Aiqun Hu

As a Research Associate in the World History Center in 2014 I focused on research to complete my book manuscript entitled "The Global Social Insurance Movement since the 1880s."  As a global history of social insurance, this proposed book is built on my coauthored article with Professor Patrick Manning.  My book develops a theoretical framework labeled “interactive diffusion” which emphasizes two-way interactions between transnational policy actors and domestic policy agents in developing, promoting and spreading social insurance ideas and institutions around the world since the 1880s. This book argues that the global social insurance movement began with German social insurance legislation of the 1880s, which stimulated the formation of the 1912 Lenin principles of social insurance that evolved into the Soviet model associated with Stalin in the 1930s.  Social insurance is defined as any governmental programs providing income compensations for work injury, sickness, maternity, old-age, and unemployment, and is often viewed as the “historical core” of the welfare state.  This book further argues that the global social insurance movement proceeded throughout the twentieth century, involving almost all the countries in the world; it was not until the 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism, that it reached its peak.  From the 1990s, however, the Soviet model collapsed with the socialist systems, whereas the German model remained the dominant form despite the rise of the World Bank’s neoliberal model of privatization.