Yet Another Typology of Theories of the Welfare State

This paper is an effort to update a typology I developed in two papers I wrote here, for Prof. Michael Kennedy and Prof. Howard Kimeldorf.  The paper for Prof. Kennedy was titled “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.”  It was a 56,000 word exploratory study.   The second, Bringing the World Back In: The Cold War and the Origins of a Guns and Butter Consensus in Postwar Social Policy, was a proposal for Prof. Kimeldorf's Historical Methods course, and was intended as the start of a prospectus for a dissertation on this topic.  Alas, I concluded at the time, 1995, that too few years had passed since the end of the Cold War for me to be able to fully explore my hypotheses, and that the proposed historical qualitative alternative focusing on the early years of the Cold War would require access to archival documents which had not yet been declassified.

There have been numerous historical comparative studies of Western social welfare development.  But none of them have sought to understand the role of the Cold War in inhibiting or stimulating that development.   As the Cold War drew to a close, the possibility of a peace dividend captured the public imagination.  But that dividend has not materialized. 

There have been two main explanations for this.  First, we point to the continued high levels of military expenditures.  Second, we blame the globalization process.  Both are good partial explanations.  But there is a third factor. The end of the Cold War resulted in an accelerated reduction in the already declining level of elite consent to welfare state expenditures.  For instance, Malcolm S. Forbes Sr. said in 1993: “The Cold War is over....What was tolerable in war is no longer in peacetime....The costs of the welfare state are becoming unsustainable - politically and economically.”  

In September 2006, Brian Gifford published an article in the American Journal of Sociology, “Why no trade-off between ‘guns and butter'?  Armed forces and social spending in the advanced industrial democracies, 1960-1993.” (Gifford 2006).  Gifford concluded, using better data than in earlier studies, that nations with relatively large armed forces make smaller social welfare efforts, just as previous studies have shown that higher military expenditures are associated with lower social expenditures.  

I disagree.  I contend, although I am currently not in possession of confirmatory data, that the ratio of Western European and Japanese military expenditures to social expenditures was higher than those in the United States due in significant part to subsidization of their defense needs by the strategic military expenditures of the United States and N.A.T.O..  I also contend that both military and social expenditures were higher during the latter half of the 20th Century than they would have been if there hadn't been a Cold War.  As much as it may be hard for many of us to swallow, the Cold War tide lifted all ships, and many of our domestic policy achievements were tolerated by elites largely because of their value in fighting the Cold War.