Multicultural Challenges and the Recession of the Welfare State: The British Case in the 1940s-1960s

Abstract

The impact of multicultural diversity on the welfare state is becoming a critical agenda in the globalized world where every nation state has experienced a multicultural transition. The underlying assumption of such a debate can be named as the diversity and redistribution trade-off hypothesis. This paper tries to answer to the trade-off hypothesis in a different way. Instead of providing another empirical data, I trace back to the early stage of welfare state in the 1940s Britain where the ideas and rationale of the welfare state had just started. I suggest republican ethos of the 1940s in Britain as a main rationale of the welfare state and examine the meaning of republican ethos and its relations with increasing ethnic diversity. To clarify republican ethos as the underlying philosophy of the welfare state, this paper reviews Beveridge’s social insurance plan (1942), Butler’s Education Act (1944), and Bevan’s National Health Service (1948). This paper also analyzes the 1948 British Nationality Act, the 1958 race riots, and the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act as mutually influenced events by the fluctuation of republican spirit. Through such examination, I argue that one should blame the deterioration of republican institutions rather than increasing number of ethnic minorities as the reason of recession of the welfare state. Since British republican spirit of the 1940s presupposed communitarian solidarity, the active role of the state, and education of faithful citizens, waning republican ethos mainly resulted from the weak role of the state as well as society as an agency of formative politics, that is, their inefficient battle for implanting the sense of common humanity and battering prejudice against ethnic minorities. Although political agitation surrounding ethnic minorities do influence the recession of the welfare state, if people exclusively credit the trade-off hypothesis, it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy which unfairly stigmatizes ethnic minorities under the well versed propaganda against strangers.