Social Security Beneath the Nation State

Abstract

The phenomenon of a Europe-wide (and beyond) mutual-benefit movement has been widely neglected among historians and social scientists. Scholars have tended to focus on the history of labour movements as a history of trade unions and socialist parties, or on the history of social security systems with a focus on state action, thereby marginalising institutionalised struggles of workers against social risks in mutual benefit societies during the nineteenth century. The study of local and other benefit associations has been bound to national appraisals and, even more popular, regional studies.¹ The recent interest in benefit societies can be attributed to the growing interest in the voluntary sector for welfare provision (Harris 2012). But the state of research in each country differs widely; while we know a lot about British friendly societies (Gosden 1967; Neave 1991, 1996; Hopkins 1995;Cordery 2003; Weinbren 2006; Harris et al. 2012), research in Spain has only just begun (Castillo 1996; Vilar Rodriguez and Pons Pons 2012). Due to this unequal situation, comparative perspectives are rudimentary. One pioneering work edited by Marcel van der Linden in 1996 started to fill this gap by presenting an invaluable pool of 29 country studies that reflect the respective state of research. However, these often pioneering case studies stand alone and only very rarely provide comparative insights.