SOCIAL SECURITY, SOCIAL INEQUALITY 193
3.5 years and among women by 2.6 years, with East Germans on the low
end. Just twenty years later, these diff erences had shrunk to 1.3 and 0.2
years, respectively.^6 Additionally, since the turn of the millennium, the
varying attitudes toward the welfare state and social justice have become
less pronounced as a result of changes on both sides of the old Wall. This
chapter looks more closely at such ambivalent aspects of sociopolitical
integration while seeking to situate the system change of 1989/90 within
a longer social history perspective.
In places where the welfare state has put the brakes on the market, the
politically regulated access to transfer incomes, social infrastructures,
and social services has had a decisive impact on the livelihood of citizens.
Alongside families and markets, welfare regimes are the third hub around
which social relations revolve in modern societies, and their signifi cance
has increased steadily over the course of the twentieth century. Welfare
regimes sculpt life courses and defi ne the social positions of individu-
als in that they reduce, limit, legitimize, and even produce inequalities.^7
Given the centrality of such issues for the lives of citizens, it makes sense
to analyze how the basic patterns of social security have changed in East
and West Germany since the 1970s in terms of sociopolitical leitmotifs
and management practices, as well as the awareness that problems exist.
Going a step further, then, how did these changes impact the empirical
development of social inequality? Such an analysis not only looks at a
fi eld of politics that was decisively shaped by the division and reunifi ca-
tion of Germany, but also it examines sociohistorical developments that
follow their own distinctive long-term rhythms of change. It thus provides
insight into the relationship between transformation-related and long-
term exogenous factors that have induced shifts in social inequality.
“The Golden Years”? Welfare and Work in East and
West Germany around 1970: Two German Welfare States
After the fall of the Third Reich, both German states developed distinct
welfare regimes that generally faced the same kinds of issues, but tried
to deal with them diff erently. Especially during the formative years of
the early postwar period, each side was strongly driven by the desire to
clearly set itself apart from the other German state. In doing so, they drew
on traditions that had coexisted “in tense juxtaposition to one another”
during the Weimar Republic.^8 The West German welfare state began to
expand steadily in the 1950s. By ensuring and then elevating the social
status of employees, the growing welfare state made work less of a com-
modity, thereby reducing the underlying tensions between capital and