Defining Social Security on the National Level

The emergence of the concept of social security in the twentieth century has to be situated against the longer history of notions of security. Directly or indirectly, the idea of social security drew upon previous understandings of security, especially the physical idea of security, which stemmed from medieval traditions and from a prophylactic understanding of security that emerged in the nineteenth century and focused on the role of individuals in taking precautions against the future. In a premodern, feudal context, the notion of security was firmly linked to feudal power relations, reflecting the physical protection and security provided by the sovereign in exchange for the feudal services imposed on the subject (Conze Reference Conze and Brunner1984; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1973: 56). With the rise of the modern territorial state and its monopoly of violence since the seventeenth century, and parallel to the emergence of liberal societies in the nineteenth century, the cultural meaning of security shifted profoundly. Now government institutions replaced feudal authorities as guarantors of security and protectors against physical violence.

However, increasing economic and social liberty produced new insecurities and instabilities. Liberal societies, in other words, produced their own social risks and their specific needs for social security. Modern meanings of security have to be seen against this background: as addressing the needs for social and economic stability in an era of accelerated social and cultural change. In the nineteenth century, at least in the German-speaking context, security was still understood in terms of a liberal tradition that made the individual responsible for taking precautionary action. And the risks that social policy was designed to address were equated with the new dangers of the industrial age: wage losses through sickness, accidents, or unemployment.

The Bismarckian social insurance legislation of the 1880s was firmly embedded in a liberal and corporatist narrative of self-precaution on the part of those social groups that were particularly exposed to economic and social risks of industrial societies. Based on contributory social insurance schemes, which was declared compulsory for the working class, the Bismarckian welfare model was essentially a corporatist answer to the risks of a capitalist form of modernization. Similarly, the modern notion of prevention, which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, also relied on individual action by the precautionary subject (Lengwiler and Beck Reference Lengwiler and Beck2008).

The concept of social security, as it emerged in the 1930s, was distinct from the Bismarckian tradition in two respects. Social security was first meant to be universal, a right to receive social benefits based on citizenship and not on class. It was also seen as more comprehensive than the patchwork of social insurance policies provided by the Bismarckian model. Social security included not only social insurance but the systematic and integrated provision of other forms of social assistance and social services—at least that was the programmatic goal implicit in the concept. This generalized notion of security reflected a new perception of social risks, marked by the Great Depression and the pauperization of parts of the population that extended far beyond the working classes.

Until the early postwar period, this universalist notion of “social security” was misleading, as the concept took on different meanings in different countries. The United States, Britain, France, and Germany illustrate this well. Each country witnessed substantial welfare reforms in the period between the mid-1930s and the 1950s. And in each case, the notion of social security played an important part in this transformation—yet, in completely different ways. In the United States, where the notion of “social security” first emerged, it was closely linked to the Social Security Act of 1935. The term stood for the goal of comprehensive protection, based on a mixture of contributory social insurance and programs of assistance, which would provide a variety of measures, including a modest old-age insurance, a similarly moderate unemployment insurance, and eight public assistance programs, such as old-age assistance and services for widows and the disabled (Poole Reference Poole2006: 7–9). In this context, the semantics of social security was marked by a tension that was characteristic of the United States' New Deal legislation. On the one hand, social security was an idealistic project reflecting the social hopes and promises of the early New Deal era. In this sense, it offered the first step into an era of social peace (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1973: 92–95). On the other hand, the term was also marked by the compromises and limitations of the New Deal policies and of the American welfare tradition in general. In this context, social security also reflected a deeply gendered perception of social risks, manifest in the Social Security Act, in which spouses' benefits were based on traditional gender and family roles (Béland Reference Béland2006: 61–97). The legislation also included forms of racial discrimination. In the years after 1935, people with incomes below a minimum wage and agricultural and domestic labor were excluded from old-age and unemployment insurance. The excluded individuals were predominantly African American (Poole Reference Poole2006: 175–80). Finally, the benefits provided by the act were all comparatively low, aiming at subsistence level and leaving plenty of room for the expansion of private pension systems and private health insurance, with their competing understanding of security (Hacker Reference Hacker2002: 85–123). From the beginning, the system of social security in the United States was built on this mixed welfare economy. The same applied for many Western European countries.

Britain took up the notion of social security in the context of the Beveridge report during the war, and further pursued it in the immediate postwar period under the Attlee government. Here, social security gained a much more centralist and universalist meaning than in the United States. It was centralist inasmuch as the Beveridge report and the Attlee government tried, under the title of social security, to develop a central framework for the management, or at least the coordination, of all social services, in particular in the health sector. This policy was epitomized in the formation of the National Health Service in 1948, which ultimately became the symbol for the British welfare state in general. And it was universalist in that social insurance entitlements were based on a status of citizenship, a system that was less exclusionary than in the United States. Other idiosyncrasies of the British system of social security included measures to achieve full employment and the practice of tax-financed lump-sum payments, which aimed to provide subsistence-level support—a tradition that can be traced back to the nineteenth-century poor law system (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1973: 99–104, 111–15). Despite this centralizing tendency, the values of self-help remained important in Britain, and forms of voluntary insurance, provided by trade unions, friendly societies, occupational pension schemes, or life assurances continued to play an important role in the British welfare state (Harris Reference Harris2004: 284–300; Macnicol Reference Macnicol1998). The British system made the state, in other words, only partly responsible for protecting against social and economic risks. The state guaranteed a minimum level of security; beyond this level, it was the individual who had to make provision against risks.

By contrast, in France, the concept of social security primarily referred to the administrative bureaucracy of the social insurance systems (the sécurité sociale, abbreviated la sécu) and less to any overarching vision or ideal. Moreover, the social security administration included a series of autonomous bureaucracies and was thus a less centralized body than in Britain, reflecting the particularistic, group-centered (and nonegalitarian) structure instituted by the French welfare reforms after 1945. This particularistic tradition is aptly illustrated in the autonomous administrative bodies for social insurance, the so-called régimes spéciaux, which targeted specific professions. The legislation on social insurance, introduced in 1930, and the social security policy of 1945 excluded a series of occupations, notably public servants and the professions (clergymen, lawyers), from the general schemes of insurance, in order to secure their privileged insurance systems. In this context, the term sécurité sociale referred to a system in which social risks were perceived and interpreted through the lens of a deeply hierarchical system of professions (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1990: 163–85).

Finally, in postwar West Germany the term social security was hardly used at all. In the immediate postwar years, German social-policy makers were engaged with reconstruction efforts and could not invest sufficient resources to expand social security services such as in France or Britain (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1973: 108–15). In the early 1950s, politicians instead echoed the Bismarckian tradition of social insurance by calling upon “social reform” (Sozialreform). That term reflected the specific historical roots of the German welfare state, but it also has to be understood in the context of the competition between the social insurance systems of East and West Germany (Hockerts Reference Hockerts1998). The idea of “social reform” gained prominence in the early 1950s and called for a comprehensive reform of existing social insurance, including an increase in benefit levels and a coordination of organizational structures. However, the project did not go as far as setting a minimum level of provision or institutional reforms, and it certainly did not reach the level of centralization that characterized British efforts during this period. The concept of “social reform” primarily served as a regulating idea, informing several welfare laws, such as Adenauer's pension reform of 1957. Moreover, social security became a negative ideal, linked to ideas of radical redistribution in East Germany, from which political groups started to distance themselves. Even the Social Democratic Party (SPD) dissociated itself in 1959 from the notion of social security. In its Godesberg Program of that year, the SPD abandoned its revolutionary traditions and adopted policies in support of the principles of a market economy and national defense. This orientation was seen as necessary for winning a constituency beyond the party's class-based electorate (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1973: 113–15).

These examples show that early notions of social security were firmly embedded in a national context, reflecting the peculiarities of the respective national welfare systems. Even on this national level, however, there was no coherent meaning of social security. The concept encompassed a variety of understandings of “social risks” and assumptions about how to address them. In this sense, “social security” simply provided an umbrella term for reforms enacted during the Great Depression and after World War II.

Social Security as Promoted by International Organizations

On an international level, and parallel to these national trajectories, the notion of social security gradually took on a more coherent meaning during the early postwar decades. International organizations were crucial actors in this process of semantic homogenization. The ILO and especially the ISSA were among the most prominent promoters of the notion. The ISSA was founded as an expert organization in 1947 (with a predecessor going back to 1927) and was supported by the ILO, which had been established in 1919 as a means to guarantee social peace internationally after World War I. The ISSA was dedicated to pursuing research projects in the fields of the ILO's activities (Guinand Reference Guinand2008; Stack Reference Stack1967: 12–18). Among the ISSA's main goals was promoting the idea of social security, which was even enshrined in its name. As an unofficial think tank of the ILO, the ISSA was able to transfer its agenda to the ILO and, by virtue of the tripartite structure of the ILO, to the government administrations, trade unions, and employers' associations of the organization's member countries. Thus, together with the ILO, the ISSA acted as a political trendsetter, in postwar Europe and partly also in other world regions (Guinand Reference Guinand2003: 95–98; Reference Guinand2008: 81–98; Kott Reference Kott2008; Maul Reference Maul2012). Until the 1950s, the ISSA largely operated as a closed expert circle, corresponding with the ILO and cooperating with national social security experts. In the 1960s, with the increasing public relations activities of national social security agencies, the ISSA's work was also recognized by a wider public (Bulletin der IVSS [1963] 16 (7–9): 285).Footnote ¹ Together with the ILO, the ISSA quickly became, in the postwar decades, the leading international organization for the development of welfare policies. The organization kept this prominent status at least until the beginning of the 1970s, when it gradually lost its influence to competing organizations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or the European Economic Community (EEC) (Leimgruber Reference Leimgruber, Kott and Droux2013).

In the interwar period, the ILO and the predecessor of the ISSA largely followed the Bismarckian model of corporatist, class-based social insurance (Guinand Reference Guinand2008; Seekings Reference Seekings and Van Daele2010: 147f.). Only during World War II did the ILO shift to a universalist model of the welfare state, calling for a minimal level of social provision and income security, as represented by the Scandinavian or the British welfare reforms of the early postwar years (Seekings Reference Seekings and Van Daele2010: 152–56). In the postwar period, the ILO and the ISSA came to promote three different meanings of social security. In the late 1940s and 1950s, social security stood as the idealistic, often missionary goal of the ISSA's policies, as it sought to convince member states to adopt a comprehensive and universalist form of social protection. In the 1960s, social security took on a more modest, pragmatic, and increasingly problematizing quality, as an umbrella term that covered different sorts of welfare states and also highlighted their diversity. The third meaning of social security, which began to emerge in the 1950s, referred to a technocratic approach to the administration and governance of increasingly complex social insurance systems. In this third sense, social security offered a semantic strategy to come to terms with the rising complexity of social insurance systems in the postwar decades.

The idealistic notion of social security was first articulated in the early 1940s, notably in 1941 as part of the Atlantic Charter of the Allied forces. The ISSA adopted the concept through the ILO. At this time, the ILO was already operating from exile in Montreal, Canada, where it took up the notion of social security and used it for its programmatic Declaration of Philadelphia in 1942. The declaration combined the ideas of social justice, human rights, and an international order of peace. When the ISSA was founded in 1947, as a successor of a smaller organization of European social insurance experts, the ILO, as the parent organization, was responsible for the concept of social security that was enshrined in the constitution of the new organization (Bulletin der IVSS [1948] 1 (1); [1952] 5 (10–11): 165–67; Guinand Reference Guinand2003: 65–87; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1973: 55–64, 92–95, 124f.).

For the ISSA, social security primarily meant the expansion of social protection in the context of a public institution (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1973: 124f.). In the 1950s, the ISSA also used the concept as a catchword for its declared goal of exporting European traditions of the welfare state, modeled after advanced European nations like Britain, France, or the Scandinavian states, to the developing countries in Africa and Latin America. These activities gained momentum in the 1960s, with the decolonization of Africa, and the increased weight of developing countries in the ILO's parliament, the International Labour Conference (Maul Reference Maul2012: 227–58). The broad efforts of the ISSA to collect comparative data on national social security systems on a global scale, and convert these tables into a global ranking, was also motivated by this missionary ambition (e.g., Bulletin der IVSS [1955] 8: 307–11; [1958] 11 (1–2): 38–42).

In the 1960s, that ambition was further endorsed by representatives of the EEC, who saw in the concept of social security a common regulatory idea for the accelerated European integration after the Treaty of Rome (1957). There were direct links between the work of the ISSA and that of the EEC. One of the EEC experts on social security was Pierre Laroque, who directed the ISSA's Expert Committee on Social Security in the early 1950s. Before that, Laroque had been involved in French social security legislation at the end of the World War and later directed the French Sécurité sociale (Guinand Reference Guinand2003: 113–37). Laroque saw European social security legislation in the tradition of the civil rights legislation of the French Revolution and as a correlate to the economic liberalism of modern societies. In his perspective, social and economic progress would necessarily lead to comprehensive systems of social security and to the global adoption of the European (he mainly thought of the French and British) welfare model. The close links between welfare reforms in Britain and France were partly due to the fact that the leaders of the resistance movement and the provisional government under De Gaulle were based in London and had thus a firsthand knowledge of the debates about the Beveridge report (Bulletin der IVSS [1966] 19 (3–4): 87–93; [1952] 5 (10–11): 150–53).

In a similar sense, the sociology of social security—an academic field which emerged in the 1960s and was very close to the ISSA's networks—was shaped by Eurocentric and teleogical ideas about the development of welfare systems. The discipline studied the interactions between sociological, demographic, economic, and cultural factors, on the one side, and the development of social insurance systems, on the other (Rys Reference Rys1964: 15–35; see also Bulletin der IVSS [1966] 19 (7–8): 236–39). Here again, personal networks closely linked national and international levels. Richard Titmuss for example, professor at the London School of Economics and one of the most prominent experts in social security, was responsible for transforming the field of social policy into an academic discipline in Britain, but he also directed the ISSA's first permanent research committee on social security, founded in 1967. The group included other prominent national experts, such as Ida Merriam, an influential collaborator of the Roosevelt administration during the New Deal era and, after 1945, research director at the Social Security Administration of the United States (IVSS 1986: 43f.).

The second, more pragmatic meaning of social security emerged in the 1960s. The “messianic” notion started to lose its momentum, mainly because it became more and more unlikely that the model of universalist systems of social insurance would be adopted internationally. Disenchantment about the spread of a common model was partly based on growing knowledge about the divergence between different welfare systems. In the early 1960s, the ISSA carried out a series of international surveys about the organizational and technical features of national welfare systems. These surveys dealt with topics like accident prevention, funding schemes for old-age insurance, the relation between social insurance and social services, the index linking of pensions, or the assessment of disability pensions. The results were published in the Bulletin of the International Social Security Association. They usually showed a wide variety of insurance models, which accorded with national institutional traditions (see the following special issues: Bulletin der IVSS [1962] 15 (6–10); [1965] 18 (1); on the ISSA's methodology see Rys Reference Rys1966).

The problem of integration was particularly obvious in Europe. In the 1960s international organizations like the ISSA or the EEC realized that the vision of a common European welfare model would not materialize quickly. With the Treaty of Rome, the EEC liberalized migration policies, but was subsequently confronted with the need to offer comparable levels of social protection for migrant workers. This was a crucial precondition for the common labor market, something the Italian government was eager to point out already in the early 1950s (Bulletin der IVSS [1950] 3 (6): 1–4). The fear was that workers would be deterred from emigrating if they could not expect comparable social rights and entitlements at the new workplace as in their home countries (Bulletin der IVSS [1958] 11 (3): 154f.; for similar anxieties in the late nineteenth century see Moses Reference Moses2009). Thus, in the immediate postwar years, Western European countries agreed to a series of bilateral agreements on social policy issues, followed, from the early 1950s, by an increasing number of multilateral agreements among the members of the European Coal and Steel Community and the Council of Europe (Bulletin der IVSS [1950] 3 (6): 1–4; [1958] 11 (3): 154f.; [1954] 7 (3): 120–125; for a survey on the bi- and multilateral agreements: [1958] 11 (10–11): 442–50).

But the differences among the welfare systems remained vast, and the accommodation of the levels of protection proved more difficult than expected (Bulletin der IVSS [1955] 8: 3–7). As the EEC mainly focused on economic liberalization, and not on social policies, and as the ISSA only acted as a consulting expert body, without the power to impose itself directly on national policy makers, the task of achieving convergence among national welfare states was mainly left to the ILO. With its power to enact legal conventions and recommendations, the ILO was the only international organization in possession of an effective instrument for influencing national policy makers (although conventions still had to be ratified on the national level to become legally binding).

But this instrument also proved to be too weak to achieve its goal. In the interwar period, the ILO's conventions had comparatively ambitious objectives, like defining a common pension level for old-age insurance. However, few states adopted these conventions. Most European countries abstained from fully ratifying them, with the result that ILO policies were not always implemented on the ground (Lengwiler Reference Lengwiler2010: 56–60). In years immediately following World War II, the ILO lowered its sights and pursued more cautious policies, not least because countries like West Germany or the Netherlands were focusing on reconstruction rather than the expansion of social provision (Guinand Reference Guinand2003: 113–37). This modest course ultimately settled on the common goal of minimum standards, epitomized in what was arguably the most important convention in the history of the ILO: the Social Security (Minimum Standards) Convention, adopted in 1952. The convention set specific minima for nine fields of social security (medical care, sickness benefit, unemployment benefit, old-age benefit, employment injury benefit, family benefit, maternity benefit, invalidity benefit, survivors' benefit). As soon as a country could subscribe to any three of the nine standards, it was allowed to fully ratify the convention (Johnston Reference Johnston1970: 198f.). Later the EEC and the Council of Europe followed this strategy and pursued their own policies of harmonization, also by setting minimal standards of security for migrant workers (Bulletin der IVSS [1963] 10–12: 332–36; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1973: 105–8). The most important among these measures was the European Social Charter, adopted in 1961 by the Council of Europe and declaring several minimal norms of social security systems (Bulletin der IVSS [1962] 15 (3–4): 69–71). The advantage of these flexible standards was that they allowed many countries to adopt the policies. The other side of the coin was that most countries adopted the standards without significantly altering their welfare system. Thus, flexible standards did not bring different countries onto a convergent path in the development of social security systems. This moderate, pragmatic policy was an answer to the comparably weak support for the ILO's conventions in the interwar period, when the organization followed a more ambitious policy (Guinand Reference Guinand2003, Reference Guinand2008; referring to the ILO's policies on human rights in the 1960s see Maul Reference Maul2012: 259–85).

The mood of disillusionment about the possibilities of integrating social security systems in Europe continued well into the 1960s, when developed welfare states were rapidly expanding. An EEC conference in 1962, for example, also with the participation of representatives of the ISSA, ended in a meager compromise that replaced the goal of integration with that of accommodation. The meeting concluded that the harmonization of different national welfare systems was a “very complicated problem.” The EEC only achieved convergence in one area: the availability of social policy to migrant workers in member states. Further attempts at convergence failed. Here again, the problem was a technical one. The differences in insurance coverage, funding systems, the range of provisions, and, not least, the definition of social risks proved practically insurmountable. The only strategy on which the participants of the 1962 conference could agree was to prevent the systems of social security from drifting further apart (Bulletin der IVSS [1963] 16 (5): 83–88).

Against this background, the notion of social security, as used by the ISSA, gradually changed its meaning in the 1960s. It lost its idealistic, teleological touch, epitomized by the ILO's Philadelphia Declaration and its combination of the idea of minimal social provisions, income security, and social peace, and became a pragmatic concept, an umbrella term for all sorts of different welfare systems. The concept could refer to processes of accommodation or harmonization, but no longer to paths of convergence. To speak of social security was to acknowledge implicitly the differences between social policy systems in Europe and elsewhere in the world. The ILO had increasing problems in convincing countries of the Global South to take up its policies. Until late into the postwar period, the ILO's ideas about social insurance and income security focused on employed workers. Already in the interwar decades, South Asian countries like China and India heavily criticized this policy, followed, in the 1950s and 1960s, by Latin American and African countries, which struggled with mass unemployment and mass poverty (Maul Reference Maul2012: 245–85; Seekings Reference Seekings and Van Daele2010).

The third meaning of social security, which began to take hold in the 1950s, contrasted markedly with both the universalist and the comparative understandings that were also in circulation in the postwar period. It instead pointed to the technical challenges of postwar social policies. Social security in this technical sense stood for a new form of administrative regulation or governance of social insurance. One the one hand, this reflected a general trend in policy making. In most West European states, the 1950s and 1960s were marked by a rise in technocratic approaches associated with social planning, which was often accompanied by a firm belief in a lasting techno-scientific progress (Elzinga and Jamison Reference Elzinga, Jamison and Jasanoff1995: 584–87; for Germany see Abelshauser Reference Abelshauser2004: 100–5; Metzler Reference Metzler2005: 232–60). On the other hand, administrative expertise played a particularly crucial role in the management of social security organizations. As social insurance systems became increasingly complex in the early postwar years, administrative and organizational issues became much more important. In the 1950s and 1960s, branches of the welfare state of many European countries—for example, sickness funds, health services, or old-age insurance—were centralized and demanded more management expertise (Bulletin der IVSS [1949] 2 (1): 16ff.). This was particularly the case on the aggregate level, when the variety of social insurance schemes started to be perceived and managed as one integrated system of social security, as was the case, for example, in countries like France or Britain (Bulletin der IVSS [1966] 19 (7–8): 243–46). In this sense, “social security” referred to the scientific—mainly statistical and actuarial—models for managing integrated systems of social insurance. The technical expertise invoked in this context referred, for example, to funding models for social insurance, systems of insurance benefits, and the appropriate calculation of risks and premiums (Bulletin der IVSS [1952] 5 (2): 1–5). In order to deal with the complexity of social security systems, insurance experts often took up some of the complexity theories of their time, such as operations research, cybernetics, or systems theory (or systems analysis). Thus, the technical understanding of social security was linked to the emergence and development of modern management and organizational theories since World War II (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1973: 63f.). In this sense, the idea of social security suggested that the institutions of the welfare state were able to protect effectively against the wide—and ever expanding—variety of individual and social risks of the postwar decades.

An administrative and technical understanding of social security was also relevant in the larger context of postwar economic policies. In the early postwar period, economic and social policies were based on Keynesian models, which also included the fiscal micromanagement of social security expenditures. As social security costs accounted for a growing part of the gross domestic product, their calculation was politically and economically significant. The ISSA debated, for example, the effects of social security expenditures on the national economy—how wages and consumption were affected through social security benefits, or how the funding of social insurance affected the national economy (Bulletin der IVSS [1964] 17: 139–45). The converse effects of economic development on the social security system were also studied, and in particular the question of how to adapt the level of benefits to price and wage inflation. The problem was solved, from the late 1950s, with the introduction of systems of index linking, often with mixed, price- and wage-related, indexes (Bulletin der IVSS [1954] 7 (1–2): 5–9; [1962] 15 (1–2): 23–28; [1962] 15 (11): 73–77).

Finally, on a merely administrative level, this third concept of social security also referred to the rationalization of administrative processes. Early debates about administrative technologies centered on classificatory issues, in particular on the adaption of the Dewey classification in order to organize processes and files in social security administrations (Bulletin der IVSS [1951] 4 (4): 91–94; [1954] 7 (3): 120–25). Questions of efficiency and rationalization took center stage from the mid-1960s, when the expansion of social security expenditure, for example, in the health sector, was increasingly criticized (for Britain and Germany see Lindner Reference Lindner2004: 101–18). As a reaction to these criticisms, the ISSA started to discuss ways to improve the efficiency and reduce administrative costs in various branches of social insurance. In the late 1960s, topics like the use of punch card systems, calculating machines, or early computers were regularly discussed at the ISSA's meetings, and several reports were commissioned on the issue (see also figure 1; Bulletin der IVSS [1962] 15 (3–4): 29–33; [1962] 15 (5): 144; [1962] 15: 6–10; [1965] 18 (8–10): 466–510; IVSS 1971).

Figure 1.

Technologies of trust: Delegates at the 13th ISSA congress (Washington, DC, 1964) follow a secretary demonstrating early data-processing machines at the US Social Security Administration in Baltimore. Note that the deeply gendered division of labor is also part of a setting dedicated to inspiring confidence in social security systems. Source: Bulletin ISSA [1964] 17 (10–12), nonpaginated picture pages.

In all these debates, however, and not just in discussions about this third meaning of social security, the concept's technical connotations had an important symbolic value. The public display of complex technical questions conveyed the message that social security experts were fully in control of social security systems and able to handle their growing complexity: that these systems were stable and plannable. In this sense, the technical meaning of social security also aimed at increasing the trust of the public in the management and administration of social security systems—and ultimately of the specific individual and social risks produced by the accelerated social and cultural change of the postwar decades (health risks, inflation risks, etc.). The display of technical expertise—or of mechanical machinery for the management of mass data in social security administrations (as in figure 1)—thus proved to be a technology of trust, improving the confidence in social security institutions during the postwar era (Porter Reference Porter1995).

It is difficult to assess the influence of these international debates, and their associated conceptions of “social security,” on national policy makers. Clearly, national welfare states did not develop independently from each other, certainly not in Europe. But much of the transnational learning process operated on a bilateral scale, through interactions between two state bureaucracies or binational expert relations and without the interference of international organizations (for the transfers between Germany and Britain around 1900 see Hennock Reference Hennock2007). International organizations were not irrelevant, however. Although they struggled successfully to promote and implement a coherent, forward-looking vision of social security among their member states, their influence on the development of national welfare systems was still significant. As the case of the ISSA shows, the influence of international bodies on national organizations was effective, as it built on three forms of soft power. First, international organizations fulfilled an important role in technical debates in that they offered a platform on which technical standards could be developed and the harmonization or coordination of different national welfare systems could be discussed. This was important, for example, when dealing with transnational migration. National actors were usually willing to adopt technical standards, such as the calculation of demographic scenarios or pension indexes in the 1960s (for the ILO see Rosental Reference Rosental2006). Second, international organizations offered backdoors for national policy makers and experts who sought to bypass national political arenas, for example, when their plans and claims could not be realized on the national level. The important contributions of US experts to the ISSA's activities have to be seen against this background, as does the participation of representatives of many developing countries in the postwar decades. By contrast, national policy actors tried to legitimate their national claims by referring to debates on the international level. Third, international organizations offered symbolic prestige for national actors, even when their purpose was merely to promote their national systems as exemplary models. Nationalistic window dressing was indeed a popular pastime in international organizations such as the ISSA—which makes these organizations an ideal prism and historiographical object for understanding the development of different national welfare states (Lengwiler Reference Lengwiler, Kott and Droux2013).

Competing and Complementary: Notions of Security in the Private Insurance Industry

Public welfare organizations, on the national and the international level, were not alone in promoting notions of social security in the postwar period. The private insurance industry propagated similar ideas, already as early as the late nineteenth century, with the rise of commercial life insurance. From the 1930s, the activities of the private sector formed an important parallel, if not contradictory, development to public debates on social security. Commercial life insurance, and how it depicted ideas of security after 1945, exemplifies this tension between public and private notions of social security. It is important to note that private insurance companies did not speak of social security, often not even of security when describing their activities. They rather focused on specific risks and their prevention. Still, they often addressed the semantic field of security, by pointing out how to avoid specific risks and improve the safety of their clients. For this, the insurance contract was just one instrument among others. Insurance companies also increasingly tried, over the twentieth century, to influence the attitudes and behaviors of their clients in order to preemptively avoid damages and potential insurance claims. With various propaganda activities and financial incentives, they attempted to sensitize their clientele, raise their awareness, and convince them to change their behavior. The ideas of security spread by such policies were based on principles of individual responsibility and individual agency of the insured clients. These commercial notions of security differed remarkably from understandings of social security in the public sector, but they nevertheless had an indirect influence on broader public policy and debate.

The VITA Life Insurance illustrates the characteristics of private concepts of security particularly well. Admittedly, the study of just one company offers only a narrow view of a much larger and more complex phenomenon. But VITA Life Insurance was a paradigmatic company from an exemplary country. Switzerland was, and remains, one of the leading insurance markets, consistently ranked among the top ten worldwide (OECD 2009: 24f.), and VITA figured among the key players in Switzerland. VITA was founded in the early 1920s by Zurich, itself one of the leading Swiss insurance companies for property and liability insurance. After the postwar inflation crisis had hit German and French life insurers, Zurich bought Swiss client portfolios off stricken German and French life insurers and integrated them into VITA. Thus, Zurich successfully entered the life insurance business (Lüönd Reference Lüönd1998). Eventually, VITA became one of the three big life insurance companies in Switzerland (the others were Winterthur Life and Swiss Life) (Lengwiler Reference Lengwiler, Borscheid and Haueter2012: 155f.). From its start, VITA operated on an international scale, not only in Switzerland but also in Belgium, Germany, France, Holland, Spain, and Italy (Lüönd Reference Lüönd1998: 110). The boom of the 1950s and 1960s brought exceptional growth rates also for the insurance industry in general and for VITA in particular. In 1967 alone, the company accepted 268,000 new insurance policies, a growth rate of more than 10 percent (VITA Ratgeber [1968] 144: 13).

What makes VITA an interesting case for the study of perceptions of security is that it also established a reputation for its innovative marketing activities and customer relations. In 1925, inspired by American life insurers (especially the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company), VITA became the first company in continental Europe to establish a “Health Service” (Gesundheitsdienst), an organization responsible for health promotion and disease prevention among VITA's clients. The idea soon found its followers; VITA became a model and was imitated by many European competitors (VITA Ratgeber [1969] 150: 3f.; [1954] 90: 4ff.).

VITA's Health Service aimed at increasing the longevity of its customers—for obvious financial reasons. It consisted of three components: (1) a free medical examination every other year; (2) a lump-sum contribution to the costs of any life-saving operation (up to 400 Swiss Francs; this would hardly cover expensive interventions, but was certainly welcomed by the insured, as Switzerland did not yet have a national scheme for sickness insurance and most private schemes did not cover hospitalization); and (3) a free quarterly magazine for the promotion of health, called the VITA Ratgeber (Vita Advisor, published since 1929; VITA Ratgeber [1956] 96: 6). The introduction of the health service was a success. The medical check-up was highly popular (more popular than with comparable US companies), not least because the VITA—unlike its American competitors—allowed its customers to choose their own doctor and did not ask to see the results of the medical examination. The number of check-ups funded by the company quickly rose from around 8,000 examinations in 1936 to 25,000 in 1967—most of which were performed by the family doctor. In the 1950s and 1960s, around 60 percent of all clients in Switzerland were receiving or awaiting free examinations at any given time (VITA Ratgeber [1954] 90: 4ff.; [1956] 96: 4ff.; [1968] 146: 14). The physicians apparently used the examinations to help individual patients prevent heart disease. Statistical analysis of VITA's clientele indicated that the investment was profitable. The clients who undertook regular check-ups had a higher life expectancy than the rest of the insured—a finding that VITA was quick to highlight in its advertising (VITA Ratgeber [1944] 47: 24).

An analysis of the articles in the VITA Ratgeber reveals three main security-related concerns: physical risks, psychological conditions, and the measurement of human life in general. On the physical level, the articles reflect widespread concern about the rise of chronic disease, in particular heart disease and cancer. The pages of the VITA Ratgeber are full of warnings about the classic triad of risk factors: alcohol, smoking (i.e., tobacco), and an unhealthy diet (cholesterol; e.g., VITA Ratgeber [1963] 126: 9–13; [1951] 75: 12ff.). Significantly, these risk factors are symbolically linked to major cultural changes of the postwar decades, namely the gains in prosperity and rising living standards, together with the spread of a consumer culture in the new middle classes. On the one hand, wine, cigarettes, and the daily cutlet all stood for the social ascent of the working classes. On the other hand, they also symbolized the health risks of the new middle-class lifestyles. The VITA's answer to these health risks, based on the widely popular expertise of nutrition science, was to reinvent and redefine traditional forms of dietetics: balanced nutrition, supplemented by vitamins, mineral nutrients, and micronutrients, for example in the form of fruit, vegetables, salads, milk products, and wholemeal bread (VITA Ratgeber [1963] 126: 12f.). Against this backdrop, VITA's warnings against such risk factors mirrors widespread fears and doubts about the dark side of the consumer-oriented lifestyles of the postwar decades.

A second and related concern of VITA's health promotion was preventing psychological disorders, mainly discussed under the heading of stress. Here, the pages of the VITA Ratgeber offer multiple warnings about the detrimental consequences of accelerated rhythms of work and lifestyles in general, against the “painful race against the clock” (VITA Ratgeber [1950] 72: 12f.). Modern, stressful lifestyles were criticized as leading to nervousness and corroding the autonomic nervous system (VITA Ratgeber [1951] 75: 10f.). It was in this historical context that leisure activities were fundamentally redefined. Until now, leisure was connoted as the playful alternative to the disciplined workplace, or as a form of escapism from the ordinariness and banality of the working days. Now, leisure was redefined as a healthy recreation from the damages of the professional life. Leisure time should be used for relaxation, animation, and for any form of mental or physical balancing: sports, music, reading, card games—or any other satisfying hobby (VITA Ratgeber [1968] 145: 12–14; [1968] 146: 1). Since the mid-sixties, the VITA Ratgeber increasingly recommended various forms of gymnastics against stress (VITA Ratgeber 136 [1966]). The campaign culminated in 1968 with an initiative of the VITA Life Insurance to build a nationwide series of jogging courses in forests, the so-called VITA Parcours. These parcours consisted of a course of two kilometers with twenty posts for gymnastics exercises. Every major town in Switzerland ultimately had its VITA Parcours. They became widely popular and were perhaps the most important single factor for promoting jogging in Switzerland (VITA Ratgeber [1968] 145: 7ff.; [1970] 152: 6f.).

Finally, the VITA Ratgeber was concerned with the valuing of human life, and in particular working life. Of course, since the late nineteenth century actuarial calculus had provided economic expressions for the value of a life and thus an instrument for the commodification of life. In the 1960s, the VITA used this knowledge to promote insurance—an indicator that actuarial terminology had become commonplace among its clientele. In 1968, VITA assessed the value of a single life at an average sum of 700,000 Swiss francs, a sum which could rise—depending on one's earnings—to a maximum of 5 million francs (VITA Ratgeber [1968] 143: 14). Similarly, mortality rates and longevity statistics were common themes in the pages of the VITA Ratgeber. VITA pointed to the differing life expectancy between men and women, and the fact that the life span also depended on specific diseases and the unhealthy habits that produced them. The VITA journal worked hard to decipher the “secret of a long life,” drawing on the booming discipline of gerontology and its multicausal explanations of longevity (VITA Ratgeber [1970] 153: 5ff.). The message was clear: those who died before their average life expectancy were to be held personally responsible for the lost years of productivity (VITA Ratgeber [1966] 136: 5ff.). The belief in scientific, specifically medical progress—a belief clearly promoted by VITA—made it possible to see increasing longevity as an irreversible trend (VITA Ratgeber [1963] 123: 2ff.). In any case, life insurance was able to provide security against all these risks: for those facing premature death, it compensated for incremental or catastrophic loss of income; and, for others, it provided guidance on how to remain healthy.

The way in which insurance corporations like the VITA understood notions of security and prevention was therefore based on the responsibility of the individual and preventive forms of individual self-governance (for a similar argument see Petersen and Lupton Reference Petersen and Lupton1996). Such approaches not only competed with public notions of social security, but also increasingly transformed them from within public welfare institutions. In several European states, public-private systems of welfare and mixed welfare economies emerged or were reinforced during the postwar decades (Katz and Sachße Reference Katz and Sachße1996). Private insurance corporations and nonstatutory insurance associations—friendly societies, private pension funds, or the life insurance business—often fulfilled important roles in delegated public welfare systems in which the state declared a specific insurance compulsory, while the administration of the scheme was still managed by private actors (Hacker Reference Hacker2002; Klein Reference Klein2003; Leimgruber Reference Leimgruber2008; Pearson Reference Pearson2003). Thus, individualistic notions of risk and security, popularized by private insurance corporations, eventually fed into public debates on social security—a process that eventually gained momentum after the 1970s. In Switzerland, for example, during the postwar decades, private occupational pensions expanded more quickly than public old-age insurance, before they were put together into an integrated three-pillar system of old-age insurance in 1984, in which private traditions of insurance played a significant role. The field of sickness insurance was also dominated by private insurance funds and their individualizing insurance traditions (Leimgruber Reference Leimgruber2008: 263–79). In France and Germany, too, professional associations with their private insurance schemes influenced the expansion of public old-age, unemployment, or sickness insurance (Conrad Reference Conrad1994; Mares Reference Mares2003). In Britain, old-age insurance operated in a two-tier system, and during the postwar decades, the growth in old-age pensions was mainly driven by the expansion of corporate and private forms of insurance (Harris Reference Harris2004: 6f.). These mixed economies of welfare have to be taken into account when analyzing the public discourses of social security. Beyond this direct influence, the private insurance industry also shaped notions of social security in indirect ways. By providing private insurance plans for individuals (as their essentially private business), insurance corporations helped to spread a precautionary approach and practices of prevention against individual risks like illness, disability, or death.