Human Rights and the Welfare State: An Exploratory History of Social Rights in the Postwar Netherlands
Introduction
During the Second World War the concepts of welfare state and human rights were both developed to a significant extent – as part of a future ordering of the world. Although contested, the concept of the welfare state continues to be a predominant approach to ordering society in Western Europe.1 The concept of human rights also received new attention during the war. After 1948, when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in particular during the 1970s, it became increasingly common to refer to this framework.
Although there appear to be interesting entanglements in the history of these concepts the relationship between the two has hardly been investigated. To mention just two entanglements: a) both the welfare state and human rights seem to be part of a humanitarian narrative in which human dignity and equality play a leading role and (b) whereas the concept of the welfare state was generally quite popular until the 1970s and unpopular after this decade, for the concept of human rights it was the other way around.
In this paper I will first investigate such entanglements by combining elements of the historiographies of human rights and of the welfare state. After describing some main features from these historiographies I will focus in particular on the historiography of the social rights of migrants in the Netherlands.2 In the second place I will investigate the use of the social rights concept in Dutch political debates after the Second World War, because this concept has been used in the contexts of both human rights and the welfare state.3 Such analysis involves a historicization of the concept of social rights: instead of following the definitions of social rights in the literature, as I do in the case of the social rights of migrants, my investigation focuses on how historical actors have used social rights.
For the Dutch case, I will argue that human rights and welfare provisions have been put into separate compartments. This separation can be explained through analyzing how the relation between individual and community was framed since the Second World War. In the first decades after the war the so-called ideology of personalism, in which the individual was seen as embedded in society, was important for both the concept of human rights and the concept of the welfare state. Because of this common ground there was no need to base the welfare state on human rights or vice versa. Since the 1970s human rights and the welfare state were no longer part of the same ideology, but they had both to do with a renewed belief in the autonomous individual. This belief enabled the human rights movement in fighting violations of individual freedoms worldwide and inspired neoliberalism to fight the welfare state. By investigating the Dutch case, this paper will deepen our understanding of how relations between the state, individuals and humanity were framed in postwar Europe and how this framing has since affected the in- and exclusion of people in the welfare state.
▻http://zapruderworld.org/journal/archive/volume-3/human-rights-and-the-welfare-state-an-exploratory-history-of-social-r
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