Total war and welfare state development

The point of departure of this paper is the ‘paradox of war’ (Porter 1994). War is the father of immense destruction and fathomless suffering but is also seen as a pacemaker of the welfare state (e.g. Titmuss 1950; Preller 1978; Kaufman 1983; Dryzek/Goodin 1986; Dwork 1987, Marwick 1988; Porter 1994; Kasza 1996, 2002; Klausen 1998; Skocpol 1992; Reidegeld 2000; Castles 2010). To date, however, a systematic comparative analysis of war impacts on the welfare state is lacking, not least because the pertinent literature is scattered across many disciplines. A further reason why comparative welfare state research has not systematically paid attention to war as a genuine explanatory variable of welfare state dynamics is the exceptional nature of this phenomenon itself. War is a rare and anomalous contingency that is conceptualized in the social sciences as exogenous shock, ‘abnormal event’ (Kasza 1996), ‘black swan’ emergency (Castles 2010) or as a critical juncture. All these conceptualizations suggest that the conventional theories of comparative public policy rarely apply under circumstances of war and are therefore only to a limited extent suitable for generating meaningful hypotheses on the war-welfare state nexus. In a nutshell, wartime politics follows radically different rules and takes place under markedly different circumstances from that of normal peacetime politics. Even in democracies, special executive emergency powers, censorship, the suspension of democratic rights, public control of the economy, and the coalescence of government and opposition are prevalent in wartime, while institutional veto points become less important. Furthermore, wartime decision-making takes place under conditions of high uncertainty and under circumstances in which the military becomes a relevant, if not the dominant actor.