This chapter takes as its point of departure the observation that the growing acceptance of the market in state-socialist Hungary after 1956 and the evolution of a language of social justice are intertwined. It argues that in the case of socialist countries, notions of social justice, the second economy, and the black market developed in parallel. As references to the second economy and the black market became increasingly frequent in official public discourses, so did references to social justice and to its socialist-era synonyms (e.g., ‘socialist justice’), especially during late socialism. Thus, by the end of the socialist era, the market and social justice had lost their mutually exclusive and contradictory meanings. Conversely, references to the second economy and the market as a tool better suited to address social inequalities than redistribution became synonymous with the assertion of social justice.

The chapter analyses how the political and economic realities of the aftermath of the First World War gave the term ‘tax justice’ a new meaning in Belgium, occupied during four years by Germany, but also how it was fought over for moral and economic reasons during the 1920s. On the left of the political spectrum, the Socialists brought their own fiscal agenda, entailing new progressive income taxes on the wealthy. On the right, Liberals and Catholics disapproved of such innovations, judging them morally wrong and economically harmful. Compromises were found, with a real shift in the tax system. However, as the 1920s wore on, the Belgian franc suffered from a depreciation like the French and German currencies, with capital fleeing the country. The political debate on progressive income taxes shifted from justice to injustice: the massive level of tax fraud and tax evasion was making the system unfair towards honest taxpayers. Tax policies made in the name of social justice became an achievement to be defended for some and an excessive ideal to be attenuated for others.

Three decades after the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, where should a history of post-socialist social justice start from? This chapter explores how questions of social justice in Eastern Europe after 1989 emerged against the background of policies of privatization – the transfer of state assets to private hands – in public rhetoric and expert commentary. Taking a longer historical perspective, the chapter shows how the notion of a ‘popular’ or ‘people’s capitalism’ came to be instrumental in framing debates about wealth redistribution and mass entrepreneurship after decades of dictatorship in virtually all countries of the former Communist Bloc. The chapter concludes with some remarks on the wider implications of this regional experience for a history of social justice in the European twentieth century and beyond.

Social justice has returned to the heart of political debate in Europe. While the phenomenon has received significant attention from several academic disciplines, social justice has rarely been explored as a historical subject in its own right. This chapter explores why this should have been so. It argues that the elusiveness of social justice as a historical subject can be explained by the way in which conceptions of social justice were located at the confluence of other historical narratives that have shaped the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. The chapter provides an extensive survey of these influential narratives, which include the rise of state power, the development of cultures of social improvement, the changing popular expectations of government, and the domain of citizenship. The chapter then presents an innovative approach for the historical study of ‘social justice in context’. Focusing on the ways in which conceptions of social justice grew out of the intricate interplay between rulers and ruled, it develops a research agenda that concentrates on the analysis of three distinctive dimensions, including the temporalities, the spatiality, and the actors and agencies of conceptions of social justice.

This chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of the notion of social justice during the Enlightenment before surveying the volume’s achievement in historicizing twentieth-century European proposals. Social justice presupposed the invention of the “social,” in and through the insight into informal cultural and institutional ordering. And while social justice was coined earlier in the nineteenth century, the concept became unavoidable later in the century as both left liberals and Roman Catholics responded to individuals and laissez-faire, in part by innovating a new ‘social science’. This chapter concludes by speculating about the future trajectory of claims on the notion of social justice.

This chapter seeks to explain one element of inequality in Western Europe by focusing on the treatment of immigrant communities. It focuses on how attitudes to immigrants – and conceptions of them within a broader framework of social justice – evolved. One of the ways that the ‘long 1968’ challenged European complacency was to present the cause of immigrants as a cause of social justice. By contrast, today immigrants are often depicted as antithetical to social justice. Many commentators have argued that a fundamental tension exists between ethnic diversity and social equality, and depict mass migration as undermining social justice. But where did such ‘welfare chauvinism’ originate from, and how did these ideas entrench themselves within public discourse? In other words, how did we get from social justice for immigrants to immigrants as the antithesis of social justice? A conventional answer to this question might focus on the loss of confidence of left-wing political projects towards the end of the twentieth century, and the concomitant rise of the radical right. This chapter, however, interrogates tensions within social-justice discourses of the left and centre-left, paying attention to emancipatory and exclusionary aspects, and drawing links between the ‘guest worker’ era and the present day.

Women have been perceived as a ‘problem’ for visions of social justice since the emergence of the ‘social question’ in the nineteenth century, prompting feminist debates about whether social justice for women is best pursued on the basis of their equality with, or difference from, men. This chapter reconstructs those debates with a focus on Central Europe, the heartland of the late nineteenth-century European socialist and sexual-reform movements and, throughout the twentieth century, the site of conflicts between fascist, state-socialist, and liberal-democratic regimes of social justice. But these conflicts also have a strongly contemporary character, given the deeply gendered experiences of transition to a capitalist economy in the former socialist states of Central Europe since 1989. The absence of an agreed definition of how social justice for women might be achieved (and in which political contexts) was reinforced throughout the twentieth century by the weight of embedded inequalities of gender, which have remained a defining element of Europe’s modern experience. Bringing women into the story of social justice in twentieth-century Europe highlights the perceived deficit of social justice that the editors of this volume identify as the hallmark of contemporary understandings of social justice in Europe today.

This chapter seeks to illustrate from the bottom up the role that social justice played in establishing and maintaining authoritarian rule in Czechoslovakia under National Socialism and state socialism. The author investigates how notions of social justice were included in the social practice of both regimes and how the working population responded to these policies. By analysing legal disputes, this chapter explores the critical space between rulers and ruled to assess when and how notions of social justice were articulated in Czechoslovakia. In their opposition to the ‘injustices’ of past governments, such as those wrought by social inequality and economic suffering, both National Socialists and Communists drew on a language of social justice to articulate their own visions of a new order. However, their respective notions of social justice differed radically: from social justice defined in racial terms, typical for New Order movements, to social justice delimited by social class and attained for all members of the ‘socialist working society’. The main difference that emerged from the transition from the Nazi to the post-war Communist regime was a shift from the language of individual rights to a language related to the collective, to society, and to the state.

At first glance, social justice seems to be absent in the history of European integration, which ultimately led to the European Union of our own times. This chapter arrives at a different conclusion. It focuses on the period from the 1950s until the Maastricht Treaty and argues that European integration was not simply the neoliberal project it is often described as. Already the Schuman Declaration of 1950 called for a ‘solidarité de fait’. While social justice never became a key concept defining the policies of the European Community, the EC started to develop a distinct approach to social issues since the 1950s. It primarily sought social progress through economic cooperation, not through redistributive social policy. Moreover, the EC served as a platform for the exchange of experts, complementing the role of national actors, transnational forums, and other international organizations such as the International Labour Organization. But it also started developing a highly diverse set of policy instruments with deep implications for social justice. These policies remained patchy. They gained importance only incrementally and never seemed to be driven by an overall logic. Even if the EC was a hidden actor on questions of social justice, it clearly mattered.

The history of peace research offers a window onto mid-twentieth-century European political thought in transformation. This chapter focuses on the transformation of peace research from the 1960s to the 1980s, as it evolved a radical and trans-national approach to politics, linking developmentalist concerns with decolonisation and economic underdevelopment at the global scale to a critique of social hierarchies at the national scale. Historically located both after the post-war pursuit of European peace through economic growth and regional integration and before the emergence of Euromissile peace movements of the 1980s, one strand of peace research soon became an approach to social justice all of its own, and came to be known as ‘positive peace’. Positive peace was most prominent in the Nordic countries, where it offered a means of connecting nationally framed accounts of social democracy to more radical and utopian calls for social justice on all political scales. During these years of international encroachment and domestic upheaval in Europe, positive visions for peace provided a space within which European intellectuals responded to newly recognised global-scale injustices such as the Vietnam War and the spectre of global famine, as well as building a more just social order at home.

Southern European Fascist regimes claimed to be ruled by a higher concept of ‘social justice’. While the propagandistic nature of this claim is clear, this chapter argues that behind it lies a coherent (if at times paradoxical) ideal that directed the action of states and institutions. Drawing on the cases of Italy and Portugal, this chapter charts the roots of fascist ‘social justice’ and how it reflected a core set of ideas about the relationship between the individual and the state where hierarchy and the primacy of the nation shaped a deeply anti-egalitarian idea of justice.