Abstract
The article focuses on the critical moment when the idea of equality entered international law. The article argues that a political claim to equality of all human beings surfaced at the ...international level already in the 1920s and 1930s, long before human rights were discussed at the United Nations. The International Labour Organisation (ILO), established in 1919, provided the venue for delegates from non-European countries or territories—most of them confronting some form of colonialism—to raise their voices against the exploitation of labour in India, China and other places under the domination of colonial powers. The delegates’ idea of equality was present in arguments attacking racial hierarchies and in arguments criticizing unequal treatment in ‘native labour’ relations. The universalistic idea of the equal worth of all human beings and the idea of equal treatment was advanced to de-legitimize narrow concepts of equality based on race.
The book is an in-depth study of the origins and the trajectories of the law governing social policies in Brazil, China, India, and South Africa, four middle-income countries in the global South with ...a history in social policy making that starts in the 1920s. The policies of these countries affect almost half of the world’s population. The book takes the legal framework of the policies as a starting point, but the main interest lies behind the letter of the law: What were the objectives and goals of social policy over the course of the last 100 years? What were the ideas, ideologies, and values pursued by relevant actors? The book comprises four country studies and a comparative study. The country studies concentrate on the political and social context of social policy making in Brazil, China, India, and South Africa as well as on the ideas, ideologies, and values underpinning the constitution, statutory laws, and case law that frame and shape social policy at the national level. The country studies are complemented by a comparative study exploring and describing the commonalities and differences in the ideational approaches to social policies across the four countries, nationally and – in the formative decades – internationally. The comparative study also identifies the characteristics that make Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, and South African social policies distinct from European social policies. With its emphasis on law and drawing on legal scholarship, the book adds a new dimension to the existing accounts on welfare state building, which, so far, are dominated by European narratives and by scholars with a background in sociology, political science, and development studies. This book is relevant to specialists and peers and will be invaluable to those individuals interested in the fields of comparative and international social security law, human rights law, comparative constitutional law, constitutional history, law and development studies, comparative social policies, global social policies, social work, and welfare state theory. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Why did »equality« become prominent in European societies based on hierarchy during the Enlightenment? What does »equality« imply for societies, politics, or legal systems? The contributors to this ...volume draw on various historical case studies, from visionary practices in revolutionary France and the collection of data on the poor in 19th-century Germany, to claims raised under the minority regime of the League of Nations and the anti-discrimination politics of the UN and India. The dynamics of universalizing equality are contrasted with a concept asserting that equality must be limited to and by order. The contributions thus explore concepts of equality from the perspectives of history and law and show that practices of comparing were essential when it came to imagining others as equal, fighting discrimination, or scandalizing social inequalities.
Für die Nachkriegsgenerationen in Deutschland ist Demokratie eine Selbstverständlichkeit. Doch welche Spielräume hat besonnene demokratische Abwägung in Zeiten globalisierter Märkte, Rating-Agenturen ...und Expertenkommissionen? Brauchen wir neue Formen demokratischer Teilhabe und Entscheidungsfindung? Mit Hauke Brunkhorst, Horst Dreier, Burkhard Hirsch, Julian Nida-Rümelin und Volker Wulf/Marén Schorch diskutieren renommierte Autoren aus Wissenschaft und Politik Schwachstellen unserer Demokratie und weisen Wege zu ihrer Überwindung.
The article investigates the relevance of UN‐sponsored economic and social rights for social citizenship, commonly understood as a set of social rights granted on the national level. Do UN‐sponsored ...economic and social ‘rights’ promise social citizenship? The article cautions against quick assumptions that draw simply on the wording of these rights. An in‐depth historical analysis demonstrates that the advocates of economic and social rights propagated several ideas (liberalism, developmental thinking, socialism), mostly unrelated to the idea of social citizenship. Only later, in the 1990s, did the reading of these rights shift significantly, testifying to a new ideational consensus among states. Empirical data extracted from all the States Parties reports filed under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (1977–2011) indicate that, at least with respect to poverty, important rights under the ICESCR are nowadays understood so as to incorporate elements of social citizenship, obliging states to not neglect individual over collective welfare.
The article explores how national social policy ideas and UN-sponsored international social rights interrelate, historically and recently. Based on UN documents of the 1940s and 1950s, the article ...argues that UN-sponsored social rights — the "global social" — originally did not primarily reflect welfare statism (as taken for granted today), but drew on competing ideas (liberal welfare statism, developmental thinking, socialism). Based on an analysis of the state reports under the Social Covenant from 1977 to 2011, the article also argues that the states' reading of the UN social rights became more homogeneous over time. Only from the 1990s did essentials of welfare statism spread globally. This recent reading of the "global social" focuses on poverty and basic rights, such as the right to food and housing, with instruments like social assistance and measures enabling access to health services, education and land. The article draws on a global database of UN documents created by the author.
This Guest Editorial explores whether the concept of citizenship, which originated in the city and the nation‐state, travels to the globe and what global citizenship could mean. Introducing a ...collection of related articles, we focus on social citizenship. We discuss conceptual issues, including modifications of T. H. Marshall's concept of social citizenship, and point at empirical evidence that global social citizenship is taking shape: International human rights have come to be interpreted as encapsulating social citizenship, and are part of multi‐tiered social citizenship; ‘having rights’ is a meaningful expression in the global realm, including binding obligations of states under international human rights, negotiations in multiple sites or even ‘insurgent citizenship’ from below; institution building in the global South – social cash transfers for the poor, land rights or non‐state welfare production in informal settings – is transforming European conceptions of ‘the social’. Global social citizenship materially underpins notions of cosmopolitan belonging and activism.
