Universal Conscription, the Military, and Welfare State Development in Europe

与西方福利国家出现的标准描述相反，本项目认为西欧社会政策和教育立法的开端在很大程度上受到军事利益和政府权力野心的影响。这些政策领域的军事起源以及军队的相关作用迄今为止一直被比较福利国家研究广泛忽视。19世纪下半叶，普遍征兵制的普及和军事技术的迅速进步，在军事、强权政治和国家干预之间建立了至关重要的因果联系。这两种发展都与工业化的推进和人口结构的转变相吻合，并导致了工业化大规模战争的时代。在这种背景下，人口的规模和教育水平以及公共卫生问题对军队的战斗力和国家权力的野心变得重要起来。所谓人力资源的数量和质量方面的军事关切被视为社会和教育改革的导火索。本文将对大约1860年至1920年期间的五个西方国家进行比较分析，并采用计量经济学方法对这一论点进行实证检验。

Contrary to the standard account of the emergence of the Western welfare state this project argues that the beginnings of social policy and education legislation in Western Europe were significantly shaped by military interests and the power ambitions of governments. The mili-tary origins of these policy areas and the related role of the military have hitherto been widely neglected by comparative welfare state research. The spread of universal conscription and the rapid progress in military technology during the second half of the 19th century created the crucial causal links between the military, power politics and state intervention. Both de-velopments coincided with advancing industrialization and demographic transformations and gave rise to the age of industrialized mass warfare. Against this backdrop, the size and edu-cational level of the population as well as public health issues gained importance for the combat power of the military and national power ambitions. Military concerns in terms of the quantity and quality of the so-called human material are regarded as triggers for social and educational reforms. A comparative analysis of five Western countries over the period from ca. 1860 to 1920 as well as econometric methods will be employed for testing this argument empirically.