Social Security and National Security in a Cold War World An Exploratory Study of the Cold War International Context as an Exogenous Variable Influencing Elite Consent to Postwar Social Welfare Development

The goal of this paper is to prepare for future research by exploring

theoretical, epistemological, methodological and empirical aspects of a topic of

historical and contemporary concern: the relationship of the Cold War and postwar

social welfare development. The paper begins by exploring one aspect of a master

narrative of postwar social welfare development: the notion that military and social

expenditures have been implacable enemies of each other. According to such a

discourse, an end to the Cold War and the related arms race can and should bring

enhanced social welfare spending, yet no such peace dividend has been forthcoming.

Possible flaws in the logic of the master narrative are examined, and a different

posing of the proverbial guns and butter question is proposed. Next, a variety of

theoretical perspectives relevant to the examination of the proposed topic are

explored. Theoretical amendments to the existing body of theory are proposed.

These amendments are threefold. The first is a macro-structural, exogenous factor

affecting social welfare development, specifically the structural context of an

historically unprecedented bi-polar system of states centered upon the United States

and the Soviet Union. The second is an agency-level, intervening variable between

the effects of this structural factor and postwar social welfare development: elite

consent, motivated by a need to project what Szelenyi has called the “human face of

capitalism”. Third, George Steinmetz’s use of the concept “regulating the social” to

describe state efforts to address the “social question” is revised (Steinmetz 1993).

The term “securing” rather than “regulating” is used. The nature of the “international

question” facing nation-states is also stressed. The relationship between the social

question and the international question is posed in terms of the concepts social

security and national security. The relationship between the dual role of the state in

securing the “social” and securing the “world” is thus explored.

In the epistemology section, the role of a realist epistemology in the proposed

research is described. The realist approach is adopted subsequent to the consideration

of a variety of epistemological outlooks, beginning with the role of personal

standpoint, and including orientations towards social explanation, methodological

individualism, radical historicism, and various metaphors of discovery. In the

methodology section, one methodological approach, adapted from Knoke and Pappi

(1991), is adopted for use in the analysis of policy decisions in the proposed research. Another, adapted from Martin Rein (1983), is described as a template for the analysis of discourse in future research.

Next, empirical research relevant to the proposed topic is reviewed and

critiqued, including polity-centered approaches; the logic of industrialism approach;

and social-democratic and class struggle outlooks. Then, several alternative

hypotheses are presented. A preliminary examination is made of their veracity.

These include the view that social welfare “took off” prior to the Cold War, and had

its roots in Imperial Germany, pre-war England, and the Depression era in the United

States, where it developed for reasons largely independent of exogenous factors.

In the section on working hypotheses, a number of logical statements (or

hypotheses) are presented, and preliminary examinations are made of the implications

of several of them, in order to ascertain whether there is any basis for further research

along these lines. These include brief examinations of the “guns and butter” issue in

the postwar era; the relationship of the Cold War context and Western social welfare

development; a section on the Marshall Plan and social welfare; and sections on the

relationships of the Cold War to educational policy and to civil rights efforts.

Tentative conclusions are drawn in a way which contributes to ongoing

discourse among social workers and social scientists about the fate of social welfare

in the post-Cold War world. Finally, the fruits of the exploration are considered in

light of the need to focus upon a more tightly construed research question: namely the

specific relationship between the Cold War context, elite and popular outlooks, and

two key events in 1950: the passage of the watershed 1950 Social Security

amendments and the promulgation of National Security Memorandum #68 (Nitze

1950).