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7/28/2019 Book Reviews - Alfred Pfaller, Ian Gough and Göran Therbom eds., Can the Welfare State Compete A Comparativ…
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http://asj.sagepub.com/ Acta Sociologica
http://asj.sagepub.com/content/35/4/334.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0001699392035004081992 35: 334Acta Sociologica
Peter BaldwinAdvanced Capitalist Countries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991)Can the Welfare State Compete? A Comparative Study of Five
Book Reviews : Alfred Pfaller, Ian Gough and Göran Therbom (eds.),
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What is This?
- Jan 1, 1992Version of Record>>
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334
workers out of employment. These ter-
ritorializing trends in combination with the
continued one-party system and the lack
of real democracy provided an excellent
breeding ground for a new wave of ethno-
nationalisms that also fed on each other: in
Kosovo, among Serbs, in Slovenia, and so
forth. One essential pointin
Schierup’sanalysis is its implication that the lightningethnification of the Yugoslav party systemin 1990-91 is only superficially similar to
that after World War I; the causes are in
important respects different.
In his concluding chapter, ’Towards a
new exodus’, Schierup draws some scen-
arios for the (1990) future: a technocratic
managerialism that might engender a
populist-authoritarianbacklash or be
transcended by a strengthened civil societywith economic stabilization. The second has
already defeated the first - although it
shows signs of coming back at the (ex)republic level - and the third seems more
distant than ever, even if there are still
movements that try to work for it.
In analyses of what newspapers tend to
call ’ethnic’ conflicts, two opposite pitfallsabound:
takingthis label at its face value, or
trying to eliminate ethnic aspects altogetherso as to lay bare the underlying class con-
flicts. Schierup avoids both. His approachis essentially in terms of class, but his vast
knowledge of Yugoslav society preventshim from uncritically taking over generalmonocausal models at the expense of the
complexity of social reality. Having been in
close contact with Yugoslavia for a quarterof a century, I cannot recall any other book
on it from which I have leamt so much. It
is a must for anyone who wants to under-
stand the roots of the Yugoslav tragedy.
Håkan WibergPeace and Conflict Research, Copenhagen
Alfred Pfaller, Ian Gough and Göran
Therbom (eds.), Can the Welfare State
Compete? A Comparative Study ofFive Advanced Capitalist Countries
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).
The topic of this book - the extent to which
social policy has recently yielded to the
imperatives of an increasingly competitivemarketplace - is obviously important and
its treatment here, although surrendered to
the never-tender mercies of a committee of
scholars, is remarkably lucid and har-
moniously coordinated.
The overall problem is the relationshipbetween the
marketplacewith its
allocationby activity and social policy’s redistribution
according to need. Has social policy dulled
the incentives of the market and lessened
productivity and competitiveness and must
its reallocative ambitions therefore be
reined in? Or - the other end of the spec-trum of argument represented in this vol-
ume - does the correction of market
infelicities accomplished by social policy in
fact make, at least in the
longrun, for a
more effective productive environment; is
social policy economically rational and not
just redistributive in a zero-sum sense?
This is not exclusively a recent dilemma.
Bismarck, as leader of the nation which
pioneered a significant channelling of
resources into the deferred consumptionmade possible by social insurance, worried
that such burdens on the productive processwould hobble German
employersin their
competition with foreign colleagues who
were not similarly weighed down. More-
over, it is also obviously a false dichotomyif pressed too far. If the market and social
policy were antithetical, then any nation’s
welfare effort would have to stand in direct
relation to its isolation from the world mar-
ket. In fact, the relationship seems to be
almost the reverse, with some of the most
well-developed welfare states also the most
exposed economies. Hence, either there
must be an element to social policy that is
conducive to productivity or - a less likelyalternative - these nations are simply so
dramatically efficient that they can not onlycompete with aplomb on the world market,but do so with the millstone of generoussocial policy around their respective econ-
omic necks.
The introductory chapters, by Pfaller,
Gough and Therborn, lucidly outline theissues at stake, distinguishing between vari-
ous senses ofcompetitiveness andthe trade-
offs as well as the positive relationshipsbetween them and social policy. Theyemphasize the ambiguity of the conclusions
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335
that can be drawn: that there is no con-
sistent correlation between welfare state
development and competitive sluggishness,but also that there generally has been no
clear competitive benefit, seen in statistical
terms, to well-developed social policy; that
while there has been pressure to enhance
competitiveness, this has not uniformly or
necessarily led to across-the-board cutbacksin social policy.The country studies, in turn, flesh out
such generalities. Each appears to have
been written according to the same recipe,with only a few variations. The French case
strays furthest from the path, the German
refuses to discuss telecommunications,which, along with automobiles, is one of
the two specific industrial cases otherwise
considered in each. Each national studyshows the way that competitiveness has
become an increasingly important concern,
but at the same time demonstrates that the
image of a Reagan or a Thatcher choppingaway at the supposedly strangling under-
brush of welfare entitlement oversimplifiesthe issue. In the United States, for example,the effect of welfare cutbacks has been less
to deprive regularly employed workers of
their job-related benefits than to cut theentitlements of the marginal and poorest,who have least to do with the issue of com-
petitiveness, and thus to accentuate the
two-tier nature of the American welfare
state. Gough’s chapter on Great Britain
argues that more than simply worries about
economic competitiveness was packed into
Thatcher’s ideological baggage and that
some of the goals pursued by her govern-
ment in fact ran at cross purposes to thehope of making Britain more economicallymuscular. Competitiveness and a return to
the nightwatchman state, in other words,
were not always aims that could be recon-
ciled. The German Christian Democrats,m turn, are portrayed as moderate welfare
scourges, compared at least with their more
radical Anglo-American counterparts.
Representatives of a broad spectrum of
right-of-center interests, influenced by longtraditions of Christian socialism and willingto accept an interventionist role for the
state, they have been content to advocate
tinkering with social policy rather than
slash-and-burn. Moreover, the German
economy has been performing sufficientlyadmirably that the whole competitivenessdebate has taken on significantly less apoca-
lyptic tones than in Britain, the United
States, or - witness the imbecilities of a
Cresson - in France.
The only nation that stands out is
Sweden. The other countries under the
glass here are ones for which the efficiency/equality dilemma has been posed by the
economic stresses of the 1980s. Each has in
some way sought to address such problems,and social policy has to some extent in each
been made the scapegoat for lackluster
economic performance. In Sweden,however, no such tough choices, Therbomwould have us believe, have had to be
faced. Taking 1986/87 as his benchmark,
Therbom portrays Sweden as having beensingularly able to unite generous welfare
coverage, low unemployment and vigorousinternational competitiveness - as havingbeen, in other words, a country able to
sidestep the whole dilemma that informs
this book. And yet, after the last election
and the Bildt government’s proposedreforms, surely all bets are off. Will not
this chapter and those parts of the overall
conclusion based on it need to be exten-
sively rewritten, if not entirely reformul-
ated, in any future edition of this volume?
That is the danger of contemporary history:one’s contemporaries often turn out to be
less predictable than one thought.
Peter Baldwin
University of California, Los Angeles
Michael Shalev: Labour and the Political
Economy in Israel. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1992.
I have read many books on the history of
modem Israel, those written both for the
lay reader and the academician. Of these,I found none more comprehensive and to-
the-point than Labour and the Political
Economy in Israel by Michael Shalev. In myview, Shalev is the first author to provide a
whole new way of looking at the history of
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