From social fragmentation to peaceful social cohesion: Historical and future themes

Beginning in the early 20th century, a few economically advanced Western states began to develop democratic welfare regimes with the aim of stabilizing and building peaceful, egalitarian societies. Certain key characteristics of these transformations set them apart from all earlier or contemporary socio-political regimes. Social peace on the principles of inclusion, democracy, equality, and solidarity was an essential and concomitant condition for the development of these welfare regimes by stabilized states, based on increased taxation and social transfers that consolidated the loyalty of all or most social classes. Intersecting ideas of liberalism, constitutionalism, democracy, and socialism formed a necessary ideational framework for the successful emergence of a peaceful social compromise. By 1945, however, war exhaustion and the defeat of the fascistic regimes enabled a much more widespread consolidation of the social democratic formation with developed welfare regimes. In the late 20th and into the early 21st centuries, the social state form withered under the influence of economic stagnation, growing inequality, and neoliberal ideology. But the erosion of social solidarity and then the threats of climate change and pandemics have severely altered the interrelationship of state and society in such a way that only a planetary understanding and solidaristic structure can begin to solve the new, enormous problems facing the biosphere as a whole.