Can Bismark save us?

Big, long article on the situation. This time, with allusions to Bismark.
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link:http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55347.htm

Flailing States: Anglo-America Loses its Grip
By Pankaj Mishra

July 14, 2020 “Information Clearing House” – The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States…
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……Few narratives are more edifying, as economies tank and mass unemployment looms, than the account of the ‘social state’ that emerged in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. ‘The state must take the matter into its own hands,’ Bismarck announced in the 1880s as he introduced insurance programmes for accident, sickness, disability and old age. German liberals, a tiny but influential minority, made the usual objections: Bismarck was opening the door to communism, imposing a ‘centralised state bureaucracy’, a ‘state insurance juggernaut’ and a ‘system of state pension’ for idlers and parasites. German socialists saw that their Machiavellian persecutor was determined to drive a wedge between them and the working class. Nevertheless, Bismarck’s social insurance system wasn’t only retained and expanded in Germany as it moved through two world wars, several economic catastrophes and Nazi rule; it also became a model for much of the world. Japan was Germany’s most assiduous pupil, and the Japanese, in turn, inspired China’s first generation of modern leaders, many of whom spent years in Tokyo and Osaka. Despite the defeat and devastation of the Second World War and the US occupation, Japan has continued to influence East Asia’s other late-developing nation-states: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam.

What made Germany such a compelling prototype for Japan? It is that Germany was a classic ‘late developer’ – the archetype of all nation-states in Asia and Africa. It unified only in 1871 and began to industrialise nearly a hundred years after Britain. Its leaders had to cope with the simultaneous challenges of rapid mechanisation and urbanisation, the disappearance of traditional livelihoods, the growth of trusts and cartels as well as trade unions, and an intensifying demand, articulated by a vibrant socialist movement, for political participation.

Buffeted by socio-economic changes and rising inequality, Germany faced early on what Japan and every other late-developing nation was forced to confront – the ‘social question’. Max Weber put it bluntly: how to ‘unite socially a nation split apart by modern economic development, for the hard struggles of the future’? Weber was among the conservative German nationalists who saw the social question as a matter of life or death. Military and economic rivalry with Britain was a daunting enough prospect for their fledgling state. But, as disaffection increased among the classes uprooted and exploited by industrial capitalism – a political party representing the interests of the working classes emerged in Germany decades before it did in Britain – the fear of socialist revolution also preyed on the minds of German leaders.

They could not set about removing impediments to individual freedom in the way their counterparts in laissez-faire Britain were then doing, nor could they entrust economic affairs to the invisible hand of the market. As the deliberations of the influential Verein für Socialpolitik (Association for Social Policy) between 1872 and 1882 reveal, unfettered economic liberalism was seen as a threat to institutions and to a still fragile national unity. The safest way to defuse the volatile social question, the association decided, was to ensure state-guaranteed protection for citizens exposed to extreme socio-economic tumult and radical insecurity – what Bismarck, seeking to outmanoeuvre his socialist opponents, described as ‘moderate, reasonable state socialism’.

In Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), Daniel Rodgers showed that many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries returned from stays in Germany with ideas that would inform the New Deal. Little, however, is still known about the global history of this German-devised state – what W.E.B. Du Bois, who was in turn-of-the-century Germany as a student, described as ‘the guardian and leader of the social and industrial interests of the people’. It’s not surprising that the social state receives scant attention in boosterish Anglo-American accounts of the making of the modern world. Milton Friedman claimed that postwar Japan and South Korea were exemplars of open, competitive markets; Francis Fukuyama credited the prewar successes of Germany and Japan to ‘economic liberalism’. It’s also true that the social question did not until recently seem as critical in Anglo-America as in late-developing nations. Britain, the first major imperialist power of the modern era, successfully combined its early industrial and scientific revolution with slave labour and land grabs from Fiji to the Caribbean. Socialism stood little chance in a country where habits of deference to the ruling classes were (and remain) deeply entrenched.

Alexander Hamilton is a rare example of an early American internationalist who saw strong states as playing an essential role in the hard struggles of the future. But Americans, busy forging a nation from the white masters of a slave society, could afford to ignore him…..see link….”