during the post-war decades of economic boom. This choice of privileging market integration as a solution to the social problems of the time was far from uncontroversial. Some groups had hoped the ECSC would develop a different approach. The French and the Italian governments in particular favoured a more redistributive model, hoping to profit from funds provided by other member states. Once the EEC had been established, the European Commission, representatives of the member states’ social democratic parties, and trade unionists repeatedly pushed for a European social policy oriented more strongly on the national model, with a greater focus on the achievement of social justice. Actors such as these laid the groundwork for the methodological nationalism that later came to undergird research on the issue: the EEC was regarded as deficient since it did not replicate the social functions of a modern state. The German social democrat Gerhard Kreyssig, for instance, complained in 1958 that the EEC remained largely powerless in this field and argued that it should implement redistributive policies. To his mind, this was the only convincing manner in which social justice could be advanced.18 But this current never became prevalent amongst policymakers, and redistributive social policy remained a predominantly national matter. Since the Second World War, welfare had become a central responsibility of the nation state, enhancing state legitimacy and fostering a loyal citizenry. The fear that ‘more Europe’ would mean ‘less national welfare state’, would ultimately reduce the power of national governments, and would lead to excessive costs defined the policy choices of most European politicians, including Konrad Adenauer’s cabinet in Bonn. And while Paris tended to be more open to the idea of ‘social Europe’, most politicians across the member states saw no need for a comprehensive redistributive policy at the EC level that might have compromised their own roles and the powers of their respective nation states. 17 18

A complete English version of the original EEC Treaty can be found as Appendix A in B. Cocks, The European Parliament: Structure, Procedure & Practice (London, 1973), p. 196. G. Kreyssig, ‘Die sozialpolitische Fundierung der Montanunion’, Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte, 9 (1958), 217–23, quote 219; more generally, see, e.g., K. Fertikh, ‘La construction d’un “droit social européen”: Socio-histoire d’une catégorie transnationale (années 1950– années 1970)’, Politix, 115 (2016), 201–24; A. Ciampani and E. Gabaglio, L’Europa sociale e la Confederazione europea dei sindacati (Bologna, 2010); L. Leonardi and A. Varsori, Lo spazio sociale europeo (Florence, 2005); Mechi, ‘From Recurring Reference to Identity Trait’.

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Moreover, they feared potential costs for their own national budgets as well as tensions within their respective societies, reminiscent of the inter-war years, if social justice were to play a major role at the European level. Christian democratic politicians were particularly reluctant to see integration as a project that could advance a transnational version of social justice. Instead, they backed the productivist logic that hinged on limited state interventionism, moderate social reforms at the national level, and trade liberalization internationally as engines of economic growth. Christian socialist impulses that were widespread in many Western European countries in the immediate aftermath of the war were soon toned down, not least to demarcate Christian Democracy’s own approach from socialism. This shift also reflected the effect of intense transnational networks among Christian democratic parties across Western Europe and their very own, class-based conceptualisation of welfarestate policies.19 Given the predominance of Christian democracy in the political systems of the six original EC member states during the first decades of European integration, it does not come as a surprise that social-justice questions remained marginal in relation to the EC.20 There was little public pressure on this issue either.21 While trade unionists in particular had initially pushed for a more redistributive alternative at the European level, many became increasingly frustrated about the EC during the 1960s and concentrated their energies on other forums and issues.22 Against this backdrop, the ILO approach dominated in the EC, seeking social progress primarily through economic cooperation rather than redistributive social policy. Growth and productivity were regarded as the best medicine for raising living standards – and via this approach to also reduce social inequality and conflict. The EC’s adoption of ILO ideas, however, changed their very quality. Since its inception, the ILO’s international social law has only been able to address states that, in a best-case scenario, transposed ILO recommendations and its other stipulations into their national laws. EC law, in contrast, has a supranational dimension, with direct effect and primacy; as such, it was a much more powerful instrument. 19 20 21

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P. Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (Cambridge, 2009). C. I. Accetti, What Is Christian Democracy? (Cambridge, 2019); W. Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cambridge, 2007). For a summary, see H. Kaelble, ‘Geschichte des sozialen Europa: Erfolge oder verpasste Chancen?’, in G. Metzler and M. Werner (eds.), Europa neu besehen: Geistes- und sozialwissenschaftliche Einblicke (Frankfurt am Main, forthcoming 2024). A. Crespy and N. Verschueren, ‘From Euroscepticism to Resistance to European Integration. An Interdisciplinary Perspective’, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 10 (2009), 377–93; A. Andry, ‘“Social Europe” in the Long 1970s: The Story of a Defeat’, unpublished PhD thesis, European University Institute Florence (2017).

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The Logic of the Common Market, 1950s to Early 1970s The EC’s dominant focus on market integration, productivity, and economic growth makes it easy to overlook the way it addressed social affairs. In fact, the European Community became active in this field in several ways, with clear effects for the societies of their member states. At least the three most important effects must be mentioned here.23 Although the EC viewed the populations of the member states primarily as workers, not as citizens or consumers, it was not completely blind to other categories, such as gender, as this section will also show. First, the EC sought to facilitate transnational labour migration among its member states. The EEC Treaty aimed to end ‘any discrimination based on nationality between workers of the Member States as regards employment, remuneration and other conditions of work and employment’. It also stipulated that the Community should ’adopt such measures in the field of social security as are necessary to provide freedom of movement for workers’.24 This vision realized the ILO’s logic of concentrating on growth and productivity without creating a supranational welfare state,25 and built on its work since the 1920s. Already in the years after the First World War, the ILO had helped to establish a network of international conventions and agreements granting migrant workers access to welfare in areas such as accident compensation and pension rights.26 This set of legal instruments had already benefitted the European labour market during the inter-war period; from the 1950s onwards, the EC built on this experience and appropriated it according to its own needs.27 Given that economic growth depended on labour mobility, Christian democratic parties across the member states were open to this idea. The same holds true for some social democrats and socialists, for whom this approach resonated with their internationalist credentials. Others on the left,

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For a more detailed and yet comprehensive survey of the debates and measures, see, e.g., A. Varsori, ‘Development of European Social Policy’, in W. Loth (ed.), Experiencing Europe: 50 Years of European Construction, 1957–2007 (Baden-Baden, 2009), pp. 169–92; E. Eichenhofer, Geschichte des Sozialstaats in Europa (Munich, 2007); Linda Hantrais, Social Policy in the European Union, 3rd ed. (Houndmills, 2007). See articles 48–51 EEC Treaty, in Cocks, European Parliament, pp. 173–4, quotes article 48, article 51. Fertikh, ‘La construction d’un “droit social européen”’; T. A. Glootz, Alterssicherung im europäischen Wohlfahrtsstaat: Etappen ihrer Entwicklung im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), pp. 187–265; and, already at the time, D. S. Gerig, ‘European Multilateral Social Security Treaties’, Social Security Bulletin, 22 (1959), 12–14. See, e.g., H. Creutz, ‘The I.L.O. and Social Security for Foreign and Migrant Workers’, International Labour Review, 351 (1969), 351–69. F. Romero, Emigrazione e integrazione europea, 1945–1973 (Rome, 1991).

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especially trade unionists, were more critical and feared that the EC stipulations would undermine their autonomy in collective bargaining.28 Against this backdrop, there was a relatively broad consensus that the EC’s policy was not to translate into a full-fledged liberalization of the European labour market, with corresponding implications for social justice that would ensue from an undue level of competition amongst member states, generating a race to the bottom in labour standards. Even the EEC Treaty accepted clear limits to the freedom of movement. It failed to insist on full mutual recognition of school and vocational qualifications, for instance, while certain professional groups were explicitly excluded. Freedom of movement did ‘not apply to employment in the public service’, for example.29 On many other issues, decisions remained with the member states, whose elites often understood European integration as a means to consolidate and expand the welfare state at the national level and therefore had no interest in undermining social standards through excessive competition; instead, liberalization always remained selective.30 Second, the EEC Treaty addressed issues of social justice in requiring ‘the application of the principle that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work’.31 Here, however, intentions need to be separated from effects, as a wider commitment to social justice was not the main reason for this provision. Some member states had already anchored the principle of pay equality in national law by ratifying a 1951 ILO Convention calling for ‘equal remuneration for men and women workers for work of equal value’. It was especially the French government – a pioneer of equal pay legislation, even prior to the ILO Convention – that insisted on including such a clause in the EEC Treaty, mainly because it feared a comparative disadvantage for its industries if such a provision were not in place in all member states.32 As on so many other issues, the debate pivoted around competition and growth, not gender equality and female empowerment, reflecting general trends in Western European societies with regard to gender norms at the time. This also helps to explain why the 28 29 30

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Andry, ‘Social Europe’, pp. 31–41. See article 48, 4 EEC Treaty, in Cocks, European Parliament, p. 173. E. Comte, The History of the European Migration Regime: Germany’s Strategic Hegemony (London, 2018); also M. Berlinghoff, Das Ende der ‘Gastarbeit’: Europäische Anwerbestopps 1970–1974 (Paderborn, 2013); E. Calandri, S. Paoli, and A. Varsori, ‘Peoples and Borders: Seventy Years of Migration in Europe, from Europe, to Europe (1945–2015)’, Journal of European Integration History, 23 (2017) (special issue). See article 119, EEC Treaty, in Cocks, European Parliament, p. 196. ILO Convention C 100 (Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951), www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/ f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C100. Belgium ratified the convention in 1952, France in 1953, and Germany and Italy in 1956; see, e.g., I. Heide, ‘Supranational Action against Sex Discrimination: Equal Pay and Equal Treatment in the European Union’, International Labour Review, 138 (1999), 381–410; C. A. Ellina, Promoting Women’s Rights: The Politics of Gender in the European Union (New York, 2003), esp. pp. 21–65.

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stipulation had little legal muscle. Rolf Wagenführ, director-general of the EC’s statistical office, had a point in the mid-1960s when he cited the equal pay article as an example of the EEC Treaty containing ‘ambiguous and fungible clauses’.33 Still, the EEC equal pay provisions did trigger change, at least in some member states. One example is the Republic of Ireland when it joined the EC in 1973. While accepting the existing overall EC legal framework with all its implications, the Irish government rejected the principle of equal pay. In a conservative cultural and political climate, an atmosphere of economic recession, and under pressure from business, it took a lackadaisical stance. At the same time, however, civil society groups used European legislation to push for a new position for women in Irish society. It did not take the EEC to motivate them to fight for their rights, but the equal-pay clause did provide them with a new, powerful argument. The European movement widely lobbied women and women’s groups during the membership referendum campaign, and Irish Women United soon joined the fight, along with less radical groups including the Irish Housewives Association. In February 1976, the various groups pushing for equal pay presented 35,000 signatures gathered from all over the country to John Kelly, parliamentary secretary to the Irish Taoiseach. In the end, it took a ruling by the European Court of Justice in 1976 to force the Irish government to implement this piece of legislation.34 In sum, therefore, EC membership facilitated the advancement of equal pay in Ireland. Equal pay remained, however, a distant goal in Ireland even after this decision, and the situation was little better elsewhere. To this day, practices and outcomes differ markedly across the various member states, as the EU itself has frequently conceded.35 Nevertheless, the ruling provided a rhetorical reference point and a practical legal instrument with substantial impact. Third, the EC instituted a number of targeted policies that did have a redistributive dimension. The most important early example was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Established with the EEC Treaty, the CAP soon shifted from the political sidelines into the project that absorbed most of the EC’s political energy, bureaucratic planning, and financial resources. Integration went further in agriculture than in the manufacturing industry: as well as abolishing internal barriers, Common Market Organisations were introduced to

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Translated from R. Wagenführ, ‘Die Statistik in der Integration der Sechs’, Statistische Hefte, 7 (1966), 51–73, quote 51. A. Keogh, ‘Managing Membership: Ireland and the European Economic Community 1973–1979’, unpublished PhD thesis, European University Institute Florence (2015), pp. 155–86, on the signature campaign: 177. For an analysis of the phase under discussion, see, e.g., J. Pillinger, Feminising the Market: Women’s Pay and Employment in the European Community (Houndmills, 1992).

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set the prices for most agricultural products. This made Brussels directly responsible for incomes in the sector. The CAP’s social dimension remained somewhat hidden though. On paper it pursued a whole spectrum of objectives that were first and foremost intended to increase production. But the EEC Treaty also included the objective ‘to ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community’.36 Ultimately, the CAP operated as a clandestine central pillar of the EC’s social policy, introducing policy measures to cushion the sector’s utter transformation and the dramatic shrinking of its workforce. It helped to ensure that the historic transformation of the primary sector progressed largely free of major conflict in the second half of the twentieth century, whereas the same process in the first half of the century had led to enormous political destabilization.37 The impact of specific historical experiences was not, however, the only reason why this sector received so much support. The Christian democratic parties that were in government in most member states at the time also sought to provide massive support for a section of the electorate that was particularly known for its conservative leanings. Social policy à la CAP, therefore, had a clear social bias. Apart from this vital, if somewhat concealed social cushioning of the gradual decline of the agricultural sector, however, the CAP had many problematic effects: for instance, its protectionism impeded growth and trade, it was expensive for consumers, and it had detrimental environmental repercussions.38 A second example of a targeted policy with redistributive outcomes was the European Social Fund, also established with the EEC Treaty. This had the ‘task of rendering the employment of workers easier and of increasing their geographical and occupational mobility’.39 It remained much smaller in ambition and budget than the CAP during Western Europe’s years of economic boom, focusing on re-training workers from increasingly obsolete branches of the economy and providing assistance with their re-employment. As such, it complemented the EC’s three main social instruments. It did not counterbalance the preoccupation with growth, but it did help to ameliorate some of the most glaring social problems for which the market provided no remedy.40

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Article 39 EEC Treaty, in Cocks, European Parliament, p. 168. See, e.g., R. Paxton, French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgères Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture 1929–1939 (Oxford, 1997); J. Osmond, Rural Protest in the Weimar Republic: The Free Peasantry in the Rhineland and Bavaria (New York, 1993). A.-C. L. Knudsen, Farmers on Welfare: The Making of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (Ithaca, NY, 2009); K. K. Patel, Europäisierung wider Willen: Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland in der Agrarintegration der EWG 1955–1973 (Munich, 2009). Article 123 EEC Treaty, in Cocks, European Parliament, p. 197. J. Brine, The European Social Fund and the EU: Flexibility, Growth, Stability (London, 2002); E. Tomé, ‘The European Social Fund: A Very Specific Case Instrument of HRD Policy’, European Journal of Training and Development, 37 (2013), 336–56.

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Taken together, the EC’s various policies therefore did not result from an active push for social justice. Calls of that kind were voiced during the first decades of European integration, especially in the European Parliament (EP), but they always remained politically marginal. The European Economic and Social Committee, an EC consultative body established in 1958, time and again pushed into a similar direction, but had even less influence than the EP.41 Instead, the growth-led ILO model provided the main orientation, and the aforementioned schemes, stipulations, and policies primarily followed a complementary and compensatory logic. While the policies on transnational labour migration focused on coordinating different national models, those on equal pay sought to dismantle obstacles to the free market and thus were part of what Fritz Scharpf has famously called ‘negative integration’.42 The CAP and similar policies added a thin layer of ‘positive integration’ (in Scharpf’s parlance) to this mix, by adding policies with a directly redistributive effect. Together, the various policies reveal an important tendency in the broader genealogy of projects of social justice in post-war Western Europe: At the time, protecting the market from democratic politics was sometimes seen as more important than strengthening democracies pivoting around the idea of social justice.43 The benefits of growth were unevenly distributed, and the complementary and compensatory logics informing the transnational migration regime, equal pay for men and women, the CAP, and the European Social Fund remained targeted policies with comparatively little systemic impact. In general, the effects of European integration on the social, political, and economic fabric of member states were relatively small during this period. Although the EC gradually started to establish itself as an actor that contributed to the way in which specific conceptions of social justice were pursued in Western Europe, it was still very easy to overlook its role.

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A. Varsori (ed.), Il Comitato Economico e Sociale nella costruzione europea (Venice, 2000); K. van Zon, ‘Assembly Required: Institutionalising Representation in the European Communities’, unpublished PhD thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen (2019), pp. 307–76. F. W. Scharpf, ‘Negative and Positive Integration in the Political Economy of European Welfare States’, in G. Marks, F. W. Scharpf, P. C. Schmitter, and W. Streeck (eds.), Governance in the European Union (London, 1996), pp. 15–39. See also, e.g., P. Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals (Cambridge, MA, 2013). Recent research comparing the EU to India has stressed the difference to the South Asian experience, where the central state defined itself as a developmental state seeking to achieve social justice by democratic means. Having said this, both share the ‘imperfect constitutionalisation’ of social rights; see P. Dann and A. Thiruvengadam, ‘Comparing Constitutional Democracy in the European Union and India: An Introduction’, in P. Dann and A. Thiruvengadam (eds.), Democratic Constitutionalism in India and the European Union: Comparing the Law of Democracy in Continental Polities (Cheltenham, 2021), pp. 29–33; and, more specifically, G. Bhatia and E. Christodoulidis, ‘Social Rights’, in Dann and Thiruvengadam (eds.), Democratic Constitutionalism, pp. 223–51, quote 234.

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The Discreet Expansion of EC Activism, 1970s to Early 1990s The end of the post-war boom in the early 1970s led to important changes in the EC’s role in questions of social justice. Despite more far-reaching hopes, particularly among social-democratic and socialist groups that were at that time arguing for wealth redistribution, planning, and economic democratization, the process remained slow-paced and incremental, building mainly on the expansion of pre-existing instruments. Beyond the atmosphere of crisis after the boom years, the rising debate about human rights, and the call for more political action, two dynamics in particular shaped this process: the pressures of enlargement and, especially during the second half of the 1980s, the idea of deepening the Common Market project.44 When the boom came to its jarring end in the early 1970s, the selective approach to social issues received serious scrutiny. After having gained momentum since the late 1960s at both the domestic and international levels, discussions on redistributive measures came to the fore in political debates on the EC, albeit briefly. This was particularly so during the years in which social democracy was on the rise and Communist parties resorted to a form of Eurocommunism that no longer fundamentally rejected the EC. The European Social Fund began to play a larger role, with some 90 per cent of its funds being directed to training and other vocational measures. The tiny budget on which it had survived until the early 1970s expanded substantially; but it remained negligible compared with the member states’ own welfare spending.45 The member states agreed on a Regulation on the Application of Social Security Schemes to Employed Persons and Their Families Moving within the Community,46 and the Social Action Programme followed in 1974. The 1970s and early 1980s were also the heyday of the CAP’s untrammelled social dimension, with ever greater resources being funnelled into this policy. At the time, it consumed up to 80 per cent of the EC’s overall budget. Concomitantly, the EC’s regional policy acquired social policy aspects as it emerged from the CAP, aiming to reduce the gap between poorer and richer regions in the Community.47 Equal pay acquired more legal muscle too. The equal-pay stipulations of the EEC Treaty did not provide for clear legislative powers, but it opened the battlefield of litigation between workers and employers. A string of directives from the mid-1970s onwards, partly triggered by a 44 46

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45 Andry, ‘Social Europe’. Tomé, ‘The European Social Fund’. 1408/71/EEC; see also R. Leboutte, Histoire économique et sociale de la construction européenne (Brussels, 2008), esp. pp. 619–82; A. Varsori, ‘Le rôle de la formation et de l’enseignement professionnels dans la politique sociale européenne et le Cedefop’, Formation professionelle, 32 (2004), 70–85. For this period, see, e.g., Majone, ‘The European Community’; J.-F. Drevet, Histoire de la politique régionale de l’Union Européenne (Paris, 2008).

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ruling of the European Court of Justice (ECJ),48 gave the EC more powers of the kind Wagenführ had found lacking roughly a decade earlier.49 The EC’s overall approach remained gradual, however, and all these activities remained subsidiary to the instruments and objectives of the Common Market. Moreover, the enormous problems of the CAP elicited increasing criticism, discrediting the idea of the EC being capable of managing meaningful redistributive policies.50 Even if social policy therefore did not reach the heart of the EC, the period did witness an increase in the EC’s impact on social issues, contributing to a number of important wider trends. Most significantly, the differences between national systems narrowed noticeably. While the respective systems retained their own characteristics, social spending and benefits converged. Additionally, inequalities between member states were shrinking in the 1980s – although they were soon to increase again. To be sure, this process was not attributable exclusively to the EC, and there were wider domestic and international dynamics at play that shaped this development. Nevertheless, the leap forward in the scope of European convergence is striking.51 Enlargement amplified the role of pre-existing instruments and their effects in the societies of the member states. The year 1973 saw the entry of Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Since Denmark and the United Kingdom were rather affluent countries, quite comparable to the founding member states, this did not trigger fundamental debates on social policy. The British government, in particular, however, pushed for a more independent role for the EC’s regional policy. This was also intended as a means to offset the unequal distribution of CAP money from which the United Kingdom did not profit very much, and which in subsequent years became one of the most thorny issues in the relationship of the United Kingdom with the EC. Ireland, the EC’s poorhouse at the time, was too small to have a systemic effect on the Community, with a population of some three million, although the example of equal pay has already demonstrated that EC law could make a difference. The social question had a much larger impact in the next two rounds of enlargement. During the 1970s, Greece, Spain, and Portugal submitted their bids for membership, with Greece joining in 1981 and the two Iberian states in 1986. As comparably poor nations with large agricultural sectors, their entry reinforced the CAP’s redistributive logic and role. Enlargement thus deepened 48 49 50 51

Case 43/75, Defrenne v. Sabena [1976] ECR 455. H.-W. Micklitz, ‘Social Justice and Access Justice in Private Law’, EUI Working Papers LAW, 2 (2011), 16. Patel, Europäisierung wider Willen, pp. 503–20. H. Kaelble, Sozialgeschichte Europas: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2007), 332–57; H. Kaelble, Mehr Reichtum, mehr Armut: Soziale Ungleichheit in Europa vom 20. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main, 2017).

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the path already taken, and the same effect was to repeat itself later, when the former GDR became part of the EC through German unification in 1990, and again another fifteen years on, with the EU’s eastern enlargement of 2004.52 A second significant trend was even more remote from public debate than the inner logics of the CAP. The Single European Act (SEA) that was signed in 1986, and in particular the secondary law it generated,53 gave the EC a new role on social questions. The SEA sought further market integration to fight the economic malaise of the time, and to deepen European integration for political reasons too. Its economic rationale was guided by the idea that the Single Market could be achieved only with clearer standards to protect workers and consumers. The European Commission headed by French socialist Jacques Delors already made this point in the 1985 White Paper that launched the initiative that eventually led to the Single Market, while also pleading for a new initiative for ‘free movement for labour and the professions’.54 As before, the EP readily supported such plans. After decades of frustration with pushing unsuccessfully for social policies that, in their eyes, would help deliver social justice, various MEPs now adopted the language of market integration that had been dominant within the EC, emphasizing the potential economic gains resulting from social initiatives and warning of a potential loss of competitiveness if low social standards were accepted.55 The SEA was the first treaty to directly refer to social justice as a goal of European integration, and its article 118a gave the EC powers in the area of occupational health and safety.56 Moreover, secondary legislation soon mushroomed. Alongside antidiscrimination stipulations, EC private law came to play an important role by securing consumers’ and workers’ rights. At first glance, many of these initiatives appear to pick up old international social policy concerns. The ILO had been busy in fields such as occupational health and safety since the 1920s, and in a way, the EC simply took up the thread and made it a special concern of the Community. It would be wrong, however, to reduce the activism of the 1980s to a mere continuation of older debates. While the changes in EC private law 52

53

54 55

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As an overview, see K. K. Patel, Project Europe: A History (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 76–82; see also, e.g., C. Salm, Transnational Socialist Networks in the 1970s: European Community Development Aid and Southern Enlargement (Houndmills, 2016). While EC/EU primary law are the treaties as binding agreements between the member states, the body of law that comes from the principles and objectives of the treaties is called secondary law. EC/EU secondary law includes regulations, directives, decisions, recommendations, and opinions. EC Document COM(85) 310, quote 25. On these debates, see M. Roos, ‘A Parliament for the People? The European Parliament’s Activism in the Area of Social Policy from the Early 1970s to the Single European Act’, Journal of European Integration History, 27 (2021), 37–56. EC Document L 169/1, preamble and article 118a.

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remained patchy, they all pivoted around both anti-discrimination and a second principle, best described by legal scholar Hans Micklitz as ‘Zugangsgerechtigkeit’, or ‘access justice’: fair access to participation in the market.57 In the Common Market, as the EC’s institutional heart, redistribution thus remained secondary, and the guiding idea diverged significantly from the kind of social-justice provisions enshrined in most national private law. The principles of anti-discrimination and access justice had antecedents in the EC since the 1950s but now acquired a different quality and new forms. In private law, the decade from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s had mainly seen the coordination of national laws; the following years witnessed legal activism that led to a much stronger role for the EC in its own right. This approach soon culminated in the Social Charter of 1989 and the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights of 2000, with stipulations on integrated consumer policy and some elements of social rights. Most of these points, however, had a largely declaratory character and remained abstract principles rather than producing concrete legislation. In the cases in which they did become more specific, they mostly remained linked to the completion of the internal market.58 More consequential than the charters with their grandiloquent words were mundane directives on workers’ rights, such as 76/207/EEC, on equal access to employment, vocational training, promotion, and working conditions, or 89/301/EEC, on the introduction of measures to encourage improvements in the safety and health of workers at work. Their binding, supranational character made them powerful legal instruments. They are all the more important since they partially compensated for the decline of national consumer law and workers’ rights protection in the member states at the time.59 These legal developments that were largely confined to discussions within expert circles were overshadowed by other debates that were more in the public light. Most notably, the second half of the 1980s also saw a renewed discussion about explicitly redistributive social policies. While pushing for anti-discrimination and access justice to counterbalance the effects of enhanced market integration, Delors also advocated what he called a ‘social dimension’, partly premised on the national model, with ‘solidarity’ as a central component.60 The British government was particularly critical of such

57 58 59 60

H.-W. Micklitz, The Politics of Justice in European Private Law (Cambridge, 2018); Micklitz, ‘Social Justice and Access Justice in Private Law’. E.g., S. J. Silvia, ‘The Social Charter of the European Community: A Defeat for European Labor’, ILR Review, 44 (1991), 626–43. Micklitz, The Politics of Justice in European Private Law. Trades Union Congress 1988, speech Jacques Delors, ‘1992: The Social Dimension’; europa. eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-88-66_en.htm.

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ideas, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher frequently clashed with Delors over the issue. Much to the dismay of trade unionists, sections of the European Parliament, and the Commission, a European social policy modelled on the post-war welfare states ultimately never came into being.61 Even in the last decade of the Cold War, social policy ‘proper’ remained a marginal concern in the Council of Ministers as the EC’s most important decision-making organ. Between 1978 and 1987 it generally occupied a halfway prominent place on the agenda at only two meetings per year, while meetings on policy areas like external relations and the CAP were consistently in the double figures.62 So, while actors arguing for social justice had become more vocal since the 1970s, the social democratic momentum was soon fading away. With conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher coming into office in 1979 and Helmut Kohl in 1982, and France repositioning itself with the ‘tournant de la rigueur’ (austerity turn) under François Mitterrand in 1983, the new political mood of the time ushered in a period that saw the rise of what came to be termed neoliberalism. While this somewhat simplistic term obscures a much more complicated reality,63 the 1980s certainly witnessed a new form of market orientation outpacing social-justice concerns of a redistributive brand. On the whole, however, the epic fight and failure to create a ‘social Europe’ almost entirely overshadowed the more discreet but still important advances in EU policy-making on questions of social justice via policies targeting questions of anti-discrimination and access justice. Despite some innovative elements, the EC’s overall approach remained committed to ideas with antecedents in the inter-war debates in the ILO. Social Justice since the Early 1990s This is not the place to give a detailed account of developments since the early 1990s. What can be said is that the trends that gained traction from the mid1980s continued to define the EU’s stance on the social until roughly the turn of the century. Against the backdrop of rising discontent with the Union’s policies, the challenges of the pending eastern enlargement, and economic problems including mass unemployment across many member states, the debate then took a new twist, at least at first glance.

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A. Bitumi, ‘An Uplifting Tale of Europe: Jacques Delors and the Commitment to Social Europe’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 16 (2018), 203–21; Andry, ‘Social Europe’, pp. 328–33. Eurostat, Revue 1977–1986 (Luxembourg, 1988), 24. During this period the number of annual sessions fluctuated between fifty-eight and ninety-nine. L. Warlouzet, Governing Europe in a Globalizing World: Neoliberalism and Its Alternatives Following the 1973 Oil Crisis (London, 2017).

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The turn of the century brought a discussion about ‘social inclusion’, for instance, in the context of the so-called Lisbon Agenda,64 while the EU started to piggyback on a more general debate about a ‘European social model’.65 As its strategy, it emphasized access, knowledge, and investment in people, undergirded by neoliberal ideas. It also developed new governance techniques, most importantly the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), with its focus on creating a common understanding among member states and achieving a consensus on solutions and implementation. OMC gave experts a clearer presence in the process of devising policies at a European level on social issues.66 During this period, the European Court of Justice also began to play a more important role on questions of social justice – sometimes issuing rulings that strengthened social protections, and sometimes not. With the exception of a 1976 ruling on equal pay, the ECJ had thus far remained relatively silent on the social dimension, at least when compared with other issues on the EU’s agenda, for which it had already become an important player since the 1960s and 1970s.67 But also for the period since the 1990s, EC secondary law deserves particular attention, which in the overall literature on European integration often stands in the shadow not just of primary law but also of the ECJ’s landmark decisions.68 Access justice in EC style was increasingly prevailing over national legislation, for instance, in consumer law, thus marking a change in comparison to the first phase of coordination until the 1980s and the second phase of legal activism until the late 1990s.69 Taking the various dimensions together, parts of the rhetoric changed, and the post-Maastricht EU introduced some new means, but there was also much continuity. Redistribution did not move to the foreground, and the main idea of social inclusion gravitated around the notion that citizens ought to be helped to help themselves. Moreover, the EU continued to lack a robust comprehensive constitutional or even just institutional framework on social issues. 64 65

66

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68 69

As an example for the academic debate at the time: P. Littlewood, I. Glorieux, and S. Herkommer (eds.), Social Exclusion in Europe: Problems and Paradigms (Aldershot, 2000). See, e.g., A. Giddens, P. Diamond, and R. Liddle (eds.), Global Europe, Social Europe (Cambridge, 2006); G. de Búrca, ‘Towards European Welfare’, in G. de Búrca (ed.), EU Law and the Welfare State: In Search of Solidarity (Oxford, 2005), pp. 1–9. See, e.g., J. Zeitlin, ‘Social Europe and Experimentalist Government: Towards a New Constitutional Compromise?’, in de Búrca (ed.), EU Law and the Welfare State, pp. 213–41; H. G. Hockerts and W. Süß, ‘Markt und Nation: Über zwei Relationen des Sozialstaats und ihren Wandel in Zeiten von Globalisierung und Europäisierung’, in C. Marx and M. Reitmayer (eds.), Die offene Moderne: Gesellschaften im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2020), pp. 318–42. For the period prior to the 1980s, the Case 36/74, Walrave and Koch v. Association Union Cycliste Internationale and Others [1974] ECR 1405 deserves mention next to the aforementioned Defrenne ruling. K. K. Patel and H. C. Röhl, Transformation durch Recht: Geschichte und Jurisprudenz europäischer Integration 1985–1992 (Tübingen, 2020), pp. 18–19. Micklitz, The Politics of Justice in European Private Law, esp. pp. 180–95.

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The biggest change occurred elsewhere. The EU acquired many new powers, across a broad spectrum of policy domains, most obviously in the field of monetary integration. Building on processes that had begun during the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s, it now became the dominant player in international cooperation in Europe. In addition to its new powers, successive rounds of enlargement added to its stature, especially the 2004 eastern enlargement. From here on, the EU massively impacted the fate of its member states’ economies and societies – for better and for worse – with obvious consequences for the broader realm of social justice.70 This became most visible during the financial crisis that hit Europe in the late 2000s, triggering a policy of austerity with highly detrimental effects, particularly for some of the EU’s Mediterranean countries and their (national) welfare systems. The European Central Bank’s zero interest-rate policy is another example with massive implications for the redistribution of wealth, not just between citizens, but also between member states. COVID-19 has only exacerbated existing inequalities, particularly those related to gender.71 Against this backdrop, the EU’s approach to social inequality and justice has fallen into a significant crisis since the late 2000s; it became one of the main drivers of growing Euroscepticism across the member states. The European social model, praised just a few years earlier, has therefore been described as the ‘great loser in the political and institutional reconfiguration’ of the EU under the impact of the financial crisis.72 It would be wrong, however, to disregard the strong continuities that link the present to the EU’s past. Many earlier EU policies have remained intact, and recent developments could be read as further steps in the incremental process of expanding the EU’s role. The EU Vaccine Strategy has considerable social ramifications, as an inroad into a field in which until 2020, the EU had virtually 70 71

72

For details, see Patel, Project Europe. M. Steer, ‘Sind die Frauen die Verliererinnen der Corona-Krise? Überlegungen aus der Frauenund Geschlechtergeschichte’, H-Soz-Kult, 1 Sept. 2020, www.hsozkult.de/debate/id/diskussio nen-5049; M. O’Dwyer, ‘European Economic Governance: A Feminist Perspective’, in D. Bigo et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Critical European Studies (London, 2021), pp. 174–87; A. Elomäki and J. Kantola, ‘European Social Partners as Gender Equality Actors in EU Social and Economic Governance’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 58 (2020), 999–1015. C. Joerges, ‘Social Justice in an Ever More Diverse Union’, in F. Vandenbroucke, C. Barnard, and G. De Baere (eds.), A European Social Union after the Crisis (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 92–119, here 92. Joerges offers a more nuanced analysis than the quote suggests; he just refers to the ‘loser’ interpretation. Also see, e.g., A. Crespy, ‘Social Policy: Is the EU Doing Enough to Tackle Inequalities?’, in R. Coman, A. Crespy, and V. A. Schmidt (eds.), Governance and Politics in the Post-Crisis European Union (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 196–216, and, as a very pessimistic perspective, S. Giubboni, ‘Free Movement of Persons and Transnational Solidarity in the European Union (EU): A Melancholic Eulogy’, in S. Civitarese Matteucci and S. Halliday (eds.), Social Rights in Europe in an Age of Austerity (London, 2018), pp. 273–90.

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no powers. NextGenerationEU, with its epic budget for regional cohesion, youth unemployment, and other issues, explicitly addresses the social and has powerful redistributive dimensions. As before, the set of policies and governance approaches remains mixed. What can be said is that the past decade has seen a firm tendency to move from market liberalization to a greater focus on securing the institutional status quo and giving greater priority to noneconomic goals, with corresponding implications for the broader pursuit of social justice.73 Whatever the concrete results of these and other policies might be, it is clear that the EU is too big to ignore in any discussion about social justice in twenty-first-century Europe. Conclusion For Swiss cheese, the formula is very simple: the bigger the eyes, the better the cheese. This, or its opposite, is not the argument of this chapter on the role of social justice in the history of the EU. Its claim is more modest in that it has simply sought to demonstrate that there was actually a cheese in the first place. While informed by a formula with antecedents in the ILO, the EC’s approach to the social always relied on a patchy mix of instruments. The CAP, regional policies, and recent debates associated with NextGenerationEU do have an emphatically redistributive dimension. In the period under study, redistribution remained, however, sectoral and specific, and its social implications never dominated EC/EU policies. Instead, regulatory policies always outpaced redistributive capacities. EC measures on access justice and anti-discrimination gravitated around the (re-)distribution of opportunities, not of means, with access justice in particular premised on the idea of a market citizen, conceptualized as a well-informed, dynamic, flexible, and mobile homo oeconomicus.74 The EC’s main levers hinged on ‘negative integration’, in the sense of dismantling obstacles to the market and maximizing the incentives for individual success in the economic sphere, also beyond the traditional male breadwinner model.75 The associated economistic logic was the main reason why the member states accepted these inroads into their sovereignty in the first place, and the pursuit of national interest was crucial in preventing the EC and more recently the EU from becoming more powerful in the field of social policy. However, the member states never fully determined the process. European integration had its own dynamics, for instance, through legal activism via secondary law. 73 74 75

This is the argument of K. K. Patel, Europäische Integration: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich, 2022). Micklitz, The Politics of Justice in European Private Law, p. 19. Scharpf, ‘Negative and Positive Integration’.

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A patchy landscape of EC/EU policies eventually emerged, reflecting the many decades of struggle for attaining greater powers and the tendency to create ever more links and forms of fusion between the national and the European levels. There was, therefore, no master plan driving these developments. The ILO’s template was sufficiently open to permit a broad spectrum of ideas and programmes, and although policies expanded over time, the gap between the EU’s overall impact on European societies and the means dedicated to the governing of the social certainly not did shrink over time. One important qualification is necessary: the EC’s various social justice– related initiatives tended to apply to the citizens of the member states. Thirdcountry nationals – unless they were refugees, stateless persons, or family members, where specific measures applied, – profited much less from measures designed to increase social justice.76 The global ramifications were also mixed: sometimes, the EU’s trade regime helped secure high regulatory standards elsewhere, but the protectionist CAP with its devastating impacts on producers in third countries, including most notably those in the Global South, is a stark reminder that the global ‘Brussels effect’ was not always positive.77 The EC/ EU’s main focus was always on its interior dimension and hinged on its conception of the ‘market citizen’ – an ambiguous expression in which the first term was more important than one might think. This specific approach also explains why the European level did not manage to forge strong emotional ties to its citizens; instead, its role mostly remained indirect and hidden. Just like at the national level, European policies could be justified only through the benefits they brought to the people. In political-science parlance, output legitimacy, and thus the substance and effects of decisions, came first, even if member states often claimed the successes of European integration for themselves. In contrast, input legitimacy, understood as citizens’ participation in collective decision-making, played an even smaller role for the EC than at the national level.78 Put differently: for the longest time, there was rather little concern about the democratic legitimacy of European integration, which created its own tension with regard to questions of social justice.79 Since the financial crisis and even more since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU has developed new policies with strong social implications. And, even more importantly, it has raised expectations as to its own role. 76 77 78

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D. Sindbjerg Martinsen, ‘Social Security in the EU: The De-territorialization of Welfare?’, in de Búrca (ed.), EU Law and the Welfare State, pp. 89–110. With a focus on its positive sides, see A. Bradford, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford, 2020). See, as new ideas in this context, A. Sangiovanni, ‘Debating the EU’s Raison d’Être: On the Relation between Legitimacy and Justice’, in Journal of Common Market Studies, 57 (2019), 13–27. M. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age 1945–1968 (Princeton, NJ, 2020), 212–24.

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French President Emmanuel Macron insisted on a ‘Europe qui protège’ (Europe that protects), while Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gushed that the European Vaccine Strategy would deliver ‘tangible European solidarity’. Likewise, Portugal placed the various aspects of social justice front and centre during its 2021 Council presidency.80 In the process, the gap between hopes and means has become larger than ever before. In the past, the Commission and other actors have used exactly that gap as an argument for why the EU’s power ought to be increased. Given the tangible powers that the EU now wields, and the concomitant high expectations amongst Europeans that it delivers concrete results that ameliorate their living conditions, this strategy has become a dangerous wager. Overall, some of the EC’s ways of dealing with the social in the post-war period are more reminiscent of the early twenty-first century than of the second half of the twentieth. Issues of class were hardly ever addressed as such, explaining the many complaints from the political left at the time. Gender, in contrast, already held a noteworthy place during the post-war decades, and was in relative terms more prominent than at the national level. In hindsight, EU policies seem like a harbinger in another respect too: since the 1980s, social policies at the national level have been increasingly shaped by market-oriented ideas, not least under the auspices of neoliberalism, while market orientation has always been a key approach of European integration. In the final analysis, therefore, national policies and legislation have shifted to varying degrees more in the direction traditionally associated with the EU, while the EU has recently moved slightly more in the opposite direction.

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See speech by Emmanuel Macron at the Inauguration of the Collège du Renseignement en Europe, www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2019/03/05/inauguration-du-college-du-renseigne ment-en-europe; press release: ‘Von der Leyen on European Vaccine Strategy’, ec.europa.eu/ commission/presscorner/detail/es/ac_20_1120; Portuguese Council Presidency 2021: Identidade Visual, www.2021portugal.eu/pt/presidencia/identidade-visual.

13

Postscript Samuel Moyn

Assessing the contested meaning and multiple trajectories of social justice in twentieth-century Europe, as this collection does so compellingly and pioneeringly, requires starting one or two centuries earlier. After all, justice – an age-old concern with both biblical and Greek roots in the Western tradition – was already made ‘social’ on the brink of the twentieth century. The twentieth century saw Europe torn apart over bringing it into being – even as the result of the contestation endured only up to a point, and has been revealed as highly provisional in the long run. Europeans spent the first half of the twentieth century slaughtering one another over rival ideological and practical alternatives, and schemes of social justice were an important element of that struggle. Then Europeans settled down to a more consensual though ultimately crisisridden version of social justice in the second half of the century and since. With its earlier background, and twentieth-century vicissitudes, the trajectory of social justice reconstructed in this collection sets the stage for the struggles of the future – though no more than in other cases does the history of social justice make prediction easy or unerring. The concept ‘social’ is rooted in a Latin word – socius (ally or friend). But it was not applied to justice for a long time, or only implicitly. In the eighteenth century, when the notion of society became popular in the different European languages, sociality underwent a fateful evolution in meaning. It was no longer just about fellowship; it was about form. From the ancient to the modern world, typologies of politics had focused on who rules. Adjusting Plato’s scheme, Aristotle’s theory of regimes was a trifurcation between monarchy (and its perverse form of tyranny), aristocracy (and the threat of oligarchy), and democracy (and the spectre of mob rule). The most basic distinctions thus depended on types of government. And following the Bible, the content of laws, and therefore of who would control their interpretation, sat at the very centre of prior traditions too. The invention of social theory has been one of leading contributions of modern intellectuals, who insist on defining regime types by looking ‘beneath’ rulers and rules. They claimed that the analytical locus of prime significance was less who exercises power or who interprets the 267

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laws than what kind of collective meaning and organization prevails in a given place and time. Historian J. G. A. Pocock put this very clearly in examining the centrality of customs or moeurs in eighteenth century, which led analysts to view even the elites in politics and law as hostage to the more basic form of each society. ‘The greatest change wrought by Enlightenment in the field of social and historical thought’, Pocock wrote, was the perception of society as the movement towards ‘manners’ or moeurs. This keyword denoted a complex of shared practices and values, which secured the individual as a social being and furnished the society surrounding him with an indefinitely complex and flexible texture; more powerfully even than laws, manners rendered civil society capable of absorbing and controlling human action and belief.1

Far from being a change in ‘social thought’, however, this transformation demoted politics at the centre of analysis in favour of promoting social criteria for classifying regimes – criteria such as the institution of kinship relations, the ownership of the means of production, or the content of collective consciousness. There were still typologies to offer; but they were not based on who ruled so much as they were inventories of forms of living together in a much broader sense. Political theory, for this reason, had to become social theory. Whole disciplines such as anthropology and economics and sociology, as well as new forms of social history, could emerge. What really mattered, in this framework, was whether societies were gemeinschaftlich (communitarian) or gesellschaftlich (societal), cold or hot, gift-centred or exchange-centred, patriarchal or matriarchal, mechanical or organic, status-based or contract-based, and riven by violence or pacified through doux commerce (sweet commerce).2 These distinctions, however, were not always moral or prescriptive – although, to the extent they were based on conceptions of primitive life, analysts were always assessing where societies stood on the presumed upward trajectory from the savage to the civilised. Indeed, the rise of ‘society’ meant that the question of justice – so often rooted before in beliefs about God’s will or natural order allegedly beyond space and time in prior traditions – had to be reconceived. Implicitly, justice was also social after the Enlightenment, in the sense that what was seen to be right and wrong depended on changing forms of social organisation, and calls for justice were really now proposals not so much

1 2

J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 19–20. On these traditions, see such works as L. Althusser, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, trans. B. Brewster (London, 1972); G. Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology (Cambridge, 1978); H. Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology (Cambridge, MA, 1988); and R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976).

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for new leaders or laws as for new forms of society. Indeed, one of the most destabilizing developments of the rights of the social was the recognition that moral beliefs themselves, and reform proposals, were dependent on evolving social organization. Even so, the late nineteenth-century anteroom to the twentieth-century struggles chronicled in this volume was clearly pivotal in making the question of social justice more explicit. Starting in the 1820s, the famous ‘social question’ around the consequences of industrialization and the prerogatives of labour impacted the intellectual and public debate even more profoundly than the original socializing turn of the eighteenth. Here, too, there is no understanding of twentieth-century European social justice without understanding its prior foundations. It seems that it was a Roman Catholic, the Italian Jesuit Luigi Taparelli, who first coined the phrase ‘social justice’ in 1855.3 By the late nineteenth century, the explosive growth of socialist ideals and parties was an undeniable fact. No wonder so many accounts of European history look to the end of the nineteenth century as the age of the social, thanks both to the rise of social science and diverse projects of social reform.4 Early sociologists revising and updating Enlightenment social theory in the era of the invention of ‘social science’ in the later nineteenth century were always focused on the distributional questions and working-class movements that waves of commercial and industrial modernity made inescapable. Even then, they tended to treat social justice less directly than they did the moral implications of social trends. Emile Durkheim, for example, was effectively linked to the Radical party in France and its ideology of Solidarism, but he never presented its policies as a matter of social justice and concentrated instead on depicting social dynamics in a modernizing and secularizing age. He therefore argued for embracing human rights not because they were valid beyond space and time, but because they were in effect the substitute religion of modern social organization as he depicted it. In Suicide, he proposed that remedies for the ailing social body rent by the anomie of individuals were to be found in providing for social cohesion in a more self-conscious manner. Such approaches differed radically from later ventures by starting from moral philosophy and its principles.

3

4

L. Taparelli, Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale (Naples, 1855), cited in L. W. Shields, ‘The History and Meaning of the Term Social Justice’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Notre Dame (1941), p. 26, as cited in J. T. McGreevy, Catholicism: A Global History (New York, 2022), p. 117. See, e.g., A. Roversi, Il magistero della scienza: Storia del Verein für Sozialpolitik da 1872 a 1888 (Milan, 1984), or J. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State (Raleigh, 2002). For a hint of the international engagement with Western European social thinking, see D. T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998).

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For many contemporaries, including the Frenchmen who first popularized the notion of social justice in the 1890s, it was of the utmost importance to provide a response to Marxist hegemony in socialist parties and movements. The same was true of early attempts at a Catholic sociology culminating in the great many references to social justice in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931) – known in its time as the ‘social justice encyclical’. This was as much true analytically as it was practically. In this way, social justice began its spectacular rise to prominence as a parallel response of Continental liberal reformists and Catholics alike to Marxism – notwithstanding important differences of those two groups from one another. In common with other theorists in his tradition, Karl Marx had placed evolving social relations at the foundations of his system. And even more strongly than other social theorists of the nineteenth century, he felt that his evolutionary (and eventually revolutionary) theory of society dispensed him from moral prescription. Marxism was a theory of society, and provided the target for most other entrants in the field. But on its own terms, it could not be a theory of social justice. Nor did Communists either before or after Red October speak in terms of social justice for a long time. Therefore, in its beginnings social justice was the common ground occupied by moral critics of market societies – in left-liberal and Roman Catholic traditions, in particular – who adjusted the target of opprobrium and the object of reform to the organization of productive social relations. These two groups shared common enemies –extremist laissez-faire economics and a materialist Marxism – though they diverged substantially from there. Left liberals such as Durkheim wanted to redeem modernity by making more explicit its contributions to social solidarity, in order to extend them.5 ‘The social people’, remarks Duncan Kennedy, ‘were anti-Marxist, just as much as they were anti-laissez faire. Their goal was to save liberalism from itself.’6 Catholics were not as insistent in remaining within modern frames and, with the rise of neo-Thomism philosophy to the authoritative mainstream of Catholic thought, started from the premise that perennial natural law provided the best source to counteract the disruptions caused by markets to pre-modern relationships. This allowed their own version of post-liberalism to slide further right more quickly. Despite their obvious differences, however, left liberals and Catholics converged in their introduction of social thinking in response to competing socialist approaches. During the twentieth century, as this volume shows, this starting point led to the universalization of claims to social justice, in the direction of both the far 5 6

S. Sternø, Solidarity in Europe: The History of an Idea (Cambridge, 2009). D. Kennedy, ‘Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought: 1850–1990’, in D. M. Trubek and A. Santos (eds.), The New Law and Economic Development (Cambridge, 2006), p. 38.

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right (sometimes though not always evolving from or in conversation with Catholic social thought) and the far left. Indeed, its ideological promiscuity was its single most striking feature, especially as the century progressed. ‘The Social could be socialist or social democratic’, Kennedy adds, ‘or Catholic or Social Christian or fascist (but not communist or classical liberal).’7 He was mistaken only about the exclusions. Communists most definitely came to embrace the rhetoric of social justice both inside and outside their regimes. And classical liberals did so too, if only to avoid spitting in the wind. Friedrich Hayek, of course, famously denounced social justice as a ‘mirage’.8 But, as far back as 1946, he floridly embraced the social turn in the name of the ‘true individualism’ that he championed. ‘True individualism’, he wrote, ‘is primarily a theory of society.. . . This fact should by itself be sufficient to refute the silliest of the common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of ) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society.’9 As a result, the historians who have contributed to this collective project chart a process of competition and multiplication that left no part of the political spectrum untouched, and indeed social justice helped expand it to both the right and left, even as the liberal centre reinvented itself. Classical liberalism never died, but liberalism was pushed in a social direction. European social democracy, as a number of the chapters show, would have been unthinkable without it – and social democrats made ‘liberalism’ a bad word in certain national settings, even when market orders were left comparatively undisturbed or when welfare states were progressively hollowed out. And, as some authors rightly stress, conceptions of social justice framed not merely how Europeans in the twentieth century reimagined economic transaction and its consequences, but also many others. In particular, they provided renewed energy for feminist critiques of patriarchy, for the redefinition of the national community in a decolonizing world, and for theories of the possibilities of international peace in an era of ongoing war. The greatest virtue of the volume as a whole, organized by case, place, and topic, is the composite depiction it achieves as a whole century of alternatives of and for (less often, to) social justice by multiple claimants. In our time, one might be driven to scepticism about the value of calling for social justice when it turns out that practically nobody is against it. To that extent, everyone is thinking and proposing their alternatives within the intellectual and moral world that the rise of the social created. As shown in 7 8 9

Kennedy, ‘Three Globalizations’, p. 22. F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago, 1976). F. A. Hayek, ‘Individualism: True and False’, in F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, 1948), p. 6.

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Chapter 11, the Czech economist and prime minister Václav Klaus could dismiss social justice – faithful in this regard to Hayek – as a legacy of socialism and an obstruction to the neoliberal order he wished to achieve. Yet not only did Hayek himself present his attempt to articulate a credible theory of social relations as a means of countering the rise of state intervention, but decades of his neoliberalism have made the conceptions of social justice that he rejected more rather than less relevant in Eastern Europe and beyond. The trouble is that the language of social justice has become simply too ubiquitous. Having been a useful idiom for a step beyond classical liberalism at the beginning of the twentieth century, by its end it was as if ‘social justice’ had become a universal idiom for staging disagreement about what set of policies would bring about a desirable social order. But that surely does not make the history of social justice in Europe unimportant. For our present time perhaps the essential question is not whether new practical agendas will interpret themselves as a cause of social justice; the record of the last century suggests that this outcome is guaranteed. Rather, the investigation of the past and the pluralization of calls for and visions of social justice leads to the disquieting conclusion that the notion that individuals and their identities and entitlements are precipitated by social conditions turns out to be less useful than once thought. From hope that recognising the fact of our social interdependence would lead to some set of policies that would fulfill or realize its implications, twentieth-century Europeans have moved as a consequence of their historical experience to acceptance of their ongoing disagreements about what kind of social order to achieve. In this way, Europeans and many others have learned that society is conflict. And, if ‘justice is conflict’, then social justice is too.10 Debates around its meaning are likely to be very different in twenty-firstcentury Europe than in the recent past. Immigrant and multicultural Europe is now far more a reality than even just a few years ago. Meanwhile, the religious argument and culture that did so much to define the origins and meaning of social justice until the 1960s and 1970s is less forceful now. No one around the world yet has devised a clear alternative to neoliberalism, and the centre-left parties that did so much in the end to define the ambitions of European social democracy as a global model of redistributive social justice have fallen on their hardest times, even as a new right – making interesting claims on Christian legacies so often lost otherwise – gains greater traction than at any time since before the Second World War. With this set of contending pressures, if social justice means conflict without resolution, this is likely to be even more the case in European history in coming years.

10

Cf. S. Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict (Princeton, NJ, 2001).

Index

abortion rights, 17, 206, 207, 210, 212, 215–16, 218, 219, 222 access justice principle, 21, 259–61, 262, 264 Action Councils for the Liberation of Women, 218 Adenauer, Konrad, 229, 250 Ahlen Programme (1947), 65 Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française, 68–9 Catholic intellectual support for independence, 73–4 Committee of Spiritual Resistance, 76 conflicts with Catholic Church, 68–9, 72–3 French Army use of torture, 69–70 Jeanson network, 75 Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne, 69–70 Mission de France, 72–3 anti-discrimination legislation, 26 EC private law reforms, 259 EC public law, 260, 264 Aquinas, St Thomas caritas principle, 56 Leo XIII, influence on, 57–8 Mission de France, influence on, 71 peace, concept of, 188 Argentina authoritarianism, 99 direct sales to investors, 243 Arias, Gino corporatist social justice, 103 Aristotle distributive justice, 30 theory of regimes, 267 Aron, Raymond, 190–1, 193, 195 Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops in France Algerian War, 69, 74 Mission de France, 70 Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française (ACJF), 69 Algerian War, 68–9

Atlantic Charter 1941, 47 Augustine of Hippo, 187 Austria Anschluss of March 1938, 123, 125 Catholicism and welfare provision, 20, 60 Christian Democracy, 63 dismantling of progressive taxes, 91 Social Democracy, 121 authoritarianism, 4, 99, 116, 118, 137 continuing existence of legal frameworks, 119 welfare policies, 25, 42 See also Argentina; Brazil; Chile; Communism; Czechoslovakia; East Germany; Italy; National Socialism; Portugal; Spain. Barrat, Denise, 67 decolonization, support for, 74–6 Barrat, Robert, 37–8 decolonization, support for, 74–6 Bastiat, Frédéric, 37–8 Belgium Christian Democracy, 63 European Coal and Steel Community, 245 supertax, 83–5, 87–8 abolition, 92, 93 condemnation of, 90–2 exemptions, 89–90 fraud relating to, 89, 92 taxation in the inter-war years, 93–5 inheritance tax, 82–3 monetary inflation, 81–2 new income taxes, 83–4 special tax on war profits, 82 tax reforms, 80–1 tax revenues, 85–7 transmission tax, 87–8 worker-priest movement, 71–2 Beneš, Edvard, 137 Beveridge Report (1942), 44–5

273

274

Index

Blair, Tony economization of social rights, 49–50 migration debate, 164 ‘duty to integrate’, 167 neoliberalism, 49–50 Bottai, Giuseppe corporatist social justice, 103–5, 109 gimnastica sindicale, 110 Boulding, Kenneth positive peace movement, 187, 196, 200 Brazil authoritarianism, 99 direct sales to investors, 243 Brundtland Commission (1983–87), 201 Caetano, Marcelo corporatist social justice, 103, 109, 114 welfare reforms, 114 Cameron, David migration debate, 167 capitalism, variations of, 35–6 Cardijn, Joseph Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, 67 caritas principle of Catholic Church, 54–7 Catholic social teaching compared, 58 Catholic Action movement, 67 Algerian War, 69–70 See also Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne; Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne Catholic Church alliances with anti-Communist states, 59, 60–1 almsgiving, 55–7 caritas principle, 54–7 changing conceptions of social justice, 53–4 ‘organicist’ conception, 58, 60 charitable missions, 56 conservativism, 53 deserving and undeserving poor, 56–7 radical models of social justice. See Catholic social justice, radical models response to rise of socialism, 57–9 sanctity of the family, 60 Second Vatican Council, 67, 214 Catholic social justice, 26, 270 organicist ideal of social justice, 53 caritas principle, 54–7 Rerum Novarum, 57–63 radical models, 54, 64–7 Catholic intellectual milieu, 73–6 decolonization, 73–6 Mission de France, 70–3 ‘specialized’ Catholic Action, 67–70 transnational sphere, 54 women’s rights, 214

Catholic social teaching caritas compared, 58 Divini Redemptoris, 60 Quadragesimo Anno, 59 Rerum Novarum, 54, 58–9 Chappel, James, 60 Charter 77 movement (Czechoslovakia), 136, 218 Charter on the Economic Rights and Duties of States, 195 Charter on Fundamental Rights of the EU (CFREU) 2000, 260 Chenu, Marie-Dominique, 66, 71, 76 Chevènement, Jean-Pierre, 166 childcare, 206, 217 access to, 206 childcare allowances, 158 Chile, 243 management and employee buyouts, 232, 233, 234 popular capitalism, 227 Chin, Rita, 177, 180 Christian Churches, 40 See also Catholic Church; Catholic social justice. Christian democracy, 61, 62–3, 114, 251 citizenship corporatism, 108 European market citizenship, 21 political citizenship, 16 rights, obligations and dispositions, 31 social citizenship, 15–17, 209, 216, 222 social rights, 15–16, 24 civil rights, 17 Cocoyoc Declaration (1974), 194–5 colonialism, 6, 19 See also decolonization. Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (UK), 167 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 254–5, 257, 258, 264 Communism, 4, 116, 139 changing attitude to social policy, 149 Comrades’ Courts, 122 limits of social equality, 128–30 social egalitarianism, 119 social justice, 121–3, 270 social policy concept, rejection of, 146–8 Western Communism migrant solidarity, 176–9 women’s rights, 211 competition law and policy, 26 fair participation in the market, 260 neoliberalism, 50 Congar, Yves, 66, 76

Index Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 189 consumer rights (EC), 26, 259, 260, 262 corporatism, 102–4, 120 changing conceptions of social justice, 104 eugenics through the lens of social hygiene and population health, 105–6 individual contributions to the collective good, 104 productivity, 104–5 social pacification, 106–7 totalitarian corporatism, 104 Council of Europe positive peace, 198 courts and judicial structures Comrades’ Courts, 122 European Court of Justice, 254, 258, 262 labour courts, 118, 121, 123, 125–6, 132–4, 138 labour disputes, 123, 135 local people’s courts, 122 Social Courts of Honour, 120–1, 123, 125 social-insurance courts, 123, 127–8, 132–4, 138 COVID-19 pandemic, 79, 263, 265 Czechoslovakia constitution of 1948, 131 feminist social justice, 218 National Socialism, 26, 117 Catholic Church, 61 efforts to gain public support, 117 labour policy, 124–7 social care for the elderly, 128 social-insurance courts, 127–8 state socialism, 117, 138 agricultural cooperatives, 131 centralization of institutions, 131 citizens’ complaints, 134–6 conciliation or arbitration commissions, 133–4 expectations of social justice, 137 popular expectations, 132–3 revolutionary councils, 130–1 trade unions, 134 worker councils, 131–2 de Rougemont, Denis European culturalist federalism, 189–90 Galtung compared, 191, 194, 195 de Rudder, Véronique, 178 decolonization Catholic attitudes towards social justice Algerian War, 69–70, 72–3 living standards within Algerian society, 73 reconciliation between Muslims and Europeans, 74 use of torture, 69–70

275 Catholic social justice, 54, 74 collective rights of formerly colonized peoples, 19 globalization of Communist movements, 208, 212 Delacroix, Léon, 82–5 Delors, Jacques, 259 social dimension and solidarity, 260 Denmark EU membership, 258 direct sales to investors, 232, 234, 235, 237, 239, 243 disability insurance, 42, 106, 127 displaced people’s rights, 17 distribution of wealth, 35 migrant workers, 172 social reformers, 41 state intervention, 32, 145, 157 income tax, 41–2 state-socialist states inequalities, 160–1, 225 See also privatization; tax justice distributive justice, 30, 119, 239 Divini Redemptoris (1937), 60 Duchêne, Gabriele, 212 Durkheim, Emile, 269–70 Dziś i Jutro movement, 65 East Germany abortion rights, 216, 222 feminist social justice, 213, 218 housework day (Hausarbeitstag), 213 social care for the elderly, 120 social justice concept, 213 voucher privatization, 234 welfare dictatorship, 20, 141, 205, 215–16 economic growth EC market integration, 249, 252 market liberalization, 249, 251 migrant workers, 252 post-war Europe, 7, 185, 216, 250 social justice, relationship with, 159–61 economic social justice, 39 See also market-related conceptualizations of social justice. economization of social rights, 47–50 See also market-related conceptualizations of social justice. eligibility-based welfare, 98 housing distribution, 152–5 embeddedness of markets, 35 employment rights, 17, 26, 42 Directive 76/207/EEC, 260 women, 206 Engels, Friedrich, 175

276

Index

Enlightenment social theory, 56, 268–9 entrepreneurialism, 24, 47–50, 51, 227, 235 equal pay legislation (EC), 253 equality principle, 195 pay equality, 253 taxation, 78 Erhard, Ludwig, 227, 229, 232 Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, 34, 35, 37, 145 ethical consumerism, 19 ethical/moral social justice, 40–1 ethics of conscience (Gesinnungsetik), 191 ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik), 191 ethnic minority rights, 18, 180 coercive sterilization, 220 interventionist assimilation campaigns, 220 Romany populations, 14, 113, 117, 222 EU Social Charter (1989), 260 EU Vaccine Strategy, 263 Eucken, Walter ordoliberalism, 46 eugenic ideals, 97 coercive sterilization, 220 fascist welfare intervention, 105 social-justice feminism, 207, 210 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 245 approach to social justice, 248–50 health and safety standards, 248 social policy, 248 training programmes for unemployed, 248 worker accommodation, 248 European Community (EC) Common Agricultural Policy, 254–5, 257 economic crisis, 257–8 European Social Fund, 255 post-Maastricht rhetoric, 262 social justice, 245, 246–7, 255–6 market integration model, 249–50, 252–4, 257 pay equality, 253–4 redistributive model, 250–1, 254–5, 257–8, 264, 272 targeted redistributive policies, 254–6 third-country nationals, 265 transnational labour migration, 252–3 European Conference on Security and Cooperation (ECSC), 195 European Court of Justice (ECJ), 254, 258, 262 European Economic Community (EEC), 245 International Labour Organization, relationship with, 249 See also European Community European enlargement (1973, 1980s and 2004), 258

European integration, 21 changing conceptions of social justice, 26 economic growth, 249, 252 market integration model of social justice, 249–50, 252, 259 pay equality, 253–4, 257 transnational labour migration, 252–3 See also European Coal and Steel Community; European Community; European Union European Nuclear Disarmament (END), 186, 200–1 European Parliament, 256 European Social Fund (ESF), 255 European Union (EU) lack of engagement with social justice, 245 monetary integration, 262–3 See also European Community Euroscepticism, 168, 263 expansion of state remit, 11 regulation and social reform, 11–12 family, 37, 268 family planning and contraception, 207, 210, 218 nuclear family, 214 patriarchal families, 54, 58, 61 fascist ideologies, 4 anti-egalitarianism, 107–8 equality of citizenship, 108–10 exclusion, 112–13 ‘natural’ inequalities, 108 exclusion of colonial subjects, 112–13 exclusion of women, 112 fascist social thought, 113–15 anti-egalitarian nature, 107–10 corporatism model, 100–1 diversity, 99–100 functional meaning of social justice, 102–7 role of the nation, 101–2 race laws, 113 re-emergence of populist ideologies, 114–15 use of violence, 113 women’s rights, 211 See also Italy, Fascist Italy; Portugal, Salazar’s regime; Spain, Franco’s Spain feminist activism, 16–17, 18 See also feminist social justice; women. feminist social justice campaigns, 209 Czechoslovakia, 218 Global South and post-colonial countries, 215 internationalist social-justice feminism, 210–11

Index Poland, 218 Romania, 219 socialism/communism/Marxism, relationship with, 207–8, 209 See also social justice for women feudal blessings thesis (Keynes), 45 feudalism, 33 financial crisis of 2008, 26, 78, 263, 265 Finkielkraut, Alain, 165, 173 First World War, 13, 267 German occupation of Belgium, 94 social justice for women, 210 fiscal policies social justice in taxation, 78–80, 93–5 Belgium, 80–5 inheritance tax, 82–3 pragmatism, 85–8 progressive income tax, 83–5 special tax on war profits, 82 France affaire du foulard, 166 Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française, 69 Catholic Church, 56 declining influence, 57 Sillon movement, 65 Vichy regime, 61 Christian Democracy, 63 decline of French empire, 73 See also Algerian War of Independence European Coal and Steel Community, 245 immigration politics, 166, 168 Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne, 69–70 Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, 67–8 Mission de France, 70–3 neo-republicanism, 165–6, 168 Revolution of 1789, 57 state intervention, 45 Vichy regime Catholic Church, 61 Francis I (Pope), 53 Fraser, Nancy, 206, 221 freedom of movement for workers, 249, 252–3 freedom of speech, 136 social justice, relationship with, 144 Galtung, Johan, 191–2 Aron compared, 193 general and complete peace and war, 194 positive and negative peace, 192–4 Rougemont compared, 194 See also positive peace movement gaucho-lepénisme, 168 gay rights. See LGBTQ rights

277 gender equality, 16–17, 212 global federations of trade unions, 214 pay quality (EC), 253–4 welfare dictatorships, 21 women’s enfranchisement, 15 See also feminist social justice; women gendered social justice Eastern and Central Europe, 205–8 German Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH), 197 German Labour Front, 120 social care for the elderly, 120 German League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual Reform, 210 German unification EU membership, 259 Germany dismantling of progressive taxes, 91 economization of social rights, 49–50 See also East Germany; Nazi Germany; unified Germany; West Germany Global South, 18–19 campaigns for social justice, 18–19, 226 social justice for women, 215 Catholic Action movements, 70, 76 Northern protectionism, impact of, 265 positive peace movement, 186 Goodhart, David, 164–7, 181 Greece EU membership, 258 Guérin, Georges, 67 Guilluy, Christophe, 179 Hainfeld Programme (1888–89), 121 harmonization of welfare standards, 249 harmony of interests (Bastiat), 37–8 Hayek, Friedrich, 49, 271, 272 headscarf affairs in Europe, 166 health and safety standards Directive 89/301/EEC, 260 European Coal and Steel Community, 248 healthcare corporatism, 98 Czechoslovakian constitution, 131 Hungary, 148, 151, 156 universal access, 6, 16, 20 women’s health, 19, 206 Hessische Stiftung Friedens und Konfliktforschung (HSFK), 197 housing rights, 17 Hungary, 151–5 eligibility, 153 housing distribution policy, 152–3, 158–9 women, 206 human dignity, 47–8, 51

278

Index

Hungary de-Stalinization, 150, 162 housing policy, 151–5 institutions of social policy, 150 Kádár regime acceptance and popular support, 142–57 duties of the Permanent Committee for Social Policy, 149 homelessness, 140–1, 149 social benefits, 141 worker accommodation, 139–40 market economics and social justice, 142–57 municipal social policy, 151 Revolution of 1956, 142, 149–51 second economy (black market), 143, 155–9 social care for the elderly, 155–7 social justice concept, development of, 157–9 state-socialism, 26 welfare system, 141–2 workers’ accommodation, 139–42 ideological language, 3, 4–5, 71, 119, 138, 184, 209, 242, 272 Hungary, 137, 142, 147–8, 155 immigrant rights, 18, 27 social housing, 179 sweatshop struggles, 180–1 immigrants capitalist aspirations, 174–6 inequalities, 163–4 myth of return, 171–2, 176 normalization of intolerance, 178 second generation migrants, 181–2 anti-racist movements, 181–3 income tax, 41–2 Indian Workers’ Association (UK), 180 individual responsibility, 18, 69 institutional inequalities, 2–4 insurance schemes, 43, 44, 133 insurance-based social-security systems, 24, 111, 124 International Committee of the Red Cross, 13 International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), 188 International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), 136, 214 International Council of Women (ICW), 210 International Labour Organization (ILO), 211, 247, 248 influence in Europe, 248–51 International League for Peace and Freedom, 215 International Peace Institute (IPI) positive peace, 198

International Peace Research Association (IPRA), 196 international relations (IR) approach to peace, 187 International Social Justice Project (ISJP), 225 Ireland EU membership, 258 equal pay principle, 254 religious constitutionalism, 60 islamogauchisme, 168 Italy Catholicism and welfare provision, 20 Christian Democracy, 63, 114 dismantling of progressive taxes, 91 European Coal and Steel Community, 245 Fascist Italy, 26 alliances with Catholic Church, 59, 60 social care for the elderly, 106 suppression of independent mutual-aid societies, 112 welfare systems, 96–9, 112 immigration politics, 168 Jackson, Ben, 31 Jarausch, Konrad, 141 Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne (JEC), 69–70 Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC), 67–8 John Paul II (Pope), 76 Johnson, Boris, 168 joint-stock corporations, 228 just war doctrine, 75 Kádár, János, 139–43, 145, 149–50, 152, 157, 160 Kennedy, Duncan, 270–1 Keynes, John Maynard, 38, 41 feudal blessings thesis, 45 Klaus, Václav, 224, 238–9, 272 Kohl, Helmut, 261 labour courts East Germany, 133 Nazi Germany, 121 Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia Grimichová case, 125–7 labour policy Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, 123, 124–5, 133, 138 laissez-faire policy, 38, 270 language of rights, development of, 17–18 global platform, 18–19 language of social justice, 3, 4–5, 71, 119, 137, 138, 142, 147–8, 155, 184, 209, 242, 272

Index leadership principle corporatist social justice, 120 League of Nations, 89, 211 legitimacy of the communist elite social justice as a threat to, 224 legitimacy of state power, 14 successes of welfare policy, relationship between, 142–57 Lentin, Alana, 165 Leo XIII (Pope), 40, 53 See also Rerum Novarum LGBTQ rights, 18, 167, 221 liberal ideologies, 5, 271 Catholic Church’s attitude to, 59, 62, 270 Communist backlash, 128, 137 Fascist backlash, 100, 104, 106, 119 interwar taxation policies. See Belgium; tax justice Marxist attitude to, 270 multiculturalism, rejection of, 166–7 neoliberalism, 46, 165, 260–1, 272 gender politics and equality, 220, 222 women’s social justice, 221 positive peace movement, 190, 192 liberation theology, 77 Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme, 173 Lisbon Agenda, 262 living conditions pensioners, 156 workers, 57, 65–6, 102, 103, 110, 125, 266 East and West compared, 200 harmonization, 250 market liberalization, 249 Lüdtke, Alf, 118 Luxembourg Belgian tax policy, 92, 93 European Coal and Steel Community, 245 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 246 Macron, Emmanuel, 168, 266 Maier, Charles, 43 management and employee buyouts (MEBOs), 227, 232, 239, 242 Chile, 232, 233, 234 National Freight Company (UK), 234 Mandouze, André, 73–4, 76 Marchais, Georges, 179 Maritain, Jacques, 61, 101 market integration model of social justice, 249, 252 European Community, 249–50 pay equality, 253–4, 257 transnational labour migration, 252–3 harmonization of social systems, 250 Single European Act, 259

279 market-related conceptualizations of social justice changing conceptions of social justice, 32–7, 46, 51–2 economic narrative, 39 distribution of resources, 42 efficiency and national productivity, 43–4 consumption, relationship with, 44 state intervention, 44–5 expansion from civil and political rights to social rights, 38 harmony of interests, 37–8 political narrative, 39, 41 social narrative ethical/religious narrative, 39–41 social security and insurance schemes, 42 Marosán, György, 139 Marshall, T.H., 16, 31, 38 Marshall Plan, 44 Marx, Karl, 33, 117, 270 Marxism, 270 masculinization of citizenship, politics, and economic rights Eastern Bloc countries, 222 mass shareholding, 227, 228–32, 242–4 See also management and employee buyouts; voucher privatization Matuschka, Albrecht Graf, 234 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 190 Mexico direct sales to investors, 243 free market, 231 Michnik, Adam, 4, 224 Miller, David, 30 Mission de France, 76 Algerian War, 72–3 evangelizing mission, 70–1 worker-priest movement, 71–2 Mitterrand, François, 166, 177, 261 Monnet, Jean, 247 moral disposition of individuals and groups, 30–1 moral economy, 25 Mounier, Emmanuel, 61, 66 Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples, 173 Mouvement des travailleurs arabes, 180 multiculturalism, 165, 168 rejection of, 166–7, 180 UK, 167 Mussolini, Benito social justice, 103 mutually assured destruction doctrine, 198

280

Index

national interest fascist ‘social justice’, 101–2 national protectionism, 163–70 welfare chauvinism, 170–2 National Social Security Institute (Hungary), 147 National Socialism, 116 alliances with Catholic Church, 61 harmony in the workplace, 120–1 racist and nationalist norms, 119 social redistribution, 119–21 See also Czechoslovakia; Nazi Germany nationalistic understanding of ‘social justice’ citizenship, 108–10 welfare chauvinism, 163–4, 170–1 popular understandings of entitlement, 171–2 Nazi Germany occupation of Czechoslovakia, 26 Social Courts of Honour, 121 Volksgemeinschaft, 5, 119, 120, 123–4, 138, 212 See also National Socialism neoliberalism, 46, 165, 260–1, 272 gender politics and equality, 220, 222 women’s social justice, 221 neo-republicanism, 165 Netherlands, 37 economization of social rights, 49 European Coal and Steel Community, 245 social justice and distribution of wealth, 41–2 social justice and political rights, 41 social justice and social security, 42–3 social security, 44 New International Economic Order, 195 New Women’s Movement (neue Frauenbewegung), 218 NextGenerationEU, 264 Nobel Peace Prize, 201 non-discrimination principle (EC), 259–60, 264 Northern Ireland civil rights for minority groups, 17 Norway immigration politics, 168 Oslo Accords, 201 positive peace movement, 186, 201 Scandinavian model of humanitarianism, 201 See also Peace Research Institute Obra das Mães pela Educação Nacional (OMEN), 105 Ohlin Report (1956), 249 Open Method of Coordination (OMC), 262 Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia (ONMI), 105 Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestinians, 201

paternalism Catholic Church, 60 state socialism, 208 Patterns of Resource Use, Environment and Development Strategies, See Cocoyoc Declaration peace institutionalization of, 188, 196–9 Peace and Conflict Research Institute in Tampere (TAPRI), 197 peace through peaceful means doctrine, 199 peace research, 185–6 Peace Research Institute (PRIO) (Norway), 186, 196 Galtung, 201–2 Journal of Peace Research, 197 pedagogical function of welfare institutions, 110–11 ‘hearts and minds’ strategies, 111 suppression of autonomy, 111–12 pensioners increasing numbers, 155 living conditions, 156 social care for the elderly, 16, 87, 106, 120, 128, 129, 155–7 pensions, 128, 158, 175 entitlement, 161, 252 fascist race laws, 113 irrelevance to migrant workers, 172, 175 privatization, 227 women, 206 People’s Welfare Ministry (Hungary), 147 people’s capitalism. See popular capitalism personal autonomy, 18 women and reproductive rights, 216, 218 personalism, 61–2, 64, 76, 100, 101, 189, 195 Picht, Georg, 194 Pinochet, Augusto, 227, 233 Pinto, Antonio Costa, 100 Pius XI (Pope), 59 Divini Redemptoris, 60 Quadragesimo Anno, 59, 270 Pius XII (Pope) Christian Democracy, 62–3 Christian personalism, 61–2 Pocock, J.G.A., 268 Poland Dziś i Jutro movement, 65 feminist social justice, 218 trade unions, 134, 218 Polanyi, Karl, 33–4 popular capitalism, 227, 232–3 Eastern Europe post-socialism, 233–42, 244

Index Portugal EU membership, 258 Revolution of 1974–75, 114 Salazar’s regime, 26 Catholic Church, 61 Estado Novo, 99, 114 limitations of public welfare, 111 welfare systems, 96–9, 111–12, 114 positive peace movement, 186, 188, 203–4, 272 criticisms Boulding, 196, 200 Michnik, 199 emergence, 187 European culturalist federalism, 189–90 peace and liberalism, 190–1 and Galtung, 191–4 Boulding’s criticisms, 196 legacies European Nuclear Disarmament, 200–1 intellectual legacy, 202–3 Scandinavian model of humanitarianism, 201–2 personalist ethics, 195 positive peace defined, 192 social justice through removal of structural injustice, 193 structural violence, 187, 193 violence defined, 193 Powell, Enoch, 172 privatization, 26 direct sales to investors, 232, 234, 235, 237, 239, 243 Eastern Bloc rhetoric, 222 Latin America, 231–2 management and employee buyouts, 227, 232, 239, 242 Chile, 232, 233, 234 National Freight Company (UK), 234 pension funds, 227 popular capitalism, 227 public offerings, 227, 230, 231, 237 Reagan, 233 redistribution of assets, 225–7 UK, 229–31 Volkskapitalismus, 229 voucher privatization, 227, 233–4, 239, 242 asset-stripping concerns, 238 Czechoslovakia, 237–8 East Germany, 234 failures, 239–41 fairness, 235–7 International Monetary Fund warnings against, 238 Lithuania, 239

281 Poland, 235–6, 243 Romania, 243 Russian Federation, 239–41 West Germany, 229 productivity and national strength, 44, 249, 252 consumption, relationship with, 44 corporatist social justice, 104–5 eugenics through the lens of social hygiene and population health, 105 social pacification, 106–7 public offerings, 227, 230, 231, 237 Quadragesimo Anno (1931), 59, 270 Rawls, John, 31, 202–3 Reagan, Ronald, 232 redistributive model of social justice, 250 domestic nature of, 250–1 European Community, 250–1 Common Agricultural Policy, 254–5 European Social Fund, 255 trade unionists, 251 ‘refrigerator socialism’, 141 refugee rights, 169 See also immigrant rights. Regulation on the Application of Social Security Schemes to Employed Persons and Their Families Moving within the Community, 257 reproductive rights, 53, 218, 222 abortion rights, 17, 206, 207, 210, 212, 215–16, 218, 219, 222 family planning and contraception, 207, 210, 218 Rerum Novarum (1891), 40, 53 Catholic social teaching, 54, 58–9 social reforms, 57 revolutionary councils, 130 rise of capitalism, 33, 224–7 Romania feminist social justice, 219 privatization, 239, 242, 243 Romany populations, 14, 113, 117, 222 Roosevelt, Franklin D, 47 Russian Revolution (1917), 59, 122, 208 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 190 Schröder, Gerhard, 49–50 Schuman, Robert, 247 Schuman Declaration 1950, 247 second economies/black markets Hungary, 143, 158–9 Second Vatican Council (1962), 67, 76, 214

282

Index

Second World War, 12–13, 188, 267 electoral and enfranchisement reforms, 15 social justice for women, 213 Socialist regimes, 4 social and demographic changes, 7 second-wave feminism, 180, 217–21 Secretariat for Social Policy of the International Workers’ Relief women’s rights, 212 sexual freedoms, 207, 221 sexual justice social justice, relationship with, 215–16 sexual reform movements, 206, 210, 211 See also abortion rights sexualization of the concept of democracy, 221 Sillon movement, 65 Slovenia privatization, 226 Social Action Programme, 257 social care for the elderly, 87, 129 East Germany, 120 Fascist Italy, 106 German Labour Front, 120 Hungary, 155–7 Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, 128 pensioners, 16 social citizenship changing conceptions of social justice, 16 social constructedness of markets, 36 Social Court of Honour (Soziales Ehrengericht), 120–1, 123, 125 social democracy, 38, 41, 46, 168, 271 Marxism, relationship with, 209, 257 nationalism, 170 positive peace movement, 186 social engineering, 5–6 social honour principle, 120–1 worker rights, 121 social improvement culture campaigns for moral and social improvement, 13 non-state actors, 13 overseas humanitarian and development policies, 13 regulation and social reform, 11–12 social inclusion, 3, 26, 262 Social Insurance and Allied Services Report, See Beveridge Report social justice defined, 1, 4–5 Catholic Europe, 20 Eastern and Western Europe compared, 19–21 importance of historical narrative, 27–9 social justice as political rhetoric. See language of social justice

social justice, understandings of, 5, 11, 26–7 social justice for women different conceptions of, 213–16 housework day (Hausarbeitstag), 213–14 See also feminist social justice social norms and obligations, 25 social rights, 15–16, 24 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 47 social security, 44–5 See also insurance-based social-security systems; welfare state social-insurance courts Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, 127–8 Social Welfare Group (Hungary), 140 socialist ideologies, 5 Solidarity (Poland) (trade union), 218 solidarity, in the European project, 247 solidarity, between native and migrant workers, 172–4 declining, 179–80 French car industry, 182–3 Western Communism, 176–9 soziale Gerechtigkeit, 209, 213 See also language of social justice. soziale Krankheit, 39 soziale Marktwirtschaft, 46 See also market-related conceptualizations of social justice. Sozialethik ‘the social’, 40 Spain EU membership, 258 Franco’s Spain Catholic Church, 61 welfare systems, 96–9 spatiality of social justice, 24–6 specialized Catholic Action movements. See Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne; Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne; Mission de France Stalinism, 20 state intervention Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, 45 distribution of wealth, 32 income tax, 41–2 neo-Calvinism, 45 Orthodox Treasury approach, 45 state-socialism changing conceptions of social justice, 26 collapse of women’s social justice, 221 Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, 26 Third Reich, 5 See also Czechoslovakia; East Germany; Hungary

Index Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 197 structural violence, 186, 187 subsidiarity doctrine, 45 suffrage and enfranchisement, 41, 213 women, 211, 213 supranational social justice, 25 Taguieff, Pierre-André, 165, 173 tax justice, 78–9, 85 Belgium, 79–80, 93–5 taxation capital accumulation principle, 85 equality principle, 78 income tax distribution of wealth, 41–2 Luxembourg’s impact on Belgian tax policy, 92, 93 progressivity principle, 82, 89 dismantling of progressive taxes, 91 social justice in taxation, 78–80, 93–5 Belgium, 80–5 inheritance tax, 82–3 pragmatism, 85–8 progressive income tax, 83–5 special tax on war profits, 82 supertax, 88–93 tax justice, 78–9, 85 Belgium, 79–80, 93–5 taxation in inter-war Belgium, 93–5 inheritance tax, 82–3 monetary inflation, 81–2 new income taxes, 83–4 special tax on war profits, 82 supertax on the rich, 83–5, 87–8 tax justice, 79–80 tax reforms, 80–1 tax revenues, 85–7 transmission tax, 87–8 temporalities of social justice, 22–4 Thatcher, Margaret, 166, 227, 229, 231, 232, 261 Theunis, Georges, 86 Thompson, E.P., 200–1 Tiso, Jozef Gašpar, 61 torture Algerian War, 69–70, 72–3, 74, 75 Trade Union Social Security Centre (Hungary), 147 trade unions, 134 Catholic social justice, 54 fascist regimes, 101 Hungary administration of social security, 147 institutionalization of welfare rights, 118, 132, 134, 147

283 internationalising conceptions of social justice, 214 neoliberalism, 47, 49 personalism, 62 social corporatism, 100 Transcend International and Galtung, 202 transnational labour migration (EC), 252–3 Treaty of Rome (1957) equal-pay stipulations, 257 market integration and harmonization of social systems, 250 Trilateral Commission on the Crisis of Democracy, 49 true individualism (Hayek), 271 UK migration debates, 164–5, 167–8, 172 unemployment eradication, 146 See also employment rights unified Germany social justice for women, 213 See also Germany United Kingdom, 37 Brexit, 164 economization of social rights, 49–50 EU membership, 258 migration debate, 164 ‘duty to integrate’, 167 neoliberalism, 49–50, 166, 227, 229, 231, 232, 261 United Nations, 214 Conference on Trade and Development, 195 Decade for Women, 215 Environment Programme, 195 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 47 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 47 universalization of claims to social justice, 170–1, 270 van Bavel, Bas, 33 van Rhijn, A.A., 44 vocational training, 249 Directive 76/207/EEC, 260 Volksgemeinschaft, 5, 119, 120, 138, 212 social welfare, 123–4 von Stein, Lorenz, 39 voucher privatization, 227, 233–4, 239, 242 asset-stripping concerns, 238 Czechoslovakia, 237–8 East Germany, 234 equity versus wealth, 233–42 privatization, 233–42 failures, 239–41

284

Index

voucher privatization (cont.) fairness, 235–7 International Monetary Fund warnings against, 238 Lithuania, 239 Poland, 235–6, 243 Romania, 243 Russian Federation, 239–41 Wauwermans, Paul, 78, 84 Weber, Max, 228 ethics of responsibility, 191 welfare capitalism (Esping-Andersen), 37 welfare chauvinism, 115, 164 local chauvinism, 170 national protectionism, 170 Schrödinger’s Immigrant, 163–4 theoretical universalism, 170–1 popular understandings of entitlement, 171–2 welfare Communism, 140 welfare democracies, 4, 19–20 welfare dictatorship and social control, 141, 142–57, 160, 161 gender (in)equality, 20, 205, 215–16 iustitia socialis, reinterpretation of, 208 welfare state, 19–21 crisis, 47–50 See also insurance-based social-security systems West Germany Ahlen Programme, 65 Catholicism and welfare provision, 20 Christian Democracy, 63 European Coal and Steel Community, 245

women migrant women, 219–20 reproductive rights, 53, 218, 222 See also reproductive rights right to vote, 211, 213 welfare dictatorships, 20 Women for Peace positive peace movement, 198 Women Strike for Peace positive peace movement, 198 women’s enfranchisement, 15, 211, 213 Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), 215 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 188, 211, 215 worker-priest movement, 71–2 workers’ rights complaints, 134–5 EC, 259 Directive 76/207/EEC, 260 Directive 89/301/EEC, 260 labour courts, 118, 121, 123, 125–6, 132–4, 138 labour disputes, 123, 135 legal path to sue employers, 135 social-insurance courts, 123, 127–8, 132–4, 138 trade unions, 134 working conditions Directive 76/207/EEC, 260 World Committee of Women against War and Fascism, 212 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace (1948), 189 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), 214