Immigration, Social Cohesion and

Political Reaction Bill Jordan

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/immigration-social-cohesion-and-political-reaction-bill-
jordan/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Social Value in Public Policy Bill Jordan

https://textbookfull.com/product/social-value-in-public-policy-
bill-jordan/

Resisting Theology, Furious Hope: Secular Political

Theology and Social Movements Jordan E. Miller

https://textbookfull.com/product/resisting-theology-furious-hope-
secular-political-theology-and-social-movements-jordan-e-miller/

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/

The Arab Uprisings in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia:

Social, Political and Economic Transformations 1st
Edition Andrea Teti

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-arab-uprisings-in-egypt-
jordan-and-tunisia-social-political-and-economic-
transformations-1st-edition-andrea-teti/
Successful Educational Actions for Inclusion and Social
Cohesion in Europe 1st Edition Ramon Flecha

https://textbookfull.com/product/successful-educational-actions-
for-inclusion-and-social-cohesion-in-europe-1st-edition-ramon-
flecha/

Ethico-political Governmentality of Immigration and

Asylum: The Case of Ethiopia Dilek Karal

https://textbookfull.com/product/ethico-political-
governmentality-of-immigration-and-asylum-the-case-of-ethiopia-
dilek-karal/

Wretched Refuse The Political Economy Of Immigration

And Institutions Alex Nowrasteh Benjamin Powell

https://textbookfull.com/product/wretched-refuse-the-political-
economy-of-immigration-and-institutions-alex-nowrasteh-benjamin-
powell/

Far right political parties in Australia

disorganisation and electoral failure 1st Edition
Jordan Mcswiney

https://textbookfull.com/product/far-right-political-parties-in-
australia-disorganisation-and-electoral-failure-1st-edition-
jordan-mcswiney/

Diversity and Contact: Immigration and Social

Interaction in German Cities 1st Edition Karen
Schönwälder

https://textbookfull.com/product/diversity-and-contact-
immigration-and-social-interaction-in-german-cities-1st-edition-
karen-schonwalder/
Immigration, Social
Cohesion and Political
Reaction

Bill Jordan
Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political
Reaction
 Bill Jordan

Immigration, Social
Cohesion and Political
Reaction
Bill Jordan
Social Policy and Social Work
University of Plymouth
Plymouth, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-52707-5    ISBN 978-3-030-52708-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover Pattern © Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To the memory of Jean Packman—partner, colleague and inspiration
 Acknowledgements

For helpful discussions and suggestions, I would like to thank Sarah

Jordan, Linda and Colin Janus-Harris, Simon Pearson, Alexandra Allan,
Franck Düvell and John Ingham.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction: Migration, Integration and Pandemics—

Historical Perspective  1

2 Solidarities Under Conditions of Mobility 19

3 Global Capitalism, Inequality and Insecurity 33

4 Family, Health and Well-Being 45

5 Terrorism and Instability 59

6 Policies for Sustainability 69

7 Alternative Scenarios or Back to the Future? The Case of

the UK 79

8 The Growth in Coercion 89

9 Conclusions 97

References105

Index111

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Migration, Integration

and Pandemics—Historical Perspective

Abstract Although globalisation has transformed every aspect of the

world’s economies, polities and societies, by accelerating movements of
money, goods and people across national borders, it has been the recent
migration of refugees that has in many ways been most transformative of
political life. Whereas wars—both civil strife and international conflict—
have always given rise to movements of people, the persistence of long-­
drawn-­out hostilities in the Middle East, and especially Syria and the
Lebanon, have caused mass migrations towards Europe, while those in
South and Central America have led to similar movements to the North.
These in turn have played a great part in the transformation of democratic
politics, weakening traditional ruling parties, and giving rise to authoritar-
ian regimes or significant nationalistic mobilisations. The coronavirus pan-
demic has added a dimension to these processes.

Keywords Globalisation • War • Authoritarianism

Movements of people have recently far exceeded those of the immediate

post-war period. For example, in the UK, the migrant population in long-­
term residence rose by over half a million between 2011 and 2015 (BBC
News on-line, 6th March, 2015); by November 2018, another quarter of
a million immigrants a year were arriving, but the proportion from the
European Union (EU) was falling, and that from the rest of the world

© The Author(s) 2021 1

B. Jordan, Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2_1
2 B. JORDAN

rising. Asylum applications peaked between 2004 and 2007, but have con-
tinued at high levels ever since. After 2016, fewer students from EU coun-
tries came, but this was more than compensated by the increase in non-EU
immigration (Migration Statistics, November, 2018). By the end of 2019,
there were estimated to be a million undocumented (irregular) immi-
grants in the UK, similar numbers in Germany, and 800,000 in the USA
(BBC Radio 4, News, 14th November, 2019).
But now a new factor has put a sudden brake on these population
movements, as nation states rush to close their borders against the spread
of the coronavirus Covid-19. Although economic globalisation is much
too strong a force to make this a feasible policy goal, the pandemic has
slowed economic growth, caused mass lay-offs of workers and launched
whole new institutional innovations. The idea that President Donald
Trump would authorise the payments of something like Universal Basic
Incomes (UBIs) to US citizens would have seemed wildly implausible only
a fortnight before the pandemic struck the USA.
In this book, I shall argue that it has been the dominance of politically
driven movements of people (in which religion, too, has played a major
role) that has made this century’s mass migrations distinctive.
Industrialisation, which came first to the UK, then to Western Europe and
the USA, and finally to Russia and the Far East, was achieved mainly by
movements of peasants and other rural workers into factory jobs in cities,
mostly within national borders (the huge trans-Atlantic migration from
Ireland during and after the famines of the 1840s took several decades).
Now refugees from civil wars, most with religious undertones, have com-
bined—first with economic and now with pestilential factors—to acceler-
ate these movements.
There have been other examples of mass migration, especially from the
Soviet Union after the First World War, and from former communist states
to the West after 1989. But the scale and consequences of present-­day
movements have been exceptional; in combination with the other features
of globalisation, they have challenged our democratic political systems and
now also our health systems.
After all, the main features of Democratic Party politics were estab-
lished towards the end of the nineteenth century, and remained in place
until very recently. Conservative (Christian Democratic) and socialist
(Social Democratic/Labour) parties ruled throughout in Western Europe,
with the mercifully brief exceptions of the rise of Fascism in Italy in the
1920s, Spain in the following decade through to 1970s and Nazism in
 1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRATION, INTEGRATION… 3

Germany from the early the 1930s to the end of the war. Even in Russia
and Eastern Europe, the Soviet period seems quite short from the perspec-
tive of the present day; in Hungary, for instance, it was crumbling within
a decade of its establishment. The impact of globalisation is likely to be far
more lasting than that of those versions of Fascism or Marxism; those of
the pandemic are even more difficult to predict, as institutional innovation
becomes a feature of some unlikely regimes.
This book will analyse the relationships between policies for political
and economic integration at the national level, and those for regulating
movements of people across borders. During the period of industrialisa-
tion in the USA, mass immigration, notably from Ireland and Eastern
Europe, was supplying labour power for the new factories and construc-
tion sites. After the Second World War, the reconstruction of the German
economy, and its recovery as an industrial power, were achieved with large
supplies of labour power from Polish and East German refugees. But there
is no such demand in today’s post-industrial Western economies; these
refugees have arrived in countries with long-standing mass unemploy-
ment, and in which even the service sectors, expanding sources of employ-
ment for many decades, have begun to experience the impact of automation
through Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Jordan 2020a). The impact of the
pandemic has rapidly exposed the shortcomings of policies to sustain
employment levels; earnings subsidies have quickly had to be replaced by
income guarantees for those struck down.
The tension between social cohesion and free movement has always
been recognised in capitalist countries and in unions of states such as the
EU. The goal of policy has been to take specific measures to sustain soli-
darities between backward, rural districts (and nations) and dynamic,
industrialising ones (most recently, ones in which services deploying IT
and other digital innovations have flourished, and ones where manufactur-
ing has declined, or agriculture has remained predominantly on a subsis-
tence basis). Various forms of support and subsidy have been used to assist
those activities and areas losing ground, and particularly disadvantaged
citizens and districts within them. Suddenly now the main transfers are
between the healthy and the sick.
Before the coronavirus crisis, these measures seemed to have sustained
political stability in Western European countries since the Second World
War, and to have given rise to a successful transition to democracy in the
former Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe. There were
few signs of resentment or dissent among the latter during the years after
4 B. JORDAN

1989; rather, they seemed to compete with each other in their keenness to
comply with the terms of membership of the EU, and to embrace the
reforms required. If the older generations grumbled and looked back with
some nostalgia, the young took every opportunity to travel to the West for
work and study, to learn English in particular, and to become good EU
citizens. As a professor employed by the EU to teach democratic politics,
social policy and social work in Slovakia and Hungary in the 1990s (none
of which had existed under their old regimes) I experienced friendliness
among most colleagues, and enthusiasm among most students.
However, there was always a price to be paid for globalisation, and it
was those made redundant by traditional industries, and the less-skilled
staff in the expanding service sectors, who paid it. Not only did they
endure periods of unemployment and see their wages and salaries fall to
match those in the industries that had been shut down; they also experi-
enced precarious work and earnings (Standing 2011), often requiring
supplementation by state benefits (Jordan 1973, 1987, 1996, 2008).
Crucially, this work was enforced by the benefits authorities, by means of
sanctions (cuts) and disqualifications, the coercive conditions imposed on
claimants, both employed and unemployed (Haagh 2019a, b).
Above all, the insecurity engendered in populations as diverse as France
and the USA contributed to mass protests against governments, and cre-
ated the climate for a rise in authoritarianism (Standing 2017; Jordan
2019, 2020a, b). Immigration was blamed for this insecurity, even in
regions with low levels of inward movement, when the true causes were
long-term failures in systems for social integration. For instance in the
Mediterranean French city of Marseilles, the whole northern urban exten-
sion has become a segregated concentration of immigrants, originally
from Israel, then Algeria and most recently from the Middle East; some
terrorist incidents and high rates of unemployment of those with Muslim
names, together with the election of a Mayor from the former Front
National, have brought an erosion of the French republican tradition of
laïcité. So far, drug gangs rather than ethnic conflicts have constituted the
main social structures, but economic forces could soon cause this to
change (BBC Radio 4, Le Divide, presented by Lucy Williamson, 25th
March, 2020).
In the USA, UK, Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, the rise in authori-
tarian regimes and parties could be seen as related to the replacement of
many state benefits and services designed to cover whole national popula-
tions from contingencies of ill-health, illiteracy and environmental
 1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRATION, INTEGRATION… 5

degradation, as well as poverty, by private agencies and companies, often

international in scope. These were claimed to be able to identify varying
needs of beneficiaries and service users, who in turn could select the qual-
ity they required, and to contribute (in fees and charges) in line with their
means. The hierarchy of such membership organisations did not include
the poorest and most vulnerable, who were left to the (coercive) provision
of states (Jordan 1996, 2005, 2019). These were, of course, most suscep-
tible to the coronavirus pandemic.

Reconciling Migration and Social Integration

In the 1950s, the end of post-war austerity signalled a rapid burst of eco-
nomic development, in which societies were transformed. In every West
European country except the UK (where this process had occurred before
the First World War) there were large flows of population from the coun-
tryside to the towns and cities. This involved the building of new residen-
tial districts (Power 1997); it also soon required large flows of migrant
workers from Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece and the Southern
regions of Italy), and from Turkey, as well as from the colonial territories
of the UK (the Caribbean and South Asia) and France (North Africa), to
supply the growing demand for labour power (Freeman 1979).
The processes of integration of these migrants into systems for political,
economic and social cohesion among their citizens were uneven, and var-
ied considerably between countries. Only after economic growth began to
slow down, and rivalries between native citizens and immigrants began to
sharpen, was the need for active measures for integration recognised. For
instance, the establishment of the European Economic Community
addressed issues of trade and labour standards for several decades before it
turned to migration between its constituent states. Free movement was
not achieved until the 1990s, and then accompanied by restrictions on
access from outside the Union, applied especially to the citizens of the
post-communist countries which eventually gained membership in the
first decade of the new century; ‘mobility is socially divisive’ (European
Foundation 1990, p. 10). Only the UK and Ireland introduced visa
schemes for skilled workers; the other EU states blocked access from
Eastern and Central Europe until their members joined the Union in the
next century.
It is easy to forget how this whole history, both in terms of social inte-
gration and free movement, was accomplished in an environment of
6 B. JORDAN

threat. The US still had large numbers of military personnel in Europe for
much of the period, and the imminent danger of conflict among European
states was a major motivational force in the steps taken. It was these dan-
gers, rather than the desire to create a new kind of European social citizen-
ship, which shaped institution-building; the integration of populations
was a secondary goal to the need to defuse risks of armed conflict.
So the re-integration of Europe, which had been split in the aftermath
of the Second World War, had also eventually led to Europe-wide policies
for the integration of migrants between member states after the collapse of
the Soviet Bloc in 1989. But at this time the integration of citizens in each
member state’s systems for social cohesion was still not settled or secure.
As a result, the strains on the European social model of the financial crisis
of 2008–09 were most obvious where this had the biggest impact, and
made integration and migration once more politically contested.

Social Integration, Economic Development

and Political Stability

In each EU country, different mechanisms were used to reduce the risks

of organised disaffection. Whereas Stalin’s allies had used intimidation to
keep citizens in Central Europe in line, and his successors had brutally
punished the leaders of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and imprisoned the
ministers who implemented the 1968 Prague Spring reforms, his earlier
rejection of post-war Marshall Aid had signalled that German re-­unification
was not in prospect (Pulzer 1995). The Bonn regime was therefore
focussed on reconciling its security against threats from the East (espe-
cially in West Berlin) with measures to enable social integration.
The federal structure it adopted devolved many powers to the Länder,
still allowing the national regime to oversee the economy, mediating
between capital and labour. Forty per cent of coal and iron producers,
two-thirds of electricity-generating plants and the majority of the banks
were owned by the state. Trades unions were represented on boards super-
vising these, and banks were involved in processes of decision-making. As
part of this systematic cohesion-building, the most successful political
party, the Christian Democrats, and their ally, the Christian Social Union,
gained support from both Catholics and Protestants across the country,
and in both urban and rural constituencies (Judt 2006, pp. 265–7).
 1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRATION, INTEGRATION… 7

In Austria, the rival People’s Party, which represented Catholic and

small-town interests, and the Socialists, supported by workers in cities,
formed a Grand Coalition, in the face of the nearby threat from the Soviet
Bloc. The public services were also partitioned between them, so that the
issues could be negotiated through consensually structured institutions
(Bader 1966). Italy, too, gained stability through systems for redistribut-
ing resources to the backward southern regions; both industry and infra-
structure were controlled through state agencies, allowing extensive
patronage and clientelism, and deployed by the Christian Democratic
Party to keep the communists from holding power. This gave rise to seri-
ous problems of corruption in later decades, but it did allow the renais-
sance of the country’s economy and social cohesion.
Despite differences in both institutional structures and political alli-
ances, all these arrangements overcame historic conflicts and the extremist
brutality of the interwar years, to enable reconstruction, and eventually
rapid growth. They also saw large movements of population from back-
ward to dynamic regions, and growing incomes for their working-class
citizens. Charles Kindleberger’s (1967) account of the period argued that
‘the major factor shaping the remarkable economic growth which most of
Europe has experienced since 1950 has been the availability of a large sup-
ply of labour’ (p. 3), a ‘delayed Industrial Revolution’, exemplifying the
dynamic between a high-productivity, high-wage sector and a less effi-
cient, labour intensive one, as theorised by Lewis (1954)—a repetition of
the process experienced in the UK in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury (Kindleberger 1967, p. 22).
More significantly from an economic perspective, similar transforma-
tions occurred in Europe’s remaining Fascist dictatorships, Spain and
Portugal, in this period; in Spain, per capita income rose from $2397 in
1950 to $8739 in 1973. Smaller countries like Austria, the Netherlands
and Finland were also transformed into prosperous economies, with per
capita incomes to rival those of Germany and France. This helped to sta-
bilise democratic politics in these countries, with successful processes of
negotiation between formerly rivalrous classes and ideologies being estab-
lished. These forms of corporatism, more than the active engagement of
citizens or gains in their civil rights, were the characteristic themes of the
post-war period.
8 B. JORDAN

Welfare States and Transnational Migration

The 1950s were not an era in which democracies extended the social rights
of citizens in significant ways. Despite these increases in incomes per head,
the shares of GDP going to capital and labour did not vary either during
that decade (Kindleberger 1967, p. 3). The ‘social democratic moment’
came in the 1960s, as parties of the centre left gained power all over
Europe (including the UK). As social benefits and services embraced more
aspects of the economy and society, it was assumed that ‘the state … would
do a better job than the unrestricted market … in designing and applying
strategies for social cohesion, moral sustenance and cultural vitality’ (Judt
2010, pp. 360–1).
Hence the rising proportions of GDP spent by governments—from
27.6 per cent in 1950 to 38.8 per cent in France, from 30.4 per cent to
40.2 per cent in Germany, and from 34.2 per cent to 41.5 per cent in the
UK in the same period, with even faster growth in the Scandinavian coun-
tries. But at the same time as these measures sought to integrate national
citizens in a web of benefits and services, other policies for attracting for-
eign workers, without membership of several of these systems, were also
developing. Such immigrants were denizens rather than citizens.
In West Germany, this process had started in the late 1950s, with
recruitment from Southern Italy, soon followed by agreements with Spain
and Greece in 1960, Portugal in 1964, and Yugoslavia in 1968; but Turkey
became the main source of ‘guest workers’ once the southern European
states started their own processes of economic development. Indeed, the
proportions of the potential labour forces of these countries emigrating to
North-West Europe was comparable with the movements from rural to
urban Chinese districts in the last decades of the century. A quarter of the
Greek labour force and a third of the Portuguese emigrated, and these
countries were heavily reliant on remittances from migrant workers to sus-
tain their living standards in the last ten years of their dictatorships.
France and the UK attracted migrants from their former colonies, espe-
cially those in North Africa to the former, and the Caribbean to the latter,
in this period. In some cities, street conflict between indigenous and
immigrant groups broke out, and in Paris the police were accused in the
press of the murder of some 200 Algerian immigrants after a protest dem-
onstration. In the UK, there were ‘race riots’ in Notting Hill, London and
Nottingham; the slowing down of the economy in the 1970s gave rise to
fears of further tensions. Controls on immigration from the non-white
 1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRATION, INTEGRATION… 9

Commonwealth countries were introduced in a series of acts in the 1960s,

and the Race Relations Act of 1965 banned discrimination in public
places, supplied remedies for discrimination in employment and criminal-
ised incitement to racial hatred. In 1976, the Commission for Racial
Equality was created, all ahead of such developments in Europe.
Altogether, some 40 million foreign workers were reckoned to have
contributed to the industrialisation and urbanisation of Europe in the
1950s and 1960s (Böhning 1972). At the same time, autocratic regimes
in Greece, Portugal and Spain, which had blocked development, were col-
lapsing, and new, democratic revolutions enabled these countries to seek
membership of the European Community (EC), at the moment when
their economies were on the cusp of growth. It was at this moment that
the Community was beginning to address the issue of movement between
member states.

The Challenge to Cohesion of Free Movement

During the early years of the Community, despite the substantial overseas
colonial empires still ruled by France and Belgium, the member states still
conducted most of their trade with each other, and this proportion grew
during the boom years of the 1960s, extending to the new member states
as they joined. Thus the political motivation for the formation of the
Community was gradually displaced by economic factors; ‘The EEC was a
Franco-German condominium, in which Bonn underwrote the
Community’s finances but Paris dictated its policies’ (Judt 2010, p. 308).
After the economic downturn, the families of workers who had flooded
in from Southern Europe and Turkey continued to enter for settlement,
but after 1973, substantial numbers of Greek, Spanish and Portuguese
workers returned to their homelands as their economies started to develop
(Collinson 1994, p. 55). In 1988, the Cecchini Report concluded that the
Community’s Structural Funds would need to be doubled to offset the
potentially damaging effects of the single market for poor regions. That
year, the Council of Ministers determined that the emphasis of cohesion
policies was to be equally on the promotion of workforce mobility, the
creation of minimum social regulations and the support for marginal social
groups and regions.
This reflected a new recognition in economic theory of the complexity
of relationships between core and periphery, high-productivity and low-­
productivity regions. As a large, advanced economy, with increasing
10 B. JORDAN

returns to scale, attracted labour from a smaller, more traditional one, with
constant returns to scale, the gap between the centre and the periphery
could widen, as the latter came to specialise in traditional production and
to lose competitiveness (Markusen 1988; Krugman 1991). So the centre
could gain a permanent economic advantage, as its concentration of highly
skilled workers in turn led to increased movement from the less-developed
region. This theory cast doubt upon the Lewis model, and focused atten-
tion on the need to compensate backward regions for the sake of social
cohesion.
A more powerful influence pushing the European Community towards
new regulations and policies on migration was the sudden collapse of the
Soviet Bloc regimes after 1989, as the pressure for Westward movement
previously restrained by the Iron Curtain was suddenly released. But in
addition, global economic integration meant that transnational mobility
had become an integral part of world economic development, while politi-
cal instability in the Middle East was producing increased asylum-seeking.
This meant that the EC was required to develop a framework of law, policy
and practice on the control of immigration.
Meanwhile, structural unemployment had become a feature of the
economies of member states, and there was pressure on public spending to
support the versions of citizenship established in the 1960s. The challenge
of populations on the margins of their economies, often concentrated
around the fringes of cities, and with high proportions of minority-ethnic
households, was confronting the governments of member states (Power
1997). These new issues emerged at the same moment that cohesion
became an explicit goal of Community policies. Globalisation and the fall
of the Soviet regime intensified this challenge.
Furthermore, another branch of economic theory now informed the
supply of public services like education, health and environmental protec-
tion, starting in the USA and UK. This was the Public Choice school,
which regarded nations as ‘clubs’ and citizens as ‘members’ who shared
the costs of these collective goods (Buchanan 1965, 1968; Cornes and
Sandler 1986). The EC was a kind of federation of such clubs (Tiebout
1956; Inman and Rubinfeld 1997), allowing circulation of members
between them. But in relation to outsiders (non-citizens), the marginal
gains from allowing large-scale entries from the east and south were seen
as far smaller than the costs (in terms of training, integration and the costly
effects of competition, crowding and congestion). It therefore set itself
the task of controlling access at its external borders.
 1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRATION, INTEGRATION… 11

Managed Migration and Social Integration

The need for a common approach to immigration began to be part of the
shift towards open borders within the European Community in the early
1990s, as it became the European Union by the Maastricht Treaty of
1993. This meant that millions of citizens of the former communist states
to the east had good reasons to cross the border without work permits, in
order to increase their earnings as undocumented workers. Conflicts in the
Balkans and in Africa added to the stream of refugees from the Middle
East in search of asylum, and had focussed governments’ concerns on
supranational institutional innovations (Collinson 1994, p. 63), ahead of
the free movement achieved under the Schengen Agreement. The author-
ities recognised that ‘the suppression of internal frontiers … could entail a
risk that the absence of checks at internal borders will render any control
of immigration impossible. … This has led Member States to recognise
the need for a common approach’ (European Commission 1991, p. 8).
So a programme was set up to co-operate over border control regimes,
especially in Southern Europe, and to harmonise visa policies, asylum laws
and admission procedures (Lavenex 2001), as well as various co-operative
arrangements for police and border-agency activities. Simultaneously,
negotiations with representatives of the Visegrad Group of candidate
accession countries (Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia) established
systems for acting as some kinds of buffers to migration from countries
further to the east, with training programmes for border police forces
(Jordan and Düvell 2002, p. 42). The right to free movement was pre-
sented as a part of the new European citizenship which accompanied the
formation of the EU, along with political elements aimed at giving it dem-
ocratic legitimacy.
Thus the rhetoric of social inclusion and cohesion was deployed just
when national systems for social integration were under the greatest strain,
from mass unemployment and slow growth, especially in the newly re-­
united Germany. The European Social Model was criticised as an over-­
ambitious attempt to protect the earnings and security of employees,
leading to a labour market which was incapable of adapting to competi-
tion from the newly industrialising countries of the Far East and South
America. The UK had chosen a path of ‘flexibility’, with much more
short-term and part-time work, mainly for young people and the high
numbers of women who had returned to the labour market after having
children. The economists who influenced its government policy had
12 B. JORDAN

compared Continental Europe unfavourably with the USA, arguing that

more inequality of salaries, easier hiring and firing, limited job security and
social protection all enabled lower unemployment and faster growth
(Tachibanaki 1994, pp. 2–3; Layard and Nickell 1994, p. 284).
In the theories of this school, mobility was the key to labour-market
flexibility. In the US version of these policies, local authorities and states
sought to attract capital investment from the whole world, by investing in
infrastructural facilities and public services, within an overall economic
environment of mobility. They sought to minimise the costs associated
with unemployment and local recessions through this mobile workforce
(Wildasin 1997; Devillanova 2001). In the model underpinning such poli-
cies, politicians, bureaucrats and trades unions were all seen as seeking to
maintain rigidities, inefficiencies and inflexibilities; curbs on mobility
increased unemployment and slowed growth (Minford 1991).
In these ways, the model espoused by market-minded Anglophone
economists, and largely adopted in the UK, tried to reproduce the condi-
tions for the post-war boom, with large numbers of workers moving from
hard-pressed regions to more dynamic ones. They saw the European
Social Model as to blame for the low growth rates of Continental member
states of the EU, and for concealing mass underemployment through early
retirement schemes and ever-expanding numbers claiming disability
benefits.
Although the whole rationale of European social policy resisted such
approaches, the massive differential between wage levels in the former
communist countries and those in the West created just the potential for
this dynamic after 1989. Rather than allow differential wage rates to accel-
erate movement across the line of the former Iron Curtain, member states
developed limited schemes for access of specific occupations, such as sea-
sonal agricultural workers, and used the prospect of future membership of
the Union to persuade Central European former communist states to
make their borders more secure against irregular migration (Lavenex
2001; Cyrus and Vogel 2000).
Following the decision of the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl,
to pursue unification with the former communist East, there was massive
investment in the latter; subsequently German firms invested heavily in
other post-communist states (Judt 2010, pp. 638–43). The Western world
polarised between the US-UK model of privatisation in collective life
(with an underclass of state serfdom), and ‘Fortress Europe’, with both
 1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRATION, INTEGRATION… 13

social cohesion and free movement for citizens, but continuing impover-
ishment and the risk of disorder on its Eastern fringes.
After the financial crash of 2007–08, most of the Continental countries
proved resilient, with Germany bailing out Greece and other South
European states through massive loans. With policies for social integration
overstretched in the latter, the alternative of migration was attractive to
many. It was the best-educated among the younger generation who could
most readily adopt this life-strategy, leaving some districts and regions of
their home countries in a depressed state.

Conclusions
On 21 April 2020, the BBC World Service ‘Business Matters’ reported that
irregular migrants from Asia and Africa, employed as domestic servants in
the USA, were being laid off during the pandemic because of the reduced
incomes of the households in which they were working. This encapsulated
many of the issues raised by globalisation—the income inequalities embod-
ied in the servants’ situation, their vulnerability as immigrants without
proper status, and the impact of a rapidly spreading world pestilence. A
similar situation was developing as poor Indian women were attempting
to walk home, having been sacked by households in the oil-rich Arab states.
This book aims to analyse the impact of recent decades of historical
developments on the generation coming to adulthood in the past decade.
Since the financial crash, the European Social Model has been less con-
vincing as a blueprint for the integration of its younger citizens. Its rival,
seeking greater flexibility, including the recruitment of migrants from
other continents, pursued by the UK and USA, has also experienced prob-
lems, leading to the Brexit vote in the 2016 referendum on EU member-
ship in the UK, and the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA.
Above all, neither version has created sufficient decently paid employ-
ment for this generation, despite its improved standards of education.
Instead, many have been forced to take temporary or part-time jobs, with-
out prospects of career development or occupational qualification. In his
account of the growth of this ‘precariat’ (a term first used in France),
Standing (2011) points out that this is a world-wide phenomenon; as
many as half the workforce in South Korea, and a third in Japan, could be
seen as belonging in that category.
Yet it was in North Africa and the Middle East that this economic
demography led to the most disruptive political instability. The ‘Arab
14 B. JORDAN

Spring’ of 2011 toppled the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes and led to the
civil war against the Gaddafi government in Libya; refugees from these
conflicts forced the EU to re-appraise its free movement rules. The French
and Italian governments called for the suspension of the Schengen
Agreement in the face of increased influxes of refugees (the most numer-
ous from North Africa to Italy, but most bound for France and beyond, to
Northern Europe or the UK). But the anger, alienation and anxiety which
fuelled the Arab Spring was also evident in the demonstrations in Greece
and Spain during May, 2011, blaming Social Democratic governments for
their failure to integrate this generation into their economies, societies or
polities.
The stagnation of wages and salaries, even during periods when profits
were growing fast, and financiers were getting fabulously rich, has been
the characteristic of capitalism for several decades, and these demonstra-
tions showed that the new generation were no longer willing to accept the
situation. The rise of nationalistic parties, even in the Scandinavian coun-
tries and the Netherlands, all questioned the EU’s project for reconciling
social integration with free movement.
The clearest winner from these developments was China, yet even there
recent political issues in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and a slower rate of
economic growth, have signalled issues over the sustainability of its model.
In spite of its success as a supplier of infrastructural facilities all over the
world, it may have reached a stage in its own economic development anal-
ogous to the 1970s in Europe.
Above all, the stagnation or decline of the salaries of median earners in
all the developed countries, including Germany (Kelly 2011), has posed a
challenge to progressive political parties and the global reputation of lib-
eral democracy. In the Iowa caucuses of the Democratic Party for the
selection of an opponent for the presidency to Donald Trump, the large
number of candidates struggled to make a convincing case for measures
that could offer improvements in living standards and prospects. As in
many other countries, Trump’s policies had reduced unemployment, but
many were working in three or more jobs simply to cover their every-
day costs.
Curbs on immigration were, according to one commentator, for Boris
Johnson ‘second only to EU withdrawal itself in establishing the founda-
tions of the post-Brexit Britain over which he wishes to preside’, and the
motivation for them ‘primarily political, not economic’. They were ‘about
driving a wedge into the opposition parties’ and ‘to impress the voting
 1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRATION, INTEGRATION… 15

public rather than to solve labour market issues’, because ‘arguments

based on national identity are proving to be tailor made for splitting the
social democratic constituencies that used to maintain parties like Labour’
(Kettle 2020, pp. 1–2). In other words, in the more recent context,
opportunistic populist leaders could seek to undermine social cohesion for
political gain, exploiting fears over immigration.
Into this unstable situation, with social divisions and resentments
expressed in demonstrations and protest over several years, that the coro-
navirus pandemic struck. It is not too fanciful to compare its impact with
that of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, which killed more
than a quarter of England’s population, and brought about the end of
feudal economic relations, allowing the peasantry to become freeholders,
and setting in train the centuries-long processes by which Britain became
the first country to adopt liberal civil, and eventually political, rights
(Macfarlane 1978). I shall therefore explore the possible role of the coro-
navirus, which has already caused the Trump and Johnson administrations
in the US and UK to adopt measures for public health and income main-
tenance which they had previously foresworn, as a potentially radical turn-
ing point in economic and social policies.
So my purpose in this book is therefore to examine the interactions
between immigration and social cohesion as elements in the politics of
democratic capitalist countries, and argue that present mainstream
approaches, which have been threatening the liberal democratic order, are
now suddenly under pressure from the pandemic. In order to avoid esca-
lating disaffection, extremism and a public health catastrophe, radical new
programmes will be required.

References
Bader, W. B. (1966). Austria Between East and West, 1945–62. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Böhning, W. R. (1972). The Migration of Workers in the UK and the European
Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Buchanan, J. B. (1965). An Economic Theory of Clubs. Economica, 32, 1–14.
Buchanan, J. B. (1968). The Demand and Supply of Public Goods. Chicago:
Rand McNally.
Collinson, D. (1994). Europe and International Migration. London: Pinter/
Royal Institution of International Affairs.
16 B. JORDAN

Cornes, R., & Sandler, T. (1986). The Theory of Externalities, Public Goods and
Club Goods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cyrus, N., & Vogel, D. (2000). Immigration as a Side-Effect of Other Policies:
Principles and Consequences of German Non-immigration Policy. Paper Prepared
for the Project ‘Does Immigration Matter?’ Oldenburg: University of
Oldenburg.
Devillanova, C. (2001). Regional Insurance and Migration. Scandinavian Journal
of Economics, 103(2), 333–349.
European Commission. (1991). Communication from the Commission to the
Council and the European Parliament on Migration, SEC (19) 1855, Final.
Brussels: European Commission.
European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.
(1990). Mobility and Social Cohesion in the European Community: A Forward
Look. Dublin: European Foundation.
Freeman, G. P. (1979). Immigrant Labour and Racial Conflict in Industrial
Societies: The French and British Experience, 1945–75. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Haagh, L. (2019a). The Case for Universal Basic Income. Cambridge: Polity.
Haagh, L. (2019b). Public State Ownership with Varieties of Capitalism:
Regulatory Foundations for Welfare and Freedom. International Journal of
Public Policy, 15(1/2), 153–184.
Inman, R. P., & Rubinfeld, P. L. (1997). The Political Economy of Federalism. In
D. C. Mueller (Ed.), Perspectives on Public Choice: A Handbook (pp. 73–105).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jordan, B. (1973). Paupers: The Making of the New Claiming Class. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul (Republished 2019).
Jordan, B. (1987). Rethinking Welfare. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jordan, B. (1996). A Theory of Poverty and Social Exclusion. Cambridge: Polity.
Jordan, B. (2005). Social Policy for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity.
Jordan, B. (2008). Welfare and Well-Being: Social Value in Public Policy. Bristol:
Policy Press.
Jordan, B. (2019). Authoritarianism and How to Counter It. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Jordan, B. (2020a). Automation and Human Solidarity. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Jordan, B. (2020b). The Age of Disintegration: Nations, Collectives and Public
Services. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jordan, B., & Düvell, F. (2002). Irregular Migration: The Dilemmas of
Transnational Mobility. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Judt, T. (2006). Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Vintage Books.
Judt, T. (2010). Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents. London:
Allen Lane.
 1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRATION, INTEGRATION… 17

Kelly, G. (2011, May 22). Why the Squeezed Middle Is Here to Stay. The Observer.
Kettle, M. (2020, February 20). The Tory Points System Won’t Work – Except at
the Ballot Box. The Guardian (Journal), pp. 1–2.
Kindleberger, C. (1967). Europe’s Post-War Growth: The Role of Labour Supply.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Krugman, P. (1991). Geography and Trade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lavenex, S. (2001). The Europeanization of Refugee Policies: Between Human
Rights and Internal Security. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Layard, R., & Nickell, S. (1994). Unemployment in the OECD Countries. In
T. Tachibanaki (Ed.), Labour Markets and Economic Performance: Europe,
Japan and the USA (pp. 253–295). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Lewis, W. A. (1954). Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour. Manchester
School, 22, 159–191.
Macfarlane, A. (1978). The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property
and Social Transition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Markusen, J. R. (1988). Production, Trade and Migration with Differentiated
Skilled Workers. Canadian Journal of Economics, 21(2), 231–259.
Minford, P. (1991). The Supply-Side Revolution in Britain. Aldershot: Edward
Elgar/IEA.
Power, A. (1997). Estates on the Edge: The Social Consequences of Mass Housing in
Europe. London: Macmillan.
Pulzer, P. G. J. (1995). German Politics 1945–95. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London:
Bloomsbury.
Standing, G. (2017). The Corruption of Capitalism: How Rentiers Thrive, and the
Many Grow Poorer. London: Biteback.
Tachibanaki, T. (Ed.). (1994). Labour Markets and Economic Performance: Europe,
Japan and the U.S.A. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Tiebout, C. (1956). A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures. Journal of Political
Economy, 64, 416–424.
Wildasin, D. E. (1997). Factor Mobility, Risk and Redistribution in the Welfare
State. Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 97, 527–556.
 CHAPTER 2

Solidarities Under Conditions of Mobility

Abstract Post-war welfare states were systems of membership which

assumed stable national populations. From the early 1970s, these assump-
tions have been increasingly unrealistic, and governments have been
forced to take measures both to absorb immigrant populations and to
adapt their public sectors to a global market for collective goods. This
chapter analyses how these processes have been managed in an era of
growing disillusion with democracy.

Keywords Collective goods • Public sector • Democracy

The freedom to choose where to live and work is a fundamental right in

modern liberal democracies, distinguishing them from feudal societies in
which serfs were tied to specific estates, and authoritarian regimes where
mobility is either limited or directed by rulers. The moral equality of per-
sons is also a basic principle of democratic politics; yet liberal democracy
has no coherent theory of boundaries, or how members are chosen for, or
themselves select, political communities. These are the underlying reasons
why liberal democracy faces serious problems in reconciling the economic
decisions of footloose and competitive individual agents with the social
needs of more sedentary and vulnerable populations (Jordan and Düvell

© The Author(s) 2021 19

B. Jordan, Immigration, Social Cohesion and Political Reaction,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52708-2_2
20 B. JORDAN

2003, ch. 1). Pestilence knows no borders either; in a globalised economy,

coronavirus invaded every continent in little more than a fortnight.
More recently, an added dilemma has been posed by issues of environ-
mental sustainability. For example, the livelihoods and relationships with
their habitats of forest-dwelling tribes in Brazil and traditional villagers in
woodland Romania are both threatened by the incursions of loggers, and
the developers who are felling trees to make space for new houses, facto-
ries and farms (BBC Radio 4, ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, 6th
February, 2020). Such conflicts of interest have been parts of the histories
of capitalism’s advance in all nations, but the combination of globalisation
and democracy makes them anomalous and ethically challenging in our
present age.
The theory of boundaries and mobility can be addressed from a num-
ber of theoretical perspectives. First, that of national sovereignty claims
that secure borders and well-defined memberships are necessary condi-
tions for the international as well as the democratic political order of states.
This suggests that controls on immigration are necessary for equality and
justice among citizens, since countries could ‘export’ their political dissi-
dents by intentionally persecuting them, or deal with social problems by
dumping needy or criminal minorities on their neighbours (Weiner 2000).
Conversely, another school of thought argues that national boundaries
are increasingly irrelevant under globalisation, since other systems of
membership (international companies, with staff from many countries,
producing world-wide, or global social movements to resist pollution and
climate change) might be more relevant and effective for the understand-
ing of both mobility and belonging (Oates 1999). The UK after Brexit has
been presented by some (such as Professor Patrick Minford and Lord
Lilley) as a potential leader in such a global development (Waldegrave
2019, p. 84 and chs 9–12).
A third group of theorists point to migration as a contributory factor in
rising inequality and poverty world-wide, as mobility undermines the
institutional structures of welfare states. This might demand more exten-
sive and effective transnational schemes for income maintenance and
health care, with special attention to the developing countries (Bauman
1998; Cole 2000).
This chapter will address these issues from the standpoint of the chal-
lenges to social cohesion posed by a continuing rise in global mobility,
both economic and political. It will consider the role of financial interests
 2 SOLIDARITIES UNDER CONDITIONS OF MOBILITY 21

in this process (Shaxson 2018), as well as ones of democratic effectiveness

(Bartels 2016).
Some forms of mobility, of course, do not involve people in physical
movement between organisations or jurisdictions; electronic transfers
allow individuals to switch allegiance from one fund, firm, brand or club
to another without leaving their computer screens, and this applies par-
ticularly to movements of money, including international currency
exchanges. But this chapter will focus on systems involving interactions
between members, especially states and their citizens.
Historically, nomadic peoples, who paid no attention to political
boundaries, were a large proportion of the world’s population, and a few
do still exist in border regions, causing some puzzles for political authori-
ties. But in today’s world the main challenges to the sovereignty and
power of states come from economic organisations and their mobility, not
that of such tribes.
The potential for these challenges arises from the fact that new tech-
nologies have allowed international companies to supply many goods and
services, which required an expensive infrastructure of buildings and tech-
nology, and previously could not easily exclude those who had not paid for
them from their use. These had previously been treated as non-excludable
‘collective goods’, and provided by states. The obvious example is tele-
phone networks; governments bore the huge costs of installing wires and
cables, but now innovations like satellites and mobile phones have enabled
commercial companies to restrict access to all but their own subscribers,
who pay for calls and for internet connections.
More recently, governments have also chosen to contract out the tasks
of education, health care and public transport to companies, along with
many other formerly national and local government responsibilities, such
as prisons and the supply of water and drainage. The optimum population
and geographical size for each of these goods (from an economic stand-
point) may vary between them—hence the diversity of organisational
arrangements under which they have come to be provided.
Much of the employment in infrastructure services was heavy physical
labour, and over time in the UK, British workers were increasingly reluc-
tant to take it. After 1989, many immigrants from the former communist
states of Central Europe were recruited for these tasks. In 2011, it was
revealed that in the previous year there were 310,000 fewer home-born
people in employment in the UK, and 180,000 more foreign-born (BBC
Radio 4, Today, 11th November, 2011). In addition, the National Health
22 B. JORDAN

Service and the social care system relied heavily on professionals from the
European Union and the Commonwealth (Jordan and Düvell 2002).
As a result, the former public infrastructure facilities and the health and
social care systems were, by this time, contributing to immigration as
much as they were to social cohesion. These workers were valued, and for
the most part their contribution to the economy and society was recog-
nised, but their numbers, and their concentration in certain districts, cre-
ated opportunities for populist nationalist political parties to mobilise
those who felt insecure about their economic prospects (and who had
never been enthusiastic for the European Union). All of this meant that
immigration could be presented as a threat to social cohesion, even when
the causes lay in the individual and political choices of UK citizens
themselves.
Some economic changes did affect native populations’ employment
and earnings in adverse ways. In October, 2012, well into the ‘recovery’
from the financial crash of 2007–08, official figures on unemployment
were down, but full-time employment levels in the UK were still below
those of the spring of 2008. The increase was mainly in part-time work, a
quarter of a million in all, and much of this was reckoned to have been
involuntary; self-employment, mostly in a small way, had also grown (BBC
Radio 4, Today, 16th October, 2012).
The long-term impact of the recession also varied between age groups.
In 2013, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that the incomes of peo-
ple over 60 in the UK had risen by 1– 2 per cent since 2008, whereas those
of people in their 20s had fallen by 12 per cent (BBC Radio 4, News, 14th
June, 2013).
In general terms, these conditions in the UK labour market continued
to favour the opportunities for young, single men, especially those from
the EU accession countries, to find work, often with the intention of
returning to their homes after a few years. But many in fact stayed longer,
and some were joined by their families and settled.
In this chapter, I shall analyse how the boundaries associated with
national sovereignty, and with the systems previously providing services
such as education, health and environmental facilities, have become more
porous, as those with money, or with roles in international firms or agen-
cies, or in search of opportunities for higher wages, move between states;
and how the political priority for individual choice over social cohesion has
contributed to new forms of organisational mobility, and weakened
 2 SOLIDARITIES UNDER CONDITIONS OF MOBILITY 23

community solidarities. It has also, of course, provided vectors for illnesses

such as coronavirus.
All this has also contributed to mass movements of people without
proper immigration status, whose journeys are facilitated by the fact that
capitalism has transformed itself into a system of constant global move-
ment of commodities and employees (Jordan and Düvell 2002). Irregular
migration is, in turn, used as a rationale for the rise of authoritarianism in
national politics (Jordan 2019).

States and Social Cohesion

Nation states have been winning their autonomy from ancient Empires
ever since the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648,
and this process was completed with the independence of African and
Asian colonies of European powers from the 1950s onwards, and the
breakup of the Soviet Union after 1989. Unlike Empires, states (with
democratic claims on their citizens) sought cohesion through a wide range
of institutions, cultural as well as political and economic, through which
citizens could identify common interests with each other, even when they
were competitors in many fields.
Welfare states were the main means for forging the solidarities which
characterised programmes to re-create cohesion after the traumas of the
Second World War. Both globalisation and the privatisation of public-­
sector institutions now pose new challenges for cohesion-building, with
the risk that economic insecurity and disillusion with political leaderships
will contribute to populist, authoritarian movements.
From the perspective of national governments in the context of post-­
war insecurity and austerity, when the memory of pre-war mass unemploy-
ment and the threat of political extremism were still vivid, welfare states
offered the promise of social inclusion and greater equality of incomes.
Labour markets were reconstructed so as not to be simply competitive; the
Continental European model in particular was focussed on the growth of
overall living standards and of productivity. Unemployment insurance had
existed for many years, and it had not prevented employers from laying off
huge numbers of workers during the depression; they were now required
to make severance payments. The combination of these and minimum
wages meant that firms were given incentives to improve productivity,
rather than exploiting and then sacking their workers (Blanchard 2002).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Go to sleep, my
darling
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Go to sleep, my darling

Author: Winston K. Marks

Release date: November 8, 2023 [eBook #72069]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1958

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GO TO

SLEEP, MY DARLING ***
 Go to Sleep, My Darling

By WINSTON K. MARKS

If you're totally convinced

it's a man's world, don't
read this. But if in doubt....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Infinity November 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
At 46, Bertrand Baxter was a man's man, still struggling to adapt
himself to a smotheringly woman's world. His work, selling sporting
goods for Abernathy and Crisp Co., was his element. Not only was
he an ex-All American tackle, but his abiding love for sports had led
him into a business where he dealt almost exclusively with men.
Old Crisp had once told him, "Bert, if we had two more salesmen like
you we could fire the other twenty. You have a sixth sense dealing
with these coaches and school superintendents. They love you."
Yes, Bert Baxter could anticipate his male customer's requirements,
objections, moods and buying habits with an almost clairvoyant
insight. But give him a woman! He was licked before she opened his
catalog.
Women found him attractive enough. His six-foot-four, square-jawed
athletic prowess had given him the pick of the class of '29, including
the statuesque Rolanda. But to marry a woman and to understand
her were different matters: the former ridiculously easy, the latter
bewilderingly impossible.
The easy familiarity he enjoyed with men of the slightest
acquaintance was something he could never establish in his own
home with his own wife and his own daughters. Fate, as if to further
confound him, had presented Bertrand with four daughters.
Of all these females, Rolanda, Aileen, Grace, Norma and Annie, only
two month-old Annie was currently making sense to Bert Baxter.
That was because she was a baby, and not yet a female in the
baffling sense of the word. His other three daughters had had their
turns, but as they emerged from infanthood into childhood they
became unmistakable girl-children almost with their first mama-papa
lisps, and thereby removed themselves from Baxter's realm of
fathomable human beings.
He lay sleepless one November night beside the gently snoring
Rolanda, debating the wisdom of having induced her to try once
more to provide him with a son. Although Rolanda was forty at the
time, Annie had arrived without undue trouble, fitted immediately into
the Baxter feminine regime and established herself in Bert's heart
quite solidly, if only temporarily.
The misgivings that beset him were vague ones. Annie was the
apple of his eye, but in a few short months she would add to the
flooding tide of womanhood that swirled through his house,
squealing, giggling, moping, hair-curling, nylon-rinsing, plucking,
powdering, painting, primping, ironing, sweater-trading, lipstick-
snitching and man-baiting.
Too soon—much too soon—dear, understandable little Annie would
move off in her own miasma of perfume and verbal nonsense,
leaving Bertrand once again a lonely man in his crowded home.
The illuminated dial said precisely two o'clock when a tiny whimper
seeped through the adjacent wall from the nursery. Baxter was on
the verge of slipping into a doze, but it brought his eyes open.
The two o'clock feeding!
He loved Annie dearly, but it was high time she was omitting the late
feeding. It meant rousing Rolanda, who never heard the call. It
meant lights and commotion, short tempers, bottle-banging in the
kitchen. It meant disturbing the other girls, which occasioned a
slipper-shuffling parade to the bathroom with attendant flushing, tap-
turning, glass-rattling and ostentatious whispering that turned the hall
into a rustling snake-pit.
Don't wake daddy! He has to get up early.
Indeed daddy had to get up early if he hoped to enjoy his shower in
peace in the stocking-strewn bathroom.
"Go to sleep, Annie," Baxter said in the deep recesses of his mind.
"Go to sleep, my darling," he urged gently. "Please don't start the
circus! Let me rest. Go to sleep, my darling."
Annie's whimper faded. Stopped.
In the hazy realm between waking and slumber, it didn't seem
remarkable to Baxter. Not until he was stuffing his briefcase the
following morning did he recall that Annie had at last skipped her late
feeding. The memory of his urgent, silent pleading with her came
back, and he smiled to himself. If it were only that easy, he thought.
He had a strenuous day driving out to a rural school district and
rounding up five members of the athletic board to complete a nice
contract for basketball equipment. He dribbled an Abernathy & Crisp
basketball around the gym twelve times for the coach, lugged four
sample cases of uniforms up a flight of stairs, and made uncounted
round trips to his distantly-parked station wagon for afterthought
items to satisfy inquiries.
But he had energy enough to bowl all evening at the athletic club, of
which he was a board director. When he arrived home at ten o'clock,
a "bargain" in fireplace wood which Rolanda had purchased from a
late peddler was heaped across the short driveway and had to be
tossed into the basement before he could garage the car.
He had learned not to question Rolanda's bargains, regardless of the
time of day or night they occurred. She welcomed such criticisms as
occasions to strike for an increase in the household allowance. "Of
course, I wouldn't have to take advantage of these penny-savers that
you say cause more trouble than they're worth—if we could afford
another five dollars a week...."
So he changed clothes, threw in the wood, showered and sank
gratefully into bed. Rolanda was still wiping on cold cream. He
asked, "Would you please open the window before you jump in?"
"But it's cold out, dear."
"It's barely November," he pointed out. "We had that all out last year.
Closed windows only during blizzards and high winds."
"I know, dear, but summer's just over, and our blood's still thin.
Besides, we put on the electric blankets today."
Since, theoretically, expensive electric blankets were supposed to
add to one's security against chilling, the argument detracted not a
whit from Baxter's convictions, but he was too tired to pursue the
annual debate about chilling-versus-fresh air requirements.
He inhaled the dense mist of aromatic, warm, humid boudoir
essences and fell into exhausted slumber. His dream was a
recurrent one wherein he wandered barefoot through an echoing
chamber. He was a Lilliputian, searching the interior of Rolanda's
skull, a great, empty, reverberating dome. He had no notion for what
he was searching, but all he found were the roots of her yellow hair
sticking down through the pate.
The edge of his fatigue had just nicely worn off to that treacherous
point, where to be awakened would result in hours of wakeful
tossing, when the whimper came. It came again, and Baxter swam
up from the depths until he was half awake.
"Sleep, baby!" he urged. "Close your eyes and go to sleep, my
darling." His lips didn't move, and he was only dreamily aware of the
foolish hope that his good luck of last night might be repeated.
It worked. Annie quieted, went back to sleep and stayed asleep until
morning.

A week later Rolanda remarked about it at the breakfast table. It did,

indeed, seem that Annie had reformed her nocturnal habits; but
Baxter knew better. Each night, now, at the first whimper he sent his
silent, mental message winging through the plaster, lath and pink
wallpaper to the pink baby under the pink blanket in the pink crib.
Annie was still waking at two a.m. each night, but she was still
complying with his soothing thought-appeals.
That night, the whimper found him sleepless again. Starkly awake,
with eyes wide open, it seemed ridiculous to repeat such a foolish,
wishful-thinking process, and he refrained from doing so. Telepathy
was nonsense!
The whimper grew in volume, welled up into a full-throated wail that
prickled the short hairs of his neck. "Oh, no! Annie, for heaven's
sake!"
Without thinking further on it he slipped into his silent pleading. "Go
to sleep, baby. Go to sleep, my darling."
Annie had too much momentum to capitulate easily. He pleaded and
cajoled, and finally he mentally hummed three stanzas of "Rock-a-
Bye Baby."
The wail trembled and fell off into a few reluctant sobs. Annie was
comforted, reassured. Annie slept.

For all his preoccupation with sports and other manly extroversions,
Bertrand Baxter was not unimaginative. His stunning victory on this
seventh night was too dramatic to ignore. He said not a word about it
to Rolanda, but the following night he deliberately stayed wide
awake until Annie sounded off.
Instead of immediately flooding his infant daughter with the warm
reassurance and pleading requests that she sleep, Baxter let his
mind "feel" of the situation. He spoke softly to her in his unmouthed
mind-talk, and for the first time he became aware of a tiny but
positive mental response. There was a faint fringe of discomfort-
thoughts—a weak hunger pang, a slight thirst, a clammy diaper. But
mostly there was the cheerless darkness and a heavy feeling of
aloneness, a love-want, an outreaching for assurance.
As his thoughts went out he could sense that Annie did receive them
and take comfort from them—and the little physical hungers and
discomforts faded from her mind.
She felt reassured now, loved, petted, cosy and warm in the velvety
gloom, in the restful quiet.
He sensed the peace that settled through her, and the same peace
flooded through him, a rare sensation of security, understanding and
blind trust.
Annie slept. Baxter slept.
And then it was Saturday morning. Baxter stayed abed, yielding the
bathroom to his three teen-age daughters. Annie was still asleep,
too, so Rolanda was stretching leisurely beside him like a long, pink
cat. Noticing the time, she raised to an elbow and viewed him with
some concern. "No golf this morning? Aren't you well, Bert?"
Had he plunged out of bed to forage for his golf shoes as usual, she
would have grumbled about how it must be Saturday, and she
wished that she had a whole morning off each week to herself.
He replied slowly, "Later, maybe. Want to rest a little bit. Don't stare! I
feel fine. Just thinking a little."
She shrugged, put on her robe and entered the bathroom
competition.
Baxter lay waiting, eyes closed, concentrating. Then it came. The
sensation of gentle awakening. Light—at first just a diffused pink
light, then outlines forming: the ceiling fixture, the yellow-billed ducks
on the pale pink wallpaper, the round bars of the crib. The sensation
of movement, stretching, a glorious feeling of well-being.
Annie was awake.
Then in rapid succession, the sensation of wet diaper, cramped toe,
hunger pang, hunger pang!
Annie yelled.
The sound came through firmly and demandingly, interrupting
Baxter's concentration and breaking the remarkable rapport, but he
had proved to himself beyond all doubt what he had been dubiously
challenging: He had established a clear, telepathic entry into his
daughter's mind.

Now he was so excited that he forgot himself and tried to explain the
whole thing to Rolanda. She seemed to listen with half an ear as she
assembled breakfast. She didn't understand, or she misunderstood,
or she understood but disapproved—Baxter wasn't at all certain
which it was. When he finished she simply paused in her oatmeal
dishing, pulled her housecoat tightly about her and said, "Nonsense!
You went back to sleep after I got up. You're dreaming these things.
It is high time that Annie began skipping her night feeding."
But her eyes were narrowed cat-slits, and Baxter felt a positive
warning in them. He felt that since creation, probably no man had
actually penetrated a woman's brain to probe the willy-nilly logic that
functioned there:—functioned well, for somehow things got done, but
functioned in such a topsy-turvy manner as to drive a serious male
insane if he pondered it too long.
He retreated to the morning paper and said no more about it. Before
he left for the golf club he had another remarkable experience. He
stepped into the nursery and stared down at the adorable little pink-
cheeked Annie. He closed his eyes and sought her mind—and saw
himself standing above the crib—through her eyes! It was clear as a
TV image. In fact he noted that he needed a shave and looked quite
strange with his eyes closed.

In the days that followed Baxter became addicted to slipping into

Annie's innocent little mind at almost any hour of her waking. At the
office. In a customer's waiting room. Even out on the golf course
while waiting for a slow foursome to tee off ahead. Distance was no
obstacle to the telepathic rapport.
And he began to make fabulous plans. As Annie grew he would
follow her mental progress, investigating every aspect of her thought
processes to learn the key to womankind's inexplicable mind.
Through her eyes and other senses he would experience the
woman's world as it impinged upon her, and one day he would
fathom the deepest, eternal secrets of all womanhood.
Whether Rolanda divined his intentions Baxter never knew, but when
Annie was three months old she suddenly began resisting her
father's mental intrusion.
He first noticed it one evening right after Annie had been tucked in
for the night. Baxter was pretending to doze in his leather chair in the
den, but actually he had been keeping mental watch until Rolanda
cleared out of the nursery—for some reason he feared communing
with Annie while his wife was in the room.
Rolanda had come out, down the hall, stopped in the open door of
his den, and he had felt her gaze upon him for a long minute.
When she passed on without comment, Baxter sought to enter
Annie's mind and enjoy her nightly snugged-down feeling of
contentment. He probed gently, and to his surprise he met a barrier,
an impalpable resistance, a shutting-out that he had never
encountered. He pressed more firmly. Dim perceptions began to
come through to him, but they were dominated by displeasure
emotion.
Annie cried out.
Baxter withdrew instantly, feeling somewhat guilty. Then he tried
again.
Annie screamed.
Rolanda came down the hall, paused at his door and said, "What do
you suppose is the matter with her tonight? She always drops off."
Without waiting for an answer, she passed down the hall to the
nursery and comforted Annie to sleep. Baxter tried no more that
night.

It was the same each time he tried thereafter. Abruptly, Annie had
become irritable, intolerant of his probing. How she could understand
what was happening mystified Baxter, but he was determined to
retain contact. He kept pushing, gently but firmly, and although it
brought on some furious yells, he succeeded in making at least one
daily survey of his infant daughter's mind.
For a week Rolanda became increasingly hostile for no apparent
reason. Baxter felt that the tension that grew between them was in
some way connected with Annie, but his wife never spoke of it.
Never a particularly demonstrative woman, she became even colder,
and often he caught her regarding him with an enigmatical look of
suspicion.
As a long-sufferer to her moods, Baxter had no fear that an open
break might develop. His life was insured for $75,000, and Rolanda
was much too hard-headed to consider divorcing such a solid
"producer" of bread and luxuries as she and her female brood had
learned to enjoy.
Meanwhile, Annie's mind was becoming an even more fascinating
field for exploration. In spite of her resistance, Baxter's shallow
penetration revealed the amazing network of learning that daily
increased her web of knowledge, experience and stimulus-response
conditioning. Often Baxter pondered what a psychologist would give
for such an opportunity as this.
He became so bemused with his objective study that, the night Annie
withdrew her barriers, Baxter fell into her mind like a lion into a
game-hunter's animal pit.

He was, again, in his leather chair. Rolanda had just put Annie to
bed and passed his open door. He probed for Annie's mind and
leaned the heavy weight of his own strong mind on the expected
barrier. It was gone!
He sank deeply into his daughter's brain and caught his breath. He
had forgotten what it was like, this total absorption with her physical
and emotional sensations.
Annie was feeling good. Her stomach was full, she was warm, dry
and pleasantly tired from her evening romp. She stretched and
yawned, and a feeling of euphoria swept over Baxter.
Never had he completed such a transfer. He could feel every little
primitive pleasure sensation that rippled through Annie's healthy,
growing body. Conversely, two dozen trivial but annoying twinges,
aches, pains and bodily pressures that slowly accumulate with the
years vanished from his 46-year-old body.
The abscessed tooth that he should have had pulled a month ago
quit hurting. The ache from the slightly pulled muscle in his back
faded away. The pressure from the incipient gastric ulcer in his
stomach eased off and disappeared. All the tensions and minor
infirmities that had slipped up on him, almost unnoticed with middle
age, vanished; and Baxter knew once again the long-forgotten,
corporeal ecstasy of a young, human animal in the rapid-growth
stages.

He awoke to see the fuzzy image of Rolanda over him. It was

morning. Her face was faintly troubled, but she smiled with a rare
warmth when he cooed at her. She caught him up in her arms,
murmuring endearing sounds. Snuggled to her breast, he felt the
satisfaction of a great subconscious yearning as the scented
woman-smell pervaded his nostrils and her strong, warm arms
cuddled him tightly.
There was the unpleasant business of a diaper change, during which
he became sharply aware of hunger. He yelled lustily for food, and
soon he was sucking hungrily on a deliciously flexible rubber nipple
that yielded an ambrosia of warm sweetness.
A jumble of clear, high voices chirped familiarly in his ears, but he
paid no attention to the words as such. His bath was delightful,
although he sneezed violently at the talcum dust afterward. Now the
voices were silent except Rolanda's occasional soft words to him.
Again he enjoyed his liquid meal and slipped into delicious slumber
with the shades drawn.
Voices awakened him. A man's voice mingled with his wife's.
"In here, doctor. We managed to carry him to bed, and he hasn't
awakened yet."
Baxter heard the words with mild interest but no comprehension. The
man's voice came through the wall of the nursery from the next
bedroom, a low rumble of pleasant sound. "No sign of physical
impairment. Resembles a catatonic trance. Strange. Heartbeat is
rapid, light—respiration, too. Like a baby's. We'd better take him
down to the hospital."
"Is it that serious?"
"Will be if he continues unconscious. He'll starve."
"I'll call the ambulance."

Baxter fell asleep again. The chirping voices returned that afternoon,
but there was a subdued air about them. For a few days the routine
continued: eating, sleeping, eating, bathing, sleeping, eating—a
wonderous, kaleidoscopic fairyland of enjoyable sensations.
The subdued air disappeared, and the voices chirped loudly and
happily around him again. All was pleasant, comfortable, secure.
Then one morning his heart beat heavily, awakening him from his
nap. His eyelids tore open to a weird sight. Several strange men and
woman stood around him. They were dressed in white, and he was
in a hospital bed. As he traced a rubber tube from its stand-hung
bottle down to his arm, a rush of unpleasant sensations, twinges,
pains, stiffnesses swarmed back into him.
Reluctantly he heard the doctor speak and he tried to pay no
attention. "The adrenalin did it. He's coming around, I think. No,
dammit, he's closing his eyes again. Doesn't seem interested. I
thought for a minute...."
Baxter clenched his eyes tightly and tried to ignore the burning
emptiness of his emaciated stomach, the harsh roughness of the
hospital sheets against his weak, bed-sore calves. The drug was fire
in his veins, and his heart threatened to jump out of his breast.
Annie, where are you?
A soft, nonverbal little response touched his wracked brain, inviting
him to return. He concentrated, blocking out the muttering voices
around him....
"—can't keep a man his size alive indefinitely with intravenous—
better phone Mrs. Baxter—call a priest, too."

He made it. He was back in the crib. Rolanda was pulling up the
nursery shades terminating his nap. The phone was ringing.
"Be right back, sweetheart," Rolanda said. "Mother has to answer
the phone."
Her voice came only faintly from the hallway in dull monosyllables.
Then she was back, scooping him up in her arms. She sat in a
rocker and looked down at him thoughtfully, a serious frown across
her wide, white brow. "You poor little darling. You'll never know your
daddy."
For an instant Baxter's consciousness flickered back and forth
across miles of intervening space. A cold panic clutched his heart.
He heard a sharp sob escape from Annie's lips, then Rolanda was
rocking him and comforting him.
"Don't you worry, sweetheart. It's all right. We'll get along. Daddy's
insured. And there's his service pension. We'll get along just fine."
An intuitive flash of horror chilled Baxter. He struggled to escape to
his own brain, his own dying body, but now the barrier was up again,
not impalpable but tough and impenetrable.
The more he struggled the weaker he became. Sensations from the
nursery began to fade. The light grew dimmer, and Rolanda's face
became hazy. Frantically, he tried to withdraw from Annie's mind, but
he was mousetrapped!
Was this Annie's doing? Was this the vengeance she took against
her own father for his invasion of her privacy?
Or was it his own mind's refusal to face life again through the
network of pain and misery of his adult identity? Infantile regression,
the doctor had called it—but the doctor didn't know about Annie.
He could still feel the gentle rocking motion and his wife's arms
holding him tenderly in the warm blankets.
"We'll get along just fine, honey," she was saying. "When we get the
insurance money we'll have a larger house and a new car."
Rolanda! For God's sake, make Annie let me go!
"And you'll have a pretty room all to yourself when you are older. And
—and there's no reason why you can't sleep in my room tonight.
Would you like that, Annie?"
Now the light was dimming fast, but Baxter sensed the glow of
pleasure in Annie's tiny body and heard her soft cooing.
"Why, Annie," Rolanda's words came from a great distance, "you're
smiling! As if you understood every word! Why, you little dickens!"
Annie stiffened suddenly, then she sighed and gurgled happily—as
though she had just gotten something off her mind.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GO TO SLEEP,
MY DARLING ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in
these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it
in the United States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of
this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept
and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and
may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the
terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of
the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as
creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research.
Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given
away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with
eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject
to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE