ABSTRACT
The modern welfare state is a European invention which can trace its institutional roots, if not its concept and conception, to the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Comprehensive national social insurance, originating in Bismarck’s Germany in 1883, spread all over Europe before 1920. The German social insurance of the 1880s inspired initiatives for social insurance legislation in the Nordic countries (Kuhnle 1981). In the interwar period, the European ideal of social security spread all over the world. Towards the end of the twentieth century core elements of the welfare state have been established and consolidated in the democratizing East Asian miracle economies such as South Korea and Taiwan. Ever since the inception of state-backed social insurance and healthcare, voices of anxiety about the cost and size of public social responsibility have been raised. In Germany, the allegedly excessive economic burden imposed by Bismarck’s social legislation had already been debated in the beginning of the 1900s at a time when government expenditure for social insurance amounted to a tiny fraction of gross domestic product (GDP). In 1952, The Times in Britain inaugurated the first of many debates ever since on the ‘crisis’. In that year, 15.6 per cent of the British GDP was spent on social security and services. Fifty years later, Britain spent much more, and European countries in general spend between 20 and 32 per cent of their GDP on welfare state purposes. In 1994, the newspaper The European (28 January 1994) wrote: ‘The welfare state is at a breaking point.’ Assessments of this kind have been ample throughout European welfare state history, but welfare states have survived, although under more or less constant small-scale reconstruction in recent decades (Kuhnle 2000).
