ABSTRACT
Contemporary Western government stands apart from all its historical predecessors because of its welfare state. The welfare state constitutes a particular balancing act between individualist and collectivist needs that has so far proved to be flexible enough to satisfy supporters at both ends of this continuum. This chapter explains size of the welfare state in relation to total government expenditures. It then discusses nation building as a process that resulted in an imagined togetherness in multiple communities. The chapter also explores the professionalization of the budget and the various mechanisms for large-scale redistribution. What motivated the nationwide redistribution of income in the first half of the twentieth century drove the emergence of development aid in the decades following World War II. In the 1940s and 1950s, development aid became large-scale after the establishment of the development assistance committee (DAC) of the organization for economic cooperation and development (OECD) in 1960.
