Suchergebnisse

As one of the most potent hypothesis in political economy, the negative impact of ethnic diversity on the provision of public goods made the welfare state–nation state isomorphism seem a one-way connection. Against the grain of existing studies I argue, through a case-study of interwar Romania, that welfare states are constructed to proactively (re)build the nation, rather than retroactively emanate from it, once established. Rather than an ahistorical ethnolinguistic fractionalization, the article takes nationhood as historically fluid and contested because through institutionalized action, elites can and do proactively revamp the political arena, redistributing coalitions of winners and losers based on exogenously given criteria. The article therefore shows that nation forgers typically internalize the global social question through the topoi of local socio-economic problems construed as a national question. Because elites can pick and choose who becomes part of the national compact, the politicization of the perception of incomplete nationhood provides a sufficient ideational thrust for welfare policymaking, irrespective of pre-existing national solidarities. Consequently, welfare policies are typically layered as remedial or compensatory policies designed to foster a specific social mobility, deemed in a top-down fashion to be completing the nation.

Although an increasingly voluminous scholarship has contributed to unpacking Central and Eastern European (CEE) "hybrid welfare regimes," significant gaps still remain, particularly vis-â-vis the very first policy choices. This occurs due to a preference for macro-structural approaches which do not fully dissect the layered and complex "etatization of welfare programs". Picking up the gauntlet, Maria Bucur offers an in-depth historical analysis on the transformation of individuals into socio-political stakeholders, via state centralization.

The present paper offers an exploratory case study of employer-centric
approaches to welfare state development in interwar Romania. By focusing on
ideational debates rather than macro-structural conditions, I argue that, similarly
to the well-researched cases of developed countries, employers also played key
roles in the historical creation of welfare institutions in late developing countries.
Focusing on the nuances of historical contingencies, I show when, why and
how Romanian employers acted as consenters, supporters or dissenters of an
emerging welfare state, envisaged by policymakers as a key tool for catch-up
development.

This book is the first attempt to bridge the current divide between studies addressing "economic nationalism" as a deliberate ideology and movement of economic 'nation-building', and the literature concerned with more diffuse expressions of economic "nationness"—from national economic symbols and memories, to the "banal" world of product communication. The editors seeks to highlight the importance of economic issues for the study of nations and nationalism, and its findings point to the need to give economic phenomena a more prominent place in the field of nationalism studies. The authors of the essays come from disciplines as diverse as economic and cultural history, political science, business studies, as well as sociology and anthropology. Their chapters address the nationalism-economy nexus in a variety of realms, including trade, foreign investment, and national control over resources, as well as consumption, migration, and welfare state policies. Some of the case studies have a historical focus on nation-building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while others are concerned with contemporary developments. Several contributions provide in-depth analyses of single cases while others employ a comparative method. The geographical focus of the contributions vary widely, although, on balance, the majority of our authors deal with European countries