Zimmermann's book covers, in five chapters, the entire period during which the Hungarian welfare state came into being. The three main chapters deal with the years 1848 to 1914, and examine poverty policy, social reform, and state intervention, as well as the central state's social policy. For this, Susan Zimmermann uses a broad and impressive range of administrative, political, and legal primary sources to demonstrate that the nascent Hungarian welfare system, including local poor relief and private charity, can be characterized as fragmented, minimalist, and repressive. She argues that in the case of the Kingdom of Hungary social provision had hardly anything to do with the degree of neediness among the poor but rather with power struggles and structures. Newly created health and accident insurance schemes, child protection measures, housing, as well as unemployment and labour market policies were instruments of the ruling classes. They were used to discipline and deter not only industrial workers but also the mobile poor, female domestics and agricultural workers.
Divide, Provide, and Rule is based on a contribution, published in 2010, to a German-language general handbook on the history of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918. It was translated into English to make the Hungarian case available to the international academic community and “to serve as a point of reference for a new international and transnational history which draws a more realistic picture of the past and present of inequality and exploitation within and between the countries and regions of Europe” (p. xii).
Unfortunately, the content and structure of the book, which in its English-speaking context stands as a monograph, were not adapted to an international audience that is primarily interested and specialized in the comparative history of poverty, welfare states, and inequality, but that may have hardly any historical knowledge regarding the Habsburg Monarchy or Hungary. Historical contexts – presumably covered by other sections of the original handbook – are missing from the narrative. As a result, it lacks necessary information on the Hungarian political and parliamentary system, its political parties, demography, geography, as well as on the socio-economic conditions of the urban and rural classes. This information is important if one is “to lay the groundwork for systematic comparison with other countries and contexts” (p. 3). To those familiar with recent historical research, especially on the development of the welfare state in rural countries, Zimmermann's descriptions will sound very familiar and not at all surprising. The task of seeing the broader significance of the author's findings and of situating them in a comparative framework is left entirely to the reader.
Zimmermann's account also invites critical appraisal in relation to the ambivalences of welfare policy. Without providing substantial evidence for her assertion, Zimmermann characterizes liberal politics as purely repressive. She herself contradicts this view when she argues that the Hungarian Liberal Party laid the legal groundwork for a progressive housing policy (p. 63). This is one of several examples in which her analysis could have profited from taking into account the conceptual richness of recent research on the history of poverty, poor relief, charity, and social insurance, and where a systematic application of innovative theoretical frameworks could have contributed to making sense of such paradoxes. Instead of simply replacing the term “politics of repression” with the term “politics of exclusion” (p. 19), the author could, as promised in the introduction, have focused on describing systematically the specifically Hungarian mixture of both inclusions and exclusions for different actors, phases, and places. This framework might also have helped to reveal possible nationalist motives for the politics of exclusion directed against the mobile poor (Roma) and non-Magyar people who lived within the borders of the Kingdom of Hungary. One notices that “Magyar nationalism” is mentioned only once (p. 50), and wonders if nationalist policies of Magyarization from the 1880s onwards would not have served as a good explanation of why Hungarian politicians and bureaucrats placed such an “astonishing” emphasis on the protection of children (pp. 48–56).
Given recent research on religiously motivated charities and how their structures essentially fed into the formation of welfare states in Europe, Zimmermann's argument that it was only the “international environment” (pp. 84–85) that gave an impulse to new welfare policies in Hungary does not appear plausible either. On the contrary, in her comments on the photographs in the appendix – religiously motivated charity is mentioned only in passing in the main body of the text (pp. 8–10) – Zimmermann explains that the institutional welfare provided by hundreds of women's organizations, charities, and foundations “remained a significant feature of poverty policy throughout the period” (p. 173). Remarkably, the question of how denominational charities in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society might have shaped the transformation of Hungarian welfare policies “from below” remains entirely unaddressed.
It is astonishing that in such a highly contentious and politically relevant research area the author manages not to refer to historians of the communist period – without further explanation. I wish she had reflected on the discontinuities pervading the historiography of the early welfare system in Hungary. Also, it remains unclear how the Kingdom of Hungary fits into the broader historical master narratives of a modernizing world. For example, Zimmermann describes the progressive role of municipal social policy in the city of Budapest (p. 67) and of relief structures in several other cities, but she fails to connect that analytically to the historiographical debates on the role of innovation in urban social policies in the inclusionary or exclusionary structures of subsequent modern welfare states and social insurance systems. By the same token, agrarian social policy is hinted at, but its concrete context, starting with the number of farms and people employed in agriculture and stretching to information on land laws or popular political ideology, is never elaborated upon.
The book comes with a comprehensive bibliography of sources and the literature as well as a comprehensive index of organizations, people, and places. It contains, too, a selection of photographs depicting poor people, philanthropy, and working life around 1900. Here again, for the non-Habsburg expert a map of the Kingdom of Hungary as well as a chronology with dates of important events, laws, and the founding dates of organizations would have been helpful. In terms of readability, the choice of thematic chapters without a comprehensive analytical structure to support them produces a lot of redundant paragraphs and too many footnotes referring to other chapters, turning the account into a somewhat cumbersome read. Also, the English translation – aside from containing a lot of German-language idioms – suffers from a series of flaws: important and recurring terms such as poor relief, settlement law, and child protection are often translated inaccurately and used incoherently throughout the book.
Despite the critical observations this book elicits, it is certainly an important achievement. It has made the case of Hungarian social policy under the Habsburg Monarchy more accessible to the English-speaking academic community interested in the development of the welfare state.
