War and Welfare: Europe and the United States, 1945 to the Present (review)

War and Welfare: Europe and the United States, 1945 to the Present. By Jytte Klausen (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1998) 341 pp. $59.95.

Klausen's War and Welfare is a rich and ambitious book. It reflects the value of comparative politics as an approach to the study of the modern world, but also its pitfalls. Her basic argument is a plausible one: World War II created both the structures and the mental dispositions among the political and economic elites of Western Europe and of the United States (albeit there to a much lesser extent) through which postwar economic reconstruction and the forging of a societal consensus could be publicly planned and managed. World War I, as the first total war in modern history, acted as a prototype for the coordination of all spheres of national life for the purpose of victory in World War II, and the memory of the post-1918 failure of socio-economic reconstruction provided the stimulus to tackle post-1945 problems differently, that is, through state-led planning.

Klausen examines the attitudes and policies adopted in several Western countries, but also shows that the results of government planning efforts were ultimately disappointing, leading to a restoration of private power, in which she includes the labor movement. She is most detailed and knowledgeable about Britain and Sweden, to which she devotes two full chapters each. West Germany and the United States get one chapter each, and her final chapter contains no more than brief sub-sections about "the Austrian road to national economic development," as well as on that of France (248). Overall, she advances "a historical-institutional explanation of the postwar welfare state" in which the state acted "as the central organizing principle of politics and policy" (280). This approach implies "that, in the absence of the concentrating power of another war," there would be disintegration "as part of an 'aging' process" (280).

Accordingly, Klausen demonstrates that the planning processes originally envisaged and initiated in both Britain and Sweden sooner or later ran into the ground, weakened by the dynamic forces of postwar liberal capitalism and the compromises that it began to make with the private power of labor. The question is where these forces originated. Klausen's study, recounting individual national experiences and primarily focused on the domestic aspects of change, seems to have left her external, international variables too vague and amorphous. She accurately identifies the United States as representing the weakest case of postwar planning. Moreover, although in her view there was more public planning in Ludwig Erhard's West Germany than others have noticed, that country, too, moved more quickly toward liberal notions of associational autonomy than Britain and Sweden did.

If Klausen had related these latter findings more explicitly to the fact that America had become the hegemonic power of the West, the failure of the British and Swedish experiments might have become plausible. After all, anti-public-planning pressure on Europe from across the Atlantic gradually increased during the postwar decades. In this context, occupied and later semisovereign West Germany was purposefully used by the United States as a battering ram to soften up the more dirigiste policies of other noncommunist European nations. By submerging these power realities in a larger, anonymous picture of the creeping liberalization of the postwar world economy, Klausen is diverted from seeing the failure of state planning as part of a deliberate economic "Americanization" of the Western world. In other words, the United States, with West Germany in its wake, played a greater role in "war and welfare" than Klausen's analytical framework, with its focus on the nation state and the domestic consequences of war, and the organization of her chapters can accommodate.

Klausen's mastery of her material is impressive. But a comparative history that gives equal space and weight to all relevant factors, national and international, in...