The social-democratic roots of global governance: Welfare internationalism from the 19th century to the United Nations
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066117703176 |
| Author | Leonie Holthaus,Jens Steffek |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117703176
European Journal of
International Relations
2018, Vol. 24(1) 106 –129
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066117703176
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The social-democratic roots
of global governance: Welfare
internationalism from the 19th
century to the United Nations
Jens Steffek
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Leonie Holthaus
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Abstract
Welfare internationalism was and still is one of the most powerful justifications for
establishing international organizations. It suggests that public international organizations
should cater to the material needs of individuals, rather than solve conflicts among states.
In this article, we trace the origins of welfare internationalism, challenging the dominant
narrative that depicts it as a projection of the British welfare state or the American
New Deal to the globe. We show that welfare internationalism emerged earlier
and combined ideational elements of very different origins. Notions of professional
colonial administration migrated to the international context and dovetailed with a
cosmopolitan interpretation of 19th-century public unions as caretakers of citizen
interests. Reform socialist approaches to the social question inspired domestic and
international developments simultaneously, leading to the foundation of the International
Labour Organization, which became a crucial venue for the promulgation of welfare
internationalism. We thus document how international theorists and practitioners of the
early 20th century established a new perspective on international affairs, emanating from
individuals and their needs. That perspective came to rival the traditional conception of
international politics as intergovernmentalism and delivered important building blocks
for the (self-)legitimation of the League of Nations and the United Nations.
Keywords
Colonialization, equality, global institutions, ideology, legitimacy, United Nations
Corresponding author:
Jens Steffek, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Dolivostrasse 15, Darmstadt 64293, Germany.
Email: steffek@pg.tu-darmstadt.de
703176EJT0010.1177/1354066117703176European Journal of International RelationsSteffek and Holthaus
research-article2017
Article
Steffek and Holthaus 107
Introduction
In this article, we discuss the origins of welfare internationalism. The term ‘welfare inter-
nationalism’ is shorthand for the idea that public international organizations (IOs) should
cater to the material needs of individuals, rather than solve conflicts among states. Over
the 20th century, welfare internationalism was a very influential blueprint for building
international institutions. It inspired the foundation of the International Labour
Organization (ILO), the World Bank Group and the functional branches of the United
Nations (UN) system, in particular, those concerned with humanitarian and development
aid. Important elements of welfare internationalism can also be found in the European
Union (EU), for instance, in its cohesion policy that aims at reducing disparities of living
standards within and across member countries.
The assumption that IOs should be responsible for individual welfare raises some
thorny issues of the practical-political kind. The material resources of IOs are notori-
ously limited and often insufficient to live up to the promises made in their mission state-
ments. What is more, in practice, welfare internationalism often implies a redistribution
of resources across borders. Such redistribution from wealthier to poorer areas of the
globe is regularly called for — on moral, legal and political grounds — but proved hard
to achieve in the past. The long-standing controversy over the size of official develop-
ment assistance (ODA) can illustrate the point. At an aggregate level, it never even came
close to the mark of 0.7% of developed countries’ gross domestic product (GDP) that
was first envisaged in 1970.
Given these manifest practical difficulties, it is a highly interesting question to ask
how welfare internationalism could ever become a widely supported justification for
political internationalization, and a blueprint for global institutions. We do not wish to
discuss this question in the typical terms of International Relations (IR) theory, for
instance, by pitching rationalist accounts of international cooperation against social-
constructivist ones. Instead, we adopt a genealogical perspective and ask how the rise of
welfare internationalism was possible. We thus contribute to a growing body of literature
that studies global governance in historical perspective (Barnett, 2011; Buzan and
Lawson, 2015; Murphy, 2005; Plesch and Weiss, 2015, 2016; Reus-Smit, 2016). That
literature is revitalizing the interdisciplinary dialogue between IR and international his-
tory, and it challenges many traditional views and tacit assumptions about the origins of
global governance.
Regarding the rise of welfare internationalism, the dominant view is that the domestic
welfare state was ‘writ large’ and lifted to the international sphere in the 1940s and that
it found its first concrete manifestation in the post-war system of functional global organ-
izations. This narrative comes in two varieties, both focused on the wartime bargain
between the US and Great Britain about the shape of the post-war world order. The first
variety emphasizes domestic developments in the US, where Roosevelt’s New Deal had
strengthened welfarist ideas, along with great faith in the virtues of public management.
The second variety gives more weight to the British influence. In the course of the trans-
atlantic negotiations, the British side, and, in particular, John Maynard Keynes, managed
to introduce a good dose of the welfarism and socio-economic planning that were en
vogue domestically. Both narratives converge on the idea that crucial for the advent of
welfare internationalism were projections of domestic ideas and institutions to the globe.
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