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V. Conclusion Confronted with the “critical economic circumstances” and the ensuing unemployment debacle of 1913, the capital city, Budapest, tried to take action as did other authorities outside the capital. It established a system of municipal unemployment benefits which foreshadowed a branch of social insurance entirely missing from Hungarian social policy as it was in other countries. Faced with the doubling of daily admission figures of children to the state childcare system, the minister for the interior called upon the local authorities to proceed with “utmost care” when deciding about admission or rejection of those in need.1 Only a few months later he had to admit in parliament that there was indeed a fundamental problem. “Hungary in the field of child protection at that time misjudged its strength and has, as demonstrated by the consequences, taken regulatory action which overtaxed its capacity; nevertheless, these regulations are, measured against our poverty, truly beautiful, human, and might serve as a model for richer countries.” One idea to solve the crisis was that state children from the age of seven should contribute to their maintenance by “their own work.”2 The need-related policies unfolding in Hungary in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries were indeed characterized both by limited room for maneuver given the existing socio-political balance of forces in the Hungarian market economy, and by imaginative innovation and reform. Socio-political innovation took place on national and local levels and in the context of transnational transfer of strategies in welfare and social policy. As regards the limited room of maneuver, this study has shown that in Hungary developments towards a more socially integrative poverty policy , like reforms aimed at social inclusion and a more far-reaching state social policy, bore only limited fruit. This has to be read bearing in mind that in the course of Hungarian economic development the situation of 1 BFL-C IV 1407b 1056/1908-IX, which includes Ordinance 160.633/1913-XII, Minister for the interior, and other material. The doubling of the daily admission figures was experienced in Budapest. 2 As quoted in A gyermekvédelem lapja 10 (1914): 127 f. 148 Divide, Provide, and Rule large sectors of the population by and large remained socio-economically unstable or marginal. In poverty policy there certainly was no overall trend toward retracting repressive measures such as the criminalization of certain social consequences of poverty. Just how deeply or systematically the repressive side of poverty policy—which like in other countries in particular areas even expanded —actually affected the living conditions of the lower classes is difficult to assess, especially as comparative data are rare.3 However, local authorities , the police, and the Hungarian state undoubtedly made every effort to ensure that they possessed far-reaching legal rights to intervene against life-styles deemed inappropriate and not respectable. This affected the Roma population in particular. The normative expectations about what counted as an appropriate life-style differed markedly between the sexes, in that the moral judgment of women was sexualized whereas this was not the case for men. The expectation that the able-bodied should work and were therefore not entitled to relief, while put forward in gender-neutral terms, clearly discriminated against many women. In these repressive sectors of poverty policy in Hungary integrative reform did not take place. This was different in Austria. Here the regulations on legal residence status (Heimatrecht ) enacted in 1863, which drastically exacerbated the politics of legal exclusion from access to poor relief for those who didn’t live in their place of origin, were changed in 1896 so as to alleviate the circumstances of those who had left their place of origin in search of a better life.4 As for provision, the other side of poverty policy, public assistance was extremely scant. The level of benefits remained low and the portion of the population who actually received benefits remained small. This is true not only if the capital city of Hungary, Budapest, is compared with the capital city of the empire as a whole, Vienna,5 but also on the national and local level when Hungary is compared with other countries. In England and Wales under the poor laws after 1834, for example, the ratio of recorded paupers on relief in 1910 – the lowest ratio in the period from 1840, and 3 For an international overview—though also lacking quantitative data—of the in-part intensified emphasis on strategies of exclusion, especially...

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