When American history is divided into discrete eras, the New Deal stands, along with the Civil War, as one of those distinctive events that forever change the trajectory of the nation&’s development. The story of the New Deal provides a convenient tool of periodization and a means of interpreting U.S. history and the significance of contemporary political cleavages. Eisner&’s careful examination of the historical record, however, leads one to the conclusion that there was precious little &“new&” in the New Deal. If one wishes to find an event that was clearly transformative, the author argues, one must go back to World War I. From Warfare State to Welfare State reveals that the federal government lagged far behind the private sector in institutional development in the early twentieth century. In order to cope with the crisis of war, government leaders opted to pursue a path of &“compensatory state-building&” by seeking out alliances with private-sector associations. But these associations pursued their own interests in a way that imposed severe constraints on the government&’s autonomy and effectiveness in dealing with the country&’s problems&—a handicap that accounts for many of the shortcomings of government today.

While the first half of the 20th century was characterized by total war, the second half witnessed, at least in the Western world, a massive expansion of the modern welfare state. A growing share of the population was covered by ever more generous systems of social protection that dramatically reduced poverty and economic inequality in the post-war decades. With it also came a growth in social spending, taxation and regulation that changed the nature of the modern state and the functioning of market economies. Whether and in which ways warfare and the rise of the welfare state are related, is subject of this volume. Distinguishing between three different phases (war preparation, wartime mobilization, and the post-war period), the volume provides the first systematic comparative analysis of the impact of war on welfare state development in the western world. The chapters written by leading scholars in this field examine both short-term responses to and long-term effects of war in fourteen belligerent, occupied, and neutral countries in the age of mass warfare stretching over the period from ca. 1860 to 1960. The volume shows that both world wars are essential for understanding several aspects of welfare state development in the western world.

Few areas of the world have been as profoundly shaped by war as the Middle East in the twentieth century. Despite the prominence of war-making in this region, there has been surprisingly little research investigating the effects of war as a social and political process in the Middle East. To fill this gap, War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who explore the role of war preparation and war-making on the formation and transformation of states and societies in the contemporary Middle East. Their findings pose significant challenges to widely accepted assumptions and present new theoretical starting points for the study of war and the state in the contemporary developing world. Heydemann's collaborators include political scientists, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Their essays are both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, covering topics such as the effects of World War II on state-market relations in Syria and Egypt, the role of war in the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the political economy of Lebanese militias, and the effects of the 1967 war on state and social institutions in Israel. The volume originated as a research planning project of the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the Social Science Research Council.

In the decade after 1945, as the Cold War freeze set in, a new Europe slowly began to emerge from the ruins of the Second World War, based on a broad rejection of the fascist past that had so scarred the continent's recent history. In the East, this new consensus was enforced by Soviet-imposed Communist regimes. In the West, the process was less coercive, amounting more to a consensus of silence. On both sides, much was deliberately forgotten or obscured. The years which followed were in many ways golden years for western Europe. Democracy became embedded in Germany, and eventually triumphed over dictatorship in Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Britain and France faced up to the necessity of decolonization. The European Economic Community was founded and went from strength to strength, as the economies of western Europe bounced back from the devastation of the war. The countries of the East lagged far behind and seemed caught in a perpetual game of catch-up, but even there conditions had improved since the end of the war, albeit at a much slower rate. Above all, throughout this period the European world continued to be sustained by the broad anti-fascist consensus that had emerged in the years after 1945. However, as Dan Stone shows in this new history of the continent since the war, this fundamental consensus began to break down in the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s, a process which has rapidly accelerated since the end of the Cold War. Globalization, deregulation, and the erosion of social-democratic welfare capitalism in the West, and the collapse of the purported Communist alternative in the East, have all fatally undermined the post-war anti-fascist value system that predominated across Europe in the first four decades after the end of the Second World War. Ominously, this has been accompanied by a rise in right-wing populism and a widespread revision of the anti-fascist narrative on which this value system was based. The danger of this shift is now evident: financial and social crisis, an increasing inability on the part of European populations to resist historical myth-making, and the re-emergence of fascist ideas. The result, as Dan Stone warns, is socially divisive, politically dangerous, and a genuine threat to the future of a civilized Europe.

Combining detailed analysis with a close reading of historical narratives, documentary evidence and first-hand interviews, this is the first book on conflict to look seriously at the issue of ethnic identity and what it means for future peace.

From belligerent to neutral countries, the civilian war economy that developed from 1939 to 1945 created the foundations for the postwar welfare state. War and Welfare examines the legacy of the 'warfare state' and reveals how it paved the path for the welfare state in ensuing decades. Jytte Klausen shows how the institutional marks made by World War II were critical to capitalist reform after the war. She argues that the warfare state was a gift to the European Left, and asserts that state-expansion and the changing domestic order during the war, in most countries regardless of their stances, anticipated the welfare state. When the war ended in 1945, the reconstruction process rested on piecemeal decisions to remove or retain war-time controls over the economy, ranging from state cartels to wage fixing. Klausen argues that the welfare state ratified prior changes in state-society relations and represented a continuation of institutional development undertaken during the war years. Meticulously researched and cogently argued, War and Welfare offers a different angle on the conception and construction of the welfare state, and lends insights into what may lie ahead in the future.

Randstad Holland is the urbanized western part of the Netherlands. It contains the four largest cities of the country: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. The name Randstad (rim city) refers to the distinctive shape of the conurbation, a horseshoe of cities around an open agricultural and recreational area, known as the Green Heart. This book analyzes the restructuring of the region. The volume summarizes the research of the Urban Networks research program. The discussion is focused on four themes: housing, labor market and employment, infrastructure and transportation, and the provision of public services. The Randstad is internationally known as the playground of urban and regional planners. Their debates on present policy issues are extensively reviewed in the book. Teachers and students of urban change and planning, and policy makers and planners in The Netherlands and abroad will find much valuable information in this book.

This collection of twelve essays reviews the history of welfare in Britain over the past 150 years. It focuses on the ideas that have shaped the development of British social policy, and on the thinkers who have inspired and also contested the welfare state. It thereby constructs an intellectual history of British welfare since the concept first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The essays divide into four sections. The first considers the transition from laissez-faire to social liberalism from the 1870s, and the enduring impact of late-Victorian philosophical idealism on the development of the welfare state. It focuses on the moral philosophy of T. H. Green and his influence on key figures in the history of British social policy like William Beveridge, R. H. Tawney, and William Temple. The second section is devoted to the concept of 'planning' which was once, in the mid-twentieth century, at the heart of social policy and its implementation, but which has subsequently fallen out of favour. A third section examines the intellectual debate over the welfare state since its creation in the 1940s. Though a consensus seemed to have emerged during the Second World War over the desirability and scope of a welfare state extending 'from the cradle to the grave', libertarian and conservative critiques endured and re-emerged a generation later. A final section examines social policy and its implementation more recently, both at grass roots level in a study of community action in West London in the districts made infamous by the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, and at a systemic level where different models of welfare provision are shown to be in uneasy co-existence today. The collection is a tribute to Jose Harris, emeritus professor of history in the University of Oxford and a pioneer of the intellectual history of social policy. Taken together, these essays conduct the reader through the key phases and debates in the history of British welfare.