‘Welfare Does Not Know Any Borders’: Negotiations on the Transnational Assistance of Migrants before the World Wars

Abstract

Abstract Today, the tensions between European conceptions of the welfare state and transnational migration are a heatedly debated issue. Little is known, however, about how the challenges of migration were addressed in the early phases of welfare state formation. Nevertheless, in the historiography the assumption is widely held that the rise of modern welfare policies around 1900 fostered the nationalist exclusion of foreigners. This article aims at qualifying this assumption by highlighting how the welfare of cross-border migrants became a topic of cross-border deliberations. It centres on the plan for an international convention on the assistance of foreigners, which was promoted by the International Congresses on Public and Private Assistance and taken up by a diplomatic conference in Paris on the eve of the First World War. On the agenda was the task of finding a formula that could guarantee migrants equal access to social services, although this proved to be a difficult goal.