HERE AND NOW
575
The crucial question, to which no answer can yet be given, is whether
this concern will remain limited to a tiny segment of the population,
driven wild with frustrated reachings towards transcendence.
• In its own right, the welfare state does not arouse strong
loyalties. It seems easier,
if
no more intelligent, to die for King and
Country, or the Stars and Stripes or the Proletarian Fatherland than
for Unemployment Insurance and Social Security. The welfare state
makes for a fragmentation of publics and, at a certain point, a decline
in political participation. By one of those accursed paradoxes history
keeps throwing up, the welfare state seems to undercut the vitality
of the democratic process even while strengthening both its formal
arrangements and its socioeconomic base.
But again a word of caution.
It
should not be assumed that in
a country like the United States, despite the rise of group interest
politics and the atomization of social life, the traditional claims of the
nation no longer operate. For they do, even if in a muted and more
quizzical way. Millions of people still respond to the call of patriotism
and the rhetoric of democracy, even in their corniest versions. The
centrifugal tendencies set into motion by the welfare state must always,
therefore, be seen against a background of historical traditions and
national sentiments which lie deeply imbedded in collective life.
• The welfare state cannot, within the limits of the nation-state,
cope with the growing number of socioeconomic problems that are
soluble only on an international level or do not really fit into the
received categories of class or group conflict.
As
Richard Titmuss
says:
It is much harder today to identify the causal agents of change - the
microbes of social disorganization and the viruses of impoverish–
ment - and to make them responsible for the costs of "disservices."
Who should bear the social costs of the thalidomide babies, of urban
blight, of smoke pollution, of the obsolescence of skills, of automa–
tion, of the impact on the peasants of Brazil of synthetic coffee
which will dispense with the need for coffee beans?
• The welfare state provides no clear or necessary outlook con–
cerning the role of the nation in the modem world.
It
is almost com–
patible with any foreign policy, despite our too-easy assumption that
domestic liberalism
is
likely to go together with restraint abroad. The
welfare state can be yoked to a foreign policy which
~aves
Titoi
t
