European Societies: Fusion or Fission? (Routledge E.S.a. Studies in European Society, 1)

European Societies

Both at an international level and within individual states, Europe is being transformed. This book brings together many of the leading experts in the field to ask whether recent developments in Europe have brought about a higher level of integration or whether they are causing increased divergence and difference between countries. Combining acute observation and analysis with extensive empirical data, European Societies covers a wide range of subjects, including the move towards political democracy and market economy in central and eastern European societies, the project of the European Union, ethnic conflict, the rise of nationalism, social exclusion and the role of women in public life. European Societies will be an essential reference book for all those involved in the study of Europe. Contributors: Sheila Allen, Sara Arber, Margareta Bertilsson, Volker Bornschier, Marlis Buchmann, Rosemary Crompton, Godfried Engbersen, Ute Gerhard, Michal Illner, Mark Mitchell, John Rex, Dave Russell, Julia Szalai, Iván Szelényi, Piotr Sztompka, Göran Therborn, Alain Touraine, Patrick Ziltener. Thomas P. Boje is Professor of Sociology at the University of Umea, Sweden, and editor of Work and Welfare in a Changing Europe. Bart van Steenbergen is Associate Professor in the Department of General Social Sciences at the University of Utrecht and is editor of The Condition of Citizenship. Sylvia Walby is former President of the European Sociological Association and Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. Previous publications include Gender Transformations and Theorizing Patriarchy.

Routledge/European Sociological Association Studies in European Societies Series editors: Thomas P. Boje, Max Haller, Martin Kohli and Alison Woodward 1. European Societies Fusion or Fission? Edited by Thomas P. Boje, Bart van Steenbergen and Sylvia Walby 2. The Myth of Generational Conflict The Family and State in Ageing Societies Edited by Sara Arber and Claudine Attias-Donfut 3. The End of the Welfare State? Responses to State Retrenchment Edited by Peter Taylor-Gooby and Stefan Svallfors

European Societies Fusion or Fission?

Edited by Thomas P. Boje, Bart van Steenbergen and Sylvia Walby

London and New York

First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 1999 selection and editorial matter Thomas P. Boje, Bart van Steenbergen and Sylvia Walby; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this title has been requested ISBN 0-415-19843-7 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-03142-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17541-7 (Glassbook Format)

Contents

List of illustrations List of editors List of contributors Introduction

vii viii ix 1

THOMAS P. BOJE, BART VAN STEENBERGEN AND SYLVIA WALBY

OPENING ARTICLE 1 ‘Europe’ as issues of sociology

19

GÖRAN THERBORN

PART I Social exclusion and European integration 2 The revitalization of Western Europe and the politics of the ‘social dimension’

33

VOLKER BORNSCHIER AND PATRICK ZILTENER

3 European integration: disparate dynamics of bureaucratic control and communicative participation

53

MARLIS BUCHMANN

4 Gender inequalities in European societies today

66

SARA ARBER

5 The undocumented outsider class: illegal immigrants in Dutch society

84

GODFRIED ENGBERSEN

PART II Citizenship and gender 6 The role of social movements in the project of civil society: the case of the women’s movement UTE GERHARD

105

vi

Contents 7 Women and democratization: some notes on recent changes in Hungary

118

JULIA SZALAI

8 Non-standard employment, citizenship and social exclusion in Europe

132

ROSEMARY CROMPTON

PART III Nationalism and ethnicity 9 Multiculturalism and political integration in European cities

149

JOHN REX

10 Nationalism, national identity and citizenship in the new Europe

163

MARK MITCHELL AND DAVE RUSSELL

11

Nationalism: ethnicity and gender

178

SHEILA ALLEN

12 The Balkan tragedy: a universal or a particular issue?

193

MARGARETA BERTILSSON

PART IV Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe 13 The cultural core of post-communist transformations

205

PIOTR SZTOMPKA

14 The rise of managerialism: the ‘new’ class after the fall of communism

215

IVÁN SZELÉNYI

15 Second thoughts on the transformation in Eastern and Central Europe

234

MICHAL ILLNER

PART V Conclusion 16 European sociologists between economic globalization and cultural fragmentation

249

ALAIN TOURAINE

Index

263

Illustrations

FIGURES 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 14.1 14.2

Wife’s independent income as a proportion of couple’s gross income Factors perpetuating the subordinate position of women Three key resources influencing independence and dependence Distribution of personal income in 1991, British men and women aged 65+: from the state, from non-state pensions and total Percentage of older men and women with severe disability Social structure of reform socialism Social structure of managerial society

71 73 74 76 78 224 226

TABLES 1.1 4.1 5.1 13.1 14.1

The development of real GDP in five countries, 1989–94 Living arrangements of older men and women Rotterdam: country/region of origin of legal and illegal immigrants, 1989–94 Dichotomy of institution-building and culture-building Characteristics of managerial society

26 79 90 206 218

Editors

Thomas P. Boje is Professor of Sociology at the University of Umea, Sweden and Treasurer of the European Sociological Association. He was previously Associate Professor and for a period Head of Department of Social Sciences at the University of Roskilde, Denmark. He has been American Studies Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Harvard University and Jean Monnet Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. He is author of Mobilitets -og beskaeftigelsesmonstre pa det danske arbejdsmarked 1980–81 (Mobility and Employment Patterns in the Danish Labour Market 1980–81) (The Copenhagen Business School, 1987); editor of Work and Welfare in a Changing Europe, also published as three special issues of the International Journal of Sociology 1994–5; and joint editor of Scandinavia in a New Europe (Scandinavian University Press, 1993). Bart van Steenbergen is presently Associate Professor in the Department of General Social Sciences at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands). He has previously been Secretary General of the European Sociological Association, Secretary of Studies of the Foundation ‘Working Group 2000’ and Visiting Fellow at Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley. He is author of Het voorlaatste Oordeel, een kritische beschouwing van de Tweede Golf Wereldmodellen (The Last Judgement but One, a Critical Evaluation of the Second Wave of Global Models) (Bert Bakker, 1979), De Post-Materialistische Maatschappij’ (The Post-Materialist Society) (De Horstink, 1983), and Afscheid van de Twintigste Eeuw (Farewell to the Twentieth Century) (NGC, 1993); editor of The Condition of Citizenship (Sage, 1994); and co-editor of Advancing Democracy and Participation, Challenges for the Future (Centre de Prospectiva, 1992). Sylvia Walby was the founding President of the European Sociological Association and is Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. She has previously been the Professor and Head of Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol; Reader in Sociology and Director of the Gender Institute at the LSE; and Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. She has been Visiting Associate Professor in Sociology at UCLA and Honorary Visiting Scholar at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. She is author of Gender Transformations (Routledge, 1997), Theorizing Patriarchy (Blackwell, 1990), and Patriarchy at Work (Polity, 1986); joint author of Sex Crime in the News (Routledge, 1991), Localities, Class and Gender (Pion, 1985), Contemporary British Society (Polity, 1988, 1994), Restructuring Place Class and Gender (Sage, 1990), and Medicine and Nursing: Professions in a Changing Health Service (Sage, 1994); editor of Gender Segregation at Work (Open University Press, 1988) and New Agendas for Women (Macmillan, 1999); and co-editor of Out of the Margins: Women’s Studies in the Nineties (Falmer, 1991).

Contributors

Sheila Allen is Professor of Sociology and University Equal Opportunities Adviser at the University of Bradford, UK. Her main research interests and publications are in the fields of the sociology of work, gender relations and race and ethnicity. She is currently writing a book on Feminist Contributions to Sociology. She is a past President of the British Sociological Association and a member of the Executive Committee. Sara Arber is Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK. She has written extensively on gender inequalities in later life, women’s employment and inequalities in women’s health. Her books include Gender and Later Life (Sage, 1991); Women and Working Lives: Divisions and Change (Macmillan, 1991); and Connecting Gender and Ageing (Open University Press, 1995). Margareta Bertilsson is Professor of Sociology at Copenhagen University, Denmark. Her most recent work includes books on Scandinavian Sociology, From a Doll’s House to the Welfare State (edited with Göran Therborn, ISA-publication, 1998), on Social Constructivism (in Danish, edited with Margaretha Järvinen, 1998), and on The Good Life: On the Renaissance of an Old Discipline (in Swedish, with Mikael Carleheden, 1996). Her current interests focus primarily on social and legal theory. Volker Bornschier is Professor of Sociology at the University of Zurich. After studies of sociology and economics he received his PhD in Sociology in 1972. His habilitation followed in 1976, while he served on the faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zurich. From 1983–1996 he was President of the World Society Foundation. He was director of the research project ‘The Genesis of the Single European Act’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, at the Sociological Institute of the University of Zurich (1995–1997). His latest book is on Western Society in Transition (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London, 1996). Since 1997 he has been director of the Sociological Institute of the University of Zurich. Marlis Buchmann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich. Her major research interests are social change, labour markets, life course, career mobility, and gender. Her numerous publications include: The Script of Life in Modern Society: Entry into Adulthood in a Changing World (University of Chicago Press, 1989), and, together with Stefan Sacchi, ‘Mehrdimensionale Klassifikation beruflicher Verlaufsdaten – Eine Anwendung auf Berufslaufbahnen zweier Schweizer

x

Contributors Geburtskohorten’, in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 35 (3), 413–42 (September 1995).

Rosemary Crompton is Professor of Sociology at University City, London. Her most recent books are (edited with Duncan Gallie and Kate Purcell) Changing Forms of Employment (Routledge) and Restructuring Gender Relations and Employment (OUP, 1999). She is currently directing a cross-national project (ESRC R00235617) on Gender Relations, Employment and Occupational Segregation. Godfried Engbersen is Professor of Sociology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. He has written extensively on new forms of social inequality and urban marginality in advanced welfare states. He is the author of numerous books including (in English) Cultures of Unemployment: A Comparative Look at Long-Term Unemployment and Urban Poverty (Westview Press, 1993) and The Unknown City: Illegal Immigrants in Dutch Society (forthcoming). Since 1997 he has been editor of the Annual Dutch Year Report on Poverty and Social Exclusion (Amsterdam University Press). Ute Gerhard is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Her main interests are in the study of law, social sciences and history. She has been co-editor of Feministische Studien, a journal for interdisciplinary women’s studies, since 1982. Several publications on women’s rights, the history of women and social policy, such as Verhältnisse und Verhinderungen Frauenarbeit, Familie und Rechte der Frauen im 19 (Suhrkamp, 1978) (Women’s Work, Family and Women’s Rights during the 19th Century), Gleichheit ohne Angleichung. Frauen im Recht (Beck, 1990) (Equality without Assimilation, Women in Law) and Unerhört. Die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Rowohlt, 1990) (History of the German Women’s Movement). Michal Illner is Director of the Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague and lectures in sociology at the Charles University in Prague. His main research interests include social aspects of local and regional development, local and regional policy and politics and social indicators. Recent publications include Local Democracy and the Processes of Transformation in East Central Europe, with H. Baldersheim and others (Westview Press, 1996), Changing Territorial Administration in Czechoslovakia, with P. Dostal and others (Amsterdam University, 1992). He also edited Czech Republic – Transformations after 1989 and Beyond (1993) and Human Development Report – Czech Republic 1997 (1998). Mark Mitchell is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Portsmouth in the UK and is a member of the interdisciplinary Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe Research Group in the Faculty. He has a long-standing interest in the politics of race and racism and, with Dave Russell, has for the past ten years undertaken research in this field, focusing on the United Kingdom, South Africa and, more recently, the New Europe. John Rex was the Founder Chairman of the Departments of Sociology in Durham and Warwick. He was the Former Director and Research Professor of the British Economic and Social

Contributors

xi

Research Council’s Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations. He has held the Chair of the British Sociological Association and ISA’s Research Committee on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. He was a Member of UNESCO Experts Committee on the nature of racism and race prejudice. Dave Russell is Programme Director for Social Studies at the University of Portsmouth and is a member of the interdisciplinary Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe Research Group in the Faculty. In collaboration with Mark Mitchell, he has published work on state and society in South Africa, as well as race and racism in Britain. More recently, his research has focused on the politics of race, immigration and citizenship in a broader European context. Julia Szalai is Deputy Director of the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Chairperson of the Max Weber Foundation for the Study of Social Initiatives. Her research interests are: the comparative history of social policy; the social historical origins of ‘old’ and ‘new’ poverty; the gender-related aspects of post-Communist transformation. Recent publications (in English) include: Poverty in Hungary in the Period of Economic Crisis (World Bank Publications, 1990); Social Policy in the New Eastern Europe, edited jointly with Bob Deacon (Avebury, 1990); ‘Some Aspects of the Changing Situation of Women in Hungary in the Process of Transition’, in Signs (fall 1991). Iván Szelényi is Professor of Sociology at UCLA and a member of the Hungarian National Academy of Sciences. He is author/co-author of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1979); Urban Inequalities under State Socialism (Oxford University Press, 1983); Socialist Entrepreneurs (Polity Press, 1988) and Making Capitalism Without Capitalists (Verso, 1998). Piotr Sztompka is Professor of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University at Krakow (Poland). He is a member of Academia Europaea (London), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.) and a Vice-President of ISA. He was the recipient of the New Europe Prize 1995. His books include Society in Action (Polity Press, 1991), The Sociology of Social Change (Blackwell, 1993) and Trust: A Sociological Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Göran Therborn is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Social Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden. He has previously held the European Chair of Social Policy in Budapest. His current research involves roads to/through modernity in different parts of the world, dimensions and historical waves of globalization, urban iconography, the family in the world, and issues of sociological conceptualization and of social policy. His publications include European Modernity and Beyond, Why Some Peoples Are More Unemployed Than Others, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, and Science, Class and Society. Alain Touraine founded the Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques in Paris in 1981. He was a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He has been President of the Société Française de Sociologie and Vice-President of the International Sociological

xii

Contributors Association. He is the author of numerous books including The Post Industrial Society, The Self-Production of Society, The Return of the Actor, Critique of Modernity, and What is Democracy?

Patrick Ziltener works at the Sociological Institute of the University of Zurich. He studied Sociology, History and Economics at the University of Basel, at the Freie Universität (FU) Berlin, and received his MA in Sociology at the University of Zurich in 1994. From 1995 to 1997 he was project coordinator in the research project ‘The Genesis of the Single European Act’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Zurich. The results of this research project will be published in the volume Statebuilding in Europe: The Revitalization of Western European Integration, scheduled for 1999.

Introduction Thomas P. Boje, Bart van Steenbergen and Sylvia Walby

The aim of this book is to address the contemporary changes in European societies. Whether the social, political and cultural development in European societies and in Europe as a whole are undergoing fusion or fission was the core question at the Conference of the European Sociological Association in Budapest in 1995. At both the European level and within the individual European societies we find tendencies towards both fusion, convergence or integration, and fission, divergence or differentiation, in contemporary social and political development, and these two apparently contradictory tendencies of integration and disintegration occurring simultaneously at many different levels in the European House. The clearest form of systemic integration at the European level are the convergence of the Central and Eastern European societies to the model of political democracy and market economy found in the West, and the project of the European Union in Western Europe. Furthermore, women’s integration into public life in all European societies can be considered as one of the most profound forms of integration at the social level. While the process of European integration can be found mainly at the system level, the process of differentiation or disintegration is dominating at the social level. These disintegrative tendencies are especially pronounced around ethnic conflict, racism and nationalism, on the one hand, and around social exclusion derived from unemployment and poverty, on the other hand. In this introduction we shall consider some of the more important consequences of these processes of integration – fusion – and differentiation – fission. The paradigm of integration and differentiation in sociology can be traced back to the founders of the discipline. They raised the question how integration was possible in a society which was increasingly differentiated and individualized. For the classic sociologists the question primarily concerned the transformation of the traditional society integrated by status credentials and family bonds into a modern society in which the division of labour was ever more complex and in which market and state increasingly were the major integrative forces. In industrial society, class solidarity was a major dynamic force ensuring social integration. In today’s society, diversity and social divisions are primarily the result of gender, age and ethnicity, more than of class cleavages. Today, the questions concerning integration raised by the classic sociologists must be posed in relation to a fundamentally different environment.

2

Introduction

INTEGRATIVE PROCESSES IN EUROPEAN SOCIETIES The process of European integration took a new turn as a result of the economic and political transformations in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. The breakdown of the ‘communist’ regimes brought enthusiasm for the removal of the economic and social barriers between Western, Central and Eastern European societies. Furthermore, the internal collapse of these regimes raised aspirations that many Central and Eastern European citizens might be able to approach the Western European type of social life and standard of living. Indeed, the European Sociological Association was founded at the moment that Central and Eastern European countries were starting on their major political and economic transformations. In Central and Eastern Europe the collapse of communist rule, transition to a market economy and establishment of multiparty political systems moved the East closer to the models of democracy and market economies found in the West and were obviously considered as a remarkable step forward towards the idea of a unified Europe. For the Central and Eastern European citizens, these changes led to hopes for increased European integration shaped by a common European history and by their newly achieved civic and political citizenship rights. However, most of these expectations have not been fulfilled. There have been several limits to the hope that the East might become like the West and become more integrated into a wider Europe. One reason that the vision of the ‘common European house’ has been frustrated is by the closure of the borders of the European Union. In ‘Fortress Europe’ the establishment of insiders’ citizenship rights has involved the exclusion of the outsiders from Central and Eastern Europe as well as from other regions of the world outside the European Union. EU membership has not yet been extended to the countries of the East and the entry of the Central European countries into the EU community seems to be a long and problematic process taking place primarily on conditions defined by the large and powerful membership countries of the EU. Furthermore, the transformation of the economic and political system in Central and Eastern Europe has so far mainly taken place at the system level, while many aspects of everyday life have remained unchanged or have even deteriorated. In most Central and Eastern European countries the level of social inequality has increased and political powerlessness has grown for large groups of the population. The economic restructuring has only led to prosperity for minor groups of the population, resulting instead in widespread impoverishment for the large groups of citizens and the destabilization of the new and fragile political institutions. This has occurred because the Central and Eastern countries have given up important parts of the comprehensive system of public care and social security set up by the socialist regimes during the process of economic restructuring. The introduction of market economies, large-scale privatization of public institutions, and the requirements of the international loangivers have contributed to the decline in social protection and led to subsequent deterioration in standards of living and increase in social insecurity. A second major aspect of fusion in European societies is a result of the project of the European Union. Here the Europeanists have a vision of greater political and economic integration of which the creation and development of the Single European Market was merely the first stage. This process of economic and political integration

Introduction

3

has led to some harmonization of policies to regulate the labour market and in the development of a European environmental policy. The economic and political changes within the EU societies have also mainly occurred at the system level. A supranational system of institutions has been set up in order to create the Single European Market. The motives and inspirations behind the movements towards fusion in Western Europe have several origins. A historic determination to eliminate war between nation states in the European House, especially between France and Germany; has been a major reason for the moves towards integration in the development of the European Union. Furthermore, the growing globalization of capital and finance markets has generated a significant momentum for capital to combine and integrate at a European level to create a large domestic market. This has led to the Formation of a European economic bloc with supranational institutions, ensuring free movements of capital and labour within the community and facilitating the development of the European companies able to compete in the global marketplace. However, concurrently with the economic and political integration, a restructuring of systems of social protection has taken place in all European societies. This has not only been conditioned by the Formation of the European Union, but also by the ongoing profound transformation of the industrial societies. The changes have led to persistent high unemployment, changing family structures, and a growing risk of social exclusion. The motives driving these shifts in the welfare policies within the European Union are mainly inspired by economic liberalism and have led to policies of retrenchment in social protection and tight control of public expenditures. As a consequence of this development, most of today’s welfare systems are unable to handle the increasing social inequality and to provide social protection for the vulnerable groups of citizens. The result has been that the conditions for social citizenship have changed dramatically in the Western European welfare societies. Both in the process of transformation in East and Central Europe and that of political and economic integration in the project of European Union it might be important to distinguish between social integration and system integration. The transformation of the economic and political system in Central and Eastern Europe has led to system integration at the European level and, simultaneously, serious disintegration in the social relations of the individual Central and Eastern European societies. The same duality can be found in the process of integration in the European Union. Creation of the Single European Market involved a unified product market, harmonization of the labour market and monetary union, but concurrently with the economic and political integration at the system level new forms of diversity and social exclusion have appeared in the social relations. In conclusion, both types of fission have been dominated by system integration and have, in many cases, led to new forms of social exclusion and marginalization which, in turn, have reduced the level of social integration. A final instance of fusion is the increasing integration of women into the mainstream of European societies, and this is probably the most significant illustration of social integration to be found in today’s Europe. This process has happened especially in Western Europe, where women’s former exclusion from the public sphere has been reduced by their growing participation in education, employment, and political decisionmaking. Convergence for gender relations refers to the comparison between men and

4

Introduction

women. Immense changes have taken place across all of Europe. However, there are different accounts as to how this development should be interpreted. The rates of labour market participation for men and women are converging throughout Europe, though the labour market remains strongly segregated and women and men still differ significantly in their responsibilities for caring for family members, that is, children and the elderly. Are these differences in paid and unpaid work among men and women so great that talking about convergence in citizenship rights and economic power is meaningless? Are the changes in labour market involvement merely superficial and of no real significance for citizenship status, since women are segregated from men in employment, and take part-time rather than full-time work? What is the significance of these changes in gender relations for other social relations in the public as well as in the private sphere? In many European countries there are several coincident forms of women’s entry into the public sphere: for example, growing female labour market participation, and women’s entry into legislatures. The European Union has been committed to an effective regulation of equal opportunities and this has contributed to this process of convergence in the labour market and in social life across Western Europe. However, there are several contradictory tendencies in this process of equal opportunities. On the one hand, European level regulations now explicitly maintain that discrimination is contrary to the Treaty of Rome and the European Court of Justice supports this. On the other hand, deregulation in industrial relations and decentralization in wage bargaining seem to undermine the implementation of equal opportunity legislation. The process of convergence between men and women in occupational position has stopped and the gender wage gap is growing in some of the EU countries, for example in the Scandinavian countries. The differences between men and women in their participation in the society as a whole are still pronounced in most European countries, and this means that marked differences in European women’s effective citizenship rights still prevail both in relation to economic power and in their right to social protection. Gender relations have developed in many different ways in the countries of Europe. Some researchers argue that there will be a convergence between East and West now that the economic and political systems have become more similar. If so, will old Eastern practice influence the West, with women in employment as much as men, or will the East become like the West with similar patterns of lesser female employment and greater domestication of women? At the moment, most researchers find that Eastern women are losing ground both in the labour market and in the political sphere. More women than men have experienced unemployment and poverty, and Eastern women have in large number left the political institutions. For some, this development is seen as a new kind of division of labour where women are the ones who have primary responsibility for the community-based activities, while men continue to control the formal institutions in economy and politics. For others, the reduction of women’s labour market participation and political involvement in the Central and Eastern European countries means that they lose important elements of their citizenship status and, consequently, their previous widespread rights to social protection. In this respect, the situation of Eastern women will become more like that of Western women.

Introduction

5

DISINTEGRATIVE PROCESSES IN THE EUROPEAN SOCIETIES The other part of the basic sociological discourse – the process of differentiation, or fission – is well pronounced in economic and social development in today’s Europe. Most obviously, we have observed an intensification of ethnic and regional conflict throughout Europe, but especially in Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the overthrow of the communist one-party systems. Most dramatically, these ethnic and regional conflicts have been in the former Yugoslavia, where ethnic groups that had developed a form of harmonious co-existence during the previous socialist regime, have restarted the old battles in new and pernicious forms, with ethnic cleansing as the most devastating consequence. Also, in Western Europe we have witnessed a growth of racism and ethnic conflicts. The West has seen a continuous history of racist practices in a range of institutional and national contexts. In the West, growth in racism is strongly connected to new forms of immigration and has extended to countries – such as the Scandinavian countries – which had previously thought that they were too tolerant for this to occur. Fission, or the process of differentiation, has taken place in a comprehensive way throughout Europe. The economic recession, restructuring of the European economies and skill redundancy have caused growing social and cultural inequalities, and have led to the social exclusion of large social groups based on gender, ethnicity, and regions. The main reasons for the comprehensive social exclusion in several European societies derive from unemployment, marginalization and poverty. The persistent high rate of unemployment, in both the West and the East, is a cause of considerable concern to the OECD and the EU. It has led to the loss of effective citizenship. In the West the causes for social exclusion have been linked to globalization and the falling competitiveness of the European economy, and in the East to the collapse of old staterun industries and collective forms of care and welfare provision. Novel forms of family patterns as well as changes in age composition of the population have led to new patterns of differentiation in the social structures. As people live longer, there develop groups with different interests in the allocation of resources and new forms of social divisions based on age and generation. The male breadwinner family model no longer exists, but rather there are a variety of family models: dual-career families, lone-parent families, and people living alone most of their life. This changing family pattern has complex interconnections with gender as well as class, and has led to significant differences in income and social benefits, since entitlement to benefits is typically based on previously earned income, a system that disadvantages women, and particularly lone mothers, throughout Europe. A search for new models in organizing the welfare system and providing social services has been a major concern in all European welfare societies. This concern has been discussed in many connections and probably most clearly formulated by the EU Commission in both the White Paper on ‘Growth, Competitiveness, Employment’ (European Commission 1993) and in the EU Commission’s papers on the social dimension (European Commission 1994). In these papers the EU Commission emphasizes the need for shared responsibility for providing social protection between private companies, NGO institutions and the welfare state, and for new, more active policies aimed at ensuring people’s integration into work and society.

6

Introduction

Evidently, we can agree with the EU Commission on the description of the problems of the welfare policies. Their proposals for solving these problems, however, are more controversial, and here strong disagreements emerge among politicians as well as academics. The question is whether the European Union is going to be a force which binds Europe together or whether increasing European Union integration leads rather to more pronounced differentiation in the individual societies and in Europe as a whole, with greater social exclusion and marginalization as a result. It is possible to distinguish between two opposing tendencies in the social and economic development of the European Union: deregulation, and the building of a social infrastructure. The tendency to deregulation is represented in the policies behind the Single European Market and the EU Commission’s White Paper mentioned above. The arguments are articulated through a market-oriented growth strategy based on the theoretical framework of neoliberal economic theory. Thus it is built on assumptions that the economic performance of the European Union will be improved if competition is increased and labour market ‘rigidities’ and ‘dependency-creating’ social protection are removed. Deregulation is the procedure neoliberal economists recommend to enable the European economy to recover international competitiveness, which is being lost due to processes of internationalization and globalization. Even the proponents of this development recognize that the consequences will be uneven, and that for some groups there will be negative consequences. In particular, social exclusion can be created as a result of reduced access to employment as industries unevenly decline, with implications on a regional level, as well as uneven implications for gender and ethnic groups who are unevenly represented in these industries. The alternative vision for the European Union is a strategy based on social steering through welfare state institutions by creating a social infrastructure to counteract the tendencies towards growing regionalization and social exclusion. Advocates for this vision argue that it represents the transcendence of the national disputes that have ruined so much of Europe’s past and present with warfare and racism. This vision presents the development of the European Union as a political solution to the problem of warring nations. Furthermore, it is argued that it provides the possibility of a regulatory framework at an international level to deal with problems of environmental degradation, globalization, and social dumping. At the European level it has been argued that social policies may counteract the tendencies to social exclusion which have been caused primarily by deregulation and the development of increased competition as a result of the Single Market: that is, they should help to prevent social exclusion whether based on region, gender, migrant status or whatever, and to promote social cohesion and social justice. This approach is based on theories of citizenship in which the social, economic and political are integral to each other, and in which economic development is best achieved in a high-wage, high-productivity economy with a high degree of social cohesion resulting from social justice. Citizenship rights are an important condition for participation in and membership of a community. A ‘new Europe’ based on common and unified citizenship rights is obviously the ideal for many advocates of European integration, but so far they have faced a tough task in persuading the majority of

Introduction

7

Europeans that creating a social and economic infrastructure may provide the needed social protection and prevent growing social exclusion. WHAT IS ‘EUROPE’? Fundamental to the analysis of fusion and fission in Europe is the definition of ‘Europe’ or ‘European society’ or ‘European societies’. The specificity of Europe can be understood, in many ways, as a distinctive type of culture, economy and polity, as the chapters in this book by Therborn and Touraine in particular address. The focus of the question is sharpened when lines are drawn for purposes of comparison. Europe may be thought of in comparison with North America, in particular the USA, and with Asia, in particular Japan, and many of the contributors, notably Touraine, Bornschier and Ziltener, do this. The definition of what is specifically European demands consideration of the fundamental characteristics of societies. Therborn argues that ‘Europe’ is more than a region of the world system of capitalism, not primarily a common market, different from a manifestation of a European culture, and not an ethnic community. Rather it is a normative area: ‘“Europe” is a set of supranational, suprastate normative institutions’. The norms are those of the ‘inviolability of the basic rights of human life and dignity’. This body of rules is governed by a strong European judiciary: ‘the Council of Europe, with the European Convention on Human Rights, its Court of Human Rights, and its European Charter’. Therborn argues that we have to distinguish the origin of European modernity which can be traced back to Christianity, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment from the recent process of unification of European societies which has its background in the European world war and from the discovery of the gas chambers. This body of norms of human rights has resulted from what Western Europe has learned from recent European modernity, namely, that neither nationalism nor any other belief system should be single-mindedly pursued, but rather that they are dangerous and should be kept regulated. In this way Therborn characterizes the uniqueness of ‘Europe’ in a manner which is both positive and recent. Therborn charts an account of increasing European integration, especially that driven by the European Union, as a positive example of system building. However, he also points to three sources of disintegration: the growing gap between East and West, despite the changes in the East; the rise in unemployment; and the increase in ethnic tensions in the West as a result of recent migration into the West. Touraine positions Europe in between the major societal forms of America and Asia through an analysis of the different relationship between the economy, the state and culture. In American society there is a dissociation between the economy and culture and a weak state. The economy is governed by the market and a ruling class which is now a worldwide financial network, while in the cultural realm there is great diversity – a multiculturalism. The state is a loose and changing set of interest groups and lobbies. America contains a contradiction between mass production of symbolic goods on a global scale, and a diverse multicultural set of local communities. In Asian society there is a market economy, political authoritarianism and cultural nationalism. There is extreme integration of economic growth with cultural resources by a powerful authoritarian state.

8

Introduction

Touraine argues that the most important characteristic of current world evolution is the growing separation and dissociation between world market and fragmented cultural identities. This process is occurring throughout the world, but takes different forms in countries which are rich or poor, dominant or peripheral. In dominant or central countries, there is an internal cultural fragmentation, for example American multiculturalism. In peripheral or dependent countries, authoritarian regimes mobilize cultural resources to achieve a voluntarist, neo-Bismatckian type of industrialization. The political system is everywhere the central element of social organization, being loose in America and tight in the Asian case. Thus globalization does not mean homogenization of the world, nor the growing integration of national societies. Rather, there is both greater social inequality and exclusion within each country, and a greater distance between the dominant societies, which control the world market, and closed dependant societies, where authoritarian leaders mobilize cultural resources to resist the West. In Touraine’s view, Europe lies between the two extreme models of the American and Asian types. Europe is a third type with a different combination of internationalization of markets and fragmented cultural identities. Europe is the most political continent. The distinctiveness of Europe is the predominant role of the political system as the instrument of integration between economy and cultures. Europe remains dominated by the welfare state and the importance given to social integration. The dilemma for Europe and its sociologists, according to Touraine, is to create a way of integrating unity with diversity, of an open market-regulated economy with individual and collective identity, of the rearticulation of a globalized economy with fragmented identities. Is it possible for a society to manage diverse identities without the American solution of only regulation of the economy by the market and the law? In the creative resolution of such issues, argues Touraine, lies the future for both Europe and European sociology. Therborn and Touraine differ in their perspectives on the processes shaping European society. Therborn already sees a central set of European norms and values, and thus for him the ongoing political and economic process of integration might create a distinctive European identity. For Touraine, European norms and cultural values have been further fragmented and the role of the political system in creating social integration has been weakened. Therefore, formation of a distinctive European identity has to rely on creating a strong political state apparatus which is able to create political unification in combination with economic and cultural diversity. The book is divided into four parts: Social exclusion and European integration; Citizenship and gender; Nationalism and ethnicity; and Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. ‘Social exclusion and European integration’ examines the process of increasing integration of the European Union and asks Whether this is leading to a reduction or increase in social exclusion. ‘Citizenship and gender’ investigates the varied ways and extent to which women are becoming less excluded from the public sphere, especially employment and the state, in both East and West. ‘Nationalism and ethnicity’ addresses the increased fragmentation of European societies along the lines of ethnicity and nation in both the East and the West. ‘Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe’ addresses the diverse transformations of Eastern and Central Europe.

Introduction

9

SOCIALEXCLUSION AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION Integration is key to the project of the European Union. But does economic integration come at the cost of social exclusion? There are two dimensions here: first, deregulation and the creation of a Single European Market in order to increase the competitiveness of the European economy; second, European social policy intended to promote social cohesion and combat social exclusion. The economic policy was represented in the White Paper on ‘Growth, Competitiveness, Employment’ (European Commission 1993) and was itself composed of two elements: first, the completion of the internal market so as to give European firms the advantage of a large market in which to develop so that they could be competitive with global firms in the USA and Japan; second, to remove those forms of regulation which might privilege the firms or workers of one nation state over another. The social policy was articulated in the Social Charter and consolidated in the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty and the Green Paper on Social Policy (European Commission 1994). This sought both to support workers’ rights and to provide safe and humane conditions of employment – such as uniform health and safety regulations, maximum hours of work, and parental leave – and also to remove discrimination by sex from employment relations (to further the implementation of Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome which laid down that there should be equal treatment for women and men in employment-related issues), for instance by granting the same rights to part-time, largely female, workers, as to full-time workers. These two policies may be considered either each to be necessary for the success of the other, or to be opposed. Further, there is a question as to the extent to which both the economic and social dimensions have been or will be implemented. These questions are addressed in different ways by our first two contributors in this section. The policies also have different implications in different countries: for instance, the equal treatment policies have had more impact on countries such as the UK where the existing policies are relatively weak as compared with Scandinavian countries where they are strong. The last two chapters here address changes in the rate and form of social exclusion on the basis of gender, age and immigration status. Bornschier and Ziltener ask how central the ‘social dimension’ is to the project of the European Union. They assess three possible answers: that the social dimension is a ‘cornerstone’ of the project of the European Union; that it is merely ‘packaging’ to sell an elite pact between European transnational corporations and the European Commission to the public; and that it is merely a ‘flanking’ exercise, necessary to cushion sociopolitically the impact of the internal market and technological change. On the basis of detailed analysis of the records of the central institutions of the European Union and of the major protagonists, they conclude that the social dimension has been a cornerstone of the project of the European Union from the beginning, although it had been set to one side for tactical reasons, leading to a significant measure of defeat. Bornschier and Ziltener situate the development of the renewed European Union project in the context of the pressures of globalization and in particular economic competition from America and Japan, which was difficult to meet on the basis of small national markets. An alliance between European transnational corporations and the European Commission to restructure the European economy was key to the new

10

Introduction

project. However, the role played by Delors and like-minded socialists meant that there was always the firm intention to build a strong social dimension. The significance of the role of Delors as a political entrepreneur in this process means that the overall theory is not simply one which can be reduced to geopolitics and global economic structures. We see here parallels with the theme of Touraine as to the essentially political nature of the determination of European social structure. But despite the intentions of the actors, Bornschier and Ziltener’s final evaluation is that the social dimension does not succeed. Buchmann likewise addresses barriers to the social and political integration of the European Union, as compared with the degree of economic integration, but from a different angle. She sees the limits stemming from the absence of a European public sphere and from the democratic deficit of European institutions. Buchmann draws on the distinction between system integration and social integration, arguing that while the former has occurred the latter has not. It is to the absence of a European public sphere – what others might call a European civil society – that Buchmann particularly directs our attention. A key lack here is that of a European-wide media which she regards as essential to communications between citizens, interest groups and political decision-makers. This relates to the relative weakness of European-wide intermediary institutions of interest formation and interest articulation, such as political parties, unions and professional associations. Rather, these are still organized primarily on a national basis. This process is compounded, she argues, by the functional technocratic rationality of the European political institutions, especially the most powerful of these, the European Commission. Despite these views, Buchmann considers that there is the potential for the development of a European public sphere and its associated social integration. As the European Union has created some forms of integration there has been a tendency to tighten the controls over immigration. Engbersen notes that this has also involved a tendency to more punitive regimes towards existing immigrants who do not have legal rights of residence across Europe. Nevertheless, most policies have been marked by contradictions. In this context Engbersen examines the position of illegal immigrants in the Netherlands where, until the 1990s, there was toleration of such people. This has changed, so that now there are active attempts to exclude illegal immigrants from gaining access to public services and employment, and an intensification of attempts at deportation. This new policy has the potential to drive such immigrants into illegal ways of earning a living and other criminal activities in order to evade identification. Yet, in practice, most illegal immigrants find niches which offer support, including employers who want to employ them and schools and housing agencies which have functional reasons to keep their doors open. While some live an isolated and marginal existence, others are semi-integrated into Dutch society. Arber addresses the changing social exclusion of different groups of women. Throughout Western Europe, women are increasingly participating in paid employment and benefiting from increased access to money and social integration. There are still major differences between European societies in this regard, however, with very little gender differentiation in employment rates in the Nordic countries, and a significantly greater differentiation in much of Southern Europe. There are further differences between countries in terms of whether this employment is part-time or full-time and in the conditions and wages typically obtained. Nonetheless, there has been a considerable integration of women into market work over recent years in Europe.

Introduction

11

A major caveat to this picture of the social inclusion of women, however, is the relative poverty of older women. Older women are less likely to have held jobs which provide a good pension, and many face an old age in poverty after the death of their husbands during a period of widowhood which, in the UK, is currently on average ten years. Poverty may lead such older women to be effectively socially excluded if they cannot afford to purchase the goods and services normal for social life today. It is to the interaction of gender and age that Arber points us in order to understand the increasing social integration of some women and the relative social exclusion of others. CITIZENSHIPAND GENDER There is increasing integration of women into the public sphere in Western Europe, including the market sector of the economy, education and the elected national legislatures. Across Western Europe there have been very large increases in the proportion of women in paid employment and, in many countries, elected to public office. However, despite these changes and those in household structures women still do the majority of the care for the young, sick and old at home. This may be seen to limit women’s effective participation in the public sphere and their full social integration. The extent to which women are able to combine paid work and housework depends not only on the structure of the household, but also on whether the state has created a welfare infrastructure which assists such reconciliation of working and family life. There is a further qualification on the thesis of women’s integration in that the employment in which they engage is disproportionately non-standard or ‘flexibilized’, that is, part-time or temporary work. Comparison between West and East on the social integration of women raises in sharp form the question of the relative significance of paid work, the family and nonmarket forms of work for the theorization of gender relations. This is because the full integration of women into paid employment in the East and the provision of public childcare is not thought by some writers in the East to produce the best circumstances for women. The debate as to what constitutes the best strategy to improve the position of women in society has often polarized women in East and West. It raises questions as to the effective routes to the integration of women into society and the relative significance in these of entry to employment, public care facilities, and political and social citizenship. Crompton argues that the integration of women in the West is seriously limited by the non-standard nature of much of this employment. Further, the systematic deregulation of certain aspects of the European Union labour market in the context of the pressures of globalization is reinforcing this trend. However, non-standard employment, such as part-time working, is very variable between EU Member States, suggesting that national processes are still playing an important role in shaping gender relations in employment. Crompton notes the tension between the policies for improving the competitiveness of the economy by deregulation with those social policies designed to produce a ‘level playing field’ and to prevent ‘social dumping’, between those which promote integration and those which lead to social exclusion. She argues for a broadening of the usage of the concept of citizenship to recognize

12

Introduction

that work-as-employment has been, in practice, the major source of the emergence of a European citizenship and its associated rights. Gerhard addresses the impact of women’s movements on the position of women and, in particular, on the constitution of civil society in different European countries. Early women’s movements had recognized the strong interrelationship between the public and private sphere in women’s lives, and had combined, on the one hand, efforts to win suffrage and civil rights in the public sphere with, on the other hand, the attempt to win legal equality in marriage and self-determination in the family. She argues that early women’s movements met only with modest success, since despite women gaining suffrage in most nation-states in the early twentieth century, this political citizenship was not followed by equality in civil or economic rights, or in the family. Gerhard argues further that the development of welfare states did not radically change women’s position in society. This was because the welfare state was based on a social compromise between labour and capital involving full employment for men and a family wage. This was based on a gender-specific division of labour in the family that defined women as dependent and responsible for the housekeeping. Social protection organized by welfare states was closely connected to the employment records of individuals and, with less than half of the female population in employment and a significant number of these women employed on part-time or temporary work, this meant that women were either not usually covered by the social protection or they were protected on a much lower level than male workers in full-time permanent employment. The social welfare systems thus had two tiers. Only in the Scandinavian welfare states was a universalization of the citizenship rights implemented together with equal social protection for men and women on a formal basis. However, even here the social rights of the citizens are still closely connected to waged labour, so that the social security system is still structured into one tier for waged workers and one for the impoverished groups outside active labour-market participation. Despite formal legal equality between men and women we still, in practice, find gender inequality in both paid and unpaid work and in their social security levels in Scandinavia. Gerhard discusses the contrasting position of women in Eastern and Central Europe. In the communist societies the women’s issue was ‘solved’ politically from above. The state legislated equal access to the labour market for men and women and guaranteed full employment by political and social measures. These measures included comprehensive childcare and care for the elderly, and thus changed the traditional role of women in the public sphere of society, but failed to relieve women of their extra responsibility for housework. Often, therefore, in the communist societies, women bore a double burden of paid and unpaid work despite formal equality. Gerhard argues that this gender-based inequality has been intensified during the transformation process to liberal market economies in Eastern and Central Europe. During this process, women’s labour-market participation has been reduced, and they have lost the right to work as well as their widespread rights to social protection. The result has been a retirement of women from both paid work and from other types of public activities, especially formal politics. Szalai argues that Western analysts are wrong to suggest that the position of women has declined in Eastern Europe since the fall of the wall. She suggests that in order to understand how the transformation to liberal market economies has changed

Introduction

13

women’s citizenship rights we need both to understand the significance of the informal sector of the economy and to examine the modernization process which took place in the communist societies during the 1960s and 1970s. Szalai describes this process in the case of Hungary. In the aftermath of the 1956 revolution, when alternatives to the socialist party were destroyed, the regime sought a social compromise between party and people. This involved privacy for families and private ownership of small familybased units producing agricultural and handicraft products. This private autonomy was accepted in exchange for unreserved loyalty in carrying out economic and political duties in the formal state-run institutions. This settlement made it possible for people to establish cultural practices and to organize skills outside the formal state institutions. In these activities, women played an outstanding role. Based on their traditional functions in the family they were the main organizers of these ‘private’ social activities. For reasons such as childbirth leave, women, unlike men, could exit temporarily from economic and political activities in the official institutions and build up the alternative institutions which became increasingly important with the erosion of the old socialist system during the 1980s. In the mid-1980s, three-quarters of the households were engaged in some kind of informal production and were collecting substantial income from these activities. During the change of economic and political systems in Hungary between 1989 and 1990, the informal social institutions took control of community-based institutions and became the framework for organizing fundamental parts of people’s everyday lives. Women were central to these informal social institutions and have remained in this position since 1989. However, as a consequence, many women have at least partially withdrawn from the ‘official’ labour market. According to Szalai, Hungarian women took over management of small-scale informal production and are managing the community-based activities in care of children and the elderly. When women enter the labour market in order to take up paid work, they do so in a way which fits in with their responsibilities in the community, that is, on a part-time or temporary basis. According to conventional Western notions, the public position of Hungarian women has deteriorated dramatically, including both their labour-market and formal political situations. Most women have disappeared from the parliament or elected governing bodies. Instead, they are responsible for governing community life and for decision-making in the local politics of welfare provision and social services. Szalai argues that these changes do not constitute a deterioration in the position of women in society. Gerhard, in contrast, argues that the withdrawal of women from public life is problematic, whether it is voluntary or not. They will be excluded from the political decision-making process that is creating new social citizenship rights based on a traditional liberal market economy. Further, the social system in Eastern Europe is likely increasingly to resemble those in the West, where participation in formal paid work is crucial for the level of social protection. NATIONALISMAND ETHNICITY The fragmenting – yet at the same time unifying – effects of ethnicity and nationalism lie at the heart of the debate on the fusion or fission of Europe. That these social identities and communities are in turmoil in many parts of contemporary Europe is

14

Introduction

central to many of the chapters in this volume. These processes are paradoxical and contradictory as a result of divergent pressures. On the one hand, we have the possible decline in the salience of the nation-state in the face of globalization and the increasing power of transnational corporations, global financial markets and institutions, the significance of global environmental concerns which are beyond the scope of the nation-state, and the development of regional supra-states, such as the EU. On the other hand, we have the resurgence of conflicts based on ethnic or national projects and the tearing up of old frontiers and empires based on one set of identities and power structures, to replace them with different and more pressing ethnic and national groupings. These themes echo the concerns of Touraine as to the relationship between globalization and cultural fragmentation in different societies, and the importance of the political in the construction of this relationship. Does globalization facilitate or reduce ethnic and national projects? They raise questions as to a European identity, and, in particular, Therborn’s thesis that contemporary (Western?) Europe should be defined in terms of a commitment to the values of universally conceived human rights. How does such a commitment find expression in the context of cultural diversity? In this section we turn first to an understanding of the theories of nationalism and ethnicity in the chapters by Rex and by Allen; then to the complexity of the different forms of citizenship in Western Europe and its relation to migration and nation in the chapter by Mitchell and Russell; and finally to confronting the explanation of the horrors of genocide in the former Yugoslavia. Both Rex and Allen explore the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism in the contemporary sociological literature. Rex suggests that much of the theoretical development on ethnicity has been related to the study of nationalism. He argues that this theorization does not adequately analyse a second project of ethnicity, namely, the formation of transitional migrant communities. He develops the notion of ethnic mobilization and shows how this can be deployed in order to understand the relationship between migrant groups and the nation-states where they currently live, exploring the contrasts and tensions between the goals of assimilation and multiculturalism. Ethnic mobilization involves ties of a global kind and may act as a brake on assimilation within one country of settlement. Cross-cutting the world of nation-states there are other structures which are based on transnational ethnic communities, which is why a theory of ethnicity is not encompassed by a theory of nationalism. Allen argues that understanding and explaining nationalism has become a crucial part of discussions of change in contemporary Europe. Her starting point is the actual divergence between state and nation and the problematic tendency until recently in much – but not all – sociology to elide the two. She argues that much important work now involves explicit discussion of the relationship between the two, for instance the recent work on citizenship. Her second main point is that many theories of nationalism incorrectly fail to include the gender dimension. In doing so, theories about nationstates and nationalism have tended to neglect the crucial way that gender relations are part of the formation of human organizations; instead, they have overemphasized ethnicity in explaining their development. On the other hand, during recent years, a growing number of scholars have included both ethnicity and gender in their research on citizenship and nationalism.

Introduction

15

Mitchell and Russell consider the thesis that a new European citizenship is developing and reject it. They argue that there may be a degree of internationalization of the governance of immigration into the European Union, but that this is not the same as convergence in the sphere of citizenship. Thus they argue that nation, nationalism and national identity remain central to the new European order. Here, Mitchell and Russell are strongly in opposition to Therborn, but more or less in harmony with Touraine, in emphasizing the remaining diversity of European societies and its consequences for creating the European House. In Germany there is still an exclusionary or ‘ethnic’ model which defines the nation in terms of ethnicity and deeprooted ties of culture and language; minorities are either excluded from citizenship or allowed only very limited rights. France is an example of a second model, where there is an inclusionary republican or ‘civic’ model of the nation in which all residents are entitled to be citizens, irrespective of ethnic origin, so long as they identify with and participate in the national culture. The UK is an example of a third, more recent, multicultural model, although it is more clearly found in Australia and Canada. Here, the nation allows scope for the maintenance of cultural and ethnic identities and differences; groups with ethnically diverse backgrounds are incorporated into the nation with the right to stay culturally distinct. These different models of citizenship remain despite the move to a more uniform EU immigration policy. Mitchell and Russell argue further that defensive nationalism is currently shaping the politics of inclusion and exclusion in Europe in a way quite different from the varieties of nationalism in Eastern Europe. This is partly a response to globalization and partly a defensive response to the perceived threat of East–West and South–North migration. It is the extreme forms of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and, in particular, the tragic events in the former Yugoslavia which led to ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide, which have caused the greatest concern as to ‘fission’ rather than ‘fusion’ in Europe. Bertilsson addresses the possible explanations of these events. She agrees with Bauman that modernity is implicated in these events, but disagrees as to the manner of its involvement. Unlike Bauman, Bertilsson does not believe that the bureaucratic organization, with its effective means–end rationalization, is the cause of the events in the case of the former Yugoslavia. Rather, she argues that the massive ethnic revival in the Balkans is better understood as opposition to modernity itself. She suggests that ethnic resurgence is an attempt at seizing political subjecthood after its suppression during the period of socialist rule. Thus she argues that such revivals are part of modernity, and that this is not a particular tragedy but rather one which has universal features. In this way, Bertilsson implies that fission and fragmentation are essential features of modern Europe. TRANSITION AND TRANSFORMATION IN CENTRALAND EASTERN EUROPE The changes in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe raise the question of the fusion or fission of Europe in several ways, and, in particular, whether these countries are to become like the rest of Europe and move in a direction of integration with the West, or whether they are changing in different and perhaps disparate ways from the

16

Introduction

West. While early writers often argued that societies in Central and Eastern Europe are undergoing a transition to the Western European model after a deviant period of communism, more recent writers have argued that there is no single path of development and that the concept of transformation is more appropriate than transition. For instance, early on, Dahrendorf (1990) suggested that the events of 1989 marked the end of a ‘historical deviation which had begun in 1917’, while Habermas (1990) labelled them ‘rectifying revolutions’, and Offe (1991) suggested that the emphasis of the changes was on restoration rather than on a new revolutionary theory of society. However, the writers in this book – Illner, Sztompka, Szelényi, and Szalai – have the advantage of several years of collection of detailed evidence to support their quite different interpretation of these changes in which the concept of transformation is more appropriate than that of transition. Illner, in particular, rejects the interpretation of post-communist transformations as a return to a ‘normal’ path of development after the ‘deviation’ of the communist period. The societies developing in Eastern and Central Europe will not be simply later arrivals to the community of Western liberal capitalist states; they will not become simple copies of them, nor reproductions of the societies they were in pre-communist days. Rather, the transformations are producing new and unprecedented social forms. There are two main reasons behind his argument. First, there is greater continuity with the past than theorists of a revolutionary break or transition suggest. Social innovation is constrained by the social institutions developed both under communism and before. Illner suggests that we should not underestimate the importance of the impact of the development under the communist period of an egalitarian social welfare system, from which several groups benefited, despite the obvious lack of democratic process. Illner refers to the education system which delivered universal literacy, a general education and a skilled labour force, as well as specific subsidies to the rural and semi-rural populations, who enjoyed an increase in their standard of living under communist rule. The increase in the standard of living under the communist regime means that this period should not be written off as simply regressive nor communism as an ‘evil empire’. But second, and more importantly, Illner stresses the importance of long-term strategic factors that will increasingly differentiate the societies of Central and Eastern Europe, such as geographic location and strategic importance; economic resources; the kind and level of modernization; political history; and cultural traditions. So, for Illner, we should expect no development of an integrated European society, but rather, greater diversity. Szelényi likewise points to the divergence between the societies in the East and West of Europe. His focus is on the newly developing class relations in the context of the economic and political transformations. Szelényi argues that the new dominant class after the fall of communism is that of the managers and that the form of political economy in post-communism is best described as managerialism. The context of diffuse property relations, as a result of the particular processes of denationalization, facilitates this structure. The managers are a powerful group who control the society’s resources without owning them – indeed, they do not need to have ownership in order to have control. They have managed effectively to monopolize cultural capital, in particular the ideology of monetarism, which is the dominant belief system about political economy. Szelényi notes that the thesis of the rise of managerialism was first raised

Introduction

17

about Western societies, and that this was undermined by empirical evidence. The difference is that, in the West, managers’ aspirations to become the dominant class were defeated by a strong propertied bourgeoisie, which is not to be found in the East. The difference between ‘managerialism’ or ‘managerial capitalism’ and the type of private capitalism in most Western countries, is that in the latter we have identifiable owners, or groups of owners, who legitimate economic decision-making with ownership, whereas in post-communist societies there is more diffuse ownership with no identifiable owners to make decisions. Szelényi is not just noting the economic power of the new managerial class, but also arguing that it is their access to cultural capital which is crucial. The intelligentsia has a role but is co-opted. The crucial part of this cultural capital is the monopolization of the ideology of monetarism. In this way the hegemony of laissez-faire capitalism is complete, but it has a different form from that in the West. The uniqueness and importance of each society’s culture is a theme found also in the chapter by Sztompka as he explores the preconditions for stable democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. Sztompka argues for the importance not only of the political institutions of democracy, such as parliament, political parties and elections, but also for its cultural underpinnings in civil society. In order for there to be a full democracy it is necessary to have a fully developed civic culture. It is not enough to have political institutions such as parliaments, political parties and elections. He suggests that the societies of Eastern and Central Europe suffer from ‘civilizational incompetence’ as a result of the period of communist rule. These years created a ‘bloc culture’, based on a philosophy of dependence instead of self-reliance, of an allembracing collectivism and conformity, of rigidity and of intolerance. However, there were two other cultural traditions co-existing with this: the national or indigenous culture; and Western culture. These were both suppressed, but nonetheless had a presence during the communist period. Indeed, these societies generated mass movements in favour of democratic reform which struggled against the system, despite these inauspicious circumstances. We should not forget that it was from within that society that the democratic opposition emerged, spread and was able to mobilize large masses in the struggle against the system. Differences in national cultures means that there is considerable diversity in the receptivity of post-communist countries to democratic practices: for instance, the Czech Republic had a cultural tradition more conducive to democracy than that of Russia. Sztompka does think that the situation for democracy can become more favourable and indeed deploys the concept of ‘cultural lag’. In this way Stompka implies both the possibility of convergence of the East towards the democratic traditions of the West, utilizing the evolutionary language of ‘cultural lag’ and of ‘transition’, while yet highlighting the current dissimilarity of the civic cultures of these societies. A more optimistic note on the recent developments in Hungary was struck by Szalai in her examination of gendered patterns of economic development in her argument with Western feminists, such as Einhorn (1991), who suggest that the position of women is deteriorating significantly in Eastern and Central Europe. She argues that we cannot explain the patterns of inequality in the economy today without an understanding of the development of the informal sector during the period of communism. This sector involved the use of small one-acre private plots of land, and the labour time especially of women who had a three-year childcare leave following the birth of each child. This

18

Introduction

enabled women in particular to develop the skills and networks which are so important in a marketized economy, while men devoted most of their labour time to the formal state-run sector. Szalai argues that while women are few in the main formal political arenas, nonetheless they are significant political actors when situations arise in which they wish to intervene, such as new legislation on abortion. Hence she argues that initial analyses of statistics on the position of women underestimates the integration of women in contemporary Hungarian society. The most catastrophic changes in Eastern and Central Europe are the ones relating to war and genocide, to ethnic and national conflict. The tragic disintegration of the former Yugoslavia into warring ethnic nations, the fragmentation of the former Soviet Union with associated armed conflict, and many other incidents, demand consideration. Bertilsson asks whether Bauman’s thesis on modernity, with its means–end rationality, is the ultimate root of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. She concludes that rather than being part of modernity, it is better to see these processes as a form of resistance to modernity, that the massive ethnic revival in the Balkans is directed against modernity itself. Touraine argues that we should see the conflict in the former Yugoslavia not as cultural or religious, but as a result of a struggle by the Milosevic regime to transform his communist dictatorship into a nationalist one. These chapters on contemporary developments in Eastern and Central Europe demonstrate the importance of understanding difference in order to understand the whole picture. The different patterns of gender relations and of ethnic relations are crucial to understanding the changes in these societies. As their economies become marketized and some of their polities democratized, there will be some movement towards the freedoms and inequalities of the West. However, despite a common period of communist governance and its overthrow, the societies of Eastern and Central Europe have very significant differences both among themselves and with Western European countries, many of which date back to a period before their communist past. REFERENCES Dahrendorf, R. (1990) The Modern Social Conflict: An Essay on the Politics of Liberty, Berkeley: University of California Press. Einhorn (1991) ‘Where have all the women gone?’, Feminist Review, No. 39. European Commission (1993) Growth, Competitiveness, Employment: The Challenges and Ways Forward into the 21st Century, White Paper, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. —— (1994) European Social Policy: Option for the Union, Green Paper, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Habermas, J. (1990) Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Frankfurt: Campus.

1

‘Europe’ as issues of sociology Göran Therborn

Here in Budapest we are gathering on the sacred ground of modernity, if such an oxymoron may be allowed, full of memories of battles, and with a spring of projects. A hundred years ago this was the site of the Magyar millennium, a monumental celebration of nationalism. Only a few years later, an embryonic Hungarian sociology, allied to poetry, hailed international modernity in journals with names of fanfares, The Twentieth Century (Huszadik Század), The West (Nyugat). Karl Polanyi presided over the Galileo Circle, and just after World War I Karl Mannheim got the first Chair of Sociology. From Budapest came some of the most important witnesses to and participants of the vicissitudes of twentieth-century modernity: Arthur Koestler, Georg Lukács, John von Neumann, Leo Szilárd, among others. The bomb, game theory, neo-Marxist dialectics, and Darkness at Noon, are all largely fermentations of the Budapest imagination. Budapest is a place for new ideas, and for reflecting about the old. That’s why we are here, I suppose. EUROPE AND THE SLOW TRAIN OF SOCIOLOGY In its basic thoughts, sociology is a slow train, plodding along in meandering motion. Sociology is more like the famous night train from Budapest to Trieste – as fast in the belle époque before World War I as eighty years later – than the ‘fields’ of feverish competitive showmanship, which Pierre Bourdieu has analysed so eloquently. ‘Europe’ has for long been a marginal subject of sociology, at most. It is true that our German colleague Richard Münch (1993) has devoted a recent book to it, full of the same straightforward modern energy as the project itself, but on the whole Europe has not been an object of research. Europe has rarely, if ever, been taken as an empirical embodiment of a key theoretical concept or of a fascinating general process, nor as a challenge to our imagination of social construction. In its dismissive, non-committal form, Durkheim’s ([1970] 1987: 295) off-the-cuff remark in a debate on patriotism in 1907 is representative: ‘Europe, or if you want, the whole civilized world’ (i.e., as a more vast fatherland was being created). It had no implications of theory and analysis, nor of practice, as Durkheim remained a French nationalist. In order to link up with a committed sociological approach to Europe we have to go back almost two hundred years, to the proto-sociology of Henri de Saint-Simon, the

20

Opening article

master of Auguste Comte. Experiences of the French Revolution produced an extraordinary analytical perspicacity with regard to history and social affairs among a number of intellectuals, among whom only Alexis de Tocqueville is now read and remembered. But there were several others; Saint-Simon and his first secretary Augustin Thierry were among them. In 1814 Saint-Simon and Thierry (1868: 153–218) published a booklet On the Reorganization of European Society. It is strikingly similar in tone to the project of Jean Monnet, Robert Schumann, and Konrad Adenauer 135 years later. With the difference that, writing before Waterloo but after the main Napoleonic wars, it is a reconciliation of France and England that is crucial. The project continues the prenationalist humanism of the Enlightenment, and suggests that England should have a two-thirds majority in an Anglo-French parliament, an early expression of what contemporary Germans would call Westbindung, Western embeddedness. With the same vision that de Tocqueville had when he foresaw the coming world prominence of Russia and the USA, Saint-Simon and Thierry (1868: 213) say that the ‘German nation’ ‘is destined to play the premier role in Europe, as soon as it is united under a free government’. Saint-Simon did correctly predict that the ancien régime was doomed, in spite of the Restoration and the Holy Alliance, and that the classes of industry were soon going to assert themselves. He did not envisage the rise of nationalism, which put his European project on a backburner for a long time. What actually happened in the latter respect was instead captured by Max Weber. Weber’s inaugural lecture at Freiburg in 1895 is the most eloquent social science homage to nationalism ever presented. It is militant: ‘There can be no truce even in the economic struggle for existence’; heroic: ‘We do not have peace and happiness to bequeath to our posterity, but rather the eternal struggle for the maintenance and improvement . . . of our national character’. It is explicitly particularistic: ‘the standard of value adopted by a German . . . theorist, can therefore be nothing other than a German policy and a German standard’ (Weber 1980: 436, 438, 437, respectively; emphasis omitted). Weber expressed his time well. He also pointed silently to where Europe would go; i.e., onto the roads to Verdun, to El Alamein and to Stalingrad, if not to Auschwitz. But Weber at Freiburg is dated, mid-time European modernity. That Weber is not the classic of contemporary sociology. Today we are back to the vista of Saint-Simon, after having travelled through the horrible interlude of Max Weber’s world and its extrapolations (or most of us have, at least). Weber’s Freiburg is no longer the academic Watch on the Rhine cutting the heart of Europe into two. It is a battered, half-deserted, half-cleansed village somewhere in the triangle between Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo. The slowness of fundamental sociology may reflect the course of social history. There is still a wagon of nationalism at the rear of the train of Europe. THE EUROPEAN BUILDING SITE Now, after all, Europe is becoming a hot area of research. Europe does embody some key concepts of sociology, it harbours fascinating, epochal social processes, and it

‘Europe’ as issues of sociology

21

calls out our constructive imagination to test. But ‘Europe’ is a difficult thing. Where is it, where does it begin, where does it end? What does it mean? First of all, then, we should open our eyes to what it looks like. Europe today looks like a building site; rather like central Berlin as a matter of fact. Similar to the sense in which Paris was ‘the capital of the 19th century’, in Walter Benjamin’s characterization, Berlin is, more modestly and certainly more contradictorily, the capital of twentieth-century Europe. It has been a parade-ground of early twentiethcentury nationalism as well as the all-European example of socialist working-class organization, the tragic end of the brief hopes of a proletarian revolution, a short-lived centre of cultural modernity, the continental headquarters of Fascism and genocide, the meeting-point and the dividing line between the anti-Fascist victors, the walled-in monument of a defensive second-rate socialism, a major centre of the spirit of 1968 (in both its Western emancipatory version and its Eastern repressive form), and the place where communism was perceived to end. Most recently, Berlin was the stage of the major manifestation of art in this decade, and it is currently a hectic building ground, where Polish, Portuguese, and other workers, some legal some not but all fed by Turkish fast food, are building a German capital of uncertain meanings and implications. In contemporary Europe two major buildings are being constructed, Capitalism in Eastern and East-Central Europe, and the European Union. Both projects put challenges to the social sciences, which sociologists have been reluctant to take seriously, and which economists in the former case and lawyers in the latter have been only too happy to set their claws into. Both projects have key problems of social steering in common, like previously the EU project with the building of socialism. As I have recently presented a framework for the analysis of such long-term processes of deliberate change (Therborn 1995: ch. 16), I shall here approach some more specific issues. There are problems of system-building and of society maintenance. In the East, there are the intrinsic costs of systemic change, the issue of systemic options (are there several roads to capitalism, or is there only one?), and the questions of the cultural prerequisites of a successful capitalism and of the design of social institutions. In the West, and in Europe as a whole, it is crucial first of all to realize what kind of system is possible and desirable, as a ‘European Union’, and what that implies. But whatever the system, both Eastern and Western Europe are threatened societies, subject to powerful processes of social disintegration and dissolution. POLITICO-IDEOLOGICAL DEFINED SYSTEMS: THEIR CHANGEAND CHANCES Social transformations and systemic changes all begin in the ever-bright dawn of hope. The night-owl of historical and sociological wisdom is heard only afterwards, when the choices have already been made and when payments are due. Well before the anti-communist turn of 1989–91, social historians and social scientists knew that revolutions of politico-ideologically defined social systems were usually tremendously costly in terms of human suffering, while paradoxically often modest or contradictory in their production of social effects. The human and the

22

Opening article

economic costs of the French and the Russian revolutions had been investigated in detail by phalanxes of scholars. Among the transformers of 1989–91 probably even fewer people than in 1917–19 paid any attention to empirical experience. Sociologically understandably, because the systemic change in Eastern and East-Central Europe was extremely, nay uniquely, fortunate by historical standards. There was no resistance from the previous regime, no foreign interventions, no foreign blockade. On the contrary, there was big international applause, and some money.¹ Nevertheless, the economic effects of the systemic turn are worse, in the most ‘fortunate’ cases of Poland and the Czech Republic, than those of the 1930s Depression on Germany. In the former Soviet Union and on the Balkans, the overall effect is similar to the wartime economic destruction (Unicef 1994: 94; 1995: 277; Maddison 1985: 18, 47).² No wonder that in the early 1990s Eastern Europeans were the unhappiest people on earth (Therborn 1995: 293ff.). Politico-ideologically defined systems have uneven and variable effects upon the life-course of people. True, on the whole Communist Eastern Europe was more egalitarian than Capitalist Western Europe, but, for instance, the Social Democratic Nordic countries did at least as well, in income distribution, gender equality and social mobility. Communist Europe was not one but several structures of life-chances in comparison with Capitalist Europe. Private property income was more important in supposedly socialist Poland than in several countries of Western Europe (Therborn 1995: 153, 156, 174). The political iron curtain was not a social one. This empirical sociological conclusion bears upon the current discussion of whether there is, say, a Czech or a Hungarian road to capitalism, or whether there is only one road (i.e., that provided by the most powerful foreign model). THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM REVISITED The cultural prerequisites of any successful long-term functioning and development of capitalism were part of the core teaching of classical sociology. Onto the current Eastern European market of ideas, classical sociology has two major contributions to offer. One refers to the potential social destructiveness of the market. In other words, to create a market economy is not the same as to create or to foster a civil society. Durkheim, in his famous work on the division of labour, highlighted the problems of anomie, of normlessness in unregulated market economies. An extreme example today of Durkheim’s chickens now returning to roost is Russian banking. Here, assassination seems to be the most frequent cause of death. At this point we must also refer to the great work of Karl Polanyi ([1944] 1957), a modern classic of economic sociology. To him, the ‘great transformation’ of nineteenthcentury marketeering led, by its own inherent impossibility, to Fascism. (Polanyi, of course, wrote in exile during the war.) Fascism may not be on the future agenda. But the critique of unbridled markets – of the commodification of social relations, for their tendencies of self-endangering social destructiveness – has a strong empirical as well as theoretical base in mainstream sociology.

‘Europe’ as issues of sociology

23

The point here is that anti-sociological market economies are likely to produce not only poor people, who might be discounted or discarded, but also violence, vandalism, and environmental destruction. The other classical sociological idea is that capitalist development requires not only a normative regulation but also an economic culture. Max Weber’s famous inquiry into the ‘spirit’ of capitalism (i.e., into capitalist culture) bears directly upon the question of what decides between a ‘backward’ and an ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ capitalism. Weber distinguished very sharply between greed (what the Romans called auri sacra fames) or irrational speculation, and rational capitalism. The former had always existed, without necessarily leading anywhere economically, while the latter was a recent Western phenomenon. Weber’s point was, that any socially successful capitalism was not just private property, unregulated prices, and the maxim ‘enrich yourselves’, but that it involved a culture of values, norms and trust, of calling and time perspective (Weber 1988: 41ff. Cf. the author’s introduction to his essays on the sociology of religion, 1988: 4ff.). Capitalist prosperity is not a social ‘normalcy’. Some societies achieve it, most don’t. Europe before 1939 was not synonymous with success. After 1989 it is even less so. A developed market economy, an advanced capitalism, is not approached by a supply of luxury goods and opportunities of rapid individual enrichment. If that had been the case, Calcutta, Kinshasa, and Port-au-Prince and their likes would long since have been models of development. Here the arguments of radical development economics and conservative mainstream sociology, in the vein of Talcott Parsons, concur remarkably. Constitutional arrangements and economic forms are not enough. Underdeveloped societies are characteristically disjointed and segmented, which is why the accumulation of wealth in, for example, certain neighbourhoods of Port-auPrince has not led to much development of Haitian society. Sustained development and advanced societies require institutions of social integration. The design of new institutions of social integration has so far been largely neglected in Eastern and Central Europe. Since social integration is a major sociological stock-in-trade, we have a special responsibility for pushing it onto the agenda of transformation. SYSTEMIC INTEGRATION: EUROPEASANORMATIVEAREA With regard to the European Union, which is no longer to be an exclusively Western European project, we have to face a more elementary question – not primarily about the prerequisites of systemic construction, but about what system is being built. What European integration or union? The most obvious answer is, of course, an economic union of commercial interdependence. That was the start-up disk of Jean Monnet and others, a European functional integration of a supranational division of labour. Today, Europe as an economic subsystem would amount to a regional blurb on the Reuter screens of global markets. ‘Culture’ was Monnet’s alternative to trade and divisions of labour. And regional literati may still be called upon to sermonize on the ‘European idea’, the ‘European tradition’, the ‘European identity’. Other intellectuals might, if need be, be called upon to fulminate against the colonialist, racist, sexist, and Fascist history and/or character

24

Opening article

of Europe. (For the sake of academic peace I am here forsaking recourse to footnotes of reference.) Against all this, I would venture the proposition, that the ‘Europe’ being built is something more than a region of the world system of capitalism, and something different from a manifestation of a European culture – from an expression of European collective representations as a Durkheimian might put it. The most important, and the theoretically most fascinating, aspect of the European integration project is the emergence of Europe as a normative area, as a loosely coupled system of regulatory norms. In order to get a handle on what is happening we need to abandon a sociological vulgata of social cohesion posed in poles of division of labour – common values or identity. An excellent analytical point of departure is, then, David Lockwood’s (1964) article ‘Social integration and system integration’. Over thirty years after its publication, it should be used with somewhat of the same impious imagination that Lockwood himself used with regard to Karl Marx. Lockwood’s distinction directs our attention to the difference between a coupling of actors and a fit of systemic parts. The Europe being created is not an ethnic community, and could not be. The genetic code of current Europeans is of Middle Eastern, Lower Don/Kurgan and Northern Asian origin (Cavalli Sforza and Piazza 1993). Nor is Europe becoming a cultural unit, in spite of some French efforts. Indeed, Europe has largely lost its cultural identity. The classical, and most specific, cultural European identity of Greek and Roman Antiquity has disappeared, by and large. The world of Solon, Pericles, Caesar, Cicero, Augustus and others does not make much sense to contemporary European politicians. Even among intellectuals a knowledge of the Odes of Horace or the Metamorphoses of Ovid is no longer to be expected. If Europe is to have any meaning and substance it is not as an object of identity, as part of any identity politics. It is as a focus of institutionalization. The actually ongoing building of Europe is a process of system integration, of building a loosely coupled, open system, very different from the rigid ideological complexes of the Cold War, but also without the forceful dynamic of the world system of capitalism. As such, ‘Europe’ is a set of supranational, suprastate normative institutions. The European Union is the most concrete and tangible of this set, with a highly visible political apparatus and a substantial budgetary underpinning. The EU does not operate mainly as a ‘common market’ (its impact on trade has been uneven and unsystematic), but as a normative area governed by an extensive body of rules, vigilantly and strongly protected by a European judiciary, to which even nation-states are held liable. EU legislation is chiefly commercial, although adherence to certain basic norms of democracy and human rights is expected from all Member States. This became quite clear in the entrance process of post-dictatorial Greece, Portugal, and Spain. (NATO, it should be remembered, has never posed any demands of democracy and human rights as criteria for membership.) Members, except the UK, have also committed themselves to certain basic norms of social policy (Council and Commission of the European Communities 1992: 196ff.). The Council of Europe, with the European Convention on Human Rights, its Court of Human Rights, and its European Social Charter, has made Europe into an area of human rights, more specific and more binding than any other area of the world.

‘Europe’ as issues of sociology

25

(‘Europe’ in the Council of Europe sense does not yet include some of the countries of the former USSR and of the former Yugoslavia, it should perhaps be added.) A third major institution of normative Europe is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), officially constituted in 1992 and 1994 (when the name changed from ‘Conference’ to ‘Organization’), but going back to the institutionalized thaw of the Cold War, the Helsinki Agreement of 1975. The seventh section of the latter listed a set of fundamental freedoms and rights to act and provided for a review process. The now permanent OSCE has a special monitoring and dialogueinitiating Office on democratic institutions and human rights, located in Warsaw. Also with regard to heeding UN conventions, there is a tendency for European countries to emerge as a supranational normative area, for instance with reference to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. While Western European governments and non-governmental organizations are paying serious attention to the Convention and to the hearings of its official monitoring Committee, the United States, for instance, has not even ratified the Convention. (See further, Therborn 1996.) This normative system construction has its cultural prerequisites. But the culture underpinning the new European set of normative institutions is not any deep and ancient culture of Europeans. Rather, it is a collection of Western European lessons from recent European modernity: that nationalism, and any other ‘ism’ pursued with a single mind, is dangerous and should be kept regulated; that the inviolability of the basic rights of human life and dignity constitutes a supreme norm, overriding any social construction. This is not ancient Greece, Christianity, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment. It is the conclusion from the last European world war and from the discovery of the gas chambers. The European road to and through modernity has also left a certain legacy of social norms, reflecting European experiences of class and gender. Elsewhere (Therborn 1995: 282ff.) I have summed them up as ‘public collectivism’ and ‘family individualism’. Collective bargaining, trade unions, public social services, individual rights of women and of children are all held more legitimate in Europe than in the rest of the contemporary world. They are expressed in the social documents of the EU and of the Council of Europe. Rather than a celebration of European culture and identity, this current normative Europe might be seen as what Massimo Cacciari (1994: 157, 166–7), the Italian philosopher and the current mayor of Venice, has called the ‘occidente della sua storia’, the sundown of European history, as a ‘silent maturation of the Coming’, of Europe going into the serene evening of its own culture.³ ‘Europe’ as a normative area is a social construction that brings us into the heart of sociological theory and analysis. It also has a considerable social appeal. It is not exclusive, it requires no visas and has no border guards. It extends, and is extensible as far as adherence to its norms go. It does not prescribe any particular form of social integration among social actors. It provides a field for a limitless number of cultures and lifestyles. Put in Habermasian terms, it is a system that allows and protects a number of different lifeworlds. It is as a supranational normative area that Europe has asserted itself. This is the only thing Europe has left to tell the world, and it is being followed and imitated in new

26

Opening article

shapes in the Americas, in Asia, and in Africa, with variable (but so far mostly modest) success. The European system of regulatory norms and courts is the most institutionalized manifestation of what our Portuguese colleague Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1991) has drawn our attention to: ‘the transnationalization of the legal field’. The attempts to turn the EU into a competitive corporation, or at least a Ministry of industry and foreign trade and/or into a political superpower, have all failed miserably, most recently in Bosnia. PROCESSES OF DISINTEGRATION However, dialectics has not left Europe. Together with system building and system integration, at least three processes of social disintegration are also gathering momentum. Fission and fusion occur simultaneously. The old economic distance between Eastern and Western Europe, which narrowed in the 1950s and early 1960s and then grew again, widened to an abyss in the period 1990–3. It is still widening, in absolute terms. We may get a glimpse of the problem by comparing the economic development after 1989 in the two poorest EU countries and in the three most favoured ex-communist countries (Table 1.1). How the GDP of the two groups of countries relates exactly in terms of purchasing power parities may still be open to debate, but that of the EU countries is generally considered clearly above that of the Visegrad group. However, the latter have gone backwards, in total resources, while the former have advanced further. Table 1.1 The development of real GDP in five countries, 1989–94 (Index: 31.12.1989 = 100)

1.1.92 1.1.95

Greece

Portugal

Czech R .

103.1 104.1

108.3 108.3

78.4 79.7

Hungary

Poland

82.6 83.5

84.0 91.6

Sources: OECD, Economic Outlook, June 1995; Unicef, Central and Eastern Europe in Transition, No. 3, 1995.

How far this precipitating chasm between ordinary people may be compensated for by the rapprochement in consumption of the upper and upper middle classes will be an important topic of power investigation. How the drawing together of youth cultures and youth expectations will liaise with the diverging situations of the old and the middle aged is another grand issue, connecting us with the generational sociology that Karl Mannheim pioneered. In any case, there is a contradiction between, on the one hand, the European unification around parliamentary democracy and the market economy, and, on the other, the growing apart of life-chances in the East and in the West. Second, the economic wedge of social division is sharpened by a historical turn of contemporary developed capitalism. Modern, successful capitalism is no longer, as it was for about three decades after World War II, by and large a positive sum game. The happy times when employment, capital accumulation, wages, taxes, pensions, and profits all grew together have left us – maybe for ever. Anyway, currently and for the

‘Europe’ as issues of sociology

27

foreseeable future, even successful, socially embedded capitalism is producing and reproducing losers (the unemployed, the marginalized, the ghettoized) on a growing scale. How far this process will go is impossible to tell. It would be premature to say that it is beyond political remedy. On the other hand, there are no signs anywhere that anything serious is being done about it. The unemployment rate of the European Union is climbing upwards from one business cycle to the next. Monetary union and monetary convergence occupy the politicians’ agenda, and the willingness of the employed to pay for the unemployed is going down. Even under the best conditions, the new capitalism of Eastern and East-Central Europe is likely to produce a vast pool of permanent losers. Immigration is something to be proud of, the sincerest form of social flattery. The inequality, or, if you want, perversity, of European modernity was well expressed in the fact that, for all its global prosperity, Europe was until the early 1960s a continent of emigration. Until then, Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, was enjoying a strange wonderland, ruling large parts of the rest of the world, sucking in its surplus, and exporting Europe’s surplus population to it. Now this has changed. In a sense it means that Western Europe is becoming what East-Central Europe once was – a multiethnic, multicultural society. Multiculturality was once the characteristic of the whole strip, from the left bank of the Dnieper to the Oder–Neisse running from Vyborg/Viipuri on the Finnish Gulf to Thessaloniki/Selänik/ Soloun on the Aegean Sea and to Constantinople/Istanbul on the Bosporus: the world which has entered literature through what Elias Canetti has told us of Ruse (in Bulgaria) and Czeslaw Milosz of Vilna (or contemporary Vilnius), and which was finally destroyed in the last world war and its aftermath. Immigration brings a new cultural richness to Western Europe. Nowadays, it is tangibly expressed in a widening gastronomic horizon, and in Creole suburban music, from Stockholm to Paris. But you may also encounter this new world of Europe in the literature of Hanif Kureishi and others. However, it would be unsociologically naïve to suppose that multiculturality would arrive and settle without tension, friction, and conflict. Here we have a third tendency of social disintegration, manifested in xenophobia, discrimination, and ethnic violence. After all, the Russian Pale of Jewish settlement, the Sudetenland or Transylvania were never models of cultural harmony and social integration. Its very openness, inwards as well as outwards, is the weakness of the system of Europe. As such, it provides no solution to the new negative dynamics of capitalism and its production of economic losers and social misery. It does not cope with the anomic conditions coming out of multiplying contemporary economics with processes of individualization and cultural diversification, with the production of everyday violence. To tackle these processes of disintegration and social destruction, Europeans, East and West, will have to draw upon a positive lesson from European modernity: collective action for securing individual rights is possible. The efforts of the labour movement and the policies and institutions of the welfare state have shaped the developed modern societies of Europe more than any other part of the world. Today and tomorrow, new forms of collective action and of solidarity are called for.

28 Opening article BY WAY OF CONCLUSION Dear colleague, you are not sitting for yourself in a vast world, singly facing forces or fashions of globalization, individualization, and postmodernism. As a European sociologist you are part of the building and rebuilding of a continent. Ours is an era of social design, of new social systems in Eastern and East-Central Europe and of a union of Europe. Practice is bringing us back to the concern of the early origin of our discipline, after the end of the French Revolution. Classical and central questions of sociology have become crucial issues for the construction or destruction of Europe, deriving from the European road to and through modernity: the emergence and the erosion of norms, the regulation of markets, the culture of capitalism; the parameters of large-scale social reorganization, the possibilities of social steering, the closure or openness of social systems, forms of system integration and of social integration; bases of collective action, the social effects of economic polarization, the implications of new generational divides; the dynamics of identities, nationalism and post-nationalism, the handling of ethnic encounters, and multiculturality. How these sociological questions are answered in the practice of power will decide much of the future of Europe and of Europeans. Sociologists have usually been both suspicious of and suspect to power, with good reasons for both. But we have also a tradition, strengthened in recent decades, of speaking up to the powers that be. And as social scientists, we have no escape from social responsibility. NOTES 1. The historian’s view of comparative social revolutions is not, of course, identical with the bitter experience of the participants. While from a cool historical observer’s perspective the Eastern European social change appears extraordinarily lucky, a participant may see the limited Western aid as an expression of ‘the Choir of the Old European Hypocrisy’, as the Hungarian writer Peter Nádas put it in his acceptance speech on receiving the German Book Prize of European Understanding. 2. Poland’s GDP fell by 19 per cent in 1990/91, that of the Czech Republic by 21 per cent in 1991/ 92. In the Depression of the 1930s the peak to trough fall of the German GDP was 16 per cent. 3. The double meaning of ‘occidente’, which is also well captured by the German ‘Abendland’, is lost in the purely geographical English ‘West’.

REFERENCES Cacciari, M. (1994) Geo-filosofia dell’ Europa, Milano: Adelphi. Cavalli Sforza, L.L. and Piazza, A. (1993) ‘Biologica e genetica’, in P. Anderson et al. (eds), Storia d’ Europa, Vol. 1, Torino: Einaudi. Council and Commission of the European Communities (1992) Treaty on European Union, Luxembourg. Council of Europe (1992) Human Rights in International Law, Strasbourg: Council of Europe Press. Durkheim, E. ([1970] 1987) ‘Pacifisme et Patriotisme’, in La science sociale e l’action, Paris: PUF. Lockwood, D. (1964) ‘Social integration and system integration’, in G. Zollschan and W. Hirsch (eds), Explorations in Social Change, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

‘Europe’ as issues of sociology

29

Maddison, A. (1985) Two Crises, Paris: OECD. Münch, R. (1993) Das Projekt Europa, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Polanyi, K. ([1944] 1957) The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press. Saint-Simon, H. de and Thierr,y A. (1868) De la Réorganisation de la société européenne, in Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et Enfantin, Vol. 1, Paris: E. Dentu. Sousa Santos, B. de (1991) ‘Law in the world system: from legal diaspora to legal ecumene’, unpublished paper. Therborn, G. (1995) European Modernity and Beyond, London: Sage. —— (1996) ‘Child politics: dimensions and perspectives’, Childhood, No. 1. Unicef (1994) Crisis in Mortality, Health and Nutrition, Florence: Economies in Transition Studies Regional Monitoring Report No. 2. —— (1995) Economies of Transition, Vol. 3, No. 2, Florence. Weber, M. (1980) ‘Freiburger Antrittsrede’ (English translation as ‘The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address)’), Economy and Society, 9. —— (1988) ‘Die protestantische Ethik und der Geuist des Kapitalismus’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr/UTB.

Part I

Social exclusion and European integration

2

The revitalization of Western Europe and the politics of the ‘social dimension’ Volker Bornschier and Patrick Ziltener

THE REVITALIZATION OFWEST EUROPEAN INTEGRATION Western Europe’s move towards political union entered widespread public debate only at the beginning of the 1990s. However, it had begun almost a decade earlier, culminating in a bargain to recast the Community which was struck in 1985 with the Single European Act. These events mark a historic step from a Community paralysed by lethargy and budgetary squabbling in the ‘Eurosclerosis’ era to one in which the Community showed muscles in putting in place political structures ‘that will give it a prime role in helping define the post-Cold War world order’, as the Community presented itself to the world at Seville’s 1992 Universal Exposition. The change within the Community during the mid-1980s finds its expression in two documents published by the Community – the Commission’s White Paper (1985) for the European Council (heads of state and governments) regarding the completion of the internal market, and the Single European Act, adopted in December 1985 by the European Council and formally approved by the Council of Ministers (ministers of foreign affairs) on 28 February 1986. The first initiatives of the Commission to establish the internal market can be traced back to 1981. The internal market project was established and pushed ahead by the Commission and the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). The ERT is an informal panel founded at the initiative of Commissioners Etienne Davignon and François-Xavier Ortoli in April 1983; it was composed of 17 top European industrialists, and was later expanded to include 40 members. Wisse Dekker – head of Philips, already an influential figure in the ERT and later its president, who formulated the ‘Agenda for Action: Europe 1990’ – and Lord Cockfield – then vice-president of the Commission, under whose auspices the White Paper ‘Europe 1992’ was drafted – shared the same intentions: a Single Market. At least since April 1983, the informal panel of the ERT (informal because it is not a body within the institutional framework of the Community) and the protagonists of the Commission worked together towards this goal. The Single European Act marks the transition to proper statehood. It is called ‘single’ because it regulates European policy cooperation by treaty and changes existing treaties of the Community at the same time. Since its adoption, the superior body of the Community, the European Council (heads of state and governments of the

34

Social exclusion and European integration

Member States), coordinates political and economic policies with the president of the Commission, who is a member of the European Council with equal rights. Since the 1980s, the Community has assumed the challenges resulting from its comparative economic weakness in the triad formed by the United States, European Union and Japan. Recently, it has also begun to advance more binding normative theories designed to facilitate the necessary institutional innovations. The thrust towards a new beginning in Western Europe with the European Union as the centre of activity can clearly be shown in the White Paper of December 1993, largely influenced by the problem of unemployment. Whether the strength of European civilization is sufficient, and whether it will prove possible to break the inertia and the resistance of vested interests, is not yet certain. But the Commission’s White Paper (1994), subtitled ‘The Challenges and Ways Forward into the 21st Century’, addresses nothing less than ‘The new model of European society’. The elite pact: European transnationals in search of a political entrepreneur Our theory of the European integration process focuses on a bargain between European transnational corporations and the Commission (Bornschier 1994). Two groups of actors – transnationals and states – are considered to shape the world political economy via the theoretical mechanism of the world market for social order and protection (Bornschier 1988: 367 ff.; 1996: 50 ff.). Protection is a neglected element of national and economic production functions. Governments produce order and provide this public utility to capitalist enterprises as well as to citizens under their rule. By supplying this utility, governments affect the quality of their territory as a location in the world economy. This approach models both the demand and supply for social order and regulation provided by states within a single analytical framework. It differs from neofunctionalism because transnational business interests do not only emerge as a response to the integration process. At the same time it differs from neorealism in so far as according to our theory governments do not only compete in a politicomilitary sense, but also as providers of social order, regulation and protection for business. States as suppliers of conducive conditions for production are also involved in a genuine economic competition. In this theoretical framework of competition among political entrepreneurs for mobile capital, and competition among economic entrepreneurs for state services and protection, we may assume similar competitive strategies for both classes of actors. Not only transnationals, but also states, may form strategic alliances or even merge. Such mergers of state services are, however, much easier if supranational institutional preconditions are present and available for political entrepreneurship. Such a supranational focus for initiative was ever present in the form of the Commission, whose independence and role as initiator was stipulated in the original treaty of 1957. Why, then, the relaunch in the early 1980s? The mechanism of bargaining between political and economic undertakings and the implied economic competition between governments is part of a cyclical theory of social change, which refers to the rise and decline of societal models and of hegemons (Bornschier 1988, 1996). The pressure to rearrange the political economy is most urgent

The revitalization of Western Europe

35

when cornerstones of a societal model (Keynesianism) and interstate coordination run into crisis and when the relative decline of the hegemon (United States) and emerging new competitors (Japan) jeopardize the stability of the world political economy. An important factor behind the timing of the relaunch of the European Community was the relative decline of the United States as hegemon. Europe could no longer rely totally on its relationship with the United States. Japan was suddenly in the number two position. The competitive disadvantages of Europe as an industrial site were first felt by European transnational corporations. After the economic crisis of the 1970s, the United States as well as Japan recovered more easily than Europe. The USA, despite its loss of competitiveness, was able to take advantage of its own large and rather homogenous internal market, and Japan enjoyed the advantage of elaborate strategic planning, which had been essential for Japan’s extraordinary rise. One area where action was taken fairly early was high technology, an area particularly threatened by Japanese competition. European cooperation in hightechnology areas began in the first half of the 1980s and culminated in such programmes as ESPRIT and RACE (Research and Development on Advanced Communication Technologies in Europe, started in 1985). These programmes were the direct result of collaboration between European corporations and the EC Commission under the initiative of Etienne Davignon. In 1983 the European Roundtable of Industrialists was formed – again with the participation of Etienne Davignon – under the presidency of Pehr Gyllenhammar of Volvo and including the chief executive officers of companies such as Philips, Siemens, FIAT, and Daimler-Benz. The members of the Commission were well aware of the power of these industrialists and the fact that they could influence their home governments. The European transnational corporations directly and indirectly demanded that the political entrepreneurs in Europe provide them with the combined advantages their rivals were enjoying in the United States and Japan. This demand was met by the Commission, which created a new project for political union along the following guidelines: a large homogenous market combined with strategic planning, particularly with regard to advanced technology. Andrew Moravcsik (1991) proposes an alternative elite bargain thesis, claiming that the Single European Act can be explained on the basis of national interests and interstate bargaining between the three big Member States – Germany, France, and Britain. The advantage of our theory over Moravcsik’s is our acknowledgement of a demand from European business corporations and a recognition of this need coupled with the will of the European Commission to meet this demand (Bornschier and Fielder 1995; Bornschier 1996: 344–69). The inclusion of the strategic advantages of its two rivals – a larger market and ‘technology corporatism’ – into a new political project may well be explained by our elite bargain thesis. But, apart from ‘more market and strategic planning’, social compensations were one of the core elements of the Single European Act. However, the ‘social dimension’ is the weakest part in the new political package of the 1980s. Nevertheless, it is difficult to explain the transfer of the Western European social policy tradition to the EU level in the framework of the elite bargain model so far elaborated.

36

Social exclusion and European integration

THREE THESES ON THE POLITICS OF THE ‘SOCIAL DIMENSION’ From the fact of the economistic tilt of the integration thrust of the 1980s, and the low rank of the ‘social dimension’ within it, three competing theses can be derived: the cornerstone thesis holds that, from the beginning, the Europeanization of social policy was a cornerstone of the policy package of the supranational political entrepreneur, the EC Commission. The design of this policy area in the Single European Act (most importantly, Articles 21 and 22 of the Single European Act – Articles 118a and 118b in the Treaties) remained narrow for merely tactical reasons so as not to endanger the strategic goal of the renewal of the societal model in a European framework. The flanking thesis states that the core of the project, which was legally established by the Single European Act, was the economic union. When it became apparent that this effort might not be successful (particularly due to the public debate about its social consequences in the years 1987–8), it became necessary to cushion sociopolitically the impact of the internal market and technological change. In neofunctionalist reasoning, the politicization of social policy after the Single European Act was a spin-off of the intensified economic integration, so that the latter could be successful. The packaging thesis argues that the weak social policy regulations together with the abundance of rhetoric at the time of the initiation of the new beginning in Western Europe were merely an expression of the selling of the elite pact, with its elements of the internal market and technological advancement, to the European public: ‘Packaging the package.’ According to this thesis, social policy regulations at the European level were not really sought after by the main actors. The packaging thesis and cornerstone thesis contradict each other. The explanatory power of the packaging thesis is undermined by the fact that the social policy content was greater prior to and during the Single European Act negotiations than it was in the final agreement. On the other hand, the cornerstone thesis can explain this fact as an expression of the tactical hindsight of the political entrepreneur, undertaken so as not to unnecessarily endanger the strategic goal of the renewal of the European societal model. The fact that social policy first moved to centre stage some time after the passage of the Single European Act can be explained by both the cornerstone thesis and the flanking thesis. The flanking thesis would argue that it was the successful adoption of the White Paper (‘Completing the Internal Market’) and the ratification of the Single European Act that awoke from their slumber those actors (in particular, the European trade unions) interested in social flanking. In contrast, the cornerstone thesis assumes that the social flanking was an essential element of a renewed European societal model from the beginning. The flanking thesis and the packaging thesis do not really contradict each other, but rather could be incorporated in an expanded version. After the adoption of the Single European Act, those actors who stood behind a mere ‘packaging’ of the elite pact could not prevent other actors from pushing for the rhetoric to be turned into concrete policy measures, that is, the Europeanization of social policy. The real difference in explanations for the course of the social policy debate lies, then, between the cornerstone thesis on the one hand and the two other theses (flanking thesis and packaging thesis) on the other. Our research findings mainly

The revitalization of Western Europe

37

support the cornerstone thesis. Since 1984, the intention of the political entrepreneurs had been to anchor the social sphere in the renewed European societal model. The tactical procedure of anchoring this policy area moderately in the Single European Act was risky. In the long run, the entire strategy, as measured by the intentions of the political entrepreneurs, failed. We can also see that in the second stage of the statebuilding project, namely, in the Treaty on Political Union, the inclusion of the ‘social dimension’ remained far from that which the political entrepreneurs wanted originally. The Social Protocol was not an actual part of the agreement on Political Union, but a supplementary agreement to which only eleven of the twelve Member States agreed. In this chapter, evidence for the theses outlined above is summarized. Further details can be found in Ziltener and Bornschier (1995). This chapter restricts itself to a narrow definition of social policy, leaving aside the politics of cohesion of the EC, which also includes social policy measures, although predominantly in a regional context. The packaging thesis: selling the internal market project At first glance, the packaging thesis seems to gain support from the fact that social policy proposals in the 1984–5 integration policy package play only a minor role, while in official pronouncements they are, on the contrary, held high. Similarly, the high status given to the ‘social dialogue’ and to its participants in the mid-1980s debate is not reflected in the policy outcome. Shortly after taking office at the beginning of 1985, Jacques Delors, president of the EC Commission, invited representatives of the Union of Industrial and Employer’s Confederations of Europe (UNICE), the European Centre of Public Enterprises (Centre Européen des Enterprises Publiques, CEEP), and the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) to a talk at the ‘Val Duchesse’, a small palace on the outskirts of Brussels. The goals that Delors had pursued from the outset with the ‘social dialogue’ were reflected in the Venturini Report of 1988. The dialogue of ‘social partners’ on a European level was supposed to lead to the recognition by the ‘social partners’ of a ‘joint responsibility to manage the changes deriving from the single market and adopt a more “European” attitude by planning their strategy within the framework of a Europe without frontiers and by managing their own internal contradictions’ (Venturini 1988: 63 f.). In the area of the legal regulation of employment relationships this meant subjecting European collective agreements to compulsory standardization and coordination at the different national levels (intersectoral and sectoral agreements, company bargaining). In this way a ‘method involving social regulation and harmonization of employment and working conditions, charaterized by a combination of directives and regulations on the one hand and arrangements resulting from the social dialogue on the other’ would emerge (ibid. 65). According to Ross (1995: 45), Delors’ relaunching of the social dialogue, ‘his first social policy step’, was above all a trust-building exercise. In the longer run he strove for more substantial contractual agreements. However, after initial optimism, Delors had to confess that after three-and-a-half years the results were rather sobering.¹ In Delors’ estimation too there was the danger that longer-term fruitless activities undertaken as part of the ‘social dialogue’ could disguise actual social policy stagnation.

38

Social exclusion and European integration

From the beginning, the unions, among whose ranks the significance of the ‘social dialogue’ was not uncontested, were sceptical as to whether such a dialogue could really lead to binding agreements about such issues as working hours and new technologies.² The Union of Industrial and Employer’s Confederations of Europe (UNICE) had declared itself principally in favour of a ‘social dialogue’ on a Community level. It declined, however, to enter into binding decisions involving European agreements because of the differences between the industrial relations and collective bargaining structures in the individual EC Member States. Furthermore, the social and labour market policies were deemed to be the domain of the nation-state, and the bargaining power of the national employer’s associations would not be sufficiently reflected. Individual national member associations of UNICE, such as those of Italy, Luxembourg, and France (with restrictions), were ready, primarily for domestic reasons, to lead the European ‘social dialogue’ to a higher degree of obligation and a wider range of issues. However, the majority of the UNICE member associations declined the expansion of the dialogue.³ Similarly, the ‘European social area’ project, which was repeatedly highlighted in official EC documents, remained to a large extent fruitless. In 1984 the Council had emphasized that measures should be undertaken for the gradual establishment of a European social area in order to strengthen solidarity in the social sphere (Falkner 1994: 188). However, the Council failed to propose any concrete ideas for its practical transformation. The same notion was also contained in the Commission’s programme for 1985, in which Delors presented the concept of ‘The European Social Area’ in his introductory speech before the European Parliament on 12 March 1985. He stressed that the advantages of the single market would be given away if some countries tried to grasp advantages at the price of social regress. The European social area should thus prevent social dumping and its unfavourable effects on employment.4 The ad hoc committee for institutional reforms (Dooge Committee),5 created by the European Council in Fontainebleau in June 1984, demanded in its final report6 submitted to the European Council in Brussels in March 1985 ‘the gradual realization of a European social area as the logical result of an economically integrated, dynamic, and competitive Community’. Thereafter, in contrast to the internal market project, nothing happened in the social policy arena for a long time. At the important summit of the European Council in Milan, which accepted the White Paper on the completion of the internal market, social policy radio silence was the order of the day. In 1985, the ETUC expressed itself in favour of the internal market project, but criticized the absence of a ‘social dimension’ in the Commission’s White Paper. The simultaneous development of a ‘European social area’ would be an imperative in order to prevent social regress.7 The Economic and Social Committee of the EC, despite basically agreeing with the report, sharply criticized the fact that it did not contain concrete and approved proposals about a working programme for the formation and realization of a European dimension in the social domain (Falkner 1994: 189). The Single European Act of December 1985 underlined the statements of the Treaty of Rome, to the effect that social policy, particularly social security, is and remains a national matter. It states that Article 110, paragraph 1 (qualified majority voting8) ‘shall not apply to fiscal provisions, those relating to the free movement of persons, and those relating to the rights and interests of employed persons’ (Article 100a, paragraph 2).

The revitalization of Western Europe

39

At the same time, the new Article 118a provides for the gradual implementation of minimal social norms in the area of occupational health and safety by means of decisions by a qualified majority. Article 118b confirms the efforts of the Commission concerning the development of the dialogue between management and labour on a European level which could, if the two sides consider it desirable, lead to relations based on agreement. The negotiations for the Single European Act have been interpreted in the research literature as a process of limiting the scope and intensity of reform, a process necessary to gain the acceptance not only of Britain, but also of other Member States who, when it came to drafting a document, suddenly proved quite jealous of their sovereignty: ‘The maximalist programme of broad reform was progressively sacrificed in favour of the minimalist programme limited to those procedural and substantive changes needed to liberalize the internal market’ (Moravcsik 1991: 42). The ‘social dimension’ merely played a subordinated role in it.9 However, the packaging thesis is refuted by the simple fact that the original social policy form of intensificiation of the integration project, at least with respect to some central actors like the Commission and the French government, was much more substantive than eventually reflected (in its diminished form) in the Single European Act. Even if the incorporation of Articles 118a and 118b is regarded more as a byproduct and less as a planned act arising from premeditated action based on the fulfilment of the ‘social dimension’ (Berié 1992: 58, n. 115), and even if the expansion of the majority voting principle into the social policy area was extremely limited, the fact that these articles were included at all signifies the existence of strong interests sympathetic to social policy integration, interests which influenced the outcome of the negotiation. The interpretations of the negotiation process as an increasing restriction on the range of reforms also point in this direction. What these interests were and which kind of integration project was behind this will be exemplified by the politics of the French Socialists. The cornerstone thesis: the ‘Delorist project’ In 1984, at the time of his nomination to the Commission presidency, Jacques Delors was Minister of Economy and Finance of Mauroy’s socialist government (1981–4) in France. This administration began with a left-socialist, Keynesian economic policy (expansive state spending, wage increases, reduction in working hours, nationalizations, etc.). Initially the EC level played a subordinate role. In October 1981 Prime Minister Mauroy requested Deputy Minister for European Affairs, A. Chandernagor, to prepare a memorandum on European revival of a European social area in which, among other things, the creation of an ‘espace social européen’ (European social area) was proposed.10 This programme included three goals: 1.

placing employment in the centre of Community social policy by developing cooperation and reorganizing Community policy; 2. stepping up the social dialogue at the Community and national level, both within the company and elsewhere; 3. improving cooperation and consultation on matters of social protection.

40

Social exclusion and European integration

With the exception of the Danish interest in the social policy recommendations, this initiative provoked no response from the other European partners and was never discussed in the Council. Nevertheless, this memorandum of the French government is the birth certificate of the concept of a ‘European social area’, taken up again some three years later. The expansive economic policy of the French government quickly led to a crisis due to increasing trade imbalances, rising inflation and devaluation of the franc. By 1982, with the decisive participation of Delors, the first package of measures was adopted to check price and wage inflation and to overhaul the budget. In the Socialist Party a furious fight raged around the question of France’s withdrawal from the European Currency Exchange System and the introduction of protectionist measures to defend the national economic policy against the world market. Delors asserted all his influence to keep France in the European Currency Exchange System (see Delors 1992: 15, 23). In March 1983 Mitterrand decided against a strategy of delinking. The final abandonment of the national Keynesian policy was connected to a strategic reassessment of Community politics in the French Socialist Party. In this way, 1984 (and particularly the first half of the year, during which France held the Council presidency) became the year of the renewed Bonn–Paris axis and thereby the initial phase of the relaunch of integration. From Mitterrand’s speech on 7 February 1984 in The Hague (Europa-Archiv 7/ 1984, D 198) and also from his press conference following the session of the European Council in Fontainebleau in June 1984 (Europa-Archiv 15/1984, D 446), it becomes evident that the social policy dimension was a central element of the French initiatives to continue and to accelerate European integration. At the inspiration of the French presidency, subsequently also taken up by the Irish presidency, meetings took place between the Council, the Commission, the UNICE and the ETUC (see Kohler-Koch and Platzer 1986).11 On 18 July 1984, Delors was nominated as president of the EC Commission. Before assuming office, he visited the capitals of the Member States to clarify possible means and bases for relaunching the integration project. He met with heads of state and government and with national parliamentarians, as well as with trade union leaders and employers. In his worldview formed by ‘personalisme’, a progressive form of Catholic social doctrine, he had always put an emphasis on agreement, balancing competing interests, and cooperation between different societal groups.12 In his activities for the French union Confédération Française et Démocratique du Travail (CFDT), for the Commissariat au Plan and as a consultant on social questions to the prime minister Chaban Delmas, Delors had strongly advocated the development of a ‘politique contractuelle’ (politics of collective agreements). It became clear to Delors that the completion of the EC internal market by means of deregulation must be the sole undisputed core of the new thrust towards integration. He had already consistently endorsed the Common Market as the only basis for a project opposed to the ‘déclin’ of Europe. In contrast to the views of some national governments and interest groups, however, for Delors as well as for the French government, the creation of an internal market was not an end in itself. It was always Delors’ aim to bring the project back into ‘balance’, to achieve the primacy of politics (Delors 1992: 17). For Delors, European cooperation was therefore not only the fight against economic decline, but also against social regression (Delors 1992: 70, 14). The ‘European societal model’ had a central orientation function for Delors; it is characterized

The revitalization of Western Europe

41

by values such as solidarity, equal opportunity, a high level of social protection, and through ‘concertation’ of all partners in production. Thus social policy was an inseparable part of the relaunch of European integration. For the French Socialists, the European integration process held the promise of recapturing political control of the economy through a new system of supranational governance as well as in industrial relations, internalizing external effects that increasingly pre-empt the authority of individual national regimes, and extricating European industrial relations from the dictates of competition among regimes and market forces. Their goal was the defence and continuation of the tradition of the inclusion of unions and workers’ interests in the shaping of labour relations and political regulations in general. In this sense, current efforts to add a ‘social dimension’ to the internal market are best understood as ‘attempts to preserve, if only by default, the historical labour-inclusiveness of European industrial relations against strong economic and political pressures for deregulation by anchoring it in tripartite supranational institutions able to promote a new convergence among national regimes along labour-inclusive lines’ (Streeck 1993: 89). If we have correctly described the ‘Delorist project’, the question arises as to why its protagonists did not raise the creation of an encompassing ‘European social area’ to the condition of a sine qua non from the beginning. Ross (1995: 39) describes Delors’ strategy as an attempt to seize the available opportunities for action from the area of all political possibilities, to accumulate through success the necessary resources and to invest these again in the expansion of this area. With this strategy the transition from market-building to state-building was supposed to be achieved. In the course of the integration process, elements of state-building would emerge, that is, the transfer of national sovereignty to the EC, whose weight would thereby become greater. To implement this strategy, a mobilization of the Brussels apparatus, especially of the General Directorate V, was necessary. Delors’ most important instrument was his cabinet. Many of its members came from the French Socialist Party and/or the Confédération Française et Démocratique du Travail (CFDT). When necessary, his cabinet went around those of other Commissioners and established parallel networks to achieve the desired results (Ross 1995: 36). Delors’ cabinet was the site of conceptual innovation in the sphere of social policy; core concepts and papers were drafted there, sometimes up to the point of detailed drafts. Despite the absence of executive authority, the Commission as the only supranational political entrepreneur – a ‘corporate actor’ (Schneider and Werle 1989) with established political independence, fully developed rights of initiative and thereby great possibilities in agenda-setting – was well suited for implementing Delors’ strategy. He conceived the Commission in a central role as ‘ingénieur de la construction européenne’ (engineer of European construction) and made it clear from the time he took office that the Commission’s right of initiative would be fully utilized (Delors 1992: 46). The allies of the Commission The administrative planning and management authorities within the EC are largely self-sufficient and only weakly influenced by the representative political bodies of the EC (see Bach 1993: 265). However, Delors cleverly recruited the support of the latter

42

Social exclusion and European integration

(i.e., the European Parliament and the Economic and Social Committee) as part of his strategy. They were allies of the Commission insofar as they could be counted on as generally sympathetic to integration and to the sphere of social policy (see Springer 1992). In many reports the European Parliament favoured the extension of EC social policy13 and proposed in its draft treaty of February 1984 competing responsibilities within the proposed Union for areas of social and health policy.14 The Economic and Social Committee15 published a report by R. Beretta, ‘The European Social Area’ (Venturini 1988: app. 6) which asked for Community legislation guaranteeing basic social rights ‘immune to competitive pressures’ as a ‘key stage’ in the creation of the single market (para. 1.6). Both the European Parliament and the Economic and Social Committee advocated a broad interpretation of the social policy articles of the Single European Act. The European Court of Justice’s consistent broadening of EC jurisdiction (Falke 1993) contributed to a ‘Europeanization’ of various policy areas. In the domain of social policy the court placed its emphasis on the ‘indication of a social responsibility of the Community’ in the founding treaties of the EC and also the Single European Act, by raising it to the level of a quasi-constitutional welfare state principle (see Streil 1986; Schulte 1993b). Evaluating the cornerstone thesis In the research literature on European integration the weak anchoring of social policy at the beginning of the relaunch was a ‘negative decisive moment’, a phrase that captures the fact that social policy would not become part of the project (Berié 1992: 57). Schlecht’s (1990) thesis that the Commission did not see the development of the European social system as a logical prerequisite for the creation of a single market contrasts with our claim that it was a tactically conditioned abstinence, undertaken with the goal of not creating any obstacles to gaining the acceptance of the internal market project. A statement of EC Commissioner Lord Cockfield also indicates that this linkage with social policy demands would have clearly slowed down the integration thrust, if not completely hindered it: ‘Had “linkage” been accepted it would have resulted in intolerable delay being imposed on the Internal Market Programme and in the light of subsequent changes in the economic and political climate this delay could well have frustrated the programme altogether’ (Cockfield 1994: 46). In any case, this step-by-step process became a politically risky path, considering the different goals of the national governments with respect to integration and the structural weakness of the sociopolitically progressive actors at European level. Above all, by following this path, leave had thereby been taken from the simultaneous realization of the European social area. In the course of the two years following the Luxembourg summit, the socio-politically progressive actors were weakened further by a number of factors. The most important setback was the British Council presidency in the second half of 1986 that resulted in a neoliberal retaliation against social policy, with proposals for the extension of the British policy of deregulation of the labour market to European level.16

The revitalization of Western Europe

43

The flanking thesis: the subsequent creation of a ‘social dimension’ Most advocates of the flanking thesis make reference to the events of 1988, when fears about the sociopolitical consequences of the realization of the internal market spread among the unions, increasingly also among politicians, and above all among members of the European Parliament (see Berié 1992: 58; Mosley 1990:154; Teague 1989: 75). New initiatives in the sphere of social policy had already arisen during the Belgian Council presidency (the first half of 1987). In May 1987 the Belgian Labour Minister Hansenne advanced the concept of a ‘pedestal of social rights’. The Belgian suggestion was presented for consideration at a Val Duchesse meeting. But instead of sinking into obscurity, which according to Teague (1989: 77) was the strategy of the British and other national governments, from this point on the core concept of the social flanking of the internal market develops: the Community Charter of Fundamental Social Rights, or Social Charter. With this the project of a ‘European social area’ took on the form of a policy for the implementation of fundamental social rights in the EC. By 1987, due to the Council presidencies of sociopolitically progressive Member States and, secondarily, to the European Parliament and the Economic and Social Committee, there was a social policy dynamic within the EC institutions, albeit somewhat limited. However, this is not sufficient to explain the public debates and social policy developments in 1988. An important element was the adoption of the so-called Delors Package (the reform of the financing system and agricultural policy, and the doubling of the structural funds) by the European Council at its special summit in Brussels in February 1988. With this, some of the structural problems of the further expansion of the EC were at least temporarily solved, which, in turn, produced a general change of climate in the EC (Hort 1988). Furthermore, it freed Commission resources. New unionist dynamics and public debates Thatcher’s third electoral victory and the British ratification of the Single European Act led to a reassessment of the EC by the British unions. Up to that time the political project of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) had been a renewed national Keynesianism and with it a rejection of the EC. In October 1987 the General Council of the TUC reversed its position (see Silvia 1991: 632; Springer 1992: 124 f.). This reorientation had great significance for the ETUC as a European actor. Consequently, the ETUC unions proposed a number of suggestions for a European social programme as the ‘social dimension’ of the internal market, which were presented at the Stockholm Congress (May 1988). The principal demand contained therein was for the ‘simultaneous completion of the European internal market and its social dimension’. Naturally, Delors welcomed the new unionist dynamic at the European level, which he had always sought to advance and which he would continue to promote. He toured from one labour union conference to another. Besides his Stockholm speech, ‘Nourrir le dialogue sociale’ (Fostering the Social Dialogue) (Delors 1992: 71 ff.), his visit to the Congress of the British TUC in Brighton was extremely important. In the land of

44

Social exclusion and European integration

Thatcherism, he received ovations for his speech, ‘Construire l’Europe sociale’ on the creation of a social Europe (Delors 1992: 66 ff.).17 Thatcher’s speech at the College of Europe in Bruges (20 September 1988) must be understood as a reaction to Delors’ speech in Brighton. Against the growing pressure for social policy initiatives at the EC level she counterposed the concept of the EC as ‘a European Single Market with the minimum of regulations – a Europe of enterprise’: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels’ (Thatcher 1993: 745). The speech provoked serious protest on the part of many national governments and other European actors. Stephen George (1991: 204) interprets these reactions as a sign that she appeared to be reneging on a package deal that the other states believed they had concluded with Britain in the Single European Act. The mobilization of the unions at different levels was not without its effect. The critique of the economistic tilt of the relaunch of European integration found its echo in public debates about the social consequences of the internal market project, in particular on key issues such as rising unemployment, ‘regime shopping’, and ‘social dumping’.18 New departure in Hanover The European Council meeting in Hanover in June 198819 emphasized that the internal market measures must not reduce the social protection level in the Member States. Moreover, the single market should serve as the means for improving the living and working conditions as well as the work and health protection of all citizens. The European Council thereby dealt for the first time since 1974 with the social problematic underlining the necessity of creating, simultaneously and in a balanced manner, the ‘social dimension’ of the single market in 1992 (see Berié 1992: 58; Däubler 1989: 41). Delors, whose mandate was extended for four years in Hanover, now set the Brussels apparatus into high gear in order to make the most of this social policy momentum. He gave the Economic and Social Committee a mandate to draft a Social Charter. The Commission document, ‘The Social Dimension of the Internal Market’ (September 1988) (see Venturini 1988: annexe 7), presented guidelines for a social policy programme. The ETUC thought this did not go far enough, while the UNICE reacted positively with respect to a number of suggestions (see Tyszkiewicz 1989). In that same month, the new French government, once again socialist, put forward proposals for the elaboration of a charter which would guarantee fundamental rights. Similarly, in September the interdepartmental working party presented the report, 1992: The European Social Dimension (Venturini 1988). These initiatives, in conjunction with the Social Charter, also resulted in a revitalization of the ‘social dialogue’ (see Delors 1992: 121). Evaluating the flanking thesis One can point to the five following factors explaining the new momentum in the social policy sphere:

The revitalization of Western Europe

45

1. the constellation of Member States: the Council presidencies of sociopolitically progressive Member States, particularly Belgium and Germany, and the change of government in France; 2. the Commission, which had been mobilized following the adoption of the Delors Package, and Delors’ enormous efforts in this area; 3. the convergence of the unions’ EC policies and successful mobilizations following the reorientation of the British TUC; 4. the support of union demands by the Commission, particularly through the Commission president, and broad sections of the public; and 5. public pressure for a social flanking of the internal market, and with it the threat of withdrawing support for the European integration process20 and/or decreasing voter support for Socialist and Christian Democratic governments.21 While the packaging thesis was refuted above, the flanking thesis is more difficult to evaluate. On the one hand, it is at least partially refuted through supportive evidence for the cornerstone thesis: what happened was not (simply) a subsequent social policy attempt at flanking. On the other hand, the thesis encompasses the efforts of the unions, which, initially overrun by the integration dynamic and weakened by diverging EC policies, subsequently tried to implement a ‘social dimension’. Additionally, social policy proposals also arose from some national governments and took on greater importance in the course of 1987 and 1988. To what extent this was due to the late perception of possible undesirable social consequences of the realization of the internal market, to the threatening loss of legitimation for the integration project, and/or to the dreaded loss of voter support in national elections, is difficult to judge. The defeat of the ‘Delorist project’ (1989–91) In the following years the fight for a ‘social dimension’ focused on the implementation of an EC Charter of basic social rights, originally a proposal of the Belgian presidency in 1987. In a speech to the European Parliament in January 1989 Delors spoke of a social charter as the means to make concrete ‘the European societal model’ and to bring it to life (Delors 1992: 121). He connected this with the hope for a breakthrough in the ‘social dialogue’. It is not possible to reconstruct here the subsequent history of the Social Charter project: the British resistance, the French pressure during its Council presidency in 1989, the negotiations between the ‘social partners’, and the watering down of each consecutive proposal in detail (see Ziltener and Bornschier 1995). Eventually, at the December 1989 meeting of the European Council in Strasbourg the ‘Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers’ (Social Europe 1/1990) was adopted by eleven states as a political declaration of intention of an advisory nature. Therein, the following ‘fundamental social rights of workers’ were listed: freedom of movement; employment and remuneration; improvement of living and working conditions; social protection; freedom of association and collective bargaining; vocational training; equal treatment for men and women; information, consultation and participation for workers; health protection and safety at the workplace; protection of children and adolescents; and the integration of elderly and disabled persons. The Social Charter essentially confirmed the original sociopolitical conception of the EC, according to which, social policy regulations at the level of the EC were related

46

Social exclusion and European integration

first of all to the realization of the fundamental freedoms of the internal market (see Schulte 1993b: 39 f.). On no account should the legally non-binding Social Charter be mistaken for the fulfilment of the project for a ‘European social area’ or the ‘social dimension of the internal market’. The demand for a charter of binding rights, whose enforcement would serve as the basis upon which all could appeal, as conceived and demanded by the unions and the European Parliament, had not been fulfilled. The opportunity for such a change had been missed with the Single European Act (Berié 1992: 61), a consequence of Delors’ ‘step-by-step’ strategy and the initial postponing of the ‘social dimension’. Maastricht: A further attempt At the EC summit in Maastricht in December 1991, in light of British resistance, 11 states decided ‘to continue along the path laid down in the 1989 Social Charter’ and, leaving Great Britain aside, to finalize for this purpose a Protocol on Social Policy. The Agreement on Social Policy provided for majority voting in the areas of working environment and conditions, information and consultation of workers, equality between men and women, and integration of persons excluded from the labour market (Article 2, paragraph 1). Explicitly reserved for unanimous voting in the decision procedure are the areas of social security and social protection of workers, protection of workers when their employment contract is terminated, representation and collective defence of the interests of workers and employers (including co-determination), conditions of employment for third-country nationals, and financial contributions for promotion of employment and job creation (Article 2, paragraph 3). Important areas of labour law are excluded from Community regulations, including ‘pay, the right of association, the right to strike or the right to impose lock-outs’ (Article 2, paragraph 6). After Maastricht, the social policy momentum dissipated. Just as it had during the negotiations, the issue of economic and monetary union continued to dominate. At the same time, results of the referenda in Denmark and France reflected a strong upswing for the opponents of the integration process, at least in its existing form. The October 1993 ruling of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) declared that there is no competence for a common social policy in the Maastricht treaty (Kaufmann-Bühler 1994: 4). Within the meaning of the ‘Delorist project’, the continuation and further development of the welfare state at European level (le modèle européen de société) as a central pillar of the European integration must be regarded as a failure, and with that the failing of the ‘Delorist project’ altogether. Springer (1992: 121 f.) compares the body of social policies with the economic measures contained in the White Paper and concludes that the two are in no way of equal weight. In the judgement of Wolfgang Streeck (1994: 10 f.), the second wave of social policy proposals in the 1980s (which followed a progressive phase in the 1970s) was turned back even more decisively than the first. Apart from structural obstacles (see below), this can also be traced back to Delors’ step-by-step strategy. If at first social policy was not placed in the foreground so as not to endanger the internal market project, it was subordinated again after a short, turbulent phase to another policy area, this time the economic and monetary union (EMU) project. Lange (1992: 225) points out that for Delors himself EMU was more important than social policy progress.

The revitalization of Western Europe

47

Considering the overall lack of social policy progress, two unusually successful areas of EU social policy22 remain to be explained by further research: the equal treatment/opportunities policy, and the occupational health and safety policy. The former can be attributed to the legislative resources in the treaties of Rome, whose expansion was not considered at the time and corresponds with the broadening of jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. The occupational health and safety policy, as we have already described, is the only social policy area with majority voting in the Single European Act. As a result, it is the only area of successful high-level harmonization efforts. In the literature on this topic,23 the two most important specific reasons for the exceptional success of this area are identified as: 1. its tight connection with the realization of the free movements of goods; and 2. the ‘stage-managed’ corporatism (inszenierter Korporatismus): the special function of the European standardization associations. CONCLUSION In this chapter we first framed the politics of the ‘social dimension’ in the overall picture of the Western European integrational thrust of the 1980s. Our version of an elite bargain model is a less obvious explanation of the politics of the ‘social dimension’. In this context we have discussed and evaluated three theses that extend the initial theoretical approach. The cornerstone thesis emphasizes the politics of the Commission itself and received greatest support from the evidence. Our findings suggest that the creation of a ‘European social area’ was from the beginning a central demand of protagonists in the relaunch of European integration. Initially, the ‘social dimension’ had been set aside for tactical reasons. In 1988 the representatives of the ‘Delorist project’ renewed their efforts for implementing it. These efforts were connected with his relaunching of the ‘social dialogue’ in 1984–5 and his offer of an alliance with the trade unions for the purpose of pushing ahead with the ‘social dimension’. In contrast to the allies of the Commission in the other central areas of the integration package – that is, the single market project and technology policy – this alliance was comparatively weak and it met with the greatest resistance. One might object that the person of Jacques Delors plays too great a role in this picture. But this objection must be confronted with the following observations. First, Delors led the EC Commission for ten years with a strong hand and left his mark on it. Second, along with Mitterrand, Delors stands for a definite, and, since 1983, hegemonic tendency in the French Socialist Party, and, one might also add, a tendency that is hegemonic in Western European social democracy as well. Two central processes in the political–ideological reorientation of Western European social democracy in the 1980s have both intersected with Delors the political actor. These are: 1. the departure from a nation-state-based, left-Keynesian reform politics, and the transition to austerity politics; and 2. the relaunching of the EC level.

48

Social exclusion and European integration

Thus our concern with Delors is not so much a concern with the person as it is a concern with a particular political project, what we call the ‘Delorist project’. On the other hand, the history of the ‘social dimension’ of the internal market indicates how limited the opportunities for implementing such a political project are in the face of deep-seated differences as to the place and goal of European integration. We refer here not simply to the resistance of the British government. Many observers of EC development in the 1980s share the view that British obstruction in EC social policy created the possibility of ‘cheap talk’ on the part of other Member States (e.g. George 1991: 204 f.). That is to say, many social policy programmes and resolutions only emerged because all partners could be assured in advance that they would fail in the Council or remain toothless. It is surely the case that one reason for the failure of this political project is to be found in the present institutional structure of the EU. In the first place, the predominance of the Council, and thereby the national governments, which have worked throughout the entire history of European integration to defend their position as ‘Masters of the Community’. Next, the meagre weight of the other EC organs, which are precisely those most sympathetic to social policy integration, must be taken into account. Däubler (1989: 43) points out that the greater the expressions of social policy engagement in the drafts and announcements of the various EC organs, the less their own decision-making authority. Additional reasons lie in the specifics of the interest mediation system at the EU level. The representation of interests in and around the EU is, following Streeck and Schmitter (1991), best described as pluralist rather than corporatist. Organizationally fragmented, only slightly hierarchical, and often structured as internally competitive, peak associations at the EU level can only pursue their function in the formulation and combination of interests in a limited way. Lepsius (1991: 31) sees built-in structural obstacles due to the limits of aggregation and the diffuseness of considerations of compatibility in relations among the twelve Member States. Despite the efforts of the Delors Commission, the existing EU decision-making processes discriminate against the unions, precisely in the area of social policy, which is dominated by intergovernmental relations. According to Ebbinghaus and Visser (1994: 245 f.), national governments can easily pursue a ‘reactive strategy’ and employers can hide behind their veto power. In addition, they can also rely on the fact that the deregulation policy of ‘mutual adjustment’ encourages competition among regimes in the area of labour and social policy. The unions have much to fear considering the ‘Regulierungslücke’(regulation gap) between the insufficient EU regulation authority and the goal of deregulation pursued by Member States (as well as the EU treaty). In contrast to employers, the unions cannot rely on reactive politics that rest on national governments. Thus pro-active efforts aimed at re-regulation come quickly to a standstill in the face of polymorphous EU decision-making through the veto power of national governments and the blocking strategy of the employers. However, the weaknesses of the unions can also be traced back to internal problems, particularly the variability in the traditional conflict structures, the patterns of social mobilization, and the forms of mediation of interests. Furthermore, the varying degrees to which industrial relations are regulated, the variety of trade union and party-political goals, alliances and resources of power in the different Member States, also contribute to the resulting divergence of interests.

The revitalization of Western Europe

49

Behind these lie even more fundamental processes. First, the dissolution of the world politico-economic regime and the erosion of the regulatory capacity of nationstates due to globalization. Second, the decay of the hegemonic Keynesian-corporatist societal model of the postwar era and with it the loss of legitimation. Third, the shifting of relative political strength since the late 1970s away from the Western European left. The integration project of the 1980s can be seen as a response to these processes (Bornschier 1996: ch. 14; Ziltener 1999). The limited success of the elite pact model of integration makes clear that certain prerequisites for a European state-building project must still be created: 1. a societal basic consensus, in the sense of a renewed social contract; 2. the broader inclusion of populations and their representative bodies (parties, unions, and social movements) in the shaping of the integration process, thereby overcoming the shortcomings of democracy at the EU level;24 and 3. the recapturing and development of political formations and possibilities for intervention as the means for this. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

Delors (1992:77f., 121) at the ETUC Congress 1988; see also the Jahrbuch der Europäischen Integration 1985, p. 291. See also Jahrbuch der Europäischen Integration 1985, p. 297; Siebert (1989); Kohler-Koch and Platzer (1986:172 ff.). UNICE monthly reports, here as found in Jahrbuch der Europäischen Integration 1985, p. 292; see Kohler-Koch and Platzer (1986:168 ff.); Tyszkiewicz (1989:70 ff.). In Bulletin der EG, Suppl. 4/1985; Europa-Archiv 7/1985, 187 ff. This committee meeting consisted of representatives of heads of state and governments; Ripa di Meana represented the Commission. In the Jahrbuch der Europäischen Integration 1985, pp. 404 ff. Press release; in Jahrbuch derEuropäischen Integration 1985, p. 296. Article 100a stipulates qualified majority votes for the measures for the approximation of the provisions laid down by law, regulation, or administrative action in Member States which have as their object the establishment and functioning of the internal market. For an analysis of the social policy dimension in the Single European Act negotiation process, introduced into the negotiations rather late and mainly due to pressure by the Danish and French government and the Commission, see Ziltener and Bornschier (1995) and De Ruyt (1989). In Bulletin der EG 11/81; see Venturini (1988: 26); Lequesne (1989: 153 f.). In the course of 1984 there were informal contacts between the UNICE and the ETUC which were subsequently resumed. For Delors’ political biography see Grant (1994) and Ross (1995). For the most important proposals of the European Parliament and a list of the most important EP reports from 1986 to 1988, see Venturini (1988: app. 5); see also Hohmann (1992). Article 56 of the draft treaty regarding social and health policy included, among other things, the creation of comparable conditions for the preservation and creation of jobs, the need for the Community to take action in the area of rights of association and collective bargaining (particularly with regard to the conclusion of EU-wide wage agreements) and worker participation. Generally, the EC would have committed itself under Articles 2 and 4 of the draft to the maintenance and development of social rights, which follow from the national constitutions and the European Social Charter. The draft treaty can be found in Europa-Archiv 8/1984; see Däubler (1989: 53 f.). The Economic and Social Committee has a consulting function for the Commission and the Council of Ministers. It consists of representatives of national and European associations

50

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Social exclusion and European integration (employers, workers and different interests such as craft workers, consumers, farmers, etc.) who are appointed by the Council on the basis of nominations from the national governments. One of its nine sections covers the social policy sphere and compiles position papers as part of the general EC decision-making process or in response to specific inquiries on the part of Council or Commission. The ‘Action Programme for Employment Growth’, worked out by the British Department of Employment; see Teague (1989). See Volle (1989: 61). Colchester and Buchan (1990: 185) credit Delors’ initiative as having a positive effect on the TUC and Labour, who then departed from their anti-EC bunker. See also, among others, Venturini (1988: 63); Däubler (1989: 2). Final conclusions in Europa-Archiv 16/1988, D 443 ff.; conclusions in the social policy sphere also in Venturini (1988: 69); see also Delors (1992: 69 f.). According to the Eurobarometer survey the percentage of respondents who thought the internal market was a ‘good thing’ dropped 6 to 10 per cent from autumn 1987 to autumn 1988 in Belgium, Germany, France and the Netherlands (see also Mosley 1990: 154). Colchester and Buchan (1990: 185), who see the ‘social dimension’ as a reaction to ‘the freemarket bias of project 1992’, emphasize the argument regarding the threat of voter losses for the Socialists, but also the Christian Democrats on the continent. Streeck (1994: 12) makes reference in this respect to ‘two areas of encapsulated federalism’. See also Konstanty and Zwingmann (1989); Streeck (1994); Eichener and Voelzkow (1994). However, complaining about shortcomings of democracy should not mask the need for a debate on the constitution within which it is positioned at different levels.

REFERENCES Addison, J.T. and Siebert, S. (1991) ‘The Social Charter of the European Community: evolution and controversies’, Industrial and Labour Relations Review, 44 (4). Bach, M. (1993) ‘Integrationsprozesse in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft: Vom Zweckverband zum technokratischen Regime?’, in H. Meulemann and A. Elting-Camus (eds), 26. Deutscher Soziologentag. Lebensverhältnisse und soziale Konflikte im neuen Europa, Tagungsband II: Sektionen, Arbeits- und Ad hoc-Gruppen, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Berié, H. (1992) ‘Maastrichter Beschlüsse – Auf dem Weg zur Sozialunion’, Zeitschrift für Sozialreform, 8. Bornschier, V. (1988) Westliche Gesellschaft im Wandel, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. —— (1994) ‘The rise of the European Community. Grasping towards hegemony? Or therapy against national decline?’, in M. Haller and R. Richter (eds), Towards a European Nation? Political Trends in Europe, Armonk, NY: Sharpe; also published in International Journal of Sociology, 24 (1), 1994. —— (1996) Western Society in Transition, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. —— (ed.) (forthcoming) Statebuilding in Europe: The Revitalization of Western European Integration. Bornschier, V. and Fielder, N. (1995) ‘The genesis of the Single European Act. Forces and actors behind the relaunch of the EC in the 1980s: the Single Market’, paper presented at the 2nd Conference of the European Sociological Association, Budapest. Cockfield, Lord (1994) The European Union: Creating the Single Market, Chichester: Chancey Law. Colchester, N. and Buchan, D. (1990) Europower: The Essential Guide to Europe’s Economic Transformation in 1992, New York: Times Books and Random House. Commission of the European Communities (1994) White Paper: Growth, Competitiveness, Employment: The Challenges and Ways Forward into the 21st Century, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Däubler, W. (1989) ‘Sozialstaat EG? Notwendigkeit und Inhalt einer Europäischen Grundrechtsakte’, in W. Däubler (ed.), Sozialstaat EG? Die andere Dimension des Binnenmarktes, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung.

The revitalization of Western Europe

51

Delors, J. (1988) La France par l’Europe, Paris: Clisthène-Grasset; trans. (1991) as Our Europe, London: Verso. —— (1992) Le Nouveau Concert européen, Paris: Editions Odile Jacob. De Ruyt, J. (1989) L’Acte unique européen: Commentaire, Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles. Ebbinghaus, B. and Visser, J. (1994) ‘Barrieren und Wege “grenzenloser Solidarität”: Gewerkschaften und Europäische Integration’, in W. Streeck (ed.), Staat und Verbände, Politische Vierteljahresschrift – Sonderheft 25, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Eichener, V. and Voelzkow, H. (1994) ‘Europäische Regulierung im Arbeitsschutz: Überraschungen aus Brüssel und ein erster Versuch ihrer Erklärung’, in V. Eichener and H. Voelzkow (eds), Europäische Integration und verbandliche Regulierung, Marburg: Metropolis. Falke, J. (1993) ‘Von der Implementation zur Selbstimplementation? Zur Kontrolle der Anwendung des Gemeinschaftsrechts in den Mitgliedstaaten’, in H. Meulemann and A. Elting-Camus (eds), 26. Deutscher Soziologentag. Lebensverhältnisse und soziale Konflikte im neuen Europa, Tagungsband II: Sektionen, Arbeits- und Ad hoc-Gruppen, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Falkner, G. (1994) Supranationalität trotz Einstimmigkeit: Entscheidungsmuster der EU am Beispiel Sozialpolitik, Bonn: Europa Union. George, S. ( 1991) Politics and Policy in the European Community, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, C. (1994) Delors: Inside the House that Jacques Built, London: Nicholas Brealey. Hohmann, B. (1992) ‘Das Europäische Parlament im Prozess der EG-Sozialgesetzgebung seit Inkrafttreten der Charta der Sozialen Grundrechte der Arbeitnehmer – ein Tätigkeitsbericht’, Zeitschrift für Sozialreform, 5. Hort, P. (1988) ‘Eine Bilanz der deutschen EG-Präsidentschaft’, Europa-Archiv, Folge 15. Kaufmann-Bühler, W. (1994) ‘Deutsche Europapolitik nach dem Karlsruher Urteil: Möglichkeiten und Hemmnisse’, Integration, 1. Kohler-Koch, B. and Platzer, H.-W. (1986) ‘Tripartismus – Bedingungen und Perspektiven des sozialen Dialogs in der EG’, Integration, 4. Konstanty, R. and Zwingmann, B. (1989) ‘Europäische Einigung und Gesundheitsschutz in der Arbeitsumwelt’, WSI Mitteilungen, 10. Lange, P. (1992) ‘The Politics of the Social Dimension’, in A.M. Sbragia (ed.), Europolitics: Institutions and Policymaking in the ‘New’ European Community, Washington: The Brookings Institution. —— (1993) ‘Maastricht and the social protocol: why did they do it?’, Politics and Society, 21 (1). Lepsius, M.R. (1991) ‘Nationalstaat oder Nationalitätenstaat als Modell für die Weiterentwicklung der Europäischen Gemeinschaft’, in R. Wildenmann (ed.), Staatswerdung Europas? Optionen für eine Europäische Union, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Lequesne, C. (1989) ‘Europapolitik unter Mitterrand: Die französische Präsidentschaft als Etappenziel’, Integration, 4. Moravcsik, A. (1991) ‘Negotiating the Single European Act: national interests and conventional statecraft in the European Community’, International Organization, 45. Mosley, H.G. (1990) ‘The social dimension of European integration’, International Labour Review, 129. Ross, G. (1995) Jacques Delors and European Integration, Cambridge: Polity Press. Sandholtz, W. and Zysman, J. (1989) ‘1992: recasting the European bargain’, World Politics, 42 (1). Schlecht, O. (1990) ‘Grundlagen und Perspektiven der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft’, Unpublished thesis, University of Tübingen. Schneider, V. and Werle, R. (1989) ‘Vom Regime zum korporativen Akteur. Zur institutionellen Dynamik der Europäischen Gemeinschaft’, in B. Kohler-Koch (ed.), Regime in den internationalen Beziehungen, Baden-Baden: Nomos.

52

Social exclusion and European integration

Schnorpfeil, W. (1994) Die Europäisierung sozialpolitischer Teilbereiche in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft, Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES), Arbeitspapier AB II Nr. 4, Mannheim. Schulte, Bernd (1993a) ‘Die Entwicklung der europäischen Sozialpolitik’, in H.A. Winkler and H. Kaelble (eds), Nationalismus – Nationalitäten – Supranationalität, Stuttgart: KlettCotta. —— (1993b) ‘Einführung’, Soziale Sicherheit in der EG, 2. Aufl., München: Beck. Siebert, G. (ed.) (1989) Wenn der Binnenmarkt kommt . . . Neue Anforderungen an gewerkschaftliche Politik, Frankfurt am Main: Nachrichten Verlag. Silvia, S.J. (1991) ‘The Social Charter of the European Community’, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 44, July. Springer, B. (1992) The Social Dimension of 1992 – Europe Faces a New EC, New York: Greenwood Press. Streeck, W. (1993) ‘The rise and decline of neocorporatism’, in L. Ulman, B. Eichengreen and W.T. Dickens (eds), Labor and an Integrated Europe, Washington: The Brookings Institution. —— (1994) ‘Neo-voluntarism: a new European social policy regime?’, paper presented at a Conference on European Law in Context: Constitutional Dimensions of European Economic Integration, European University Institute, Law Department, Florence, 14–15 April. Streeck, W. and Schmitter, P. C. (1991) ‘From national corporatism to transnational pluralism: organized interests in the Single European Market’, Politics & Society, 19 (1). Streil, J. (1986) ‘Der Beitrag des Gerichtshofes der Europäischen Gemeinschaften zur Entwicklung des Sozialrechts in der Gemeinschaft’, in H. Lichtenberg (ed.), Sozialpolitik in der EG, Referate der Tagung des Arbeitskreises Europäische Integration e.V. in Augsburg, October 1984, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Teague, P. (1989) The European Community: The Social Dimension. Labour Market Policies for 1992, London: Kogan Page. Thatcher, M. (1993) The Downing Street Years, London: HarperCollins. Tyszkiewicz, Z. (1989) ‘European social policy – striking the right balance’, European Affairs, 4. Venturini, P. (1988) 1992: The European Social Dimension, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Vogel-Polsky, E. and Vogel, J. (1991) L’Europe social 1993: Illusion, alibi où réalité? Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles. Volle, A. (1989) Grossbritannien und der europäische Einigungsprozess, Forschungsinstitut der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik – Arbeitspapier zur Internationalen Politik Nr. 51, Bonn: Europa Union Verlag. Ziltener, P. (1999) ‘Strukturwandel der europäischen Integration’, PhD thesis, University of Zürich, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Ziltener, P. and Bornschier, V. (1995) ‘The politics of the “social dimension” in the Commission’s project to revitalize Western European integration’, paper presented at the 2nd Conference of the European Sociological Association, Budapest.

3 European integration Disparate dynamics of bureaucratic control and communicative participation Marlis Buchmann

The process of European integration aims at transforming the national Member States into a supranational entity, the contours of which have become more evident over the last years. In a historical perspective, this process may be regarded as another wave of modernization fuelled by the further development of the world system and the fierce economic competition among European nation-states, the United States and Japan (Bornschier 1994). Like all other waves of modernization, it is full of tensions, conflicts and contradictions. The development of modern society, from its inception to its present state, has been characterized by the breaking down of economic, political and cultural barriers. This process is accompanied by the loss of traditions, that is, the well-known and familiar, the tried and tested, and the establishment of more encompassing societal arrangements. In this respect, the current wave does not differ from its predecessors. However, the particular economic, political and cultural issues that are at stake and the tensions and conflicts that arise are unprecedented. Particularly important lines of conflict haunting the process of European integration are the great disparities in the various components of integration. There is no doubt that the economic and politico-administrative integration of the European Community exceeds the social and cultural integration by far. Over the last decades, most achievements have been accomplished in the realm of economic integration. The fully integrated internal market established as of 1993 is the most compelling sign. And the ratification of the Maastricht treaties, the formation of the European Union, represents a milestone in European politico-administrative integration. By contrast, the development of a political culture, the formation of a sense of community, and the emergence of a common cultural identity on the European level lag tremendously far behind. That is to say, with regard to political, social and cultural realms, national and/or subnational frames of reference still predominate people’s world views, values, interests and loyalties. There are only very modest signs of Europe-wide feelings of solidarity. To characterize these great disparities in the various components of integration, we may employ Habermas’ distinction between systemic and social integration (Habermas 1981): in the European Community, systemic integration greatly exceeds social integration. It is interesting to observe that the non-synchronization of systemic and social integration has engendered substantial tensions and conflicts within the EC in the recent past. The referenda of the Maastricht treaties held in Denmark and France and the controversial discussions they brought about both inside and outside these two countries provide ample evidence. It is my contention that the tensions and conflicts

54

Social exclusion and European integration

resulting from the different paces of integration will increase in the years to come. This will make the process of European integration more difficult. However, the controversies emanating from the disparate dynamics of economic and social integration are prerequisites for a greater public salience of themes associated with European integration, which, in turn, may help form a stronger sense of community and identity on the European level. In order to substantiate my claim, I would like to discuss some of the causes responsible for the non-synchronization of systemic and social integration in the formation of a supranational, Europe-wide societal order and point to some developments that are likely to increase the level of tension accompanying the further process of European integration. While the first part of the chapter focuses on the constraints on the formation of a European political culture and sense of community, the second part is devoted to the discussion of possible new measures to be instituted in the individual Member States of the European Union that may help further the process of European social integration. CAUSES OF THE GREAT DISPARITIES IN SYSTEMIC AND SOCIALINTEGRATION I now turn to the question of why Europe has rapidly grown together in the realm of economics, greatly outdistancing processes of social and cultural integration. Among the numerous causes, I would like to highlight the following: the momentum of economic integration; particular features of the institutional structure of the European Community; and the absence of a European public sphere. These three causes are interdependent; it is only for analytical purposes that they are presented separately. The momentum of economic integration With the institutionalization of the four so-called basic economic rights in 1993 – that is, the free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital within the EC member states – the competencies granted to the European Community have been greatly enhanced. The effects of this major step towards economic integration are not limited, however, to the economic realm. This is true in several ways. First, the implementation of free movement for the four basic economic assets involves the regulation of a wide array of social, political and cultural matters: for example, the exchange of students, the mutual recognition of educational credentials, and workers’ participation in the decision-making process on the company level, to name just a few (Lepsius 1991; Münch 1993). Second, the intensified economic activities propelled by the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital bring about new problems or aggravate existing ones that, in turn, demand regulation. In this respect, environmental issues are the most prominent and controversial examples. The common market has greatly increased traffic, thus putting tremendous pressures on the environment and calling for supranational, Europe-wide regulation. Last but not least, the growing density of regulations resulting from economic integration engenders its own effects, namely, the emergence of novel problems that again call for regulation. In order to illustrate the extent to which and the pace at which demand for regulation has increased over the last few

European integration

55

years, I would like to cite some figures presented by Richard Münch (1993) in his book, Das Projekt Europa (The Project Europe): the number of regulations (i.e. decrees, guidelines, decisions) passed by the Council of Ministers in 1971 amounted to only 102; it increased to 510 in 1985 and reached 1,234 in 1991. All in all, European economic integration sets in motion numerous processes outside the economic arena. The great number of anticipated issues that demand regulation, the numerous unintended effects of economic integration that need to be dealt with, and the considerable delays that often occur with regard to the recognition of emergent problems may overload the problem-solving capacity of the responsible political actors and thus increase the level of political conflicts within the European Community. Situations of intensified conflict are likely to reactivate nationalistic patterns of interest articulation. This tendency will be amplified by the fact that most intermediary institutions, such as political parties, unions, professional associations, and so forth, have barely been touched by the process of European integration. As Lepsius (1991) and many others (e.g. Münch 1993) have pointed out, intermediary institutions of interest formation and interest articulation are still organized along the lines of the individual nation-states. The almost complete absence of a Europe-wide structure of intermediary organizations is one of the crucial factors responsible for the great difficulties in constructing a supranational idea of solidarity and community. A dense web of voluntary associations and organizations would act, as Durkheim (1977) has already pointed out, as a transmission belt between individuals and society at large, constituting the social bonds that keep society together. Under conditions of increasing tension and conflict resulting from the momentum of economic integration, the absence of such a structure will make repeated relapses into particularistic modes of orientation more likely, which, in turn, will impede the development of a Europe-wide sense of responsibility, essential for the emergence of a common political culture. Particular features of the EC institutional structure Much has been said about the ‘democratic deficit’ of the European Community (e.g. Habermas 1994; Kleger 1995; Lepsius 1991; Reif 1992). And indeed, 71 per cent of the EC members when asked about their opinions in 1992 stated that they do not have sufficient influence on the decision-making process in Brussels (Münch 1993: 136). Many remedies have also been advanced to improve the democratic legitimacy of the EC’s political structures (Dewandre and Lenoble 1994; Kleger 1995; Lepsius 1990, 1991). It is not my intention to supplement this catalogue by adding other measures. Rather, I would like to focus on the ways in which particular characteristics of the European political institutions impede the development of feelings of solidarity and the formation of a sense of community that go beyond national frames of reference. In other words, I want to show that the functional, technocratic rationality, upon which the European political institutions rest, enhances the systemic integration of the European Community at the expense of its social integration. In order to develop my argument, I will elaborate upon two aspects. The first one refers to the institution of the European Commission, its functions and competencies, which are closely linked to the emergence of a transnational bureaucracy. This new type of public administration pursues an extremely functional, technocratic rationality of policy-making and prob-

56

Social exclusion and European integration

lem-handling, and is thus responsible for the low transparency of its actions. The second aspect deals with the institution of the Council of Ministers. Due to the composition of this institution, European issues and problems are largely conveyed to the EC members in the individual nation-states by the respective national actors. This favours particularistic representation of European Community issues to the detriment of a Europe-wide perspective. I shall now take a closer look at the functions and competencies of the EC Commission and the European public administration. As many authors have pointed out (e.g. Bach 1992, 1993), the Commission is the core supranational institution of the European Community. Presently composed of 17 commissioners, conjointly appointed by the governments of the Member States, the primary task of the Commission is to look after Community law and to protect the Community interests. In order to assume these functions, the Commission disposes of an unprecedented number and, above all, a unique combination of competencies. Most importantly, the Commission is the sole organ of the European Community that is vested with the power to initiate Community policy. It possesses the monopoly on proposing and drafting legislation. Moreover, the Commission enjoys complete autonomy regarding staff recruitment and appointment. The Commission’s extended staff is organized in cabinets assigned to each commissioner and approximately twenty head offices, the so-called directorates general. Neither the head personnel nor the bureaucratic and scientific experts of these organizational units are elected. Rather informal and non-transparent criteria govern the appointment of these upper-middle-level and high-level European bureaucrats. The cabinets, directorates general, and nine additional special departments fulfil the major administrative management functions of the Commission. All in all, the Commission not only monopolizes the right to initiate policy, but it also centralizes the essential controlling and executive functions at the European level. In practice, it unites all important politico-administrative functions of the European Community. As far as institutional characteristics are concerned, the Commission and the associated European public administration may be regarded as an almost completely independent political regime of the European Community. With regard to European policy-making, this institutional set-up is highly conducive to bureaucratic action orientation, which is governed by technocratic rationality – as Maurizio Bach (1992, 1993, 1994) has convincingly argued in several publications. Moreover, it gives much leeway to the European bureaucratic actors in defining and shaping European policy through transnational cooperation. These political structures are thus highly effective with regard to the systemic, politico-administrative integration of the European Community. They do not facilitate, however, the formation of a common identity and feelings of Europe-wide solidarity among the EC people because policy-making on the European level is characterized by great independence and lack of transparency. I now turn to the Council of Ministers, the second political institution I would like to examine with respect to its significance for the development of a Europe-wide sense of community. The Council of Ministers is the political institution within the European Community that represents the individual nation-states. It is vested with the power to approve Community policy initiated by the European Commission. It does not have the right to initiate policy proposals, however (Bach 1992, 1993). Put differently, the Council of Ministers is the supreme decision-making body of the European Community, stripped of the right to intervene autonomously in the legislative process. Its

European integration

57

composition varies with the political issues to be negotiated. At any given time, it is composed of the Member States’ ministers responsible for the issues in question. It is mostly through this body that the people within the EC are informed about the debates and decisions of the European Community. The respective ministers of the individual Member States pass the information to the media people of their own country. Being the official representatives of their nation-states, they also voice the respective country’s interests in the issues to be negotiated in the Council. It is therefore most likely that the information these ministers pass to their national public is dominated by the respective national perspective (Gerhards 1993a). This tendency is intensified by the fact that these ministers do not have any responsibilities vis-à-vis a European public. It is only the national public that may voice dissatisfaction with the achievements of their national representatives in the Council of Ministers. Consequently, the ministers are more responsive to their national public, thus favouring a national perspective in their information policy to the detriment of a transnational perspective. In order for a Europe-wide political culture to emerge, greater emphasis should be given, however, to a transnational perspective when information about European Community matters and policies is provided. As long as the European Community was only a loosely organized supranational entity, the lack of a transnational political culture in which the people of the Member States could at least minimally participate did not matter much. And in fact, European Community surveys show that people of the Member States have not ranked the issue of European integration among the salient topics. Richard Münch (1993: 147) even speaks of a ‘permissive consensus’ that has reigned over the formation of the European Community in the past. According to his view, the people of the EC Member States have so far left the process of European integration to the discretion of their governments in the hope of profiting from it economically and politically. However, the public salience of the European Community has greatly increased with the establishment of the internal market and the Maastricht treaties. The growing public interest in the process of European integration is likely to end the era of the so-called permissive consensus. Matters of European integration will become controversial issues, thus engendering public debates. The referenda on the Maastricht treaties held in Denmark and France have provided ample evidence of the growing political conflicts likely to accompany the future process of European integration. Consequently, political consensus on the European level will in the future depend on the active mobilization of support from the people of the Member States to a much greater extent than it did in the past. Successful mobilization of support would greatly profit from the existence of a transnational, Europe-wide political culture and sense of community. The formation of such a culture presupposes among other things the development of a European public sphere. This is the next topic I should like to elaborate upon. The absence of a European public sphere Compared with the much-discussed ‘democratic deficit’ of the European political institutions, the ‘public-sphere deficit’ of the European Community has received relatively little attention (Gerhards 1993a, 1993b; Kriesi 1993). This is rather surprising when considering the close connection between these two flaws in the European Commu-

58

Social exclusion and European integration

nity: the absence of a European public sphere may be regarded as an important cause of the European Community’s ‘democratic deficit’. I should like to review briefly the essential functions of the public in a democratic political culture and then discuss some of the difficulties in establishing a Europe-wide public sphere. In the context of this discussion, I use the general concept of the public sphere to refer to the political public sphere. In advanced modern nation-states, the public sphere, predominantly media mediated, constitutes the arena in which actors – namely, citizens, interest groups, and political decision-makers – observe each other and society at large (Gerhards 1993a, 1993b). It is predominantly through the public sphere constituted by the media that citizens and interest groups state their preferences, voice their claims, and receive relevant information about major events and ongoing developments in society. Vice versa, it is through the media that political decision-makers find out about the citizens’ demands and preferences and learn about salient issues, problems and conflicts in society at large. The intermediary institution of the public sphere thus assumes the crucial function of interest mediation. As important, this institution helps to build a collective identity. By continuously observing society through the media, citizens have a part in it and come to understand it as their own. They thus develop a sense of belonging and feelings of solidarity. Given the connections to the individuals’ consciousness, this is essential for the social integration in society, as Habermas (1994) has forcefully argued. Against this backdrop, the almost complete absence of a European public sphere may be regarded as one of the major obstacles to the formation of a European sense of community and a corresponding collective political identity – in short, a major impediment to the social integration of the emergent supranational entity of the European Community. Although a Eurobarometer survey conducted in 1991 showed the great importance of the media for people’s formation of opinion about European integration, it is within the national context of the public sphere that information is provided. When asked about the sources of information on European Community matters, 89.7 per cent of the respondents mentioned television, 63.4 per cent cited daily newspapers, and 48.3 per cent named the radio; only 17.1 per cent of the respondents mentioned personal communication, and the figure even drops to 3.7 per cent when it comes to political meetings as a source of information (figures cited in Gerhards 1993a). A number of reasons have been suggested to explain the great difficulties in establishing some form of a European public sphere. Jürgen Gerhards (1993a, 1993b) discusses the obstacles to the development of a transnational public sphere by differentiating two possible models. The first and more ambitious model entails the formation of a European public sphere independent of and overlying the nationally constituted public arenas. The second model involves – what he calls – the Europeanization of the national public spheres. Given the great cultural diversity of the Member States of the European Community – most importantly, the multitude of languages in use and officially recognized by the Community – Jürgen Gerhards argues, as others have done, that a unified European public sphere is not likely to evolve. He maintains that the Europeanization of the national public spheres is more likely to develop, although many obstacles impede this process as well. This latter model would involve, first, the ongoing representation of European issues and themes in the

European integration

59

respective national media, and second, the evaluation of these issues by employing a transnational perspective instead of framing them in the respective national viewpoint. Gerhards (1993a, 1993b) identifies several factors affecting the low representation of European issues in the respective national media, be it electronic or print media, and the predominance of the national perspective in reporting on European matters. I should like briefly to summarize Gerhards’ arguments because they are most significant with regard to the European Community’s deficit of social bonds, feelings of solidarity and identity. According to Gerhards, the underrepresentation of European themes and topics in the media has primarily to do with the fact that the European decision-making process is strongly marked by bureaucratic action orientation. Given the ways in which the media function and operate, bureaucratic news is no news. Related to the media neglect of bureaucratic issues is the fact that the drafting of legislation, the monopoly of the European Commission, is closed to the public. This factor not only contributes to the extremely low transparency of European policy-making, as has been mentioned before, but it also completely blocks any public discussion of European regulations in the making. From the individual actors’ perspective, this institutional set-up deprives them of chances to partake in the European integration process. Consequently, it does not provide any incentive for identifying with the European Community and thus for developing a sense of belonging and feelings of solidarity. The public debate of European political issues is further hindered by the fact that the European Commission’s public presentation of legislation follows the principle of cooperativeness. Hence no controversies and no conflicts become publicly manifest. Under these circumstances, low media attention is predetermined. Moreover, the commissioners are not compelled to seek media attention in order to reach the people with their messages because they are not elected, but rather conjointly appointed by the governments of the Member States. Finally, the lack of controversial debates about issues of European integration is also due to the absence of an institutionalized as well as a non-institutionalized opposition in the European Community. Without explicating the causes of this situation, it intensifies the media tendency to regard matters of European integration as nonissues. The predominance of the national perspective in the media coverage of European issues has much to do with the European Community’s organizational set-up regarding media information. As Gerhards (1993a, 1993b) maintains, it is mostly the members of the Council of Ministers – that is, the Member States’ ministers – that pass European Community information to the representatives of the respective national media. Put differently, the media news conferences are set up in such a way that the nationals stay among themselves. This favours a nationally oriented information policy. Moreover, the EC Member States’ media correspondents in Brussels predominantly interact with fellow media people of their own country or, at least, of the samelanguage culture. Because of the few interactions across nationalities, a transnational perspective on European Community matters is unlikely to develop among media people reporting from Brussels. Accordingly, people in the various Member States seldom have the chance to learn about European Community issues that transcend the national horizon. Under these circumstances, the formation of a sense of responsibility for the European Community as a whole, a prerequisite for the development of a common political culture, has little chance. However, the more

60

Social exclusion and European integration

Europe grows together economically and politically, the more the European Community has to rely on a transnational political culture. OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE FORMATION OFAEUROPEAN POLITICALCULTURE While there are plenty of obstacles impeding the process of social integration on the European level, there are nonetheless some possible measures to be considered that may further the development of feelings of solidarity and belonging to the emerging supranational entity of the European Union. Against the background of the obstacles to European social integration discussed in the first part of this chapter, I highlight here two aspects essential to the formation of a European political culture. I consider the development of European political identities and loyalities among the people of the various Member States to be a cornerstone of the process of social integration within the European Union. The two aspects I focus on are: the constitution of a European public sphere; and the development of institutions that increase people’s chances of participation in the process of European integration. The constitution of a European public sphere: the Europeanization of the national public spheres Referring to arguments advanced by Gerhards (1993a, 1993b) and Kriesi (1993) I have maintained that the constitution of a European public sphere is most likely to involve the Europeanization of the national public spheres. As discussed in the respective section, this entails the stronger representation of European themes in national public arenas on the one hand, and the greater emphasis on supranational perspectives in dealing with European Community affairs on the other. Two types of effort are likely to contribute to the constitution of such a public space. The first type of effort starts from a general sociological assumption. It states that mutual observation constitutes a basic social operation enabling actors involved in this operation to learn about their respective world views, intentions, and goals. Actors assimilate this information and integrate it into their action orientations. Applying this general assumption to the case in question, I infer that Member States within the European Union may observe their fellow members and thus learn about the respective ways in which European affairs are perceived, interpreted and acted upon. In this perspective, mutual observation of the Member States of the European Union represents a distinct form of public communication among these actors. Given that public communication in advanced modern societies is predominantly media mediated, mutual observation among the Member States of the European Union is most likely to be transported by the mass media, that is, by the public sphere. The institutionalization of this process may thus be conceived of as a means of developing the Europeanization of the national public spheres. Referring to Switzerland and its great cultural diversity, Kriesi (1993) has advanced some ideas about the ways in which the Europeanization of the national public spheres might be brought about.

European integration

61

Drawing an analogy to the nationalization of the Swiss regional public sphere (constituted by the various language groups), Kriesi maintains that similar mechanisms of horizontal and vertical coordination and integration may contribute to the Europeanization of the national public spheres within the realm of the European Union. Among the various mechanisms of horizontal integration, I shall focus on the following two. The first mechanism refers to the mutual transfer of the public discourse prevalent in the individual Member States with regard to salient issues of European integration. This mechanism constitutes a means by which the diversity of perspectives is noted and acknowledged. Such a process of mutual recognition could help overcome the underrepresentation of European themes in the mass media of the individual Member States and thus contribute to the development of a supranational perspective when dealing with European Community affairs. The second mechanism implies the existence of a mass communication elite that specializes in processing, interpreting and synthesizing information about European issues disseminated in the mass media of the fellow Member States. This mechanism is likely to break the predominance of the exclusively national perspective in dealing with problems of the European integration. With regard to mechanisms of vertical integration, Kriesi emphasizes the significance of common points of reference that help focus the attention of the various national publics. The simultaneous preoccupation with a common political theme in the various Member States of the European Union is likely to contribute to the Europeanization of the national publics. Given that the supranationalization of European politics has been advancing at a rather swift pace over the last years, the political decision-making process in Brussels is likely to constitute the major common point of reference of the various national publics in the near future. The increasing relevance of supranational politics initiated in Brussels may also affect the orientations and performance of new social movements. The development of transnational social movements within the European Union constitutes the second type of effort that may help develop the Europeanization of the national public spheres. By choosing European politics as a common point of reference, new social movements may help overcome the underrepresentation of European themes in the national publics and break the predominance of purely national perspectives in dealing with European Community affairs. It is well known, however, that decentralization with regard to patterns of mobilization and organizational structures is a predominant feature of new social movements. Nonetheless, Kriesi (1993) argues that various mechanisms of horizontal and vertical coordination, such as interorganizational and interpersonal networks, common national and/or international campaigns, and so on, may be activated in order to voice concerns about European politics and gain influence on the political decision-making process in Brussels. Given the absence of political instruments of direct democracy (e.g. initiatives) within the European Union, Kriesi suspects that the political forms chosen by new social movements at the supranational level to voice their concerns will predominantly include conventional lobbying activities on one side and direct political actions on the other. Although this tendency for delegation of political activities on the supranational level results in a greater distance between the regular members of social movements and the lobbyists and activists, the stronger presence of transnational social movements would greatly help develop a European political culture and thus Europe-wide feelings of belonging and solidarity.

62

Social exclusion and European integration

Institutionalizing political instruments of direct democracy I have argued that the ‘public-sphere deficit’ of the European Community and the ‘democratic deficit’ of the European political institutions are closely connected. At present, people of the various Member States not only have little opportunity for learning about the ways in which European Community affairs are perceived and interpreted in other Member States, but they also are deprived of directly voicing their Europe-wide concerns. The provision of instruments of direct democracy on the European level would therefore increase people’s chances of participation in the process of European integration and make them feel part of this new political structure. The exercise of direct democratic rights would help establish stronger bonds between the individual and the European Union as a supranational organization. The process of social integration that would be engendered by people’s greater chances of participation in European Community affairs may be regarded as a necessary complement to the status of citizen of the Community created by the 1991 Maastricht treaty. Interpreting this aspect of the Maastricht treaty, Soysal (1994: 147) maintains that ‘citizenship in one EC Member State confers rights in all of the others, thereby breaking the link between the status attached to citizenship and national territory’. By providing European Community citizens with the entitlement to the same status and treatment as the nationals of the other Member States, a direct relationship is established between the individual in any of the Member States and the European Union as a supranational organization. The provision of these rights thus constitutes the European Union as a public, social space beyond the national territory. However, in order for people to feel part of this new supranational social space, people’s direct chances of participation in the political and social arrangements of the European Community should be enhanced. It is my contention that the provision of rights of direct democracy on the European level would contribute to the social integration of the European Community. Below I elaborate upon some arguments that support my claim (Buchmann 1993). These arguments apply to institutions of direct democracy in general; they are not limited to particular forms of direct democratic rights. 1. From the perspective of democratic theory, citizens should be granted equality and freedom (i.e. principle of autonomy) in determining their own destiny (Held 1987). Political institutions of direct democracy are more efficient in meeting these standards than any forms of representative democracy (Kriesi 1991). The main argument is that direct democratic procedures offer highly differentiated forms of political participation in the decision-making process. This holds good with respect to substantive issues as well as timing. For example, direct democratic instruments enable citizens to set issues on the public agenda and subject them to a popular vote (Frey and Bohnet 1993). They provide a means for securing citizens’ direct access to the political arena and for voicing their concerns about social, political, cultural and technological developments (Buchmann 1995). Moreover, unlike elections, which only take place at regular time intervals, direct democratic instruments allow citizens to articulate their preferences independent of any prefixed timetable. The opportunities provided by political instruments of direct democracy

European integration

63

would certainly increase people’s feeling of being part of this new political structure and, simultaneously, help satisfy the extraordinarily high legitimacy demands with which the European political institutions are confronted. 2. Theories of political socialization attribute great importance to the educational effects of political participation (Offe and Preuss 1991; Pateman 1970). Political rights of direct democracy provide incentives for citizens to participate in public life. Compared to representative forms of democracy, the multiple opportunities of stating one’s preferences enhance citizens’ willingness to engage in public affairs. Furthermore, the public discourse likely to be engendered raises citizens’ consciousness about the issues in question. This argument underscores the great significance of institutionalized procedures of political participation in enhancing citizens’ political competence (Kriesi 1991; Offe and Preuss 1991). Extensive rights of democratic participation also support a political culture in which democratic procedures are taken for granted. Citizens respect democratic standards in their own political behaviour. 3. From the standpoint of the legitimacy of political institutions, elaborate rights to participate in the decision-making process incorporate people into the political system because the rules make them part of the decisions (Frey and Bohnet 1993). People are therefore also more likely to regard the political institutions as legitimate. This certainly enhances their political and social integration. 4. From the perspective of social change, extensive rights of political participation offer the possibility of setting novel issues on the political agenda. The public discourse engendered around these issues may thus give an impulse to societal institutions to reconsider and re-evaluate their beliefs and activities. In this respect, direct democratic instruments may assume the function of instituting learning processes within society, eventually contributing to social innovation. The four arguments presented above provide theoretically driven ideas of why such institutions of direct democracy would enhance the process of social integration of the European Community. While these ideas have been widely discussed in the literature, the elaboration of arguments about appropriate (new) forms of direct democratic institutions within the European Community has not been pursued as much. It is also beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss this issue in detail. Given the scope of the future European Community and the diversity of its Member States, it seems clear, however, that new forms of direct democratic participation must be created and combined with new efficient institutions of transnational decision-making procedures. These future institutions should also make use of new social and technological developments. In this respect, new communication possibilities provided by telecommunication and information technology are particularly relevant (Barber 1984). CONCLUSIONS It was my intention to draw attention to the disparate dynamics of systemic and social integration increasingly affecting the European Community. I pinpointed some of the

64

Social exclusion and European integration

causes of the growing temporal discrepancies in the differing paces of integration and put forward some ideas about the ways in which the deficit of social integration within the European Community might be reduced. I argued that, as Europe grows close economically and politically, the absence of a Europe-wide sense of community and solidarity will be felt more strongly. It is likely to increase the level of tension and conflict within the European Community, thus making the future process of European integration more difficult. Efforts should therefore be undertaken to think, first, about means to overcome existing barriers to the formation of a European political culture and, second, about means to increase the EC people’s chances of participation in the process of European integration. I proposed the constitution of a European public sphere which is likely to entail the Europeanization of the national public spheres and the institutionalization of direct democratic rights. While I provided the general arguments for these two propositions, future efforts should be devoted to the elaboration of ideas about the particular ways in which these measures could be institutionalized within the European Community. REFERENCES Bach, Maurizio (1992) ‘Eine leise Revolution durch Verwaltungsverfahren: Bürokratische Integrationsprozesse in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 21 (1), 16–30. —— (1993) ‘Vom Zweckverband zum technokratischen Regime: Politische Legitimation und institutionelle Verselbständigung in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft’, in H.A. Winkler and H. Kaelble (eds), Nationalismus, Nationalitäten, Supranationalität: Europa nach 1945, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 288–308. —— (1994) ‘Technocratic regime building: bureaucratic integration in the European Community’, in M. Haller and R. Richter (eds), Toward a European Nation? Political Trends in Europe East and West, Center and Periphery, Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 83–95. Barber, Benjamin (1984) Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bieling, Hans-Jürgen (1995) ‘Maastricht, neoliberale Hegemonie, deutsche Machtpolitik’, Widerspruch, 29, 39–49. Bornschier, Volker (1994) ‘The rise of the European Community: grasping towards hegemony? Or therapy against national decline?’, in M. Haller and R. Richter (eds), Toward a European Nation? Political Trends in Europe East and West, Center and Periphery, Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 55–82. Buchmann, Marlis (1993) ‘The relevance of the Swiss experience for a European constitution: a sociological perspective’, paper presented at the Workshop on Democratic Rules for a Future Europe, COST A7, Lucerne, 4–6 November. —— (1995) ‘The impact of resistance to biotechnology in Switzerland: a sociological view of the recent referendum’, in M. Bauer (ed.), Resistance to New Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 207–24. Dewandre, N. and Lenoble, J. (eds) (1994) Projekt Europa. Postnationale Identität: Grundlage für eine europäische Demokratie, Berlin: Schelzky & Jeepoc. Durkheim, Emile (1977) Ueber die Teilung der sozialen Arbeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Frey, Bruno S. and Bohnet, Iris (1993) ‘Democracy by competition: referenda and federalism in Switzerland’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 23, 71–81. Gerhards, Jürgen (1993a) ‘Westeuropäische Integration und die Schwierigkeiten der Entstehung einer europäischen Oeffentlichkeit’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 22 (1), 96–110.

European integration

65

—— (1993b) ‘Europäische Oeffentlichkeit durch Massenmedien?’, in B. Schäfers (ed.), Lebensverhältnisse und soziale Konflikte im neuen Europa. Verhandlungen des 26. Deutschen Soziologentages in Düsseldorf 1992, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 558–67. Habermas, Jürgen ( 1981) Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— (1994) ‘Staatsbürgerschaft und nationale Identität’, in N. Dewandre and J. Lenoble (eds), Projekt Europa. Postnationale Identität: Grundlage für eine europäische Demokratie, Berlin: Schelzky & Jeepoc. Held, David (1987) Models of Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kleger, Heinz (1995) ‘Europäischer Verfassungspatriotismus und europäische demokratische Identität’, Widerspruch, 29, 29–38. Kohler-Koch, B. (ed.) (1992) Staat und Demokratie in Europa, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Kriesi, Hanspeter (1991) Die demokratische Frage, Bern: Schweizerischer Wissenschaftsrat. —— (1993) ‘Oeffentlichkeit und soziale Bewegungen in der Schweiz – ein Musterfall?’, in B. Schäfers (ed.), Lebensverhältnisse und soziale Konflikte im neuen Europa. Verhandlungen des 26. Deutschen Soziologentages in Düsseldorf 1992, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 576–85. Lepsius, Rainer (1990) ‘Ethnos und Demos’, in id., Interessen, Ideen und Institutionen, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. —— (1991) ‘Nationalstaat oder Nationalitätenstaat für die Weiterentwicklung der Europäischen Gemeinschaft’, in R. Wildenmann (ed.), Staatswerdung Europas?, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. —— (1992) ‘Zwischen Nationalstaatlichkeit und westeuropäischer Integration’, in B. KohlerKoch (ed.), Staat und Demokratie in Europa, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Münch, Richard (1993) Das Projekt Europa: Zwischen Nationalstaat, regionaler Autonomie und Weltgesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Offe, Claus and Preuss, Ulrich K. (1991) ‘Democratic institutions and moral resources’, in D. Held (ed.), Political Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity Press, 143–71. Pateman, Carol (1970) Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reif, Karlheinz (1992) ‘Wahlen, Wähler und Demokratie in der EG: Die drei Dimensionen des demokratischen Defizits’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 19, 43–52. Soysal, Nuhoglu Yasemin (1994) Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wildenmann, R. (ed.) (1991) Staatswerdung Europas?, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft.

4

Gender inequalities in European societies today Sara Arber

Gender inequalities vary in their nature and significance at different stages of the life course. A life-course approach emphasizes the interlinkage between phases of the life course, rather than seeing them in isolation (Arber and Evandrou 1993; Harevan and Adams 1982). Gender inequalities are particularly pronounced in the middle years and these impact on gender inequalities in later life. This chapter examines the intersection between gender inequalities in the labour market and gender inequalities within marriage as the central factors perpetuating women’s disadvantaged position in European societies. This focus is not intended to minimize the importance of other bases of inequality, such as class, ethnicity, race or parental status, and how they intersect with gender inequalities at different stages of the life course. The chapter primarily presents data on gender inequalities in Britain, and draws where appropriate on research evidence from other European societies. A full understanding of gender inequalities across the life course requires the merging of the micro-perspective, of gender roles and relationships, with the macroperspective, which takes account of wider societal processes, such as women’s increased participation in the labour market, the progressively earlier age of exit from paid employment and improving health of the population. The latter two trends have meant that women and men spend many more active years not in paid work after labour market exit than in the past (Kohli et al. 1991). It is important to consider how trends in the public sphere of paid employment and state policies, such as pensions policy, relate to gender relationships in the private sphere. Women do not have the same access to citizenship as men, particularly in relation to ‘civil’ and ‘social’ rights (Walby 1994). Civil rights include the rights to bodily integrity, not to be beaten by a partner or carer, and the right to work at the occupation of the individual’s choice. The rights of social citizenship are bound up with both being a worker, and the role of the state in ‘the provision of an infrastructure which enables people to be guaranteed a minimum provision of necessities’ (1994: 389). This chapter will consider how gender inequalities are associated with differential access to civil and social citizenship, focusing on the middle years and later life. Since, historically, citizenship has been linked to participation in the public sphere, it is important to examine how labour-market participation influences women’s access to the rights of social and civil citizenship during these two phases of the life course. In both the middle years and in later life, gender inequalities relating to the labour market are inextricably linked to gender inequalities within marriage (Arber and Ginn 1995a). It is critical to integrate an understanding of gender relations in the public

Gender inequalities in European societies

67

sphere of paid employment and state policies with gender inequalities in the private sphere of the household. Gender inequalities in the labour market have been the subject of much more attention from sociologists than gender inequalities in marriage. Two cross-national European reviews on women in the labour market (Rubery and Fagan 1994; Rubery et al. 1994) will be drawn on extensively in the next section. GENDER INEQUALITIES IN MID-LIFE: THE LABOUR MARKET It is ironic that the amount of sociological research on different aspects of gender inequalities in the labour market is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the gender inequalities. There is a vast research literature on women’s participation in the labour market, but much less on the gender gap in access to labour market rights and benefits: for example, access to a company car and membership in financially advantageous occupational pension schemes. The gender gap in employment participation rates is becoming narrower in European societies (Hakim 1993a; Brannen et al. 1994; Rubery et al. 1994). In some societies, such as Finland, there is very little gender difference in participation rates (Arber and Lahelma 1993). In Denmark there is only a 12 per cent gender gap in activity rates, whereas it is over 30 per cent in Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal (Rubery et al. 1994: table 1.1). A comparison of participation rates masks the fact that a substantial proportion of women work part-time in many countries, especially in the UK and the Netherlands, and the pattern of employment across the life cycle varies between countries. Kempeneers and Lelievre (1991) outline a number of life-cycle employment patterns, for example, in Denmark and East Germany the majority of women return to employment within two years of each birth, whereas in ‘other northern countries’ (the UK, the Netherlands, West Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland) the interruptions are longer than in France and Belgium, and more often involve a switch to part-time work. The ‘southern countries’ of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece have a bipolar pattern in which a much lower proportion of women have entered paid employment, but those who do either work continuously or do not re-enter after childbirth. Motherhood, rather than marriage, has the major effect in depressing women’s employment participation and hours of work, but this effect is greater in the UK, the Netherlands and West Germany, than in Denmark, Finland and East Germany. Analyses of labour market participation increasingly need to differentiate among women and among mothers. There is less gender gap in participation rates for younger highly educated women working in professional and managerial occupations (Glover and Arber 1995; Rubery et al. 1994). Higher education leads to higher participation rates and a more continuous pattern of activity over the life cycle, reducing the adverse effects of motherhood on labour-market activity, and resulting in a labour-market profile which is becoming increasingly different from that of other women. However, there is little research on the magnitude of inequalities between highly educated women and men of a comparable occupational and educational level. Greater inequalities among women are resulting in increased polarization between couples and families, with a widening gap between the incomes of dual-earner and non-earner families.

68

Social exclusion and European integration

There have been extensive debates about whether increased employment participation of women has been associated with changes in the degree of sex segregation (Hakim 1979, 1993b; Crompton and Sanderson 1990; Rubery and Fagan 1994). The Scandinavian societies, which exhibit high levels of women’s participation, also have high gender segregation in employment, with women concentrated in the public sector, especially the caring professions. Sex segregation is associated with other gender inequalities, especially in earnings between occupational groups. But even among women and men in the same occupations, there are substantial gender differences in earnings (Arber and Ginn 1995a; Rubery et al. 1994). In Britain, there has been a narrowing of the gender earnings differential in fulltime pay to 81 per cent of men’s hourly earnings in 1993. The gender differential in weekly earnings is greater, because men work longer hours on average than full-time women; full-time women increased their weekly earnings as a percentage of men’s to 73 per cent in Britain in 1993 (Department of Employment 1993; Dale and Joshi 1992). There is less gender inequality in earnings in other European societies than in Britain (Rubery and Fagan 1994). Gender inequalities in earnings are mainly due to the gendersegregated structure of the labour market, and the ways in which women’s jobs are often defined as less skilled than similar jobs undertaken by men. Gender differences in earnings also understate gender inequality in occupational benefits and other forms of remuneration from employment, since men are more likely than women to receive a range of employment benefits, such as company cars, generous employer-paid pension schemes, paid time off and private health care (SCELI 1989). Women are also less likely than men to obtain pay premia for working extra, unsocial hours or flexible hours (Rubery et al. 1994). Rubery and Fagan (1994: 144) argue that gender pay ratios are an underestimate of the real gender gap in the overall remuneration package for three reasons: 1. additional benefits tend to be provided to higher paid groups, among which women are underrepresented; 2. additional benefits are often not provided to part-time and temporary workers, who are disproportionately women; and 3. there are large differences between sectors in the provision of additional benefits, with very low levels provided in textiles, retailing, hotel, catering and agriculture. Women are less likely than men to be in occupations covered by forms of collective agreement, which give rights to many additional benefits, including overtime pay, pay for unsocial hours, redundancy pay, and so on. Workers in the public sector are more likely to be protected by such rights, and women fare much better in the public than the private sector in this regard. There is little sociological research on this form of invisible earnings, so it is hard to map the extent of men’s advantage over women. Official statistical agencies do not routinely collect information on such invisible sources of remuneration from employment, hence reliable national figures are unavailable, but the information compiled by Rubery and Fagan (1994) and from smaller-scale, more sociological surveys, such as the British Social Change and Economic Life Initiative (SCELI 1989), indicates that this is a major source of gender disadvantage. Countries with a high level of regulation of both overtime and part-time work exhibit less gender differentiation in working time and in the rights and benefits of employment: for example, Denmark and

Gender inequalities in European societies

69

France in contrast to the UK, which lacks such employment regulation. However, the current situation of cuts in public sector employment and movements towards deregulation are likely to increase gender inequalities in future. The position of women in the public world of paid employment and the private domain of the family is inextricably linked. Current policies emphasize the need for a more flexible workforce. Flexibility has been the norm in many women’s jobs and is likely to increase for all jobs in the future. Rubery et al. (1994: 259) project that ‘Flexibility requirements within work may act both to reinforce gender divisions in the household and to make it more difficult to plan domestic and work lives of both sexes.’ The increasing deregulation of the labour market may have adverse effects where social rights are based on employment: Rubery et al. (1994: 296) suggest that ‘Equality policies may require a move towards benefits based for everyone more on citizenship and less on employment or household status.’ The next section argues that gender inequalities within the family are greater than those in the labour market and seem more resistant to change. A vicious circle is created which connects women’s lack of economic power within marriage and their disadvantaged position in the labour market (Arber and Ginn 1995a). Women’s employment opportunities, and hence earnings, are constrained by having to shoulder the bulk of responsibility for domestic work. Where women earn less or have less potential income than their husband, this will tend to perpetuate their relative powerlessness in marriage; the ideology that women’s labour-market contribution is less valuable and more easily dispensable than that of their husband is reinforced. This, in turn, leads to the expectation that women will perform the bulk of domestic labour, constraining their opportunities in the labour market and rights to social citizenship. GENDER INEQUALITIES WITHIN MARRIAGE Since the early 1970s there has been extensive sociological research on gender inequalities within the family. The dominant concern has been the division of domestic labour and childcare, demonstrating that women shoulder the burden of the majority of childcare and domestic work, even when they work full time (Edgell 1980; Martin and Roberts 1984; Pahl 1984; Jowell et al. 1988; Brannen et al. 1994). This work has mainly focused on younger rather than older married couples (Arber and Ginn 1991a). In contrast to the wealth of comparative European data on labour market participation of women, there is a lack of cross-national data on the domestic division of labour. However, Kempeneers and Lelievre (1991) show that there is more equality in the Netherlands, although even here 46 per cent of husbands do no domestic chores, contrasting with over 70 per cent in the UK, West Germany, Portugal and Spain. Rubery et al. (1994: 107) conclude: regardless of the level of support for equal roles the amount of work done by men is universally negligible throughout the EU . . . Even in societies where men are more in favour of egalitarian roles, they do very little domestic work. It is women, rather than the household collectivity, which accommodates a dual earner strategy, and they do this by increasing the length of their overall working day (paid and unpaid work).

70

Social exclusion and European integration

A research concern since the 1980s has been gender inequalities in resource allocation and distribution within the household. Studies of intra-household inequality have highlighted the traditional invisibility of women’s poverty within households and their lack of access to valued resources (Pahl 1989, 1990; Brannen and Wilson 1987; Arber 1993; Vogler and Pahl 1994). For example, Charles and Kerr (1986) demonstrate the nature and extent of gender inequalities in food consumption, with women in lower-class households being the most disadvantaged. Although women’s complete economic dependency within marriage is now a minority experience (Sorensen and McLanahan 1987), most women working part time are not earning sufficient to achieve ‘genuine economic independence in terms of the balance of economic power within households and of equality in household financial arrangements’ (Lister 1992: 20). Lister argues that lack of an independent income is linked to inequality in decision-making, and that ‘women’s increased participation in the labour market has opened up only very limited avenues to economic independence’ (ibid. 10), because of British women’s low pay, part-time work and lack of access to occupational welfare and its accompanying fiscal advantages. The key determinant of power in the household is likely to be the relative size of each partner’s income rather than the absolute amount of a woman’s independent income. Until women have higher earnings than their partners, it is unlikely that cultural expectations about appropriate gender roles relating to the domestic division of labour will be challenged. Major progress towards equality in the home is unlikely to occur without greater equality of the economic contributions of both partners within marriage. To date, there has been little cross-national research on the extent of women’s economic dependency within marriage, but for a number of countries there is evidence that women rarely have a higher or equivalent income to their husband (Sorensen and McLanahan 1987; Sorensen 1994; Joshi et al. 1995; Ward et al. 1996). In Britain, the possibility of earnings equality between marital partners exists only for the two-thirds of working-age couples where both partners are employed. Among 94 per cent of these couples, the wife’s earnings do not exceed those of her partner, so that the husband’s employment is likely to take precedence. In such households, wives’ own careers may be defined as secondary because in terms of earnings they are secondary, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle referred to above (Arber and Ginn 1995a; Arber 1999). Couples can be considered in terms of the degree of equality in independent income between partners. Using the British General Household Survey,2 the wife’s personal income as a proportion of the couple’s total income from all sources is examined (including earnings, state benefits, child benefit, maintenance payments and income from savings). Equal income is defined as where the wife’s income is 45<55 per cent of the couple’s total income (Arber 1999). Figure 4.1 shows that under a tenth of married women have a higher income than their partner at all ages across the life course, and approximately a tenth have an equal income to their partner. Over 80 per cent of wives have a lower income than their partner. There is very little variation in income inequality between partners across the life course, except for the reduction in disparity for British women above state pension age. Between age 25 and 60, over half of married women have an independent income which is less than a quarter of that of their husband. This low level of independent economic resources is likely to be translated into a lack of power in the family. Less

Gender inequalities in European societies

71

Figure 4.1 Wife’s independent income as a proportion of couple’s gross income, by age of wife. Source: General Household Survey, 1988–90.

than 5 per cent of women over 65 have a higher income than their partner. However, the income inequality between older wives and husbands is less than at earlier stages of the life course, because of the levelling effect of state pension income. In Britain, the National Insurance retirement pension provides most married women over 60 with a pension equal to 60 per cent of their husband’s state pension, conventionally referred to as the married woman’s allowance. This reduction in women’s relative economic dependence in later life is also found in the USA (Sorensen and McLanahan 1987). There is little sociological research which systematically examines inequalities between husbands and wives, in terms of earnings, occupational status, educational attainment or age. Gender inequalities between marital partners reflect not only gender inequalities in the labour market, which lead to lower occupational attainment and earnings of women, but also factors influencing choice of marriage partners and cultural ideologies about the appropriateness of gender differences between marriage partners. There is a tendency towards both social homogamy of marriage partners (Berent 1954) – that is, people marry those with a similar educational level and occupational level (at the time of partnership formation) – and partnership formation in which husbands have a superior status on criteria such as occupational position, educational attainment, earnings and age (Van Berkel and De Graaf 1995). There has been little change over recent years in the cultural values which support the marriage age differential (men are likely to be on average three years older than their wives in Britain), as well as the norm that the husband should have a superior status, or at least potential earnings.

72

Social exclusion and European integration

In summary, wives who are earnings dominant are rare, despite twenty years of equal pay legislation in most European societies. Women’s lower earnings than their husbands’ mean that they have less power to influence family financial decisionmaking, and their lower earnings are likely to hamper attempts to equalize the domestic division of labour. The persistence of male economic advantage in the labour market is magnified in the family, reinforcing the ideology of women’s subordination. There is a reciprocal relation between the labour market and the family whereby women’s economic disadvantage in the labour market influences their domestic role in the family, which in turn reduces women’s ability to participate to their full potential in the public sphere. Figure 4.2 provides a model of women’s continued subordinate position. Most research attention has focused on patriarchal practices in the public sphere of the labour market and state institutions. Research has also examined patriarchal practices within the private sphere relating to gender inequalities in the domestic division of labour and childcare. A third arm of patriarchal practices relates to the perpetuation and maintenance of status inequalities between (marital) partners. This has been the subject of little research: for example, of the cultural ideology and practices supporting husbands having higher status than their wives in terms of age dominance and income dominance, and to what extent it is culturally unacceptable for wives to be in full-time employment while their husband is not in the employed labour force. Where women are economically dependent on their husbands they may not have social citizenship in their own right, but only as dependants. Such dependence is a precarious route to citizenship, as will be discussed more fully in the next section on gender inequalities in later life. GENDER INEQUALITIES IN LATER LIFE The study of gender inequalities in later life is in its infancy, despite the fact that women predominate among older people, especially at the oldest ages (Arber and Ginn 1991a, 1991b, 1995b). Gender differences in later life mean that we cannot speak about ‘the elderly’, but must differentiate between the circumstances and needs of older women and men. Over age 65, there are 50 per cent more women than men in England and Wales. The numerical predominance of women in later life is found in all European countries, although the exact proportion varies somewhat: for example, in West Germany there are almost twice as many women as men over age 65, while in Greece there are less than a third more women than men (Eurostat 1991). This gender imbalance is because male mortality exceeds female at every age. In most western countries, the expectation of life at birth for women is 5–6 years longer than for men (Eurostat 1991). The gender differential in mortality together with the cultural norm for women to marry men older than themselves creates gender differences in marital status and living arrangements in later life. Half of older women are widowed in England, whereas 72 per cent of older men are married. The feminization of widowhood is particularly pronounced, with over four times more older widows than widowers in England and Wales (Arber and Ginn 1991b). Currently, half of older women and a fifth of older men in Britain live alone

Gender inequalities in European societies

73

Figure 4.2 Factors perpetuating the subordinate position of women.

(Arber and Ginn 1991b). Older women’s propensity to live alone has been seen in a negative light (Taylor 1988), yet solo living does not necessarily imply social vulnerability: it may reflect preference (Arber and Ginn 1991b). The high proportion of older people currently living alone is an unprecedented situation historically (Grundy 1992). The reasons for this trend do not lie in the abandonment of kin obligations by younger people, as some have suggested, but rather in changes in marriage and fertility patterns, and in the financial ability of older people to retain their independence (Grundy 1992; Wall 1992). The numerical predominance of older women means that, to the extent that older people are seen as a social problem or a burden on the rest of society, women are disproportionately affected. Older women are both in a numerical majority and are in greater danger of social exclusion than older men. The possibility of an individual experiencing social exclusion in later life relates to whether they possess three key types of resources (Arber and Ginn 1991b, 1993a), which are: first, material or structural resources such as income, assets, car ownership, housing and the quality of the home environment; second, the bodily resources of physical health and functional abilities of the individual; and third, access to personal, supportive and health care. These three sets of resources form an interlocking

74

Social exclusion and European integration

Figure 4.3 Three key resources influencing independence and dependence.

‘resource triangle’ (see Figure 4.3). The absence of any one of these resources acts as a constraint on the individual’s well-being, increasing their likelihood of dependency on others and thus the dangers of social exclusion. The remainder of this chapter outlines the ways in which older women are disadvantaged in relation to each of these three types of resource: material, health and caring, and how these gender inequalities are linked to the threat of social exclusion and the rights of social citizenship. Gender and income in later life Income is fundamental to whether an older person can ‘participate in the customary roles and relationships of the societies in which they live or, in short, whether or not they are fully integrated into their society’ (Walker et al. 1993: 25). The importance of financial security to the achievement of full European citizenship is recognized in the EC Charter of the Fundamental Rights of Workers (92/442/EC). Paragraph 24 states: ‘Every worker of the European Community must, at the time of their retirement, be able to enjoy resources affording him or her a decent standard of living.’ Older people in Britain are poorer than in other European countries, and there exists substantial and growing inequality of income between pensioners (Arber and Ginn 1991b; Groves 1992; Walker 1992; Walker et al. 1993; Ginn and Arber 1991, 1994). Throughout the EC, older women’s lower income and living standards compared with men is evident, with the exception of Denmark (Walker et al. 1993). Walker et al. (1993: 47) state:

Gender inequalities in European societies

75

the average incomes of older women are low relative to other younger (age) groups and to older men. The consistency of this finding across virtually the whole of the EC is remarkable: older women, particularly widows, comprise some of the poorest and most socially excluded groups in the Community both north and south – a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the feminisation of poverty in old age. However, official figures often underestimate the income disadvantage of older women when the household, family or taxation unit is analysed. The assumption that married couples share money income equally is challenged by a growing body of evidence that within households men have more personal spending money than women (Brannen and Wilson 1987; Pahl 1989, 1990; Morris 1990). A more accurate picture of gender inequality of income is obtained by comparing the distribution of personal income, that is, income to which an individual has direct, independent access. This includes a person’s own state or occupational pension and any survivor’s pension, but not their spouse’s income. The following provides an analysis of gender inequality in income in Britain to illustrate the ways in which pensions based on labour-market participation disadvantage women, because they generally have interrupted work histories and low earnings. Analysis is based on the 1991 General Household Survey (OPCS 1993). Gender differences in sources and distribution of weekly personal income amounts are shown in Figure 4.4, using three pairs of ‘box-and-whisker’ plots for state income, non-state pensions, and total income. There was little difference among older people in the amount of income from the state (first pair of boxplots), which includes National Insurance basic and earnings-related pensions, a range of needs-related benefits, and Income Support. The median income for women, £53, was only slightly less than that for men, £59. Therefore state pensions are fairly gender neutral and in Britain show little inequality between older people, but they are set at a very low level. The second pair of boxplots shows the distribution of income from occupational and private pensions (but only for those receiving this source of income). Here the spread of incomes for men is very wide. Older women’s non-state pension income distribution was both lower and more compressed. For total income (third pair of boxplots), the median for older men was £106 per week, and the amount received by the top 25 per cent (upper quartile) was over £180 per week. Older women’s income fell far below men’s, with a median of £61 and an upper quartile amount of £91. Comparing the three pairs of boxplots, it can be seen that non-state pensions are the major source of gender inequalities in personal income among British older men and women. This reflects gender differences in occupational pension income, which is closely linked to type of occupation, employment pattern and lifetime earnings. Older British women are far less likely than men to receive any income from an occupational pension – 24 per cent of women compared with 67 per cent of men – and the amounts are also less, mainly due to childcare and the domestic division of labour and the constraints this places on women’s employment (Groves 1992; Ginn and Arber 1991, 1993, 1994). In spite of formal sex equality and women’s increasing employment participation, the proportion of women belonging to an occupational pension scheme is rising only very slowly. A substantial gender gap in occupational pension income is likely to persist as long as women shoulder the bulk of society’s unpaid caring (Ginn and Arber

76

Social exclusion and European integration

Figure 4.4 Distribution of personal income in 1991, British men and women aged 65+: from the state, from non-state pensions and total, £ per week. Source: General Household Survey, 1991 (author’s analysis).

1991, 1993; Joshi and Davies 1992). Women’s disadvantage can be alleviated by redistributive state pensions supported from taxation, as in Denmark, which has a universal flat-rate pension paid as a right of citizenship according to residence (Ginn and Arber 1992; Walker et al. 1993). However, the trend is in the opposite direction: in Britain and in most other OECD countries, concern at the rising cost of public pensions as the population ages has prompted a shift in the balance of pension provision from state to private (OECD 1988; Gillion 1991). Unless the trend towards

Gender inequalities in European societies

77

privatization of pensions is reversed, gender inequality of personal income in later life is likely to increase in the future. British government policies since 1979 have emphasized an ideology of individualism and self-provision, rather than state responsibility: for example, promoting private pensions through incentives, while allowing the value of the state basic pension to fall. Although such policies are presented as gender-neutral, they are inherently gendered in their assumptions and consequences. The state pension has declined in real value since 1980 when indexing to average earnings was replaced by indexing to prices; it is projected to decline to only 10 per cent of male earnings by 2020 (Evandrou and Falkingham 1993), and is falling increasingly far below the means-tested Income Support level. Since the majority of older women have no other meaningful source of independent income than the state pension (Ginn and Arber 1991, 1994), their income will be below the level of means-tested benefits, leaving them, by definition, in poverty. Although British older women have always been poorer than older men, the state National Insurance pension has meant that since the 1950s older women have had more independent financial resources than in the past, promoting their opportunities for independent action and social citizenship. However, the signs are that these are under threat. The majority of women will be widowed and provision of widows’ benefits in occupational pension schemes is patchy and inadequate. The greater the movement towards individual provision for retirement through occupational and personal pensions as the major source of income in later life, the greater will be the income inequality between older women and men and between those who have had an intermittent, or low-paid employment history and those with an advantaged position in the labour market. Thus the opportunities to enjoy a Third Age of self-development and autonomous action are likely to become increasingly gendered, as well as class-divided, with financial dependency acting as an obstacle to citizenship rights. British government plans to raise women’s state pension age from 60 to 65 from the year 2010 will also exacerbate women’s disadvantage, by widening the gap between their last employment and the age when they can claim state pensions. Although presented as progressive legislation to ensure equal treatment of men and women, this proposal ignores gendered ageism in the labour market which results in women being considered ‘too old’ for a job at an earlier age than men (Bernard et al. 1995), as well as the handicaps faced by women in obtaining occupational pensions. Because of these gendered processes in employment, raising women’s state pension age will leave married women without an income of their own for several years, while non-married women may be forced to rely on Income Support. Most pension systems in Europe, as in Britain, perpetuate and reinforce inequalities and divisions created in the labour market into later life, because pension systems relate to contribution years and earnings. The one main exception is Denmark, which has a universal pension based on citizenship. However, there are signs of increasing inequality in Denmark with the expansion of supplementary pensions, a trend which is occurring across Europe and is being actively promoted by many governments concerned about the rising pensions bill and the perceived need for cost containment. Such changes will have greater adverse consequences for women, and for men who have been on the margins of social exclusion during their working life, for example because of unemployment or disability. Their social exclusion is likely to continue through into later life.

78

Social exclusion and European integration

Gender, health and functional disability Older women have been shown in numerous studies to have higher levels of physical incapacity than men (Verbrugge 1984, 1989; Manton 1988). Good health is essential to independence, especially the individual’s capacity to carry out personal self-care, such as bathing, negotiating stairs and walking outside the home. Chronic illness and disability tend to restrict an individual’s independence, as well as generating extra costs for a special diet, additional heating, laundry, or nursing care. Those with higher levels of functional disability or cognitive impairment will require more practical support and personal care from either informal carers or the state. Disabilities which hinder mobility and prevent an individual performing basic selfcare tasks, such as washing and going to the toilet, are conventionally measured using ‘activities of daily living’ (ADLs). Twice as many older women as older men – 14 per cent compared with 7 per cent – have a severe level of disability (see Figure 4.5). They will have difficulty washing/bathing unaided and are unable to walk down the road unaided (Arber and Ginn 1991b, 1993b). This level of disability is likely to require some provision of domestic and/or personal care/support on a regular basis. Gender differences are particularly striking at the oldest ages; above age 85, 45 per cent of older women compared with under a quarter of older men are severely disabled. Although older women have a longer expectation of life than men, they also have a longer period in which they can expect to be functionally disabled (Arber and Ginn 1991b). Thus older women are disadvantaged compared with men of the same age since they will require a good deal more care and support simply to accomplish the activities of daily living. The consequence of the gender differential in disability is that older women are more likely than older men to require both informal care and state health and welfare services.

Figure 4.5 Percentage of older men and women with severe disability (score 6+), by five-year age groups. Source: General Household Survey, 1985 (author’s analysis).

Gender inequalities in European societies

79

Gender inequalities in access to caring resources Since more older women than men need care or support in order to remain living in the community, it is pertinent to examine gender differences in access to caring resources. Older people with severe functional disability need help with activities of daily living or personal self-care on a daily basis. Table 4.1 shows that 48 per cent of older British women live alone compared with a fifth of older men. Thus older disabled women are twice as likely as older men with a comparable level of disability to live alone and therefore be reliant on family members living elsewhere, other informal carers in the community, or state-provided domiciliary services. This contrasts with the majority of severely disabled older men who can rely on support/care from their wife. Table 4.1 Living arrangements of older men and women (%) All aged 65+ Men Living Living with with Living with with Total N=

alone in own household: spouse others (mainly adult children) in another’s household: adult children others

Severely disabled aged 65+1

Women

Men

Women

20

48

21

43

70 6

36 8

63 8

30 12

2 2

5 3

6 2

12 3

100 2,155

100 107

100 302

100 1,477

Note:1 Disability score 6 and over. Source: General Household Survey, 1985 (author’s analysis).

Half of disabled older women live alone, which, while promoting independence, means that they are reliant on state domiciliary services, mainly home helps and community nurses in the UK. They are also heavily dependent on the unpaid work of relatives and other informal carers, and are the group most likely to enter residential care (Arber and Ginn 1991b). Older women’s disadvantage in access to care from family members is compounded by their lower average income (discussed above) – a poor deal for ‘the carer sex’ who have spent a lifetime of unpaid work looking after children, husband and others, often in addition to waged work. Loss of autonomy with advancing age is seen most vividly in institutional care. Nearly twice as many older British women than men live in a residential setting, because of the gender differences in marital status and living arrangements. The chances of institutional residence are closely related to marital status; married older people are least likely to be in residential care in Britain (Arber and Ginn 1991b). Widowed older people have a five times higher chance of living in a residential establishment than married people in each age group. Social citizenship for older people relates to rights of access to adequate and dignified social and medical care, should this be required. These rights are more likely to be denied for older women than men. A recent British social policy change affecting older people is access to state-provided health and domiciliary care. The NHS and Community Care Act (DoH 1989) was ostensibly based on a rationale of independence

80

Social exclusion and European integration

and choice for the older person, but the reality is that ‘social’ care is less likely to be provided by the state than in the past. Hospitals are increasingly discharging older patients who in the past would have received continuing nursing care, so that relatives are required to provide care. Older people who lack available relatives to provide care are obliged to pay for social care, whether this is provided at home or in a residential establishment. All these changes have gendered consequences, disadvantaging older women to a far greater extent than older men. As discussed above, older men are more likely to be able to rely on their wife to provide care should they need it, but older women are more likely to be widowed and reliant on wider kin and the state. Women are more likely than men to provide informal care for older relatives, and therefore any curtailing of state provision has a greater adverse effect on women, both as care-receivers and as carers. Thus the gendered consequences of social policy changes and how they impact on citizenship rights and social exclusion need close scrutiny. FROM MID-LIFE TO LATER LIFE: GENDER INEQUALITIES The constraints of childbearing and women’s earlier domestic roles, together with gender inequalities in the labour market, mean that older women have to rely more heavily than men on household members and the state for financial support. Since men die on average six years before women, and the marriage age differential is approximately three years, on average women can expect to be widowed for about ten years. Older women’s higher disability rates, combined with their greater likelihood of widowhood and living alone, make them more dependent on informal care in the community and on state services. These same factors contribute to their higher rate of institutionalization, which could be seen as the ultimate social exclusion and loss of citizenship rights. Any reduction in state welfare provision is likely to exacerbate older women’s disadvantage in maintaining their independence. Despite widowhood being a normal status for the majority of older women for a decade or longer, there has been very little sociological study of widowhood in terms of how older people reconstruct their lives following widowhood. The limited available evidence suggests that older men are more likely to remarry than older women, and that widowed men adapt less well to widowhood (Davidson 1995). Older women are much more likely to express opposition to the idea of remarriage, many reporting the benefits of widowhood in terms of independence and opportunity to pursue their own interests rather than being constrained by the role of wife in providing domestic services and caring for their husband (Wilson 1995). Yet many older women face difficulties in pursuing this new-found freedom, because of lack of financial resources associated with their poor pension position in Britain, and thus the danger of their social exclusion from society. Many societal and government policy changes have differential impacts on older women and men, reducing the opportunities for older women to live full and autonomous lives. For example, reductions in public transport, the increase in out-of-town shopping areas, increases in crime, and fears about crime and safety, all have greater consequences for older women than men. Reducing the role and provisions by the welfare state is not only occurring in Britain but in all European countries, risking a growth in social exclusion.

Gender inequalities in European societies

81

We come full circle, to a realization that we can only understand inequalities in later life, as in the middle years, through an understanding of the interlinkage between women’s position in the labour market during their working life, and their position in marriage throughout their life course. The danger is that current policy trends are increasing gender inequalities in later life, as well as risking the social exclusion of this major segment of society, as long as pensions are based on the individual’s labourmarket record rather than as a right of citizenship. NOTES 1.

2.

For access to the General Household Survey data for 1988–90 I am indebted to the ESRC Data Archive, University of Essex, and to the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys for permission to use the GHS data. I am very grateful to Jay Ginn for her collaboration on the research which is reported in this chapter. The General Household Survey (GHS) is a government national survey which interviews all adults in about 10,000 private household in Great Britain per year (OPCS 1992). A response rate of approximately 83 per cent is obtained. The analyses were conducted by the author and are based on a combined datafile from three years of the GHS: 1988–90. The small proportion of cohabiting couples have been combined with those who are married in this analysis.

REFERENCES Arber, S. (1999) ‘Unequal partners: inequality in earnings and independent income within marriage’, in L. Mckie, S. Bowlby and S. Gregory (eds), Home Truths: Gender, Power and the Household, London: Routledge. Arber, S. and Evandrou, M. (eds) (1993) Ageing, Independence and the Life Course, London: Jessica Kingsley. Arber, S. and Ginn, J. (1991a) ‘The invisibility of age: gender and class in later life’, Sociological Review, 39 (2), 260–91. —— (1991b) Gender and Later Life: A Sociological Analysis of Resources and Constraints, London: Sage. —— (1993a) ‘The gendered resource triangle: health and resources in later life’, in S. Platt, H. Thomas, S. Scott and G. Williams (eds), Locating Health: Sociological and Historical Explanations, Aldershot: Avebury. —— (1993b) ‘Gender and inequalities in health in later life’, Social Science and Medicine, 36 (1), 33–46. —— (1995a) ‘The mirage of gender equality: occupational success in the labour market and within marriage’, British Journal of Sociology, 46 (1), 21–43. —— (eds) (1995b) Connecting Gender and Ageing: A Sociological Approach, Buckingham: Open University Press. Arber, S. and Lahelma, E. (1993) ‘Women, paid employment and ill-health in Britain and Finland’, Acta Sociologica, 36, 121–38. Berent, J. (1954) ‘Social mobility and marriage: a study of trends in England and Wales’, in D.V. Glass (ed.), Social Mobility in Britain, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernard, M., Itzin, C., Phillipson, C. and Skucha, J. (1995) ‘Gendered work, gendered retirement’, in S. Arber and J. Ginn (eds), Connecting Gender and Ageing: A Sociological Approach, Buckingham: Open University Press. Brannen, J, Meszaros, G., Moss, P. and Poland, G. (1994) Employment and Family Life: A Review of Research in the UK (1980–1994), Department of Employment Research Series No. 41, London: Department of Employment.

82

Social exclusion and European integration

Brannen, J. and Wilson, G. (eds) (1987) Give and Take in Families: Studies in Resource Distribution, London: Allen & Unwin. Charles, N. and Kerr, M. (1986) ‘Eating properly, the family and state benefit’, Sociology, 20 (3), 412–29. Crompton, R. and Sanderson, K. (1990) Gendered Jobs and Social Change, London: Unwin Hyman. Dale, A. and Joshi, H. (1992) ‘The economic and social status of British women’, Acta Demographica, 1, 27–46. Davidson, K. (1995) ‘Gender differences in attitudes towards remarriage after widowhood’, paper presented to the International Congress of Gerontology, Amsterdam, August. Department of Employment (1993) New Earnings Survey 1993, Section A: Streamlined and Summary Analyses, London: HMSO. Department of Health (DoH) (1989) Caring for People: Community Care in the Next Decade and Beyond, White Paper, Cm. 849, London: HMSO. Edgell, S. (1980) Middle Class Couples, London: Allen & Unwin. Eurostat (1991) Demographic Statistics, Series 3c, Luxembourg: Eurostat. Evandrou, M. and Falkingham, J. (1993) ‘Social security and the life course: developing sensitive policy alternatives’, in S. Arber and M. Evandrou (eds), Ageing, Independence and the Life Course, London: Jessica Kingsley. Gillion, C. (1991) ‘Ageing populations: spreading the costs’, Journal of European Social Policy, 1, 107–28. Ginn, J and Arber, S. (1991) ‘Gender, class and income inequalities in later life’, British Journal of Sociology, 42 (3), 369–96. —— (1992) ‘Towards women’s independence: pension systems in three contrasting European welfare states’, Journal of European Social Policy, 2 (4), 255–77. —— (1993) ‘Pension penalties: the gendered division of occupational welfare’, Work, Employment and Society, 7 (1), 47–70. —— (1994) ‘Heading for hardship: how the British pension system has failed women’, in S. Baldwin and J. Falkingham (eds), Social Security and Social Change, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Glover, J. and Arber, S. (1995) ‘Polarization in mother’s employment: occupational class, age of youngest child, employment rights and work hours’, Gender, Work and Organisation, 2 (4), 165–79. Groves, D. (1992) ‘Occupational pension provision and women’s poverty in old age’, in C. Glendinning and J. Millar (eds), Women and Poverty in Britain in the 1990s, Brighton: Wheatsheaf. Grundy, E. (1992) ‘The living arrangements of elderly people’, Reviews in Clinical Gerontology, 2, 353–61. Hakim, C. (1979) Occupational Sex Segregation, Department of Employment Research Paper No. 9, London: Department of Employment. —— (1993a) ‘The myth of rising female employment’, Work, Employment and Society, 7, 97– 120. —— (1993b) ‘Segregated and integrated occupations: a new approach to analysing social change’, European Sociological Review, 9, 289–314. Hareven, T. and Adams, K.J. (eds) (1982) Ageing and Life Course Transitions: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, London: Tavistock. Joshi, H. and Davies, H. (1992) Childcare and Mothers’ Lifetime Earnings: Some European Contrasts, London: Centre for Economic Policy Research. Joshi, H., Dale, A., Davies, H. and Ward, C. (1995) ‘Dependence and Independence in the Finances of Women at Age 33’, report to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Jowell, R., Witherspoon, S. and Brook, L. (1988) British Social Attitudes: The 5th Report, 1988/ 89 Edition, Social and Community Planning Research, Aldershot: Gower. Kempeneers, M. and Lelievre, E. (1991) ‘Employment and family within the Twelve’, Eurobarometer, 34, DGV, V/383/92–EN, European Commission, Brussels.

Gender inequalities in European societies

83

Kohli, M., Rein, M., Guillemard, A-M. and Gunsteren, H. (eds) (1991) Time for Retirement: Comparative Studies of Early Exit from the Labour Force, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lister, R. (1992) Women’s Economic Dependency and Social Security, Manchester: Equal Opportunities Commission. Manton, K.G. (1988) ‘A longitudinal study of functional change and mortality in the United States’, Journal of Gerontology, 43, 153–61. Martin, J. and Roberts, C. (1984) The Women and Employment Survey: A Lifetime Perspective, Department of Employment/OPCS, London: HMSO. Morris, L. (1990) The Workings of the Household, Cambridge: Polity Press. OECD (1988) Reforming Public Pensions, Social Policy Studies 5, Paris: OECD. Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) (1992) General Household Survey 1990, London: HMSO. —— (1993) General Household Survey 1991, London: HMSO. Pahl, J. (1989) Money and Marriage, Basingstoke: Macmillan. —— (1990) ‘Household spending, personal spending and the control of money in marriage’, Sociology, 24 (1), 118–38. Pahl, R. (1984) Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Blackwell. Rubery, J. and Fagan, C. (1994) Wage Determination and Sex Segregation in the European Community, Social Europe Supplement 4/94, Luxembourg: European Community. Rubery, J., Fagan, C. and Smith, M. (1994) Changing Patterns of Work and Working-time in the European Union and the Impact on Gender Divisions, Equal Opportunities Unit, Brussels: European Commission. SCELI (1989) Unequal Jobs, Unequal Pay, Working Paper No. 6, Oxford: Social Change and Economic Life Initiative. Sorensen, A. (1994) ‘Women, family and class’, Annual Review of Sociology, 20, 27–47. Sorensen, A. and McLanahan, S. (1987) ‘Married women’s economic dependency 1940–1980’, American Journal of Sociology, 93, 659–87. Taylor, R. (1988) ‘The elderly as members of society: an examination of social differences in an elderly population’, in N. Wells and C. Freer (eds), The Ageing Population: Burden or Challenge?, London: Macmillan. Van Berkel, M. and De Graaf, N.D. (1995) ‘Husband’s and wife’s culture participation and their levels of education: a case of male dominance?’, Acta Sociologica, 38 (2), 131–49, Verbrugge, L. (1984) ‘Longer life but worsening health? Trends in mortality of middle-aged and older persons’, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly/Health and Society, 62, 475–519. —— (1989) ‘Gender, aging and health’, in K.K. Markides (ed.), Aging and Health: Perspectives on Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class, Newbury, Calif.: Sage. Vogler, C. and Pahl, J. (1994) ‘Money, power and inequality within marriage’, Sociological Review, 42 (2), 263–88. Walby, S. (1994) ‘Is citizenship gendered?’, Sociology, 28 (2), 379–95. Walker, A. (1992) ‘The poor relation: poverty among old women’, in C. Glendinning and J. Millar (eds), Women and Poverty in Britain in the 1990s, Brighton: Wheatsheaf. Walker, A., Alber, J. and Guillemard, A. (1993) Older People in Europe: Social and Economic Policies, Brussels: European Commission. Wall, R. (1992) ‘Relationships between the generations in British families past and present’, in C. Marsh and S. Arber (eds), Families and Households: Divisions and Change, London: Macmillan. Ward, C., Dale, A. and Joshi, H. (1996) ‘Combining employment with childcare: an escape from dependence?’, Journal of Social Policy, 25 (2). Wilson, G. (1995) ‘I’m the eyes and she’s the arms: changes in gender roles in advanced age’, in S. Arber and J. Ginn (eds), Connecting Gender and Ageing: A Sociological Approach, Buckingham: Open University Press.

5

The undocumented outsider class Illegal immigrants in Dutch society Godfried Engbersen

INTRODUCTION The existence of illegal immigrants in Dutch society painfully made the headlines in December 1992 when an El Al airplane crashed into two high-rise buildings in the Amsterdam multi-ethnic neighbourhood, ‘The Bijlmermeer’. Immediately after the disaster the authorities set about establishing the identities of possible victims. But soon the official data of the Municipal Housing Department turned out to be inadequate. What some people already knew or suspected became evident: many apartments involved were inhabited by undocumented immigrants. To find out the identity of the residents, 60 police detectives were deployed and data of several institutions were analysed and compared. The (semi-) official data could not provide exact answers about the potential inhabitants of the apartments destroyed by the crashed plane. The invitation from the Mayor of Amsterdam to the illegal immigrants who inhabited the two apartment buildings at the time of the disaster, to report to the population office, had a spectacular result. If one could make a reasonable case for inhabiting one of the apartments, one could be eligible for a residence permit. Subsequently, a queue of approximately 2,000 persons formed in front of the register office. Even undocumented immigrants from Germany and Belgium turned up to apply for the limited Dutch amnesty. Eventually, only 91 of them obtained a residence permit. The episode of the Bijlmermeer disaster reveals not only the presence of illegal immigrants in Dutch society, but also the authorities’ ignorance with regard to the social composition of the city they administer. These observations are consistent with van Gunsteren’s (1993) concept of the ‘Unknown Society’ (cf. Habermas’ (1985) ‘New Complexity’ (neue Unübersichtlichkeit) or Beck’s (1986) ‘Risk Society’ (Risikogesellschaft)). Modern society is less knowable than in the decades after World War II. The policy and implementation designs that authorities and bureaucrats use to interpret and predict social and economic trends in society are no longer in correspondence with what actually goes on.¹ The altered composition of advanced societies, as a result of migration and the differentiation in household forms and lifestyles, and the globalization and informalization of the economy, have contributed to this lack of knowledge. There is a growing discrepancy between the officially documented reality and the undocumented reality. The concept of the unknown society has a family resemblance with Simmel’s (1950) concept of the ‘secret society’.² Both concepts can be used to describe the

The undocumented outsider class

85

undocumented worlds of illegal immigrants that nowadays exist in the dual or divided cities in Europe, Japan and North America (Sassen 1991; Mollenkopf and Castells 1991; Fainstein et al. 1992). However, the unknown or secret societies in which undocumented immigrants are embedded do not exclusively consist of illegal immigrants. They are constituted by legal as well as illegal immigrants and by employers and state officials who turn a blind eye or who help and support these immigrants. In other words, unknown or secret societies are characterized by direct connections with the manifest world, or as Simmel (1950: 330) puts it: ‘The secret offers, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside the manifest world.’ The intersection of the secret and the manifest world casts doubt on the popular underworld metaphor used to portray the life world of illegal immigrants. Journalistic ‘notes from underground’ systematically neglect the open secret which is uncovered in its own writings, that is, the structural interwovenness of the documented and undocumented reality (see also Gans 1995: 70).³ Undocumented immigrants seem to form a significant element in the social configuration of certain urban areas. How large is this category of immigrants is hard to say. For the United States, estimates vary from three to fifteen million, but the most reliable figure for 1990 is probably around three million (Passel 1994). In 1991, the number of illegal immigrants in Western Europe was assessed at 2.6 million (Castles and Miller 1993). For Japan, estimates vary from 300,000 to 500,000 illegal immigrants (Cornelius 1994; Sassen 1995). Apart from the uncertainty about the number of illegal immigrants, there is a serious hiatus in our knowledge of how and where they live, and what work they do and under what circumstances. The number of studies on the life world of illegal immigrants is very limited, especially in Europe.4 Yet insight into the extent and nature of illegality is of substantial importance in the present debates about citizenship, social exclusion and poverty. Empirical research usually centres on people who receive state benefits such as the long-term unemployed, disabled, pensioners and single mothers on social assistance (Engbersen et al. 1993). Most of the undocumented immigrants, however, live beyond the national regimes of social protection. This chapter focuses on three issues. First, I survey briefly the current debate on illegal immigrants and the migration regimes that are becoming increasingly restrictive. Second, some results from the ‘Unknown City’ research project will be presented. Third, an attempt will be made to introduce and define the concept of the ‘undocumented outsider class’. THE RECLASSIFICATION OFUNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS In the past ten years, politicians and the media have become more concerned with the question of illegal immigrants, not only in North America, but also in Western Europe and Japan (Meissner et al. 1993; Groenendijk and Böcker 1995; Morita and Sassen 1994; Cornelius et al. 1994; Der Spiegel 1995; Espenshade 1995). Three factors play an important role in this. First, the growth of the numbers of immigrants as a result of various social, economic and political causes. Second, the problem of structural unemployment and labour insecurity in OECD countries. Third, the problems involving access to and provision of public services in a period of welfare state retrenchment

86

Social exclusion and European integration

(Engbersen et al. 1994; Espenshade 1995). These three elements are common to the debates in Europe and the United States (Cohn-Bendit and Schmid 1992; Cornelius et al. 1994). In most of the advanced societies confronted with growing numbers of immigrants, the idea that the national absorption capacity is insufficient to accommodate all immigrants has taken root among certain parts of the populations as well as among the politicians responsible. People are afraid that a surplus of immigrants will disrupt the culture, economy and the level of public services in the welfare state. For this reason, most Western countries have adopted more restrictive migration policies. However, despite this policy, migration flows are still increasing. And the new restrictions put special emphasis on the most feared immigrant, that is, the undocumented or illegal immigrant. Illegal immigrants are after all by definition the product of legislation that aims to control migration (Castles and Miller 1993: 90). Such a functionalist explanation of the emergence of illegal immigraton as a social problem remains insufficient. It seems that the attention currently given to illegal immigrants also stems from a moral panic among politicians and parts of the population (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994). The ‘illegal immigrant’ has become a social metaphor for immigrants who supposedly abuse welfare state arrangements (social security, housing, education and health care), commit crimes and jeopardize the employment of established citizens (Gans 1995). This moral panic leads to inflationary estimates of the number of illegal immigrants. It throws a negative light not only on the illegal immigrant, but also on the legal immigrant and recognized or ‘tolerated’ asylum seeker as well. These exaggerated estimates and behavioural imputations with respect to the illegal immigrant are not supported by the empirical research available at present (Passel 1994; Espenshade 1995). They are, in the words of Zolberg (1993: 6), ‘notoriously unreliable’. If we look at the American and European situation, we observe a social reclassification of ‘undocumented immigrants’ into ‘illegal aliens’.5 At first, they were wanted as ‘spontaneous’ foreign workers, now they are either ‘tolerated’ as necessary labour force for specific economic sectors in specific periods or excluded as ‘unwanted immigrants’. In The Formation of a Persecuting Society, the British historian R.I. Moore (1987) gives a brilliant description of how, in the period from AD 950 to AD 1250, a ‘persecuting regime’ emerged in which specific groups such as Jews, heretics, lepers and male homosexuals were isolated, persecuted and excluded. Moore points out that these groups were the victims of a classification movement: which defined them more exactly than before and classified them as enemies of society. But it was not only a matter of definition. In each case a myth was constructed, upon whatever foundation of reality, by an act of collective imagination. A named category was created – Manichee, Jew, leper, sodomite and so on – which could be identified as a source of social contamination, and whose members could be excluded from Christian society and, as its enemies, held liable to pursuit, denunciation and interrogation, to exclusion from the community, deprivation of civil rights and the loss of property, liberty and on occasion life itself. (ibid. 99) The current migration regimes are, of course, not comparable to the persecution of the groups described by Moore, but his description of the mechanism of classification

The undocumented outsider class

87

and exclusion is important as it helps us map out interventions with respect to illegal immigrants. During the 1980s, the illegal immigrants came to be (1) demarcated with more precision and (2) defined as a threat to society and economy in various countries. In this, (3) particular social myths play an important role, especially those of the illegal alien as ‘criminal’ and ‘welfare abuser’. Also, (4) the nomenclature has changed: undocumented or unauthorized immigrants have become reclassified as ‘illegal aliens’ who disrupt the social and economic order and who (5) should therefore be excluded from national society by means of a stricter, even punitive, enforcement of the immigration legislation. This reclassification movement not only draws a strict line between illegal immigrants and other categories of newcomers, but also establishes a distinction within the category of illegal immigrants reminiscent of the well-known distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor (Katz 1989). Within the framework of regularization programmes, special provisions are made for an exclusive category of ‘deserving’ illegal immigrants: they have earned a legal status due to the fact that they have worked for long periods of time and did not have a criminal record.6 These ‘deserving’ illegal immigrants should be sharply distinguished from the ‘undeserving’ ones. THE HARDENING OF MIGRATION REGIMESAND THE GAP BETWEEN LEGISLATIONAND ENFORCEMENT The reclassification process has found an institutional expression in various national migration regimes (Cornelius et al. 1994). A migration regime can be defined as the framework entrusted with the legislation, organization and enforcement of policies concerning immigrants. At the legislative level, there is a tendency towards strict entry requirements for migrants on the one hand and a rigid repression of illegality on the other. For example, Japan passed a new Migration Act in 1990. This Act created more opportunities for foreign professionals to gain temporary entry on the one hand and limited the influx of semiskilled and unskilled workers on the other. At the same time, stricter measures were taken to combat illegality (Morita and Sassen 1994; Sassen 1995). Four years earlier the US Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). The main purpose of IRCA was to attack the problem of illegal immigration, based on a two-pronged strategy. IRCA offered legalization to an estimated two million illegal immigrants, while trying to close down access to the US job market by making it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers. However, the key enforcement measure of IRCA was weakened from the outset as employers were not required to verify the authenticity of documents provided to them by their employees (Calavita 1994).7 The national migration regimes in Europe have also become more restrictive and punitive at the legislative level. Germany introduced on 1 July 1991 a rule stipulating that all dependent workers must possess a social security card with a photograph, and all employers are obliged to inform the Social Security authorities when hiring a foreign worker. In France, a new measure (Acts of 31 December 1991) increases the penalties that can be imposed on employers of undocumented workers and on the organized networks that smuggle them in (OECD 1993: 3).

88

Social exclusion and European integration

The immigration policy in the Netherlands offers a paradigmatic illustration of the trend towards more restriction. In the early 1990s, new legislation was developed to prevent illegal labour, migration and residence. In the previous period, legislation with respect to illegal immigrants was of a symbolic nature. This symbolic character of the legislation explains that working illegal immigrants were widely tolerated (Amersfoort and Penninx 1994). Until the early 1990s, nobody seemed interested in exposing the open secret of working illegal immigrants (Enzensberger 1993: 41). This situation has changed drastically since. The current policy concerning illegal immigrants in the Netherlands aims to exclude illegal immigrants from public services, to prevent illegal immigrants from working and to intensify the national surveillance of immigrants (admission and deportation policy). To support these objectives, a computerized registration system is being developed that will link all the relevant databases (of municipal records, social security, housing, etc.). Furthermore, the fines for employers who employ illegal immigrants have risen over the years. Since November 1991, it is no longer possible for an illegal immigrant to get a worker-identification number (social security number) from the tax office if he does not have a valid residence permit. Hence many immigrants no longer have access to formal labour. Another instrument to prevent illegal labour is the Compulsory Identification Act. Effective on 1 June 1994, this law makes it possible to check the identity of people in specific situations and locations (especially in the workplace). The Dutch illegal immigrants policy, which strongly resembles that of other European countries, aims to break open the secret societies or undocumented spheres in which illegal immigrants can be found. Modern society has to become transparent so that illegal workers can be traced and no longer profit from public services. The price that society pays for these measures is the invasion of privacy and growing discrimination against legal immigrants. Certain policy measures have obvious unintended or perverse consequences (Sciortino 1991). For example, the implementation of the Compulsory Identification Act has led to an increase in false documents. If identification documents are needed, then falsification of these will become a lucrative business. Furthermore, restrictive policies lead to a marginalization of certain groups of illegal immigrants. It is likely that many illegal immigrants will switch from legal labour to illegal labour when they can no longer get a social security number. They will look for work in the informal economy or seek refuge in criminal circles. Giacomo Luciani (1993: 9) states: ‘The criminalization of migration has the result of increasing the incidence of criminals among migrants.’ This would make the secret societies of illegal immigrants even more elusive for, as Simmel (1950: 347) puts it: ‘In general the secret society emerges as the counterpart of despotism and police restriction.’ However, it would be too simple to state that a stricter migration regime would automatically lead to an increase in criminal and informal activities among illegal immigrants. After all, there does exist a discrepancy between legislation and political rhetoric on the one hand and the enforcement of illegal immigration policies on the other. Several Dutch studies point out such ‘goal displacement’ (Merton 1957; Aalberts 1990; Clermonts 1994; Engbersen et al. 1995): in practice, instead of combating all illegal immigrants, the immigration and local police combat only those illegal immigrants who cause inconvenience and display criminal behaviour. As a result of this priority, specific categories of illegal immigrants hardly ever come into contact with the

The undocumented outsider class

89

immigration police or local police departments. This is chiefly the case with illegal immigrants who work for businesses that employ only a few illegal immigrants and illegal immigrants who live a shadow existence and do not engage in crimes. It is also the case that schools hardly ever ask (adult) immigrants for their residence permit and that public housing agencies hardly ever check who actually lives on their property. Health care institutions also almost never check the official status of their patients. To sum up, the hardening of the policies concerning immigrants in the Netherlands is visible at the legislative level. In actual practice, the situation is less restrictive and punitive. The same applies to other Western countries such as Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and Italy (Cornelius et al. 1994). In other words, Western migration regimes have become more restrictive in their legislation and rhetoric, but this restrictive policy is only partly visible in the actual surveillance and control of immigrants. This has important consequences for the position of illegal immigrants. THE UNKNOWN CITY: SOME PRELIMINARY RESULTS In this section, some results of the ‘Unknown City’ research project will be discussed.8 The objective of this undertaking is to provide a systematic analysis of the ways in which illegal immigrants come into the Netherlands and how they live, work and survive once there. This research is based on in-depth interviews with illegal immigrants living in the city of Rotterdam and on random and systematic samples from the files of the local Immigration Registration Office and the local police. Three basic issues deserve further examination. First, the social composition of the illegal population: what are the personal characteristics of illegal immigrants? Second, the ways in which illegal immigrants earn a living. And third, the question of the intersection between illegality and crime. The social composition of illegal immigration and the limits of expulsion policy The population of apprehended illegal immigrants resembles to a large extent that of the established migrants in the Netherlands. These are mainly Surinamese, Turks and Moroccans (in Rotterdam, also Cape Verdeans) who can be found in the files of the Immigration Registration Office. Most of the Surinamese, Turks, Moroccans and Cape Verdeans had entered the Netherlands as tourists and overstayed their visas. However, migration to the Netherlands is not always a one-step movement. Some immigrants moved first to Spain or France. After this, they then migrated to the Netherlands. A comparison of apprehended illegal immigrants and registered legal immigrants reveals a number of substantial differences (see Table 5.1). Among the apprehended illegal immigrants, there are 40 per cent less Turks, almost three times as many Moroccans and practically three-fourths fewer Surinamese. The greatest difference is found among the Algerians: there are hardly any Algerians among the legal immigrants, but one does find a considerable number of them in the illegal population.

90

Social exclusion and European integration

Table 5.1 Rotterdam: country/region of origin of legal and illegal immigrants, 1989–94 Country/region of origin

Registered legal immigrants %

Turkey Morocco Algeria Western Europe Eastern Europe Africa Asia Rest (Surinam) Total

15.1 12.2 0.2 19.9 7.7 17.5 11.9 15.5 (11.4) 100.0

Number 89 72 1 117 45 103 70 91 (67) 588

Apprehended illegal immigrants %

Number

9.0 33.4 7.4 17.6 8.7 11.2 6.8 5.9 (3.0) 100.0

29 108 24 57 28 36 22 19 (10) 323

Source: Rotterdam Police/Immigration Registration Office, 1994.

The figures in Table 5.1 ought to be interpreted with great caution. The registered illegality is the resultant of selective apprehensions and expulsions. Some illegal immigrants run a higher risk of being apprehended and expelled than others. This selectivity is the result of the priority given to combating crime and of the problems surrounding the expulsion of ‘unidentifiable’ immigrants. In addition, the daily police routine of arresting immigrants also plays a role here (Engbersen et al. 1995). Policemen utilize informal rules and informal ‘suspect typologies’ to apprehend individuals and groups (Brown 1988). These informal, institutionalized rules inevitably lead to an underrepresentation of illegal Surinamese immigrants and immigrants from East and Middle Europe (‘they will probably be legal’) and to an overrepresentation of immigrants from Morocco, Algeria and other African countries. The use of these ‘smart rules’ (in contrast with ‘proper rules’ (Freilich 1989)) is a form of statistical discrimination. These informal rules lead to more frequent arrests of ‘dark’ coloured immigrants. Our research shows that some categories of illegal immigrants, especially those who are involved in drug-related crime and offences, are difficult to evict because they are successful in hiding their identity. They lose or hide their documents and pretend that they are coming from countries which are not willing to collaborate with Dutch authorities. In the past, Dutch migration authorities had a bad working relationship with Morocco. Nowadays, the most difficult country to deal with is Algeria. In this case it is difficult to get a laissez-passer for the illegal immigrant in order to repatriate him. The return of individuals to their country often entails lengthy procedures. This recurrent problem leads to an actual practice in which most of the unidentifiable immigrants are sent back to the streets through the backdoor of the Immigration Police Office. Unidentifiable immigrants are in a constitutional state rather invulnerable with regard to expulsion (Suárez-Orozco 1994). This is the paradox of the current illegal immigration policy: those categories of immigrants who are the primary aim of apprehension and expulsion are the most successful in avoiding repatriation.

The undocumented outsider class

91

The illegal immigrants in the sample (N=323) form a relatively homogeneous group. This group consists mainly of men, and most of them are single. In most cases, these are semi-skilled and unskilled males aged between 20 and 30, and nearly half of them have been living in the Netherlands for over three years. It also turned out that most of the illegal immigrants are living in neighbourhoods where large communities of migrants exist. This trivial finding has considerable consequences for the discussion of segregation processes and problems of domestic overcrowding in multicultural neighbourhoods.9 The social composition of the illegal immigrant population confirms to some extent the well-known migration theories: a considerable number of immigrants come from countries with which the Netherlands, or cities in the Netherlands (such as Rotterdam), maintained economic or political colonial relations. These immigrants came over with the help of their compatriots, who also take care of them once they arrive in the Netherlands. However, some illegal immigrants come from African countries and do not belong to groups one might expect in the Netherlands. Some of them came to Rotterdam – after many peregrinations – without the support of a migration network. The migration routes of illegal immigrants seems much more fragmented and unpredictable than some of the dominant migration theories presuppose (Sassen 1988; Portes and Rumbaut 1990). The presence in Rotterdam of illegal immigrants from Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Somalia and India cannot be explained by past colonial or quasicolonial bonds and economic linkages between the Netherlands and these countries (Burgers and Engbersen 1995). Undocumented workers, unemployment and the vulnerability of social networks The literature on urban sociology and migration states that illegal immigrants find employment in rudimentary forms of industry (e.g. in sweat shops), in certain traditional sectors (e.g. agriculture and market-gardening) and in certain service industries. This statement is partially confirmed by recent Dutch research on illegal labour by illegal immigrants in the formal economy: illegal labour is detected relatively often in agriculture, the clothing contracting industry, and the catering industry. The first results of the ‘Unknown City’ project point in almost the same direction. The undocumented workers are predominantly working in market gardens, the clothing contracting industry and in the harbour of Rotterdam. Others work – formally or informally – in such service sectors as cleaning, the ethnic retail trade (in shops and at open-air markets), the catering industry and prostitution. Some of them were employed as handyman, caretaker, housekeeper or nurse in private households. The interviews reveal, in particular, that Turkish illegal immigrants had access to some of the abovementioned sectors, and to a lesser degree Eastern Europeans (especially in agriculture and market-gardening). The wages were sometimes far below the minimum wage, especially for those who worked in private households, and, in other cases, the net wages were equal to or higher than the statutory minimum wage. The period of employment was often rather short (less than three months) and they often had a working week of less than 24 hours. It is, however, striking that more than a third of the

92

Social exclusion and European integration

respondents had no job. In this group, the illegal immigrants from Morocco were overrepresented. Up till now, the category of the undocumented unemployed has hardly been described in the literature on undocumented immigrants. This is mainly due to the fact that most of the literature is published in the United States, which has a less regulated labour market than the Netherlands. Furthermore, it is becoming more difficult to find work in the formal economy due to stricter migration controls. Of the illegal immigrants who were interviewed and had a paid job (just under twothirds of the total sample), 50 per cent had a regular job, that is, paid taxes and social contributions. These immigrants had arrived in the Netherlands before the hardening of the migration regime. Before November 1991, it was not necessary to have a valid residence permit in order to get a social security number. These illegal immigrants work in the formal economy and contribute to the public services, but cannot profit from these in the way the settled immigrants in the Netherlands can. Some of those who had no job could fall back on a durable network of relatives, friends and compatriots. As the migration regime is becoming stricter, such a supportive network will become decisive for survival in the Netherlands. In the social worlds of illegal immigrants the possession of social capital is of greater importance than cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). Those immigrants who are well educated have great difficulties converting their cultural capital into economic capital due to their illegal status. However, their supportive networks also are vulnerable. In the long term, reliance on social support by illegal immigrants may lead to all kinds of practical problems and cause considerable tensions. This goes for those who provide this support as well as for those who are dependent upon it for a long period of time. This has to do with the consequences of long-term overcrowding for the supporting family and the tensions resulting from the fact that one is sheltering an illegal immigrant. Another problem is that an illegal immigrant often does not have the means to do something in return for the support and help he or she receives. In the long term, this also undermines the durability of the supportive social network (Mauss 1990; Mahler 1995). It also happens that legal immigrants see the presence of too many illegal immigrants as a threat to their own social position. Two issues are frequently mentioned in this respect. First, the consequences that a negative image of illegal immigrants may have for settled immigrants. Second, the displacement effects on the (informal) labour market. Both issues lead to strategies that restrict the arrival of new illegal immigrants and to discrimination of illegal immigrants within their own community. Being a ‘tourist’ in the Turkish community lowers your status, reduces your chances of marrying a Turkish girl, and ensures that you will receive lower pay than others (Böcker 1994; Staring 1998). As a consequence, illegal Turks try to hide their tourist status from other Turks (Staring 1998). The attitude of the established immigrants towards undocumented immigrants is therefore characterized by ambivalence. On the one hand, they have a strong sense of loyalty which transcends their economic self-interest (although some of them are fully aware of the fact that illegal immigrants fulfil specific economic functions within their community), while on the other hand, they are afraid that their social position will be undermined if there are too many illegal compatriots. The ambivalence towards undocumented immigrants leads to more selective help for compatriots to come to the Netherlands on a tourist visa (Staring 1998).

The undocumented outsider class

93

On the interwovenness of illegality and criminality One of the social myths turned against the undocumented immigrants is the idea that they are only able to survive by committing crimes. The collected data on illegality and crime make clear that such a statement is incorrect. Nearly half of the registered illegal immigrants were apprehended for illegal residence (47 per cent) and an additional 13 per cent of illegal labour did not report properly to the Immigration Office. A further 26 per cent were apprehended for misdemeanours (theft), 5 per cent for serious offences (robbery, murder, possession of firearms) and 9 per cent for offences against the Opium Act. The three most important offences committed by illegal immigrants are thus theft, drugs-related offences and possession of false documents. About 40 per cent of the apprehended illegal immigrants were involved in the drugs business. However, the most relevant finding was that the profile of arrests of illegal immigrants differed significantly by country of origin. These significant differences are to some extent caused by the selectivity of the arrest-and-expulsion policy, but they cannot be explained entirely on these grounds. They are also due to the overrepresentation of illegal immigrants from individual countries when it comes to specific offences (e.g. drug-related offences by Moroccans and Algerians) and violations (e.g. illegal labour in workshops by Turks). In the random survey of apprehended illegal immigrants, the following differences may be noted (see Engbersen et al. 1995): • • •

Turks and Eastern Europeans are mainly apprehended for illegal residence and illegal labour; Moroccans, Algerians and Eastern Europeans are often arrested for indictable offences (theft, false documents); and Western Europeans (mainly French), Moroccans and Algerians are often arrested for drug-related crimes.

Our research clearly shows the involvement of illegal immigrants from Algeria and Morocco in the drug trade. Within the Rotterdam drug circuit we can distinguish five categories: local users, drug tourists, drug dealers, drug pushers and drug runners (van der Leun 1995). Illegal immigrants are working mostly as drug pushers or runners. Drug pushers are the ones doing the ‘dirty work’ for the drug dealers; they carry the merchandise and deliver it to buyers. In the event of a police sweep they get caught and not the dealer. Drug runners guide the drug tourists to the retail buildings. They contact French, Belgian or German tourists on the highways and at the Central Train Station. On the highways they signal with the lights of their cars or with other signs (such as putting their middle fingers on their nostrils) to contact the drug tourists. Others are walking along the main roads in the centre of the city. Drug runners earn about 30 dollars for each car they escort. This is because the illegal status of immigrants makes them suitable for the most risky and lowest functions in the drug trade (Engbersen and van der Leun 1998). And many of them have to take risks in order to survive in the Netherlands.

94

Social exclusion and European integration

THE DIFFERENTIAL OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURE OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS The first results of the ‘Unknown City’ project reveal systematic differences between illegal immigrants from various countries in the degree to which they are integrated in Dutch society. Some have a formal job, others are unemployed, and still others engage in criminal activities. Cloward and Ohlin’s (1965) concept of the ‘differential opportunity structure’ (Merton 1957) is of pertinent importance to explain these divergent patterns. Cloward and Ohlin point out that there exists an inequality in access to the legitimate as well as to the illegitimate opportunity structure of a society. Cloward and Ohlin used their concept to explain differences in crime patterns in specific neighbourhoods. It can also be adapted to explain differences in the social position and options of illegal immigrants, provided we use it in an institutional way. At first glance, it seems as if the distinction that Cloward and Ohlin make between legitimate and illegitimate means does not really apply to (adult) illegal immigrants. They are by definition excluded from many legitimate means such as labour, education and public housing. However, our interviews with illegal immigrants show that this assumption is incorrect. The opportunity structure of illegal immigrants may be divided alongside three institutional dimensions: 1. The first dimension encompasses the degree of accessibility to the formal institutions of the welfare state: the labour market, education, housing and health care. For illegal immigrants, the period of arrival in the Netherlands is important in this regard. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Dutch migration regime had a less restrictive character (e.g. illegal immigrants were still able to get a social security number). 2. The second dimension involves the degree of accessibility to informal institutions, of which three are particularly important. The first is the informal network of family, friends, acquaintances and relatives in the Netherlands as well as in the country of origin. This network is important in order to find accommodation, financial support, a possible partner and a first introduction to Dutch society. The second is the informal economy. Third, there is the extent to which illegal immigrants profit from the selective street-level administration of the rules by the Immigration Office and other institutions such as educational and health care institutions. 3. The third dimension is access to criminal circuits. Criminal circuits reflect the diverse settings in which various offences are committed: youth gangs, drug scenes, organized crime, and so forth. These formal, informal and illegal institutions play a role in the (semi-)integration of illegal immigrants.10 The informal sphere of the labour market and criminal circles offer illegal immigrants an alternative to the formal labour market. The street-level bureaucracies play a critical role in the passive and active toleration of illegal immigrants. The discretion that institutions in the fields of immigrants’ surveillance, education, housing and health care allow themselves for reasons of capacity, control problems and humanitarian concerns opens up a social and economic situation in which illegal immigrants may become (semi-)integrated without being official members of Dutch society.

The undocumented outsider class

95

Illegal immigrants from various countries have access to different opportunity structures. I will illustrate this proposition by giving a rough outline of the opportunity structures of the Turkish and Moroccan illegal immigrants. Turkish illegal immigrants have better access to formal institutions than Moroccans. Migrants who arrived before 1991 (and obtained a social security number) could gain access to the labour market, council housing and education. Furthermore, they enjoy direct entry into the informal labour market. This is particularly true for those who work in clothing workshops, but also for those in the catering business (e.g. coffee houses) and the retail trade (e.g. butcher’s shops). Others work (mostly formally) in the agriculture and market-gardening sector. Furthermore, Turkish illegal immigrants can rely on their own community, which is less divided than the Moroccan community. This community is also liable to provide (legal) marriageable partners (Böcker 1994). On the other hand, as discussed above, illegal immigrants are of low status within their own community and that makes them vulnerable to exploitation. Because of their access to formal and informal institutions Turkish immigrants do not have to engage in risky criminal activities in the Rotterdam drug economy. Moroccan illegal immigrants, by contrast, have limited access to formal institutions, especially the wage labour market. The unemployment rate among the settled Moroccan population is higher than among the Turkish. Furthermore, they also have limited entry into the informal economy. For example, informal employment generated by ethnic business is far less available to illegal Moroccans than to Turks. Also, our research confirms previous research showing that the embedding in their own Moroccan community is problematic (Junger 1990; Bovenkerk 1994). The Moroccan community is a divided community where discordant relations cause disruption and limit mutual solidarity and trust. Illegal Moroccans have an isolated social position within it and run the risk of marginalization. Consequently, they are more prone to become involved in the drug economy. This drug economy – which is closely watched by the police – leads to crime and increases the chance that these illegal Moroccans will be arrested by the police. The differentiated opportunity structures offer an explanation for the different (non-) criminal profiles of various immigrant groups. Turks are mainly apprehended for illegal residence and illegal labour, whereas most of the Moroccans are apprehended for committing minor drug-related offences and sometimes major offences. Like the Turks, Eastern Europeans are arrested mainly for illegal residence and illegal labour. On the other hand, the Western Europeans do relatively often commit drug-related crimes. The greater involvement of Moroccans and Algerians in the drug trade is the result of their illegal status and limited opportunity structure. This does not apply to Western Europeans. The relation between illegality and crime is in their case the reverse: because of their criminal behaviour, they have obtained an illegal status. AN UNDOCUMENTED OUTSIDER CLASS The unknown or secret societies in which illegal immigrants are embedded are maintained thanks to the efforts of legal and illegal individuals, and formal and informal institutions. The economic interests of employers, the functional interests of schools and housing agencies to keep their doors open, family and kinship ties, the limits of

96

Social exclusion and European integration

expulsion policy, humanitarian considerations, and the ‘undercover adaptations’ (Goffman 1961) of the formal rules by the functionaries of the Immigration Policy, all make it hard to expose the secret societies. It is therefore incorrect to brand illegal immigrants simply as aliens living in an underworld. Moreover, they are not part of a separate world somehow severed from the rest of the society, since their partial integration is made possible by the efforts of many legal persons and institutions. However, within the category of illegal immigrants, significant differences emerge. The first results of the ‘Unknown City’ research project indicate that some illegal immigrants are semi-integrated in Dutch society and that many others live a marginal and isolated existence.11 The heterogeneous reality implies that no simple answer can be given to the question as to what extent selective migration regimes in connection with increasing migration lead to the emergence of an ‘undocumented underclass’ (see Martin 1994). The underclass is a controversial concept, especially in the American context. It has been criticized on conceptual, empirical and ideological grounds. The conceptual criticism refers to the rudimentary character of the notion of underclass, the empirical criticism to the exclusive focus on the position of black men and women in highpoverty areas in the large cities, and the ideological criticism to the stigmatizing effect and moralistic content of the notion (Katz 1989; Jencks 1992; Gans 1995; Wacquant 1995). The concept of an ‘outsider class’ (Esping-Andersen 1993) may thus be preferable as a sensitizing device for highlighting the particular position of undocumented immigrants in advanced societies.12 The undocumented outsider class is not a class in the Weberian sense, but a mobile, heterogeneous grouping of immigrants who live under marginal circumstances because they are defined ‘out of society’. They are classified as illegal persons who have no access to social entitlements and have no right to reside in a certain country. The undocumented outsider class thus becomes a ‘forbidden class’ whose members have no official status. The results of the ‘Unknown City’ project show that the illegal label imposed upon them becomes transformed within their own ethnic community into a socially inferior social status. Bourdieu (1984: 481) writes in this respect: ‘A group’s presence or absence in the official classification depends on its capacity to get itself recognized, to get itself noticed and admitted and so to win a place in the social order.’ The current restrictionist migration policies are diminishing the chances of legalization and thus recognition. Most illegal immigrants will remain outside the legal system that governs society (Chavez 1992: 18). One consequence of this is that the presence of illegal immigrants in advanced European welfare states has led to the return of old forms of subsistence poverty: exploitation, material deprivation and direct dependency on employers and relatives (Mahler 1995; Pugliese 1995). We have seen that illegal immigrants possess social capital and that they are tolerated or even supported by street-level bureaucrats, but their life chances are rigorously restricted by their illegal status. Their survival cannot be contingent upon the sale of their labour power, since their illegal status rules out their being ‘commodified’ (Esping-Andersen 1990: 21–2). This spotlights two crucial characteristics of the undocumented outsider class: their illegal status and their precapitalist labour-market position. These characteristics distinguish the undocumented immigrants sociologically from the American ghetto poor and the European long-term unemployed as described by Wilson (1987) and Dahrendorf (1988).

The undocumented outsider class

97

A third characteristic of this class relates to the social and psychological consequences of the juridical labelling process. In the context of an active restrictionist policy the illegal status of immigrants becomes a ‘master status-determining-trait’ that outweighs and overpowers all other social characteristics (Hughes 1994: 152). However, this master status is not a visible status, such as ‘race’.13 It is an invisible status which immigrants try to withhold from others who might misuse this information, or who might threaten their residence and existence. Illegality as an invisible master status has severe implications for the way illegal immigrants act and perceive themselves. They must learn ‘to live as an illegal alien’ (Chavez 1992), that is, learn to tell lies about themselves in specific circumstances (Barnes 1994), learn how to conduct themselves in public spaces, how to behave in confrontation with authorities, and how to carve out a zone of security in their private lives. In other words, their illegal status influences the way they construct social relations. Depending on the specific context and situation, the ‘secret’ of their illegal status may be kept from others or shared with others, such as employers, teachers, relatives, neighbours, doctors, and romantic associates. But there is always the danger of leak, disclosure and betrayal. Scheppele (1988) has written that secrecy is not a property of individuals or groups, but a property of information.14 In the case of illegal immigrants, however, secrecy becomes a property of their identity. This distinguishes them in a sociological sense from other marginalized groups. The precarious social position of the illegal immigrants in advanced societies reveals the cross-cutting forces that generate migration and construct illegality. Illegal immigrants are partly the product of a elective affinity (‘chemical marriage’) between the economic demand of employers and the political–juridical rejection of national and local states. These contradictory forces define an economic and social space for undocumented immigrants and contribute to new forms of urban marginality in this era of globalization and migration. It is realistic to assume that an undocumented outsider class of immigrants will remain part of the population of divided cities in advanced societies, since there is no political support for a less restrictive policy towards (undocumented) immigrants. As Castles and Miller (1993: 266) point out: ‘Stopping unwanted immigration is increasingly regarded by governments as essential for safeguarding social peace.’ Neither will there be structural changes in the economic and political situation of many less developed countries in the near future that will prevent people from emigrating. The undocumented outsider class will be among us and their presence will, at times, generate outbursts of rage, economic concerns, and feelings of compassion and indifference among the established population. NOTES 1.

Van Gunsteren (1993: 44) points out: ‘The categories in which government seeks to represent reality (using numbers and diagrams) no longer fit the processes that they are expected to describe. There seems to be widespread awareness that we need new categories and coordinates. Yet when we have to specify what those categories should be, we are clueless and often talk at cross-purposes without reaching a new consensus. We struggle on with the old categories and coordinates and find our bearings as best we can, without conviction or commitment, with all kinds of ad hoc retouched images. Planning is certainly out of the question now. We call this society that is insufficiently knowable from the point of its leaders TUS: The Unknown Society.’

98 2.

Social exclusion and European integration

Simmel (1950: 345) defines a secret society as follows: ‘The secret is a sociological determination characteristic of the reciprocal relations between group elements; or, rather, together with other relational forms, it constitutes their relationship as a whole. But it may also characterize a group in its totality: this applies to the case of “secret societies”.’ Simmel’s (1906) essay ‘The sociology of secrecy and of secret societies’ was published in the American Journal of Sociology, 11 (4), January, 441–98. 3. See e.g. Der Spiegel (1995); Rayner (1996). 4. Two excellent examples of ethnographic research are Chavez (1992) and Mahler (1995). 5. I disagree with Soysal (1994: 132) who notices a reverse classification process. She writes: ‘The changing status of illegality is also reflected in the vocabulary used to refer to them. Such terms as undocumented immigrants or irregular aliens have come to replace illegals or clandestines.’ In my view we can observe exactly the opposite trend nowadays. 6. The criteria for legalization differ from country to country. For example, IRCA (1986) provided temporary resident status for illegal immigrants who had resided in the United States continuously since before 1 January 1982. Such persons could receive permanent resident status after eighteen months if they could demonstrate a minimal knowledge of English and of US history and government, or if they were pursuing study in those areas. Newly legalized aliens were barred from participating in most federally funded public assistance programmes for five years. In the Netherlands illegal immigrants can get a residence permit if they are able to meet three main criteria: (1) to have resided continuously in the country for a period of minimal six years, (2) to have worked in the formal economy and paid taxes, and (3) not to have committed crimes. 7. This does not imply that IRCA has had no effects. It appeared to have been effective during the first two to three years after its implementation. Mahler (1995) shows that IRCA reduced the number of employers willing to hire workers without proper documents. 8. The fieldwork for this research started in 1993. Besides the author of this chapter, the research team includes Jack Burgers, Joop ten Dam, Jude Kehla, Robert Kloosterman, Joanne van der Leun and Richard Staring. One hundred and seventy-five illegal respondents have been interviewed. We have centred our research on five groups: Turks, Moroccans, Cape Verdeans, Eastern Europeans and Africans. We started our research on strategic sites (the Central Station of Rotterdam, the Paulus Church and Sisters of Mother Teresa) and worked from initial contacts through networks of friendship and acquaintance. Because we do not know the undocumented population of illegal immigrants it is impossible to analyse the representativity of our research group. In addition to these interviews, two samples were drawn from the files of the Immigration Police and one sample from the files of the Rotterdam police (see Engbersen et al. 1995). First, a random sample of 666 people was drawn from the files of the Immigration Office (period 1989–94). This sample provides a general overview of the immigrants known to the Immigration Office. In this sample 76 persons appeared to be illegal (11 per cent). Second, a random sample of 328 illegal immigrants was drawn from the files of the Immigration Office (period 1989– 94). This sample gives a first insight into the population of illegal immigrants apprehended by the Immigration Police. Third, a random sample was drawn from the files of the Rotterdam police (period 1989–94). The latter involved 639 people and provides an oversight of people in Rotterdam who were arrested on suspicion of committing a crime. In this sample we came upon 299 immigrants (47 per cent), among whom were 16 illegal immigrants (5 per cent). 9. Burgers (1995) assumes that illegal immigrants constitute more than 14 per cent of the Turkish and Moroccan population in certain neighbourhoods. Should these figures be approximately correct, then this implies that the processes of concentration and segregation are stronger than supposed. 10. According to E.C. Hughes (1994: 192–9), criminal circuits and some of the above-mentioned informal institutions can be regarded as ‘bastard institutions’. These bastard institutions form the illegal or shadow side of formal institutions (Peters 1993: 175–6). 11. This is consistent with Chavez’s (1992: 2) observations: ‘At one extreme are the temporary farmworkers, who, except for work, do not interact with the institutions and members of the larger society. At the other extreme are those individuals and families who have spent years, decades in some cases, in the United States and now feel part of this society. In many ways, they have become integrated into U.S. society and culture. They follow a pattern set down by previous generations of immigrants, except that all these immigrants remain “illegal aliens”, and thus face obstacles to full incorporation into the larger society.’ 12. I use the concept of the ‘outsider class’ in a different way than Esping-Andersen. In EspingAndersen’s conceptualization the outsider class consists of those excluded from the labour

The undocumented outsider class

99

market. He writes (1993: 228–9): ‘Our post-industrial mobility regime also incorporates the possibility of an “outsider class”. Outsiders are most likely to be formed into a class where barriers to labour market entry are huge, where their life-chances converge around similar dependencies (on welfare state transfers, for example), and where outsider “careers” emerge (such as when laid-off workers slide into long-term unemployment and subsequently take early retirement).’ 13. However, it often coincides with race. This is the reason why illegal immigrants from African countries run a higher risk of being arrested than illegal immigrants from the East and Middle European countries. 14. Scheppele (1988: 12) uses the following concept of secrecy: ‘A secret is a piece of information that is intentionally withheld by one or more social actor(s) from one or more other social actor(s).’ And she defines secret societies as ‘organizations about which the distribution of information is limited. It is not, properly speaking, the society that is secret; it is the information about the existence, membership, or purpose of the society that is restricted.’

REFERENCES Aalberts, M.M.J. (1990) Politie tussen discretie en discriminatie: operationeel vreemdelingentoezicht in de praktijk (Between Discretion and Discrimination: The Enforcement of the Immigration Act in Practice), Arnhem: Gouda Quint. Amersfoort, H. van and Penninx, R. (1994) ‘Regulating migration in Europe: the Dutch experience 1960–1992’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 534, July, 133–46. Barnes, J.A. (1994) A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beck, U. (1986) Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Modern, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Böcker, A. (1994) Turkse migranten en sociale zekerheid: van onderlinge zorg naar overheidszorg (Turkish Immigrants: From Mutual Care to State Care), Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —— (1986) ‘The forms of capital’, in J.G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood Press. Bovenkerk, F. (1994) ‘Een misdadige tweede generatie immigranten?’ (A Second Generation of Criminal Immigrants?), Jeugd en Samenleving, 7/8, July/August, 387–404. Brown, M.K. (1988) Working the Street: Police Discretion and the Dilemmas of Reform, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Burgers, J. (1995) Niet thuis: De woonsituatie van illegale vreemdelingen in Rotterdam (Not at Home: The Housing of Illegal Immigrants in Rotterdam), Research Paper No. 95/02, Utrecht: Onderzoeksschool AWSB. Burgers, J. and Engbersen, G. (1995) ‘Mondialisering, migratie en illegale vreemdelingen’ (Globalization, Migration and Illegal Immigrants), Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift, 22 (1), June, 225–49. Calavita, K. (1994) ‘US immigration and policy responses: the limits of legislation’, in W.A. Cornelius, P.L. Martin and J.F. Hollifield (eds), Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Castles, S. and Miller, M.J. (1993) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Chavez, L.R. (1992) Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society, Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. Clermonts, L. (1994) Inzicht in toezicht: De praktijk van het vreemdelingentoezicht in Amsterdam en Rotterdam (Insight in Implementation: The Administration of Immigration Policy in Amsterdam and Rotterdam), Arnhem: Gouda Quint.

100

Social exclusion and European integration

Cloward, R.A. and Ohlin, L.A. (1965) Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs, New York: Free Press. Cohn-Bendit, D. and Schmid, T. (1992) Heimat Babylon: Das Wagnis der Multikulturellen Demokratie, Hamburg: Hoffman & Campe. Cornelius, W.A. (1994) ‘Japan: the illusion of immigration control’, in W.A. Cornelius, P.L. Martin, and J.F. Hollifield (eds), Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 375–410. Cornelius, W.A., Martin, P.L. and Hollifield, J.F. (eds) (1994) Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Dahrendorf, R. (1988) The Modern Social Conflict: An Essay on the Politics of Liberty, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Der Spiegel (1995) Leben im Untergrund: Illegal in Deutschland, Vol. 49 (December). Engbersen, G. and van der Leun, J. (1998) ‘Illegality and criminality: the differential opportunity structure of illegal immigrants’, in K. Koser and H. Lutz (eds), The New Migration in Europe, London: Macmillan, 199–223. Engbersen, G., Schuyt, K., Timman, J. and Warnden, F. van (1993) Cultures of Unemployment: A Comparative Look at Long-term Unemployment and Urban Poverty, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Engbersen, G., Hemerijck, A. and Bakker, W. (eds) (1994) Zorgen in het Europese Huis: Verkenningen over de grenzen van nationale verzorgingsstaten (The European House: Explorations beyond the Borders of National Welfare States), Meppel: Boom. Engbersen, G., van der Leun, J. and Willems, P. (1995) Over de verwevenheid van criminaliteit en illegaliteit (On the Interwovenness of Illegality and Criminality), Research Paper No. 95/ 03, Utrecht: Onderzoekschool AWSB. Enzensberger, H.M. (1993) De grote volksverhuizing (The Great Migration), Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Espenshade, T.J. (1995) ‘Unauthorized immigration to the United States’, Annual Review of Sociology, 21, 195–216. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— (ed.) (1993) Changing Classes: Stratification in Post-Industrial Societies, London: Sage. Fainstein, S.S., Gordon, T. and Healve, M. (1992) Divided Cities: New York and London in the Contemporary World, Oxford: Blackwell. Fix, M. and Passel, J.S. (1994) Immigration and Immigrants: Setting the Record Straight, Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. Freilich, M. (ed.) (1989) The Relevance of Culture, New York: Bergin & Garvey. Gans, H.J. (1995) The War Against the Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy, New York: Basic Books. Goffman, E. (1961) Asylums: Essay on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994) Moral Panic: The Social Construction of Deviance, Oxford: Blackwell. Habermas, J. (1985) Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hughes, E.C. (1994) On Work, Race, and the Sociological Imagination, ed. and introduction by Lewis Coser, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jencks, C. (1992) Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Junger, M. (1990) Delinquency and Ethnicity: An Investigation on Social Factors Relating to Delinquency among Moroccan, Turkish, Surinamese and Dutch Boys, Deventer/Boston: Kluwer. Katz, M. (1989) The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare, New York: Pantheon.

The undocumented outsider class

101

Luciani, G. (1993) ‘Migration: a global phenomenon calling for common solutions’, in G. Luciani (ed.), Migration Policies in Europe and the United States, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Mahler, S.J. (1995) American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margin, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Martin, P.L. (1994) ‘The United States: benign neglect toward immigration’, in W.A. Cornelius, P.L. Martin and J.F. Hollifield (eds), Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 83–118. Mauss, M. (1990) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, London: Routledge. Meissner, D.M., Hormats, R.D., Walker, A.C. and Shijuro Ogata (eds) (1993) International Migration Challenges in a New Era: Policy Perspectives for Europe, Japan and North America, Triangle Paper No. 44, New York: Trilateral Commission. Merton, R.K. (1957) Social Theory and Social Structure, New York: Free Press. Mollenkopf, J.H. and Castells, M. (eds) (1991) Dual City: Restructuring New York, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Moore, R.I. (1987) The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Oxford: Blackwell. Morita, K. and Sassen, S. (1994) ‘The new illegal immigration in Japan, 1980–1992’, International Migration Review, 28, spring, 153–63. OECD (1993) Trends in International Migration, Paris: OECD. Passel, J.S. (1994) ‘Illegal migration to the United States: the demographic context’, in W.A. Cornelius, P.L. Martin and J.F. Hollifield (eds), Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Peters, B. (1993) Die Integration Moderner Gesellschaften, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Portes, A. and Rumbaut, R.G. (1990) Immigrant America: A Portrait, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Pugliese, E. (1995) ‘New international migrations and the “European Fortress”’, in C. Hadjimichalis and D. Sadler (eds), Europe at the Margins: New Mosaics of Inequality, New York: Wiley. Rayner, R. (1996) ‘Illegal? Yes. Threat? No. A coolheaded journey through the immigrant underworld’, The New York Times Magazine, 7 January. Sassen, S. (1988) The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor, New York: Cambridge University Press. —— (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— (1995) ‘Labour mobility and migration policy: lessons from Japan and the US’, in B. Unger and F. van Waarden (eds), Convergence or Diversity? Internalization and Economic Policy Response, Aldershot: Avebury. Scheppele, K.L. (1988) Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sciortino, G. (1991) ‘Immigration into Europe and public policy: do stops really work?’, New Community, 18 (1), October, 89–99. Simmel, G. (1906) ‘The sociology of secrecy and of secret societies’, American Journal of Sociology, 11 (4), January, 441–98. —— (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt Wolff, New York: Free Press. Soysal, Y.N. (1994) Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Staring, R. (1998) ‘Scenes from a fake marriage: notes on the flip-side of embeddedness’, in K. Koser and H. Lutz (eds), The New Migration in Europe, London: Macmillan, 224–41. Suárez-Orozco, M.M. (1994) ‘Anxious neighbors: Belgium and its immigrant minorities’, in W.A. Cornelius, P.L. Martin and J.F. Hollifield (eds), Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. van der Leun, J. (1995) Patronen van illegaliteit en criminaliteit (Patterns of Illegality and Criminality), Utrecht: Department of General Social Sciences, Utrecht University.

102

Social exclusion and European integration

van Gunsteren, H. (1992) Eigentijds Burgerschap (Contemporary Citizenship), The Hague: SDU Uitgeverij. —— (1993) ‘Four conceptions of citizenship’, in B. van Steenbergen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship, London: Sage. Wacquant, L.J.D. (1994) ‘The new urban color line: the state and the fate of the ghetto in postFordist America’, in C.J. Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1995) ‘Three pernicious premises in the study of the American ghetto’, typescript, University of California, Berkeley. Wilson, W.J. (1987) The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zolberg, A. (1993) ‘Are the industrial countries under siege?’, in G. Luciani (ed.), Migration Policies in Europe and the United States, Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Part II

Citizenship and gender

6

The role of social movements in the project of civil society The case of the women’s movement Ute Gerhard

Whoever dares to talk about civil society today, at least in German and certainly in translation, must always begin by clarifying what is meant: is the concept of civil society (Zivilgesellschaft) identical to the concept of bourgeois society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) or to that of liberal, contemporary society? Or does it merely imply a political programme for the future? Emphasizing the role of social movements as possible agents in processes of social transformation neither limits nor simplifies the topic, but may offer a novel perspective which, despite historical and political experience granting little ground for optimism, is not free from utopian elements. In any case, the example of the women’s movement, focusing on women and gender, complicates the resolution of social problems in such a way that sociological theory can provide only unsatisfactory answers. Thus, in the following pages I take a pragmatic approach: after explaining my theoretical position and the meaning of social movements in the processes of social change, I identify the role of women’s movements in three types of society: the bourgeois society (or bürgerliche Gesellschaft); its mutation into the Western form of welfare state; and the Eastern or East-Central European societies in transition with respect to their policies aimed at women. Motivating this is my interest in clarifying how today’s civil society can avoid making the mistakes of the past to transcend the exclusion of women from equal citizenship not only in social theory, but also in political practice. ON THE MEANING OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Central to my argument stands the concept of social movement. When defined most broadly, social movements are at once cause and effect, but above all, carrier and motor of social change. Actors are informal groups, independent autonomous associations and clubs that will develop into movements once the circle of activists leads to the mobilization of broader networks. Their issues, demands and protests highlight social contradictions and conflicts, thematizing experiences of injustice, demanding equal rights and citizenship. In historical as well as Eastern European forms of protest and civil rights movements the struggle for liberal freedoms and political participation was the prevailing issue aimed at democratizing and reforming social relations and politics, whereas – and this is what is characterized as specifically new in the new

106

Citizenship and gender

social movements – these raise issues not only of material inequality but also of lifestyle and life world, of individual and political self-determination in view of the atomic menace or ecological damage and the irreversible endangerment of the bases of life (see e.g. Raschke 1985; Roth and Rucht 1987; Katzenstein and MacClurg Mueller 1987; Rucht 1994). Through politicizing and publication of what seemed to have been individual or private concerns, activists try to validate their demands vis-à-vis the state and its institutions or vis-à-vis the ruling elite. In the most favourable cases, this mobilization and its new participatory styles not only change the values and political and cultural orientation of the participants, but also the political and social context itself. In political theory and research on movements, the labour movement was considered a prototypical social movement until it was established and institutionalized in the welfare state. In his Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich (The History of Social Movements in France, 1789–1850), conservative social reformer Lorenz von Stein (1921), in contrast to the ‘forces of perseverance’, called the ‘proletariat’ the driving force in history, and designated the most general reason for a modern social movement. According to his definition, the labour movement expressed the ‘continuing contradiction’ resulting from ‘a society of unequals . . . [compared] with the concept of the human being’ (Stein 1974: 4). For a long time, however, sociological analyses of movements were covered by theories of collective behaviour that treated phenomena under the auspices of mass psychology, or even as deviant behaviour and destabilization of systems. Only in the wake of the new social movements has a broad field of movement research been established, gradually and internationally, which understands movements as a critical instance in modern society and the welfare state, especially as they promote a ‘new political paradigm’ (Offe 1985). In contrast to forms of action, values and themes of conflict of an old or established form of politics, the new movements thematized, practised, changed and broadened the concept of the political as well as the political venue. This holds in particular – although theories of social movements don’t take it sufficiently into account – for the new women’s movement, which, by theorizing the gender problem under the motto ‘the personal is political’, also questions political content and form, redrawing the boundaries of the political sphere. These questions offer a common platform for the very different experiences and movements in the East and the West. Especially in newly ‘rediscovered’ civil society too (Keane 1988: 1) the various civil rights, emancipation and peace or ecology movements play an outstanding role, and we might take them as a possible common focus of social theory and politics as much for the Western democracies as for the Eastern countries in transition. Without neglecting the established and trusted forms of democratic policy-making (for instance, in political parties) and the division of power, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (1992: 19) treat social movements as ‘a key feature of a vital, modern, civil society and an important form of citizen participation in public life’. In their theory the authors deal with the women’s movement as central and exemplary, which ‘demanded that the standards of justice’ be applied to all spheres of civil society including the family; thereby contributing to the ‘detraditionalization and democratization of social relations’ (ibid. 554, 526). This is remarkable, and – as will be seen – it is important to include the family as part of civil society. For generally the women’s movement has been underestimated and ignored in social theory and in

Social movements in the project of civil society 107 German research on social movements in particular. This is certainly the case for the historical women’s movement (see Raschke 1985: 38 ff.) and is hardly less so for the new women’s movement which, if it is not underestimated, is subsumed into the other new social movements, without naming the structural conflicts in gender relations as patriarchal (Kontos 1986). Exemplary of this undervaluing, hesitant recognition, and also of a constant paternalism vis-à-vis the women’s movement, is the career enjoyed by the theme of the women’s movement in the social analyses by Jürgen Habermas, starting with the often quoted footnote 15 in his Observations on the ‘Spiritual Situation of the Age’ (Stichworte zur ‘geistigen Situation der Zeit’) where the women’s movement is said to be ‘merely concretistic desperately grasping at natural, ascriptive characteristics like . . . sex’ (Habermas 1979), before moving on to a ‘feminism’, which is admitted in contrast to all (other new) movements to have exercised the ‘push of an offensive’, ‘certainly’ with a ‘particularistic core’ (Habermas 1982: 578–9). Even in his discourse theory of the law (1992), the author maintains the assumption that, despite a background of more than 150 years of women’s history and struggle for legal rights, the insights gleaned from a gendered perspective and women’s corresponding demands for justice ‘must first be publicly clarified before they can be accepted as generally applicable’ (Habermas 1992: 513). One major difference between the women’s and other new social movements lies precisely in that the women’s movement is already as old a movement as the labour movement and that its claims for equality and autonomy are still unrealized. On the other hand, the new women’s movement emerged as a reaction to and a part of the new civil rights and alternative movements: that is, it shares with these both personnel and aims. Yet a historical contrast between the old and the new women’s movements shows not only continuities and similar aims, but also differences in organizational form, in self-awareness, and in an altered social context, including breaks and the recurring ‘loss of women’s history’. This is also true for the East European women’s movements which may link up to different cultural traditions as well as to a presocialist women’s movement dating back to the nineteenth century (see e.g. Lange and Bäumer 1901). Worth noting is the fact that this already meant a link to an international and European perspective, as much for the bourgeois as for the proletarian women’s movement with all its branches, which had created its own public in numerous organizations, media and conferences and had by this means already extended the space of civil society (see, for instance, the history of the International Council of Women, founded 1888, and the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, founded 1904). Without wishing to idealize or homogenize the women’s movement, we can gain a sharper focus on particular problems women have had in organizing and carrying through with their reforms if we consider the various phases of the movement as ‘long waves’ (Gerhard 1995) – which are designated in English, interestingly, as first and second waves with the ‘doldrums’ between (see Rupp and Taylor 1990). Thus we should not only be asking what impeded the movement’s success, but rather, we should look for that combination of social and political conditions, contradictions and favourable circumstances or resources which must exist when women are mobilized as women to transcend social, political and cultural differences, coming as they do from so many disparate modes of living. In particular, because women are not a minority or

108

Citizenship and gender

a cohort which has grown up together, but rather are usually living in close quarters, dependent and intimate or ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with those against whom they must defend themselves, their joining together on the basis of similar experiences is more remarkable than self-evident (Buechler 1990: 9–12). In what follows, the issues and alternative aims which the women’s movement in its various phases has named are intended to signpost the specificity of women’s problems in social context and to sketch the lines of conflict in gender relations, because the political power of a social movement lies in its thematizing and coming to consensus on the state of the problem and thus producing a public space for collective learning processes. THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN BOURGEOIS SOCIETY The history of the contemporary women’s movement starts with the French Revolution, that is, with the claim to freedom and equality and general human rights for women as well as for men. French women, in spite of their decisive cooperation in the overthrow of the ancien régime, were excluded from the French National Assembly and received no civil or voting rights. They thus considered themselves to have been cheated out of the fruits of the Revolution. For this reason, Olympe de Gouges in 1791 penned the Declaration of Women’s Rights and Citizenship, pointing out the lasting and central contradiction and weak points in the bourgeois civil rights and state constitutions. De Gouges revealed the contradiction between public promises of equality for all people and the private arbitrariness and force in gender relations. She also challenged the so-called space ‘free of the law’ which was the family in her apparently ‘particularistic’ claim of self-determination with regard to motherhood (expressed in Article 11 on freedom of expression and the right to claim paternity) in conjunction with expressly emphasized rights as a citizen (for instance in Articles 3, 6, 16). In addition to her Declaration, in the draft of a ‘social contract’ between man and woman which was to replace the traditional marriage contract, she stressed the systematic value of marital relations as not merely private but at the same time political, that is, as belonging to the public interest in justice and equality (Gerhard 1990: 49 ff., 263 f.; see also Schröder 1979: 43–54). For all subsequent women’s movements, the claim to general human rights was the reference point for thematizing typical experiences of injustice suffered by women and at the same time the basis of their struggle for equal rights, as in the democratic or freedom movements of the 1848 revolution in Europe and the USA. At the start of the suffrage movement in 1895 in Germany, for instance, the struggle which from that moment on was organized to win suffrage and civil rights as the precondition for all further rights reform, Lily Braun (1895: 23) summarized movement aims emphatically thus: ‘We demand a free route for self-development and for the sake of a suffering humanity . . . We also demand the application of principles of the modern state – general human rights – for the other half of humanity, woman.’ The struggle for women’s rights had many aspects, touched all living conditions and encountered bitter resistance. The most important goals were to win the right to education, training and job opportunities, to gain access to public offices, to professions and universities and above all to earn legal equality in marriage – rights which for both

Social movements in the project of civil society 109 sides of the woman question, in private and public life, were of existential importance. Because there was never any question of proletarian women’s right to work, the problem for them first of all was, in addition to laws concerning marriage and motherhood, the right to humane working conditions and to equal pay. The devaluation of all these basic demands for a life worthy of a human being as ‘only a rights movement’ (see Lerner (1979: 48–62) on the American women’s movement) means that the breadth and meaning of this movement for the present is not appreciated. Because it was not merely a question of equality in the sense of a more just distribution of goods within the ‘narrow horizon of bourgeois law’, nor was it an ‘assimilation’ to the man’s position or ‘sameness’ (see Gerhard 1990: 13–18; in contrast to MacKinnon 1987: 32–45), but rather, above all, it concerned wresting personal freedom from dependence, in order to realize the same rights and authority, especially as married women, because this realm in particular had been assigned to bourgeois women as their original and inalienable domain. Thus one major mobilizing moment in the history of the nineteenth-century women’s movement involved understanding the experience of injustice, violence and tutelage (legitimated in the legal institution of tutelage) in this particular arena. And it would be a misunderstanding to characterize the early women’s movement as being against the family. On the contrary, the movement aimed at self-determination in every respect – political, private and, particularly, sexual. Of significance is that the first women’s movement had very little success, especially with their demands for reform of marriage and family law, despite massive protests, petitioning and, at the turn of the century, a very well-organized, even international, public; nor did gaining suffrage in many nations after World War I change things. In this way, the new status of citizenship was counteracted by unchanged private law. Familial tutelage and structural economic disadvantage undermined from the start any possible political participation. And up to the present, we can see that realization of equality in this area strikes against stubborn resistance. In the meantime, historical women’s research and feminist social theories have examined and criticized in a myriad of ways these counter-forces. These studies question traditional sex roles and gender-specific structures in all social realms, and especially in the family. It is not by chance that political philosophy of civil and modern society, at the head the revolutionary teachers of natural law and bourgeois philosophers of rights and freedom (see, in particular, Rousseau, but also Fichte and Hegel), and later the family sociologists and pedagogues, referring to the ‘nature’ of women, propagated their views of a feminine sex as the decisive difference upon which all categories structuring social relations were based. It was the function of the family which formed the basis of bourgeois society, and it did not matter whether it was described as the ‘cradle of humanity’ (Pufendorf 1673 cited in Erle 1952: 119) or again and again as the ‘germ of the state’; whether it was continuously prized as an institution worthy of and receiving government protection, or considered a ‘counterpole to the rationality of the capitalistic market economy’ (Horkheimer 1936: 67); whether it was touted as ‘a community of souls’ or as an inalienable retreat for ‘nurturing and protection’, providing the ‘important balance needed by the personality of modern man’ (Lüschen and König 1965: 18; see Rosenbaum 1973). The systematic exclusion of women from the realm of the public by means of a marriage contract, the ‘sexual contract’ (Pateman 1988, 1989: 33–57), and their inclusion in the private domain of the family with a highly specific, perfectly normalized ‘order of the sexes’, was thus neither

110

Citizenship and gender

coincidental nor merely a remnant or left-over of previous social forms, but rather, constitutive of the way bourgeois society functioned. That is, bourgeois (and also civil?) society, which allies itself with freedom and equality for all people in its proclamations and principles, maintained inequality for women and, above all, women in the family as an immanent contradiction, legitimated by a social contract with a double foundation or ‘false bottom’. This exclusion was itself based not only on the separation of state and society, which served as liberalism’s constitutive moment, but also rested on a triple-tiered base in which the societal sphere that constituted a ‘bourgeois public’ was again divided into a public and private realm (see Hegel 1972: 205, §§ 238/239; Cohen and Arato 1992: 91 ff.). We now see how far-reaching the consequences were, if we could understand the family as part of the communicative and discursive realm of a civil society, ‘as a sphere of social interaction’ or of ‘individual autonomy by liberating the intimate sphere from all traditional as well as modern forms of inequality and unfreedom’. This means that the family, although not exactly a voluntary association like others, ‘would (nonetheless) have to relinquish its patriarchal form and become at least in principle egalitarian’ (Cohen and Arato 1992: 630, n. 48). In addition, it is stressed that ‘the rights of the intimate (or private) sphere’ should be placed beside the right to communicate ‘in the centre of the catalogue of constitutional freedom(s)’ (Cohen and Arato 1992: 455). Of note, however, is the fact that many important arguments about this question even in this book are mentioned only in the footnotes. WOMEN’S MOVEMENTAND THE WELFARE STATE Not only concerning civil rights, and, in particular, family law, but also in terms of social policy, the first women’s movement suffered significant defeat after World War I in the newly founded welfare states, and this despite the newly won right to vote. Like the labour movement, and by means of a myriad of initiatives for social reform, the women’s movement had contributed in major ways to humanizing capitalist living conditions, launching professional associations and self-help organizations to train and protect women (i.e. labour exchanges, legal counselling offices, etc.). Most of all, they were forerunners in the professionalization of social work as a female profession. In fact, national women’s organizations proved themselves absolutely indispensable during World War I, in the trial phase of government-organized social politics, in all areas of the war economy and welfare. Nonetheless, as social partners in a new societal compromise between wage labour and capital, they were apparently left out (see specifically, Gerhard 1988). Thus, in all Western industrial nations the sociopolitical direction was set which also encompassed the so-called Keynesian compromise. Aims and premises included full employment, although for women this meant from the start an employment rate of only 30 per cent because, at the same time, it had to be assured that the housekeeping would get done. The principle of subsidizing the family and securing the male wage-earner by means of a family wage were the sociopolitical instruments with which the gender-specific division of labour was once again reaffirmed. In spite of the differences in social securities systems viewed internationally, with regard to women in the welfare state we find rather uniform structures. American

Social movements in the project of civil society 111 feminist researchers also talk about ‘the double standard of welfare provision for men and women’ (Gordon 1990: 11) and the ‘Two Channel Welfare State’, ‘one originally for white industrial workers and the other designed for impoverished, white, workingclass widows with young children’ (Nelson 1990: 124). Similarly, Hilary Land has criticized the direction taken by the debate in England in the 1920s concerning a family wage, for which the unions campaigned, against the expressed interests of women’s movement representatives, in order to guarantee the man the breadwinner’s role and thereby anchor a sexual division of labour (see Land 1980). The Scandinavian welfare state is the single example of one which from the beginning tied social security not to waged labour but rather to (female) citizenship, thereby enabling women a gradual ‘transition from being powerless to having [a] little power’ (Hernes 1986: 167). In all welfare regimes this led to a continuation of the division between private and public spheres, constitutive of bourgeois society, despite the state having taken over certain services at the level of welfare provision, and also led to a systematic splitting of the social security system into one for waged workers and one for the impoverished (Leibfried and Tennstedt 1985). As before, the right to receive benefits remained structured according to the division between waged labour and work in the home. This means that social security systems have ‘two tiers’ too: in the upper echelon are found mainly male labourers, continuously insured, with legally secure claims, while in the lower we find the non-waged workers and disadvantaged, mainly women, who must demonstrate need by means of bureaucratic testing of individual cases. And yet, the picture is not entirely negative if we look at the dialectic of rights and legal claims. Granted, on the one hand, the welfare state has led to renewed discrimination and increased control, and to a problematic ‘juridification’ of social relations; but its guaranteed minimum for existence is also the precondition for independence from the family breadwinner, which explains why feminists are considering whether ‘that dependence on the state may be preferable to dependence on individual men; since women do not “live with the state” as they do with men, they are better able to initiate collective struggles for their entitlements’ (Gordon 1990: 23). Besides, scholars pointed out a remarkable and constructive contradiction in the welfare system: the welfare state, stepping into a husband’s shoes, has made women more independent (see Fox Piven 1990: 250 ff.). Finally, legal reform and legal claims to education, higher qualifications and training for jobs, very gradual improvement in the guaranteed standard of living and a new standard of equal rights were preconditions for the struggles of the new women’s movements. It was on the basis of at least a formal legal equality in the private sphere that Western feminists could discuss the discrepancy between legal norms and their reality. It is also a background of higher education and improved professional opportunities that allows women of today to point out the weak spots in gender relations with a clarity and self-consciousness unavailable to an earlier women’s generation. Central issues urged public and private autonomy, especially selfdetermination of one’s own body, and condemned the scandalous cover-up of raw power under the concept of a private sphere. Thus, then and now, ‘the personal is political’ is at the heart of the women’s movement challenge to traditional politics. A new definition of politics touches the underpinnings of bourgeois society and the existing political order which, as we have seen, rests on a social contract with a double or even a ‘false bottom’. Having politicized

112

Citizenship and gender

and mobilized women by means of these themes, the women’s movements have already to some extent displaced the sharp divide between private and public, thereby exercising significant influence on values and effecting social change. In order to diagnose the West today, the question is merely to what extent we still live in a bourgeois capitalist society with its alteration to a so-called social state. So many changes in relation to the family signal a post-modern world: the so-called plurality of lifestyles, individualization and altered gender roles. The answer depends on how we judge the above-mentioned characteristics of the constitution of bourgeois and capitalist modern society: is the bourgeois state necessarily founded on differentiated gender roles, cemented by the family and a hierarchical division of labour – or is the promise of freedom and equality for women, too, the aim, too long postponed, of bourgeois/civil emancipation? In that case, closure of the project of modernity would not yet have occurred, and all previous stages in bourgeois development would be merely the prehistory of a yet-to-be-realized civil society. THE WOMAN QUESTION AND WOMEN’S POLITICS IN EASTERNAND EAST-CENTRALEUROPEAN SOCIETIES IN TRANSITION As mentioned earlier, the seemingly arbitrary use of terminology, making synonyms of ‘bourgeois society’ and ‘civil socety’, does not reside in the lack of a systematic approach but more in the ambiguity of the concepts themselves to which the differing theoretical and political premises in East and West have contributed, historically and at present, as well as various languages and translations (civil society – bürgerliche Gesellschaft – bourgeois society). It is striking that in German, in the context of democratizing processes in Eastern Europe, civil society (often the English word itself) is used, most likely because the concept of the bourgeois society is historically freighted with negative connotations, as with class society. At the same time, our attention is drawn to calls for a ‘renaissance’, a ‘revival’ or a necessary ‘reconstruction’ of the concept and its political content (Cohen and Arato 1992: 29 f.; see also Keane 1988; Taylor 1991). ‘In Eastern Europe’ – I quote from a discussion in 1989 – ‘bourgeois society is understood as opposed to the state and expresses the conviction that society is irreducible to state structures. As opposed to the communist regime, which had tried to bring all aspects of life under its control, the concept of “civil society” measures the will to resist totalitarian claims of the state and at the same time expresses a maxim of political praxis’ (Michalski 1991: 8). The significance of the Eastern European dissenting and civil rights movements for the process of social transformation is constantly emphasized because, not unlike the new social movements in Western Europe, the Eastern ones acted outside the given political structures, exploiting the tensions between state and society in order to create new spaces for expressing a political will and control, as well as self-determination. And by influencing public opinion, they finally contributed to a delegitimation of power and to a democratizing of social relationships. These movements have been described as ‘a network of independent groupings, independent of the state . . . which influenced politics by virtue of their very existence and activities’ (Taylor 1991: 52, 57). In particular, it is stressed that these groups, grass-roots clubs and associations,

Social movements in the project of civil society 113 which opened new sociopolitical spaces, are unthinkable except as democratic, egalitarian and expressive of solidarity. But the most decisive question, the one motivating my considerations, which must be asked against a background of feminist critique of social theory, remains: what stand does civil society take vis-à-vis the problem of excluding women from political participation and including them in the family, that central contradiction of bourgeois society? On this point we can find in the literature very little, as a general rule no more than ‘a passing reference’ (Wallace 1995; see Funk 1993: 12 ff.), with the exception of the theory posited by Cohen and Arato (1992). Viewed from the perspective of the West, it is obvious that women played major roles in all the civil rights and democratic movements in the East and yet failed to deal specifically with the gender issue. However, the question is whether women and men actually intended to deal with this issue, or whether this question does not already reveal its Western bias. In the dialogue between women in East and West, there is no possibility other than to exchange observations, trying to come to a new intersubjective understanding. Another observation that is striking for me: even when an ‘anti-political politics’ (Havel 1988) was formulated, taking its starting point from experience and the power of resistance of the ‘life world’, thus finding itself startlingly close to the understanding of politics expressed by Western feminists, the texts utter not a word about gender relations or the context of women’s lives. Surely this derives from the fact that the woman question in state socialist societies was, on the one hand, held in high political esteem and, dictated from ‘above’, was considered resolved. Based on the promise of historical materialism, that human emancipation would follow automatically from transcendence of class differences and economic inequality, the state legislated equal access to the labour market for women and guaranteed full employment by means of a whole range of sociopolitical measures which seemed to heal (for women only) the contradiction between caring for the family and participating in the labour force. Without wanting to repeat the already broad critique of socialist theories of women’s emancipation as well as their praxis in so-called real-socialist states, clearly the 90 per cent quota of women in the labour market, affected by this brand of policy-making for women, induced a remarkable alteration in traditional women’s roles, especially in furthering women’s economic self-reliance. Nonetheless – and everyone involved, when looking back, agrees – this form of emancipation certainly failed to eliminate gender-specific structures of inequality in the state and society; in particular, it failed to relieve women of their responsibility for housework. The right and the obligation to enter the job market made women pay a significant price in double and triple burdens: ‘Emancipation’ over the last forty years meant a loss of dignity for women, who were reduced to a cheap source of labour . . . It meant a loss of woman’s identity, because women had to adapt themselves [to the given structures] . . . and had no chance to become aware of and determine for themselves what it meant to be a woman and to express it in their lives, their roles, and their personal expectations. (Kiczková and Farkasová 1993: 87) On the other hand – and these differing experiences play a significant role in determining how we understand civil society today and the transitional processes

114

Citizenship and gender

taking place since 1989 – the personal sphere in Eastern European socialist and totalitarian states was for quite some time the only space allowing for ‘the development of individual initiative and autonomy’. ‘Family and friends filled the space where civil society could not exist’ (Havelková 1995). ‘Freedom’s space was the private rather than the public’, Hanna Havelková assures us, adding that in the present process of transition, ‘the economic and psychological functioning of the family has not been transcended but rather strengthened’. Family was in this context in no sense a realm in which primarily injustice was experienced, or can be talked about. On the contrary, family under the conditions of a totalitarian regime and a repressive state was experienced as the only sphere of ‘positive freedom within which agents [could] collectively debate issues of common concern, assert new rights, and exercise influence on political (and potentially economic) society’ (Cohen and Arato 1992: 23). Or would this be an idealization? Women’s vulnerablity to sexual violence, which is now coming to light in the wake of liberalization, supposedly owed more to, in the words of a discussant in Bratislava, the ‘sexualization of social relations’ not in the private but in the economic and political sphere, a remark that was heatedly discussed and contested in this debate. At the same time, women in Central and Eastern European states are experiencing the transition in their societies to liberal market economies – in very different ways – as a new form of discrimination, disadvantage, tutelage and exclusion from the realm of production. For instance Eastern Germany aims openly at ‘normalizing’ the percentage of women in the labour market, that is, reducing the previous 90 per cent participation rate to the West German standard (around 55 per cent). In other Eastern European countries, sociopolitical triumphs are also being eroded, especially those measures that helped alleviate the conflict between professional and family life. Simultaneous with the loss of the right to work and to socially secure jobs, we find in all new East European democracies a considerable fall in women’s participation in political groups and parties which is not only the result of having eliminated government-sponsored quotas, but also results from new mechanisms of exclusion. But it would be hasty to generalize, because now very different cultural traditions and political constellations are playing a role. East European women offer explanations which interpret these facts differently. According to Julia Szalai, the retirement of women from politics is no indicator of disinterest in politics, rather the opposite, as she notes about Hungary: Political life outside these formalized spheres is full of female activists: tens of thousands of freshly organized associations, local-level chambers, single-issue NGOs seem to rely heavily on their participation, not to speak of the non-partyrelated jobs in various committees of the local governments. (Szalai 1995: 24; see also in this volume) Whether the new political and neoliberal market conditions, together with the new types of experience of injustice East European women are now experiencing, will lead to a mobilization of women as women and a new self-conscious women’s politics, is unpredictable. But at present experts are painting a rather gloomy picture: Meanwhile, the new conservative discourses cast women as primarily responsible for the family, as mothers rather than workers, reinforcing even more firmly the

Social movements in the project of civil society 115 public/private divide and signalling a return from public (socialist welfare state) to private (women dependent on male breadwinner) patriarchy. (Einhorn 1995: 224)

ANATTEMPT TO RESUME What do these various experiences and conditions mean for the concept of civil society in Europe? I assume that, in the meantime, Western feminists have learned how inappropriate it is to know better than waiting until Eastern European women have gone so far as to repeat our Western experiences of injustice. For even the Western women’s movements, facing political counter-winds and global economic problems, will also have to re-examine their concepts and review their strategies. And needed above all is a new understanding of what it means to be radical. Theoreticians of the project ‘Civil Society’ have therefore spoken of a ‘self-limiting radicalism that abandons revolutionary dreams in favor of radical reforms’ (Cohen and Arato 1992: 493). This form of self-restraint allows those who think differently the freedom to define themselves, since not one single path is considered the right one. Thus it appears that we need a dual political strategy for social movements, which would, on the one hand, strive for political influence to institutionalize accomplishments and to change the political landscape itself, in particular its decision-making mechanisms. And on the other, movement strategy would follow the lead of the feminist movement with its modes of association, consciousness-raising groups and communicative networks that have launched collective learning processes not limited to women, and have thereby reshaped the political and cultural discourse so that women’s voices can be heard, women’s concerns perceived, and the traditional conceptions of women’s roles, bodies, and identities, and the male dominance supporting them, undermined. The field of action for such an identity politics is the realm of civil society, its movements, associations and clubs, to which the family can also belong, as we have learned from the Eastern European experience. This dualistic strategy, for which we must seek allies in East and West, depends on varying social contexts for its practicability, but it may prepare the ground for a European integration process that implies neither fusion nor fission. For civil society can only move closer to realization by rejecting uniformity and a false commonality, preferring instead equality and recognition of precisely those differences and varieties of form which self-determination prizes. At the same time, given the rebirth of nationalistic discourse and death-dealing ethnic conflict, we are learning what a dangerous fuse the insistence on cultural difference can be. If we take the project of civil society seriously, this can only mean, with regard to the question of gender, that the principles of freedom and equality must be recognized and guaranteed in a civil society, especially within the family and the personal sphere. This democratization of the society still needs to be initiated as a radical reform in both West and East, yet not by women alone. This time, the males must join in, too. The role of social movements in this process is – as I hope – obvious. They open the space where, with respect to all pluralities, we may come to an ‘agreement on the demands and values of our time’ (Marx 1972: 346).

116

Citizenship and gender

REFERENCES Braun, L. (1895) Die Bürgerpflicht der Frau, Berlin. Buechler, S.M. (1990) Women’s Movement in the United States: Woman Suffrage, Equal Rights, and Beyond, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cohen, J.L. and Arato, A. (1992) Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Einhorn, B. (1993) Cinderella goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe, London: Verso. —— (1995) ‘Ironies of history: citizenship issues in the new market economies of East Central Europe’, in B. Einhorn and E. Janes Yeo (eds), Women and Market: Societies, Crisis and Opportunity, Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 217–33. Erle, M. (1952) ‘Die Ehe im Naturrecht des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Dissertation, University of Göttingen. Fox Piven, F. (1990) ‘Ideology in the state: woman, power, and the welfare state’, in L. Gordon (ed.), Woman, the State, and Welfare, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 250– 64. Funk, N. (1993) ‘Introduction’, in N. Funk and M. Mueller (eds), Gender Politics and PostCommunism, New York: Routledge, 1–14. Gerhard, U. (1988) ‘Sozialstaat auf Kosten der Frauen’, in U. Gerhard, A. Schwarzer and V. Slupik (eds), Auf Kosten der Frauen: Frauenrechte im Sozialstaat, Weinheim: Beltz, 11–37. —— (1990) Gleichheit ohne Angleichung: Frauen im Recht, München: Beck. —— (1995) ‘Die “langen Wellen” der Frauenbewegung – Traditionslinien und unerledigte Anliegen’, in R. Becker-Schmidt and G.A. Knapp (eds), Das Geschlechterverhältnis als Gegenstand der Sozialwissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 247–78. Gordon, L. (ed.) (1990) Women, the State, and Welfare, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. Habermas, J. (1979) Stichworte zur ‘geistigen Situation der Zeit’, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (English edn: Observations on the ‘Spiritual Situation of the Age’, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984.) —— (1982) Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, vol. 2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (English edn: The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987.) —— (1990) Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (English edn: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.) —— (1992) Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaates, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (English edn: Between Facts and Norms. Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.) Havel, V. (1988) ‘Anti-Political Politics’, in J. Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, London: Verso, 381–98. Havelková, H. (1995) ‘Real existierender Feminismus’, Transit, 9, 146–58. Hegel, G.W. F. (1972) Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein. Hernes, H. (1986) ‘Die zweigeteilte Sozialpolitik: Eine Polemik’, in K. Hausen and H. Nowotny (eds), Wie männlich ist die Wissenschaft?, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 163–76. Horkheimer, M. (1936) ‘Theoretische Entwürfe über Autorität und Familie’, in E. Fromm et al., Studien über Autorität und Familie, vol. 1, Paris: Schriften des Instituts für Sozialforschung, 3–76. Katzenstein, M.F. and MacClurg Mueller, C. (eds) (1987) The Women’s Movement of the United States and Western Europe, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Keane, J. (ed.) (1988) Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, London: Verso. Kiczková, Z. and Farkasová, E. (1993) ‘The emancipation of women: a concept that failed’, in N. Funk and M. Mueller (eds), Gender Politics and Post-Communism, New York: Routledge, 84–94.

Social movements in the project of civil society 117 Kontos, S. (1986) ‘Modernisierung in der Subsumptions politik? Die Frauenbewegung in den Theorien neuer sozialer Bewegungen’, Feministische Studien, 2, 34–49. Land, H. (1980) ‘The family wage’, Feminist Review, 6, 55–77. Lange, H. and Bäumer, G. (eds) (1901) Handbuch der Frauenbewegung, part 1, Berlin: Moeser. Leibfried, S. and Tennstedt, F. (1985) Politik der Armut und die Spaltung des Sozialstaates, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lerner, G. (1979) The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lüschen, G. and König, R. (1965) Jugend in der Familie, München: JUVENTA-Verlag. MacKinnon, C. (1987) ‘Difference and dominance: on sex discrimination’, in C. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 32–45. Marx, K. (1972) ‘Briefe aus den “Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbüchern”, in Marx–Engels Werke, vol. 1, Berlin: Dietz. Michalski, K. (1991) ‘Introduction’, in K. Michalski (ed.), Europa und die Civil Society, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 7–10. Nelson, B. (1990) ‘The origins of the two-channel welfare state: workmen’s compensation and mothers’ aid’, in L. Gordon (ed.), Women, the State, and Welfare, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 123–51. Offe, C. (1985) ‘New social movements: challenging the boundaries of institutional politics’, Social Research, 52 (4), 817–68. Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (1989) ‘The fraternal social contract’, in id., The Disorder of Women, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 33–57. Raschke, J. (1985) Soziale Bewegungen: Ein historisch-systematischer Grundriß, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Rosenbaum, H. (1973) Familie als Gegenstruktur zur Gesellschaft: Kritik grundlegender theoretischer Ansätze der westdeutschen Soziologie, Stuttgart: Enke. Roth, R. and Rucht, D. (eds) (1987) Neue soziale Bewegungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Rucht, D. (1994) Modernisierung und neue soziale Bewegungen, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Rupp, L. and Taylor, V. (1990) Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Right Movement, 1945 to the 1960s, New York: Oxford University Press. Schröder, H. (ed.) (1979) Die Frau ist frei geboren: Texte zur Frauenemanzipation, vol. 1, 1789–1870, München: Beck. Stein, L. von (1921) Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich von 1789 bis auf unsere Tage, München: Drei Masken Verlag. (English edn: The History of Social Movements in France, 1789–1850, Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press, 1964.) —— (1974) Schriften zum Sozialismus 1848, 1852, 1854, pub. E. Pankoke, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Szalai, J. (1995) ‘Women and democratization: some notes on recent changes in Hungary’, unpublished paper, Prague. Taylor, C. (1991) ‘Die Beschwörung der Civil Society’, in K. Michalski (ed.), Europa und die Civil Society, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 52 ff. Wallace, C. (1995) ‘A Western feminist goes East’, Transit, 9, 129–45.

7 Women and democratization Some notes on recent changes in Hungary Julia Szalai

When the future of women in post-communist societies of East-Central Europe comes up for consideration, most Western feminists express scepticism, disappointment and worries. The words of Barbara Einhorn seem to reflect the feelings of many of those who, for decades, compassionately watched and supported the struggles against Soviet-type totalitarianism, yet are increasingly disillusioned by the actual developments since the collapse of the old rule: Where have all the women gone? This may be a frivolous question: they haven’t evaporated after all. But what has evaporated, it seems, along with the euphoria and the optimism, the hopes and dreams . . . is the energy and potential for change on the part of women themselves. Gone too are both the much-vaunted economic independence and the resultant self-confidence of forty years of official commitment to a policy of ‘emancipation’ for women . . . Will the need to shed labour push women out of the labour force and back into primary responsibility for the family? There are some signs that women themselves may accept this relegation with a sigh of relief. What does this imply for our own views on what it means to be liberated? Women’s role is very much in question in the current transition period in East Central Europe. (Einhorn 1991) The reasoning is clear: however important it might be from an economic perspective, the turn from ‘state-socialism’ to capitalism would destroy the relative advantages that women enjoyed under the old regime, and would unavoidably lead to a degradation of their situation. Thus, women of East-Central Europe would soon face all the problems and conflicts known and discussed by the rich feminist literature of the past decades in the West. Surprisingly enough, authors of the region seem to be deaf to these warnings. They (better to say: we) feel some confusion and embarrassment while listening to these gloomy forecasts. Is that because of a lack of feminist tradition in this part of the world, and, consequently, our short-sighted neglect of unrecognized dangers? Or is that because of our different explanation and interpretation of the currents of transition? Perhaps both play some role. Anyway, either of the factors behind the divergent evaluations instigate a series of further questions. This chapter has the modest aim to highlight some of those questions. While bringing about an alternative interpretation to women’s reactions to the ongoing

Women and democratization 119 changes, I also hope to contribute to the comprehension of some deep-rooted political and sociological causes of lack of interest in mainstream feminism in East-Central Europe. The first part of the chapter will give a historical overview of the ways women related themselves to the forceful ‘emancipation’ from above. As it is known, the authoritarian mode of their ‘liberation’ created unbearable circumstances of daily existence. The chapter will provide arguments to show that, amid the conditions of continuous threat of oppressive actions on the part of the state, the very institution of the family has meant for a long time and for many the one and only secure body of selfprotection. Thus withdrawal to the private sphere functioned in preserving a certain degree of safety and autonomy. By pointing to their entirely disparate experiences in the decisive domains of work and private life, the major sources of discordance between Western and Eastern women in interpreting the safeguards of ‘liberty’ will be identified. That brief historical outline (based on evidence drawn from the past decades of Hungarian society) will be followed by the analysis of some of the consequences of the politicized functions of the family in the current period of transition. I will attempt to apply a broadened concept of political participation by presenting some of the recent trends in the post-1989 political life of the country. The changing patterns of women’s employment and their increased role in local-level politics will be discussed. These phenomena will be observed as attempts to develop new forms of expressing civil interest in a society where suspicion towards the ‘official’ channels of political decision-making (meant to be inseparable parts of the uncontrollable state) is widespread and is reinforced by people’s day-to-day experience. The empirical evidence for the gradual democratic development from below will be drawn from a brief overview of women’s increased participation in community-based politics and in the ongoing reforms of local social policy. SOME HISTORICAL NOTES: THE POLITICAL MEANING OF PRIVATE LIFE AFTER THE DEFEAT OFTHE 1956 REVOLUTION Analysts of the events of 1989–90 face rather substantial difficulties in applying the traditional conceptual patterns of political theory to the Hungarian case of the collapse of Communism. Systemic changes in the structure of political power were not preceded by any revolutionary struggles, nor even by clamorous mass demonstrations, strikes or other symptoms of massive political dissatisfaction. After forty years of unbroken centralized one-party rule, the passage to a multiparty-based parliamentary democracy was the outcome of a series of peaceful negotiations between the Communist Party and the most influential dissident groups. However, a reformist approach also fails to give the adequate theoretical framework. True, important reforms in the spheres of economy had been introduced throughout the 1980s, but the clear political intention in the background was to gain endurance to full political control of the Communist Party over society. Thus the reforms aimed rather at preventing than at assisting any ‘dangerous’ modifications of the prevailing political system.

120

Citizenship and gender

If neither revolution nor reforms – then how can one explain the radical turn from a totalitarian to a democratic political order? The response has to be given by the historical analysis of the preceding decades. This history cannot be understood, however, without a short description of the lasting sociopolitical impacts of the 1956 revolution. The 33 years of Kadarism can be characterized by the continuous attempts to resolve an insoluble political paradox: the completion of totalitarianism through its day-to-day questioning. Nevertheless, this paradox is the key to the peculiarity of the Hungarian case of East-Central European socialism, and also to its most peaceful disappearance by the end of the 1980s. To make this statement clearer, one has to throw a glimpse to the politically driven innovation of Kadarism in its attempt to consolidate the relationship between the ruling party and the defeated society in silent, though full and lasting, opposition to it. The revolution of 1956 was the first and, until recently, the only radical grass-roots critique of and real threat to the openly totalitarian way of governance, claiming to recast the fundamental rights for personal freedom, national independence and multiparty-based democracy. The unanimous nationwide refusal of any forms of ‘blissful’ oppression in the name of the sanctified goals of the ‘collective’ was unquestionable. Although the shockingly brief and temporary victory of civil society was defeated after two weeks, and the power base of the totalitarian reign was successfully reconstructed by Hungarian and Soviet military forces, the messages of the revolution could never be forgotten. This last statement also holds true for those immediate harsh actions of the political leadership, the purpose of which was the quick stabilization of the Communist rule. Among these was the most important campaign intended to accomplish the ‘socialist social revolution’ through the full collectivization of agriculture between 1958 and 1963. Although the abolition of privately owned land belonged to the Communist programme of extending the all-embracing control of the party-state over each individual member of society, and, albeit that it was implemented by the ‘classical’ methods of forced expropriation and compulsion, there were ‘surprising’ built-in concessions within the process. Namely, all the members of the newly organized cooperatives were permitted to withhold a small plot (maximum one acre) for private cultivation. This concession to ‘private ownership’ turned out to be crucial for later social development. The privately controlled plots slowly became the foundation of the second economy, which has played an outstanding role not only in the rapid modernization and material progress of the country, but also in the gradual emergence of alternative, ‘private’ pathways for promotion, prestige and success. Thus the incremental expansion of the informal economy served as a base for increasing independence from the formally regulated domain of social life. However, growing independence on the one hand caused decreasing potential for absolute control on the other. After all, the process concluded in a substantial weakening of the actual power of the Communist Party and an ultimate erosion of its totalitarian efforts – although this fact was not openly spelled out until the very last minutes of the existence of the regime. Nevertheless, people were always aware of the ‘system-alien’, even oppositionist political implications of their ‘private’ actions. The silent, though obvious, political meaning of their daily ‘exodus’ to devote the greater bulk of their energy and time to ‘privately’ designed goals and activities was clearly expressed in a thousand

Women and democratization 121 different forms, including the distinct ‘language’ of verbal and symbolic communication in their formal, as opposed to their informal, settings. At the same time, these clear distinctions and rigid demarcation lines between the ‘public’ which belongs to ‘them’, and the ‘private’ which is ‘ours’, helped both the rulers and the ruled to administer the principally unmanageable, above-indicated political paradox. MODERNIZATION FROM BELOW It is important to emphasize that the consolidation of the 1960s did not lead to any fundamental changes in the essential features of the working of the socialist system. The centralization of power, its property bases given by the domination of anonymous (party-)state ownership, the paramilitary way of administering economic and social life exclusively from the top to the bottom, the direct intervention in the daily operation of production and distribution, and so forth, remained practically unchanged and continued to determine the scope of ‘independent’ institutional actions, as well as the established framework of personal life. The innovation and the key to the success lay elsewhere, namely, in the actual content and the everyday meaning of the fragile compromise between the Party and society. The essence of this compromise was a tacit acceptance, even a gradual expansion, of the space for individual autonomy, based on the ideological–practical ‘rehabilitation’ of the one and only institution which was legitimately independent of direct political control, that is, the family. Nobody could foresee the extent of change that the apparently ‘minor’ political concessions to restricted private autonomy induced in the daily life of the country. The regained ‘freedom’ for privacy, in an exchange of unreserved fulfilment of one’s duties in the socialist domain, activated tremendous capacity. It turned out that, given the deeply rooted motivations of the material, cultural and symbolic pursuits of ‘Europeanism’ in broad layers of Hungarian society, significant numbers of families were able to combine their participation in formal ‘socialist’ institutions with a working out of alternative cultural patterns, values, skills and routes for social mobility. The spreading of these new norms and patterns was based on and inspired by people’s restricted independence to follow self-determined rules in the second economy. Participation in informal productive activities to realize individually chosen goals slowly developed to a vast social movement. Families started to organize their internal division of roles, the choice of qualification for their children, the concrete decisions about jobs which could or could not be accepted by their different members, priorities in spending money and time, and so on, according to a rationale that was clearly driven by their personal concept of modernity, but often did not follow the ‘officially declared’ expectations of the authorities. These diverging aspirations and expectations became the grounds for bargaining. Bosses had to accept the seasonal dictates of small-scale agricultural production in designing production-plans for their firms, otherwise they risked losing their workers. After all, the workers could easily move to another workplace amid the chronic manpower shortage of the socialist industries. Similarly, the threat of withdrawing the tacit permission on spending two hours less in official work, for the sake of two hours more in one’s informal work, became the most effective tool with

122

Citizenship and gender

which to sanction ‘undeserving’ behaviour. Thus people were effectively disciplined to observe the expected ‘socialist’ norms. The co-existence and mutual adjustment of the two distinct spheres of life had to be taken by all the partners as the basic guiding principle in the delicate day-to-day political game. Given their traditional key functions in the family, women played an outstanding role here. They not only shared the massive workload of combining gainful activities in the two spheres of economy, but also became the organizers and managers of the complex and difficult tasks which families had to face in the schizophrenic combination of diverse and contradictory rules, principles, goals and duties. The otherwise patriarchal gender division of roles turned to a source of relative freedom: women gained somewhat more space and acceptable ‘excuse’ to withdraw from time to time from the formal segments of production. Slowly, these ‘excuses’ for temporary exit from compulsory employment became semi-legalized through a series of new employment regulations. The most important among them was the introduction of the childcare grant, that is, a job-protected new social security benefit, facilitating home care for the child in the first three years of life. Due to its success and popularity,¹ this first step, however, was followed shortly by others, all pointing in the same direction: centrally administered job contracts started to incorporate entitlement for paid extra sick leave to take care of sick schoolchildren or other family members; regulations on early retirement were incrementally eased, and combined with the simultaneous introduction of various forms of part-time employment for those on pension, and so forth.² In all these cases, the ties to the formal segment of social life were maintained (open and definite withdrawal was politically unacceptable, and would also have been contradictory to the macroeconomic need for an unlimited magnitude of easily available workforce amid the conditions of an infinite hunger for all kinds of resources), but the possibilities to put one’s energy temporarily to the private side were much broadened, and the right to do so was tacitly acknowledged. True, the lessening of compulsion on full participation in the ‘socialist’ arena was gender- and age-biased: women and elderly male workers were the main subjects to it. And it is also true that while these concessions somewhat liberated them from direct control above their daily lives, the very same phenomenon also became the formal ‘rationalization’ for their slower promotion, worse payment and lower rate of occupational mobility. At the same time, however, the performances of the family enterprise run under the administration of these ‘liberated’ family members became the source of self-esteem and prestige. Each and every tree on the plot, each and every brick in the newly built family house, each and every item of modern equipment in the garden or the home, justified their efforts and fostered the gradual advancement of the family, which otherwise – that is, by relying merely on formal work and exclusively on earnings from it – could never have achieved so much. Thus, besides its face value in demonstrating material progress, the increase of private consumption had another significance. It expressed alternative notions about modernization, it induced and realized alternative taste (opposing the cultural patterns dictated by the authorities in control over the public realm), it created a scope for alternative socialization of children, and it helped in the acquisition of alternative knowledge that one could never gain in institutions of the officially run system of formal education.

Women and democratization 123 THE GRADUAL EROSION OF THE OLD RULE The multifaceted political, economic, social and cultural importance of the slow evolution of alternative concepts of living cannot be emphasized enough. First, it led to the gradual questioning of the very fundament of the delicate compromise, that is, the hindrance of the development of alternative communities as potential threats to the omnipotence of control from above. Two competing political drives were seriously and continuously clashing here. On the one hand, the totalitarian principle required the maintenance of as much direct intervention of the party-state as possible; on the other hand, the pursuit of post-1956 consolidation dictated efforts to help the substantial rise of living standards through the liberalization of family-based production. But the latter goal could not be met according to the requirements of the former: a modern society could not be kept amid the four walls of family houses. Leaving aside the political implications for a moment, the plain technical realities of everyday life contradicted any such attempts. Given the unchanged conditions of low and rigidly controlled wages, compulsory full-time jobs in state-run workplaces, full prevention of the accumulation of capital, and so on, people had neither the financial nor temporal resources to fulfil the tasks of the ‘officially permitted’ home-based production. The only source at their disposal was personal: efficiency and productivity was preconditioned by a well-organized cooperation within their informal networks. However, purposeful personal cooperation could not be restricted only to family and kinship. The incorporation of quite a wide range of skills, knowledge and qualifications was a natural development, which drew the formally supervised relations of neighbours, workmates, friends, colleagues and other companions under the competing, though equally efficient, control of complicated personal favours and obligations. There were deep-rooted patterns to be recalled to these rapidly evolving secondary structures: the quickly developing new forms of work exchange grew out from the well-elaborated and purposefully revitalized peasant culture of society.³ These traditional forms for saving capital and substituting cash flow by raw lively labour turned out to have great potentials amid the given circumstances, and proved to be applicable enough also to absorb people’s newly acquired experiences in modern industrial technologies and services. Developments on their grounds were really unexpected. The standards of productivity rapidly exceeded those of various industries in the formal segment of economy, giving rise to further expansion. By the mid-1980s, three-quarters of the households were already engaged in one or another form of informal production, collecting substantial income from it. Thus it is not an exaggeration to state that participation in the family-based economy gradually became the organizing principle of everyday life, which substantially reduced people’s vulnerability in the face of the official authorities, and also efficiently countervailed any attempts at political intervention from above. Beside the political and economic implications, these developments also had significant cultural impacts. The latter became especially important for the main organizers of the complicated family enterprise, namely, for women. Contrary to the widely expressed worries about relegating them to the kitchen and thus losing the advantages of ‘socialist emancipation’, the lengthy stay at home on childcare leave (or other occasional temporary returns to family duties) did not lead to their

124

Citizenship and gender

imprisonment within the household. Instead, these periods of withdrawal from their mostly dull, rigid, humiliating and exhaustive formal work4 facilitated a substantial accumulation of capacities and knowledge. In addition to the primary purpose of their staying at home (e.g. child-rearing or care for the sick), women started to use the greater part of their ‘liberated’ time to help the ongoing family business. By doing so, they slowly acquired a wide range of new skills, and became experts in market-oriented management amid the conditions of a non-existent market. While being at home, they learned the complicated bookkeeping of work-exchange and money-spending, became experts in economizing with the limited financial resources that had to be enough both for daily consumption and for long-term investments in the small-scale business (thus acquired a substantial marketable knowledge in acquisition and banking), learned to negotiate with the various authorities (thus developing skills in bargaining and administration), and, above all, developed a whole range of personal and consulting services for others in a similar situation. As subsequent time-budget surveys show, both the rates of participation and the average time devoted to these types of marketrelated services were continuously increasing among women. Moreover, the respective figures indicate great invariability across the otherwise important dividing lines of the type of settlement, level of schooling, occupational status, and so forth (see CSO– Institute of Sociology, HAS 1989, 1990). These newly acquired skills and knowledge also gradually imbued the formal sphere. Women returning from childcare leave and taking their children to the staterun kindergarten had to face a significant drop in standards: both the physical conditions and the educational spirit was much below the level of the self-organized childcare facilities in the community. After a while, the informal pressure of parents’ groups could not be forced back by the authorities. Squeezed between earnest claims from below and the permanent financial restrictions from above, they had to open the doors before the massive voluntary work of parents, who, in turn, gradually started to control the life of the institution in accordance with the much higher and modernized standards of their private homes. They began to complement the low budget of the kindergarten by equipping it with high-quality tools, stationery, toys; started to organize assistance to take the children to the nearby swimming pool; offered physical and financial help to enlarge the building, thus alleviating over-crowding, and so on. This informal modernization slowly reached the schools and other public services too – the increase in control by the community could not be held back. Neighbourhoods started to mobilize the available informal network of expertise to build an extra room for gymnastics in the run-down nearby primary school to maintain the ‘private’ norms of leisure; they were seeking to organize extra language courses and raised the necessary resources from donations or at their workplaces; they formed commissions to negotiate with the local educational authorities about modernizing day-care after teaching hours, and organized the necessary staff for this project. And so the system developed. Similar examples can be drawn also from health care, where the discrepancies between ‘public’ and ‘private’ standards were probably even greater. Run-down stateadministered hospitals, struggling with chronic shortages of resources and personnel, had to tolerate the presence of relatives in the wards, who gradually organized themselves into groups of caretakers. These spontaneously formed pressure groups started to negotiate the standards of meals, urged the right to choose the place and

Women and democratization 125 form of treatment, claimed the use of Western medicines which they offered to ‘import’ while away on holidays, and initiated other improvements. In short, the higher norms generated in the private homes progressively infiltrated even the most strictly and authoritatively controlled institutions and services. In this way, the initially rigid borderline between the state-dominated ‘public’ and the individually controlled ‘private’ spheres slowly blurred, and the latter started to regulate the former in a low-key but effective manner. Due to their expertise in home-run services, women became the major activists in this imposing voluntary movement. It is important to emphasize that, despite the clear political implications, the ongoing struggle for drawing the state-run domain under informal control did not take the form of open political conflict: the arguments were ‘pragmatic’ on both sides. However, the consequence was of basic political importance. These spontaneous formations gradually eroded the exclusive state control over given, though fundamental, spheres of people’s lives, and slowly led to the development of full-fledged community-based alternatives for their substitution. On the grounds of these developments, one can state that the transition towards an alternative system began several decades prior to the withering away of Communism. The systemic changes of 1989–90 were the completion rather than the start of a massive transformation. They opened the route to establish an adequate political framework for the already accomplished social and economic conversion of Hungarian society. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENTS IN WOMEN’S LIFE AFTER 1989 The history of women’s participation in the silent social movement that eroded the old system at its base left a deep imprint on the changes in their economic and social situation after 1989. Contrary to what has happened in most of the post-Communist countries of the region, open marketization has not led to a dramatic worsening of women’s conditions in Hungary. One could even state the opposite, namely, that the gender-related aspects of the current economic crisis work more to the detriment of men: the stability of achieved positions, the unquestioned prestige of former occupational status, the regularity and the security of ‘deserved’ higher earnings, all seem to have vanished rapidly in the serious devaluation of ‘socialist’ performances. Strangely enough, while economic restructuring initially hit large numbers of female jobs – especially unskilled and semi-skilled industrial labour in state-run massproduction firms, which turned out to be largely superfluous – both self-reported and registered unemployment has been consistently lower among women than among men. (The 1990 Census registered an already substantial self-reported unemployment rate of 10.3 per cent for men, while finding only 1.7 per cent among women. Though the number of those out of work has been steadily increasing since then, nevertheless the gender differentials seem to persist: while the ratio of registered unemployed in the male workforce was already over 11 per cent in late 1994, it reached only 8.3 per cent among women at that stage.) Given the declining opportunities for gainful employment, one would expect a significant rise in the proportion of housewives; yet, such an increase has not occurred.

126

Citizenship and gender

In fact, an opposite tendency has been registered during the past few years: the low rate of 4.4 per cent represented by housewives in the female population aged 14–555 in 1989 in fact had decreased to 3.5 per cent by 1994 (see CSO 1994a, 1994b). If they are neither in work nor in the household, where, then, are the great masses of semi-skilled and unskilled female labourers of yesteryear? The key to these rather surprising developments can only be found, first, in an intensified use of the longelaborated channels for partial withdrawal from employment, and secondly, in the concurrent purposeful ‘conversion’ of marketable skills acquired at an earlier stage. Regarding the first form of self-defence, women’s original ‘secondary status’ in socialist employment now seems to be turned to a definite advantage. Due to the prehistory outlined above, women have better and more numerous ways of finding at least temporary solutions to prevent the withering away of income security, and of preserving some of the additional relative gains (access to a wide range of free public services, loans from the banks, housing subsidies, etc.). Various statistical data confirm these statements. The female take-up rates have been steadily increasing in all forms of exit from employment through the ‘traditional’ schemes of social security. Despite a minor decrease in birthrates, the ratio of those on childcare leave rose from 4.8 per cent to 6.2 per cent of the total labour force, indicating a significant increase in the use of this route to avoid termination. The so-called nursing fee, paid since 1989 for longterm home care for the sick or for elderly people, has similar functions: more than 100,000 women in the middle-aged cohorts enjoy this benefit. The popularity of the scheme follows from the chance that it offers to convert ‘customary’ unpaid family duties to ‘ordinary’ respectable occupations, with the additional benefit of maintaining an efficient way of regular contribution to the family budget and a simultaneous safeguard of personal financial independence. The list of examples can be extended: the number of those taking up disability benefits five to ten years before becoming eligible for old age pension grew by 31 per cent between 1989 and 1992; the ratio of those covered by the numerous new firm-based early retirement schemes increased by 70 per cent between 1990 and 1992, and so on.6 In short, one can say that by using the ‘old’ and ‘customary’ techniques of retreat, women were able to attenuate the negative effects of dismissals, and were able to resist the rather poor and vague schemes that have been developed to ‘manage’ unemployment. While the massive claims, manifested in the figures, that are involved in the takeup of social security benefits as an alternative to facing unemployment are rather problematic from a fiscal perspective (they have some role in the recent drastic increase of the deficit of the state budget, and thus, in the acceleration of inflation), they also demonstrate the long-practised and lively skills of self-protection. People are well aware that anything is better than going on the dole, and the accumulated experience of the past few years confirms their evaluation. The considerable increase in chronic unemployment, the poor and underdeveloped retraining schemes, the bankruptcy of most of the large state-run firms – all these factors really have decreased the hope of getting back to work through the ordinary ‘old’ channels. At the same time, the private segment of the economy is not yet strong enough or large enough to offer full substitution. Faced with this situation, any devices for at least prolonging some of the unravelling ties with the state-run institutions in order to secure one’s income and to maintain a sense of ‘full social membership’ seem to be the most ‘rational’ tactics for

Women and democratization 127 survival. And due to their long-established practice in these techniques, women appear to enjoy significant advantages here. The purposeful conversion of earlier accumulated knowledge and skills also helps them amid the prevailing conditions. Even though overall unemployment is increasing, it is accompanied by a great demand for labour in those segments where economic policy under socialism chronically neglected investments and development. The poor quality of public infrastructure and the serious underdevelopment of services seem to be among the most severe obstacles to a smooth structural adjustment in the current phase of economic transformation. Thus investment in these spheres is expanding, even amid the overall chronic shortage of capital. However, these are the spheres where women collected a great deal of experience in the decade-long spontaneous division of labour in small-scale informal production. Their never-registered ‘qualifications’ can be easily mobilized and adjusted nowadays, opening up relatively favourable employment opportunities for them. True, employment is rarely secure and stable. However, due to their ‘secondary earner’ position within the family, women can easily take on even those part-time forms of gainful employment which would be unacceptable for men. In addition, their long-established practice in home-based management and administration helps them to find the most flexible and ‘rational’ combination of various part-time jobs. Clerical work in the morning, cleaning in the afternoon, a few hours of paid phone-service for a lawyer while cooking the meal for the family, baby-sitting in the evening – this is typical now of the combinations of gainful activities for younger and elderly women, for whom often the only difference between the past and the present is in receiving some payment for activities which they always used to do without remuneration. The essence of the current phase of marketization, that is, the peculiar ‘merging’ of the once strictly separated formal and informal economies, justifies the truth of this common wisdom. THE FORMS OF WOMEN’S POLITICAL PARTICIPATION As might be clear from the previous section, the home-based female strategies of adaptation and the family-bound forms of women’s self-protection have not become outdated by the collapse of the political regime from which they had originally evolved several decades ago. This is perhaps the main reason why Hungarian women show definite disinterest in reacting to the call of the few recently emerged feminist groups applying Western theories in a straightforward manner. Although associations, whose aim was to organize efficient pressure groups in defence of women’s special interests amid the transformation, were formed by small numbers of devoted and militant professional women in all the university centres, most of such initiatives have failed. Such groups quickly dissolved, or, at best, were reduced to non-politicized discussion clubs, even facing the threat of strong segregation. Nor do the more classical forms of political participation seem attractive – or at least, this is what women’s serious underrepresentation in party politics suggests. According to the usual standards of measuring political representation, women really seem to have ‘disappeared’. The first free elections brought about a significant drop in their presence both in the Parliament and in the locally elected governing bodies;7 for example, the ministers of the new government are exclusively men, while the leading

128

Citizenship and gender

posts in the influential new trade unions are also filled by men. These facts have to be interpreted with some caution, however. The markedly different earlier experiences, shaping the departing current male and female orientations, play a massive role here. As I tried to demonstrate above, due to alternative pathways of social mobility, participation in formal politics (meant as a prerequisite for promotion in the social hierarchy) was seen as more ‘compulsory’ for men than it was for women under the old regime. Women gained some prestige and were looked upon with some jealousy because of their ‘freedom’ to say ‘no’ to the dubious invitation to party membership, an invitation which men could not refuse without risking their position. While women always had the ‘good excuse’ of their multiple family obligations in order to avoid an unpleasant and humiliating political dialogue with the local boss of the Communist Party, in the case of men a refusal often took the form of open political confrontation. This situation created nearly insoluble dilemmas: either a moral price had to be paid, or long-term disadvantages had to be faced. Both solutions involved a great deal of frustration, and concluded frequently in severe conflicts, also within the private sphere. These frustrations played an important role in the characteristic male reactions to the collapse of Communism. The rapid emergence of the new parties promised to compensate for unjustly broken careers. Party politics became the arena for meeting men’s needs within a short time. Thousands of previously non-existent posts were opened, offering dignified and responsible positions to a great number of well-educated, politically motivated men who earlier could not find acceptable forms in which to realize their ideas. In turn, however, the current situation reinforces women’s scepticism towards party politics. While they often support their spouse in taking a long-deserved position offered on the basis of political loyalty in ‘hard dissident times’, they would see similar decisions rather strange for themselves. The newly formed parties are not seen by women as the embodiments of diverse social, economic and political interests, or as the best representatives of alternative visions on social development, but rather as currently instrumental channels for corrections in certain ‘masculine’ patterns of occupational mobility. Women, in fact, see professional advancement elsewhere. Forgoing full-time political careers does not indicate, however, that women are disinterested in politics.8 Political life outside these formalized spheres is full of female activists: tens of thousands of freshly organized associations, local-level chambers and single-issue non-governmental offices seem to rely heavily on their participation, in addition to non-party-related jobs in various committees of the local governments. The diametric experience in the formal and informal settings seems to come to a fruition here: women make good use of the accumulated knowledge in mobilizing seemingly ‘sleeping’ potentials of local communities. Contrary to the low representation in the elected political bodies, women participate to a considerable degree in the professional administration of the local governments. A recent countrywide survey found that women represent 34 per cent of the non-elected part-time members of the local commissions on social policy, and their proportion is over 50 per cent in every fifth board of this kind. As is shown by comparing the per capita social spending among settlements, women’s presence in the self-governing bodies turns out to be the safeguard for such projects as the rapid modernization of local childcare facilities, day centres, and homes for the elderly. In those cases where women are in the majority on the decision-making committees, the share of expenditure on welfare and social services is significantly higher than in localities where their representation is low. Similarly,

Women and democratization 129 welfare assistance reaches more of the needy and gives them more efficient support in those communities where women are in charge of forming the orientation of local politics. These socially ‘sensible’ political bodies are also usually more ready to rely on civil initiatives, thus inviting an even larger circle of women to take part in the effective shaping of community life. True, these decentralized experiences have not yet united to become a powerful force at the nationwide level of politics. And it is also true that the low rates of female participation in leading positions in the arena of national decision-making might create tensions in the long term. However, women themselves seem to be aware of these dangers, and react accordingly when necessary. Otherwise, for example, ‘silent’ masses of them played an active role in achieving the enactment of a liberal new law on abortion in June 1993: the immense protests against any restrictions were of substantial importance in converting the initially strong conservative drives of the government, and also in enforcing a significant rise in state spending on the much neglected counselling and preventive services. Moreover, women’s open support for the new free trade unions in their fight against dismissals is a further illustration of their influence: the success of a number of recent mass strikes of railway workers, nurses and teachers is unquestionable proof. All these examples point to the same conclusion: ‘No, women have not evaporated.’ It has to be admitted, however, that their presence and political will is expressed in seemingly different forms from men – and also from their sisters in long-established Western democracies. In the current unclear situation, it is too early to say whether these marked differences will continue or disappear. However, perhaps one should not be unduly pessimistic in the light of the developments I have outlined above. NOTES 1. 2.

3. 4.

Time-series on take-up of the childcare grant show a continuous expansion: six years after its introduction (in 1973), three-quarters of the young mothers had already made use of it for at least a part of the three-year period, and this rate increased to nearly 90 per cent by 1986. The scope of the chapter restricts any lengthy discussion here of the multifaceted advantages and the concurring negative side-effects of these developments. While they assisted the combination of formal and informal labour-force participation on the individual level, they also facilitated a more flexible and effective employment policy on the part of the socialist firms. Moreover, they turned out to be effective in substituting central investments to a great variety of state-run services in child- and health care, in construction, etc. The dubious outcome of this latter aspect, however, was an unstoppable degradation of public infrastructure, a significant increase of inequalities in standards and take-up, and also an unnoticed, gradual ‘conversion’ of the actual functions of social security. This latter development has concluded in a serious devaluation of benefits in cash, becoming later the main cause of extreme poverty among those who lack alternative resources of income and depend exclusively on central redistribution. For a detailed discussion, see Szalai (1991) and Orosz and Szalai (1992). The historical roots, their purposeful modern adaptation and the internal structure of modernized work exchange are discussed exhaustively in Sik (1981). The well-known fact has to be recalled here that compulsory employment of women meant, in effect, their incorporation into the least qualified segments of the economy. Although their schooling improved continuously, the quality of the work they had to do within the socialist workplaces remained very poor, both in physical conditions and in content. This is reflected in the fact that unqualified blue-and white-collar workers represented 48 per cent of the female labour force even in 1990, while the corresponding figure for men had already dropped to 27 per cent by that time.

130 5. 6. 7.

8.

Citizenship and gender

The categorization applied in labour statistics measures the magnitude of the potential labour force by the number of those who fall between the age limits of finishing primary education and retirement. In the case of women, old age pensions can be drawn from the age of 55. Unlike childcare or nursing, the various pension schemes are accessible, of course, for men and women alike. However, statistical data are not available to present gender-based figures of takeup here. As an outcome of the last ‘elections’ under socialism (in 1985), women made up 27 per cent of the MPs in the Parliament, and their share was 21 per cent in local government. The free elections in 1990 had resulted in 7.3 per cent female representation in the Parliament, and 16 per cent at the local level, while the 1994 elections brought an 11.1 per cent female proportion in the distribution of the seats in the Parliament, and nearly 20 per cent in local government (Vajda 1992; Sebestyén 1995). In interpreting these data, it has to be noted, however, that the attainable ratios of designated groups (women, youth, blue-collars, ethnic minorities, etc.) were centrally prescribed and strictly administered by the local committees of the Communist Party, even in the much-liberated political climate of 1985. Thus the actual ratios never expressed ‘true’ representation of either of the target groups. Rather, the candidates were chosen either because of their expressed loyalty to the Party, or because they were expected to play some ‘buffer-role’ in the community, transmitting diktats from above in a ‘smooth’ and acceptable way. This is also shown by the fact that while women refuse active participation in party politics, they express definite tastes and opinions in the formation of the power structure. This is clearly illustrated by their voting behaviour. Unlike in many of the Western countries, Hungarian women took part in the elections in equal numbers with men. The regular opinion polls of the past years do not indicate any decline in their willingness to maintain their political influence in much more indirect forms. As to the gender differences in party orientations, women seem to favour those political parties which have expressed some commitment to definite reforms in social policy. However, these differences do not appear to be marked enough to arrive at any strong conclusions, which is a ‘natural’ state of affairs in the current rather unsettled political situation. For more details in relation to the elections of 1990, see Fodor (1992).

REFERENCES CSO–Institute of Sociology, HAS (1989) Idôgazdálkadás és munkatevékenységek (Economising with Time and Work), Budapest: Central Statistical Office. —— (1990) A magyar társadalom életmódjának változásai az 1976–77. évi és az 1986–87. évi idômérlegfelvételek alapján (Changes in the Time Use of Hungarian Society, as Reflected in the Time-Budget Surveys of 1976–77 and 1986–87), Budapest: Central Statistical Office. —— (1994a) A nemzetgazdaság munkaerômérlege, 1994. Január 1. (Account of the Labour Force, 1 January 1994), Budapest: Central Statistical Office. —— (1994b) A munkanélküliség és a foglalkoztatottság alakulása (Trends in Employment and Unemployment), Budapest: Central Statistical Office. Einhorn, B. (1991) ‘Where have all the women gone?’, Feminist Review, 39. Fodor, É. 1992) ‘The gender gap in the Hungarian elections of 1990’, manuscript, Department of Sociology, Los Angeles: UCLA. Laky, T. (1995) A munkaerôpiac keresletét és kinálatát alakitó folyamatok (Factors Influencing Demand and Supply on the Labour Market), Budapest: Institute of Labour Studies. Orosz, É. and Szalai, J. (1992) ‘Social policy in Hungary’, in B. Deacon et al. (eds), The New Eastern Europe, London: Sage. Sebestyén, I. (1995) ‘Az 1994-es magyar parlamenti választások képviselôjelöltjeinek társadalmi jellemzôi’ (Social Characteristics of the Candidates of the Parliamentary Elections of 1994), in S. Kurtán, P. Sándor and L. Vass (eds), Magyarország politikai évkönyve, 1995 (Political Yearbook of Hungary, 1995), Budapest: Hungarian Centre of the Foundation for Democracy Studies.

Women and democratization 131 Sík, E. (1981) ‘Munkacsere Tiszaigaron’ (Work-exchange in Tiszaigar), Szociológia, 1. Szalai, J. (1991) ‘Hungary: exit from the state economy’, in M. Kohli et al. (eds), Time for Retirement, New York: Cambridge University Press. Vajda, Å. (1992) ‘Nôk a politikai színfalak mögött?’ (Women Beyond the Political Stage?), Magyar Nôk Lapja, July.

8

Non-standard employment, citizenship and social exclusion in Europe Rosemary Crompton

INTRODUCTION The collapse of state socialism, together with moves towards a Single European Market, reflect current political trends which have moved in the direction of the increased ‘marketization’ of societies, that is, the attempt to give a greater, or freer, rein to ‘market forces’ in the conduct and regulation of human affairs. In the labour market, one outcome of this trend has been an increase in the level of ‘non-standard’ employment. By convention, ‘standard’ employment has been used to describe full-time employment which is engaged in continuously over a working-age lifetime. ‘Non-standard’ employment relates to casual, part-time, and short contract working, as well as selfemployment and outworking. Such employment has served to increase the flexibility of the workforce and, it is argued, economic competitiveness. It has therefore been, to varying degrees, positively encouraged as a policy option by governments, and indeed, has been endorsed in the European Commission White Paper (1994). More negatively, however, non-standard employment is also associated with low wages and job insecurity, and its increase may therefore contribute to rising levels of social exclusion. It is important to recognize that the increase in non-standard forms of employment is not only a consequence of deliberate policy initiatives. Indeed, it might be argued that policy changes in this area are themselves but reflections of deeper structural changes in productive activity associated with the relative decline of manufacturing industry and the implementation of information technology (IT). In industrialized societies, there has been a shift from the predominance of economies driven by manufacturing industries characterized by a mass, relatively homogeneous, semi-skilled workforce, towards economies dominated by employment in services, associated with a more heterogeneous, fragmented workforce. In respect of the former, these ‘idealtypical’ production systems had their organizational correlates. Large-scale productive activities were accompanied by bureaucratic systems of personnel administration and stable organization careers. The subsequent development of flexible production systems, it is argued, has been accompanied by organizational ‘delayering’ and the decline of the long-term, single-organization, career. These developments have been summarized as the shift from ‘Fordism’ to ‘post-Fordism’.1 In Britain, employment in services has grown from 53 per cent of total employment in 1971, to 73 per cent in 1993 (Employment Gazette 1994). Developments in technology have been of considerable importance in facilitating flexible systems of production

Employment, citizenship and exclusion in Europe 133 and work organization in services, which, by their very nature, often have to be available outside the ‘standard hours’ associated with the ‘standard worker’. Furthermore (although this is not true of all service workers), the product of service work – the service – requires the exercise of different qualities and skills, often of an interpersonal nature (Hochschild 1983) compared with those associated with manual and low-level work in manufacturing industry. During an industrial era (in the West) dominated by large-scale manufacturing industry, the regulatory systems which emerged (sometimes described as ‘mature’ systems of industrial relations and collective bargaining; see Ross and Hartman 1960) tended to be dominated by those established in the leading manufacturing industries, although there were, of course, significant cross-national variations in this regard. With the shift to the service economy, the life chances associated with Fordist employment structures (stable jobs and relatively predictable career structures) are increasingly threatened. Innovations in information technology have been essential to the development of ‘lean’ production systems – stripped of management jargon, ‘lean’ production means fewer workers. Technological improvements are part of a package of innovations which are argued to be essential in order to achieve economic competitiveness (Womack et al. 1990). For example, ‘lean’ supply chains (‘just-in-time’ or kanban systems), dependent upon the information supplied by new technology, are central to the development of lean production. These systems have revolutionized not just the organization of production, but also major service sector industries such as retail, and the hotel and catering industry. In these industries, they have both encouraged the expansion of new professional services associated with the design of new information systems, and have also facilitated the sophisticated deployment of non-skilled labour, often hired as ‘non-standard’ workers. Here, ‘just-in-time’ systems are also accompanied by a ‘just-in-time’ labour force. It may be argued, therefore, that the increase in non-standard employment and associated labour-market flexibility reflects a relatively permanent shift in the organization of productive activity, and indeed, in the nature of society. It has also been argued that the idea of ‘standard’ work – of permanent, full-time, lifetime employment – is itself an anomaly, as such work represents only a short-term and temporary phase in the social evolution of productive activity. Pahl (1984: 56), for example, has argued that large-scale manufacturing employment is ‘a fossil marking a particular stage in the development of industrial capitalism’. He argues that in the case of most households, more characteristic of the past, and increasingly characteristic of the present, are strategies for ‘getting by’ which include casual and intermittent employment and self-employment, together with multiple job holding. This assertion begs the question, however, as to whether part-time, short-term and casualized employment was and is the preferred model for employees themselves – and their households. In fact, the chronicle of trade union history and working-class resistance more generally suggests that, wherever possible, employees have struggled to build market shelters, that is, protections against casual, short-term, short-hours work. One paradoxical outcome of such struggles, however, is that securing advantages for one group of employees has often been associated with the exclusion of other (usually ascriptive) categories of worker – in particular, ‘disadvantaged’ workers such as recent immigrants, ethnic groups, age categories, and women – thus intensifying

134

Citizenship and gender

the segmentation of the labour force (Rubery 1978; Freedman 1984). However, since World War II, the further development of what Marshall ([1948] 1963) describes as ‘social’ citizenship – that is, the development of ‘basic human equalities’ associated with the provision of state services such as education, and the associated development of welfare state institutions – has, in many countries, relatively improved the situation of disadvantaged groups. As we have seen, it has been increasingly suggested that the structures of labour-force regulation associated with employment protection have also led to labour-market rigidities which have had a negative impact on economic performance, and in a similar vein, it has been argued that welfare provisions have resulted not only in a fiscal crisis of the state but also contributed to the development of a workless (and work-shy) ‘underclass’ (Murray 1984). These are large issues and it is impossible to deal with all of them here. Rather, I will focus on one particular aspect of the struggle for market shelters and the historic emergence of ‘standard’ employment: that is, the exclusion of married women and the subsequent development of the ‘male breadwinner’ model of the gender division of labour. I will subsequently address the related question of the development of citizenship rights and women’s partial exclusion from them – not least because of the historical intertwining of social citizenship and the male breadwinner model of the division of labour. I will relate the discussion of both of these topics to current debates concerning the possibility of counterbalancing the exclusionary tendencies of increasing ‘marketization’ through the development of Europe-wide labour standards. It will be stressed that given the emphasis upon the necessity to develop rights for citizens-as-workers, we should be conscious of the possibility of perpetuating existing exclusionary practices deriving from the fact that ‘workers’ (in particular, women) are not necessarily in paid employment. Thus we need to take seriously the feminist argument that our conceptions of ‘work’ should be extended beyond employment, as well as changes in the nature of employment and in the male breadwinner model of the division of labour. THE RISEAND FALLOF THE ‘MALE BREADWINNER’ Women have always made a significant contribution to material production. However, with the coming of industrialism there also developed the ideology of ‘separate spheres’, in which the ‘natural’ sphere of women was deemed to be that of the home and family, whereas that of men was employment and the market (Davidoff and Hall 1987). Beck (1992) has described this as a ‘feudal’ pattern of gender relations and division of labour: ‘How . . . jobs are distributed – and here lies the feudal heart of industrial society – is not a matter of discussion. In principle one’s fate is decided in the cradle even in industrial society, lifelong housework or making a living by fitting in with the labour market’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995: 27). This model has (to varying extents and at different times in different countries) been reinforced by the deliberate exclusion of women from paid work – in particular, from better-paid and higher-status employment. Trade unions in particular had fought for a the principle of the ‘family wage’ – that is, a wage sufficient to support a working man and his family – and the demand for a family wage had, as its corollary, the assumption that women should not take ‘men’s’ jobs.

Employment, citizenship and exclusion in Europe 135 From the 1960s onwards, second-wave feminists have argued that this historical trajectory was an outcome of patriarchal exclusion – patriarchy being defined as a system through which men ensure the subordination of women. Hartmann (1976) argued that the exclusion of women from better-paying jobs and the professions denied them the means to support an independent household, thus ensuring men’s access to female labour in the domestic sphere – and moreover, the state was seen to be an active participant in this process (see also Walby 1986). In contrast, others argued that, in reality, men did not always stand to gain from the exclusion of their wives and other women from paid work, and that the conflict over the ‘family wage’ might more appropriately be regarded as manifestations of a class, rather than a patriarchal, struggle (Humphries 1982). However, whatever the merits of this debate, it nevertheless remains the case that the ‘standard employee’ – in respect of systems of employment regulation, organizational structuring, trade union organization, and so on – has historically been assumed to be a male full-time worker. This has had consequences for the development of work-related institutional arrangements, as well as the sociological concepts developed to analyse them. These assumptions persisted in economic sociology until the 1970s. In the case of the British (and other) welfare state(s), for example, social provision was explicitly organized on the assumption that (married) women would be provided for by men. Similarly, most studies of ‘work’ as employment took as their subject the male (usually manufacturing) employee (Brown 1976). However, since the 1950s and 1960s, there has been a growth of married women’s employment in all Western countries, which has often been associated with the expansion of ‘non-standard’ – particularly part-time – employment. In the 1980s, women accounted for most of the increase in the labour force in the European Member States, particularly women in the middle (working) age groups. By 1990, 65 per cent of women aged 25–49 years were in employment in the EU countries, an increase of 5 per cent over 1983 figures. The growth of part-time work among women was also considerable, and showed extensive intercountry variation – from over 50 per cent of working women in the Netherlands to under 10 per cent in Greece. It has been argued that the growth of part-time employment for women has, in effect, perpetuated a modified form of the male breadwinner model, and that, therefore, the actual significance of the numerical increase in women’s employment may be discounted. This suggestion cannot be discounted absolutely, but the extent of variation in part-time work suggests that more complex factors are at work, reflecting national variations in labour markets. Nevertheless, recent data show a persisting tendency for women to work shorter hours than men (EU 1992, 1995). Despite this consistent trend, however, there is also increasing evidence of the entry of women into full-time work (often associated with entry into higher-level jobs: Harrop and Moss 1994). It is also apparent that many kinds of non-standard work are expanding rapidly, and that the single-wage household is in decline (Watson 1994; Beatson 1995; Rodgers and Rodgers 1990). ‘NON-STANDARD’EMPLOYMENTAND SOCIAL EXCLUSION As Rodgers and Rodgers (1990) have observed: ‘Atypical work is more easily defined by what it is not than what it is’, and may include ‘temporary, casual and part-time work, various forms of disguised or illegal wage employment, homeworking and

136

Citizenship and gender

moonlighting, self-employment and outworking’. This kind of employment has offered little by way of stability and security, and, as we have seen, the ‘family wage’, and the ‘standard’ employment with which it was associated, was a central element of a strategy pursued by male-dominated trade union movements in order to build market shelters for their members. Thus ‘non-standard’ employment has always been associated with a degree of economic disadvantage by comparison with ‘standard’, and its (re-)growth may contribute to rising levels of social exclusion. Short-term contracts and self-employment are intrinsically associated with a degree of employment insecurity. Part-time work may or may not be insecure, but it has been demonstrably associated with lower rates of pay than full-time work (Rubery et al. 1994; Gornick and Jacobs 1996). Despite these disadvantages, such forms of work have been promoted as making a contribution to economic growth through an increase in labour flexibility (particularly external flexibility) and thus competitiveness. Whether or not long-run economic improvements are thus achieved is still debated, but there can be little doubt as to the increase in non-standard work in all European countries. Reliable comparisons are difficult, largely because national variations in family structures and the regulation of the employment relationship mean that there is considerable variation in the extent of different types of non-standard work between different countries. In addition, definitions – for example, of part-time work – can be non-comparable. Thus, for example, although there has been an increase in part-time employment in most countries – from 17 per cent (1979) to 33 per cent (1992) in the Netherlands, and from 16 per cent (1979) to 23 per cent (1992) in the UK, for example – in other countries in Europe such as Italy (5–6 per cent), Portugal (7 per cent), and Spain (5–6 per cent), the level has remained low, and either static or showing only a slight increase (OECD 1994: table C). Temporary work (i.e. interim and fixed-term contracts) has been growing in France and the FRG, but not particularly rapidly in the UK. However, self-employment has been growing in the UK and in Italy, but not in France, the FRG and the Netherlands (Rodgers 1989). These differences mean that it is difficult to make Europe-wide generalizations as to the impact of non-standard work. However, there can be little doubt which European country provides the best-case scenario or ‘social experiment’ as far as flexibility and non-standard work is concerned, and that is the UK, and we will use this country as our example here. In Britain, the Conservative government has since 1979 been committed to a radical market philosophy, promoting increased labour-market flexibility (Beatson 1995). Thus successive Conservative governments have sought to remove or privatize welfare protection and regulatory institutions, to stimulate the market for labour and skills by reducing rates of income tax at the upper levels, and to shift the balance between direct and indirect taxation. Employment protections have been reduced for all categories of employee, and in Britain these have been in any case lower for part-time workers.² There is also a wage limit on National Insurance contributions (£56 in 1994) which has encouraged the growth of short-hours part-time working. (The election of the Labour Government in 1997 has somewhat modified these policies.) The political decision to go down the road of deregulation and marketization has resulted in a much greater extent of social polarization in Britain than in other countries which have not taken the same path. The absolute increase in the inequality index in the UK between 1977 and 1990 was 10 per cent, whereas the highest in comparator

Employment, citizenship and exclusion in Europe 137 countries was 4 per cent, and ‘over the period 1979 to 1992 the poorest 20–30 per cent of the population failed to benefit from economic growth’ (Rowntree 1995: 15). Critics of policies such as those of the British Government, therefore, have argued that the growth of non-standard employment has been a major contributor to increasing social exclusion, and the recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation report into income and wealth (1995) identified its growth as one of the factors contributing to the increasing polarization of material standards in Britain, leading to the growth of ‘marginalized groups’, with ‘little or no stake in the prosperity of the country’, with a consequent threat to the social fabric of society. The forms of atypical work showing the greatest growth in the UK are part-time work and self-employment (Beatson 1995).³ However, the expansion of part-time work, which is largely feminized, has contributed to the polarization of ‘work-rich’ and ‘work-poor’ households. There has been an increase in two-earner households (where one person is likely to work part-time), but also an increase in no-earner households, that is, households entirely dependent on state benefits (Rowntree 1995). Self-employment is a highly precarious form of work, given the very high rate of turnover among very small firms. Up to a quarter of those entering self-employment do so from unemployment (Meager 1991), and qualitative research has shown that even when the self-employed ‘make a go of it’, they tend to work very long hours for only low rates of return. Nevertheless, despite the British example, the need for labour market flexibility, together with the associated growth of non-standard employment, has been identified in the EU White Paper (1994) as necessary to the development of a more competitive European economy. The aim has been to intensify competition within a Single European Market, and the necessity to remove national restrictions on trade, exchange and the movement of labour has been emphasized. The need for both external and internal flexibility of labour has been stressed in creating opportunities for the unemployed, through the improvement of training, geographical mobility, removal of labour-market restrictions, and so on. Thus it might be argued that the long-term impact of EU policy will be, via such attempts to promote flexibility, actually to enhance levels of social exclusion. However, moves towards increasing levels of competition within the single market have been accompanied by other EU strategies to try to achieve a level playing field within it. These include measures such as movement towards fixed exchange rates and EMU, but, more particularly, there have been sustained efforts to try to limit (within Europe) national policy options based upon a cheap labour supply – in other words, to prevent ‘social dumping’ (i.e. the movement of jobs to lower-wage economies). Thus, for example, there have been a number of attempts to harmonize upwards part-time and temporary employment entitlements within the EU. To date, efforts to move towards universal labour standards within Europe have not been successful, but nevertheless, to the extent to which there can be said to be an emerging ‘European’ social policy, it has been developed within the sphere of employment and employment-related rights (Foden 1994). Thus progress has been made in areas such as equality of the sexes, health and safety, protections for migrant workers, and in the official recognition of the ‘social partners’ in industry. Creations such as the European Social Fund and the European Regional Development Fund have also been instituted with the aim of fostering economic and social cohesion within the EU.

138

Citizenship and gender

It may be argued, therefore, that contradictory processes are in operation at the European level. On the one hand, there are pressures to increase the level of competition per se – a process which might be anticipated to increase levels of social exclusion through the growth of flexible and atypical work. On the other hand, however, the development of the European worker-as-citizen, together with his or her associated rights, has contributed to the development of ‘a model of “organised” or “managerial” capitalism far removed from the neo-liberal version’ (Foden 1994: 389) – a theme which is emerging from a number of quarters (Clark 1995). Pressures towards deregulation and ‘marketization’ are counterbalanced by attempts to establish universal workers’ rights – in particular, to achieve the same kinds of protections for ‘non-standard’ workers as for ‘standard’. In an optimistic vein, it might be suggested that these parallel developments serve to reinforce the message of Polanyi’s statement as to the impossibility of the ‘self-regulating’ market: To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity ‘labour power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s [sic] labour power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity . . . attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. (Polanyi 1957: 73) The argument that, in an industrial society, the establishment of rights in association with employment is a significant source of social solidarity has a long history in the social sciences. Durkheim argued that the division of labour would be a source of ‘organic’ solidarity reflecting interdependent differentiation, and followed up his theoretical arguments with prescriptions as to the nature of employment-related collective organization (Durkheim 1964). This ‘optimistic’ vision may be contrasted with the more pessimistic predictions of both Marx and Weber concerning the consequences of the development of ‘work’ as employment in industrial societies. Marx argued that the capitalist division of labour would lead to increasing tensions contributing to the development of class conflict (Braverman 1974), and Weber was pessimistic as to the ‘iron-hard’ cage of societal development consequent upon bureaucratic rationalization. However, despite their radically different views, what was common to the classic theorists was that their perspective on the gender division of labour was imbued with the assumptions of the ‘male breadwinner’ model. Durkheim, for example, argued that ‘Today . . . the woman leads a completely different existence from that of the man . . . the two great functions of the psychic life are dissociated, [in] that one of the sexes takes care of affective functions and the other of intellectual functions’ (1964: 60). Similarly, Weber’s ideal-typical model of the bureaucratic official rested upon the sharp (physical and emotional) separation of the bureau from the constraints of the domestic sphere, which closely corresponds to the bourgeois male breadwinner model of the division of labour (Savage and Witz 1992). In short, social

Employment, citizenship and exclusion in Europe 139 science analyses, both classic and contemporary, have rested upon the assumption of the ‘naturalness’ of the male breadwinner model. As this model is in the process of transformation, a process of reconceptualization is required – a process which will also serve to inform contemporary discussions of employment regulation and its role in combating the exclusionary tendencies of non-standard work. Both feminist commentaries on citizenship, as well as on the wider debate relating to the nature of ‘work’, provide useful insights here. WOMEN, WELFARE, CITIZENSHIPAND ‘WORK’ In an influential critique, Pateman (1988) has argued that the social contract was in essence fraternal, in that the brothers united in order to usurp the power of the patriarch – including his power over women. Maleness was seen as constitutive of citizenship, and women could not be citizens because they were not men (Meehan 1993: 22). In contractarian thought, women’s contribution was seen as being through their role as mothers, rather than as citizens. As we have seen, this ideological identification of women with the domestic sphere moved almost seamlessly towards the justification of their exclusion from paid employment itself – and indeed, the public sphere more generally. Feminist thinking has focused upon the position of women in relation to different political perspectives on the nature of citizenship, as well as both its political and economic dimensions (Siim 1995). Here we will focus upon one aspect of the citizenship debate of particular relevance to our discussion: Marshall’s model of social citizenship. In brief, Marshall developed a threefold conceptualization of citizenship rights: civil, political, and social. Civil citizenship related to individual freedoms, political citizenship to the franchise and the right to hold political office, and social citizenship – which, he argued, was primarily a twentieth-century development – described ‘the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to . . . live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society’ (Marshall [1948] 1963: 74). ‘Social citizenship’, therefore, has been closely associated with the development of the welfare state. Marshall argued that, as a consequence of these developments, in the twentieth century ‘citizenship and the capitalist class system have been at war’ (ibid. 115), that is, that the necessary inequalities stemming from the operation of the capitalist market would be less likely to lead to conflict if all citizens were equipped with a minimum of social rights. Marshall’s conceptualization of social citizenship is explicitly linked to employment. The right to work (i.e. to follow the occupation of one’s choice) is fundamental to civil citizenship, and the extension of political citizenship in the nineteenth century cleared the way for the growth of trade unionism, which Marshall describes as ‘a sort of secondary industrial citizenship’ (ibid. 116). During the twentieth century, the trade union movement has, to varying degrees in different nation-states, played a key role in the growth and development of social citizenship. However, as Pateman has argued, the linking of social citizenship to paid employment (women acquiring rights only as wives and/or mothers) means that the extension of social citizenship was not, as Marshall suggested, universal.

140

Citizenship and gender

Thus the kinds of welfareist (or ‘corporatist’) deals which were achieved in many countries during the high-water mark of the post-war consensus (Therborn 1983), and which further extended social ‘citizenship’, were almost invariably linked to the contours of the occupational structure. As we have seen, in the UK, this was recognized by Marshall in his identification of the importance of ‘industrial citizenship’ for the development of ‘social citizenship’. In the case of state welfare, the structure of ‘corporatist’ welfare states such as Germany and France was closely linked to employment (Esping-Andersen 1990). ‘Universalist’ (or Nordic) welfare states embrace all ‘citizens’ and are not as closely tied to paid work. However, Nordic welfare states were initially constructed on a model of social insurance linked to employment (Liera 1992) – as was the British – and (particularly in the case of Sweden and Denmark) policies of gender equality have been explicitly tied to increasing levels of paid employment among women. Thus paid work has remained as a major route to welfare benefits, and many citizenship rights are closely tied to employment. This close association between employment and the rights of social citizenship still persists at both the national and international levels. For example, Meehan (1993: 147) has argued that ‘in so far as citizenship has a Community (EU) dimension, citizens are citizens-as-workers’. However, in institutional terms, the formulation of ‘citizen-asworker’ rights has rested upon the male breadwinner model of family and employment, and women have gained access to many of the rights of social citizenship as mothers and/or wives. Thus women have not only maintained social reproduction but, in part through their dependent status, have also become increasingly available for more ‘flexible’ forms of paid work. Furthermore, the efforts of women to achieve a real, rather than a formal, equality with men within the sphere of employment have taken place within an institutional framework constructed on ‘male breadwinner’ principles, leading to further strains and tensions. Nevertheless, although postwar social provision was constructed in relation to a ‘standard’ employment model, there is no necessary reason why these provisions cannot be renewed and adapted so as to be more appropriate to changing forms of ‘work’ and employment. However, this process of reconstruction should also incorporate a broader understanding of the nature of ‘work’, which extends beyond paid employment as such. Returning to the feminist debates of the 1970s, it is important to recognize the interconnections between all kinds of ‘work’, including work in the household, caring work, voluntary work, and so on. At the level of the family and household, the development of institutions to reflect and incorporate changes in both households and employment patterns would require the material recognition of caring work for what it is – work. This does not mean that the household will cease to take responsibility for its members, but rather that institutional reforms should recognize and reflect the work of caring. Meehan (1993) has suggested that there are grounds for some (slight) optimism as to the EU’s potential for bringing about these changes. Scandinavian countries provide concrete examples of the development of policies which explicitly recognize the material value of caring work, as well as treating domestic caring as a joint, rather than a female, responsibility. In most Scandinavian countries, for example, caring work within the household gives entitlements to pension rights for the carer (Liera 1992). Caring work can also be provided outside the household, generating new occupations. Household and non-household provision are not mutually exclusive. It should be made clear that

Employment, citizenship and exclusion in Europe 141 what is not being suggested here is some form of ‘guaranteed income’, caring ‘topup’, or other form of neo-Speenhamlandism.4 History has shown that the effect of such strategies has been to drive down the level of wages and thus increase poverty. As Pixley (1993) has argued, recent attempts to break the cash/work nexus have invariably created permanently marginalized groups.5 Although the ‘citizen-as-worker’ model embodied in the Social Charter has focused upon individuals rather than families, Community legislation has nevertheless been used in respect of individual Member States to the advantage of women as a whole. For example, both Denmark and the UK have had to amend their national legislation to make explicit the right of equal pay for work of equal value. The Court of Justice has also sought to remove discrimination against married women. For example, in the UK, an allowance for the care of dependent relatives which was payable to men and single women, but not to married women, was extended to married women following a judgement that married women’s employment was subject to interruption as a consequence of caring responsibilities. This judgement, therefore, accepts that married women, as well as single women and men, are likely to need to earn their living through paid work. In a number of important directives and judgements, therefore, EU rulings have led to changes in legislation which both recognize the structured disadvantage of women in the labour market, as well as the passing of the male breadwinner model.6 Furthermore, as we have seen in a previous section, action on labour standards has been directed towards the establishment of similar rights for ‘non-standard’ as for ‘standard’ workers. Although, therefore, (male) workers have historically struggled to establish and protect ‘standard’ employment, it might be argued that the further development of ‘non-standard’ work is essential in order to adapt to the erosion of the male breadwinner model. The ‘feudal’ model of gender relations associated with the model of standard employment (Beck 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995) requires that work is organized on different principles in the public and private spheres. In the private sphere, work is not associated with a wage and is often carried out because of the demands of love and affection, rather than of the market. Competitiveness and individual self-interest are, supposedly, non-motivators within the domestic sphere. Traditional family life is incompatible with market principles and, according to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, growing individuation (associated, among other things, with the increasing ‘marketization’ of society) will increasingly threaten the ‘traditional’ industrial family as women increasingly exercise their rights to employment. In any case, unregulated marketization has a negative impact on private, domestic lives. For example, in Britain individuals who have been able to stay in paid employment are under considerable pressure to extend their working hours, and British men, in particular, have the longest hours of employment in Europe (Fagan 1994). Thus, in a more positive vein, the growth of non-standard employment might be argued to be not a potential source of social exclusion, but rather, essential to the development of the employment/family interface beyond the ‘male breadwinner’ model in order to accommodate to the changes in social mores associated with changes in gender roles and the family life cycle. The development of non-standard work might be seen as an important element in the creation of new institutions and practices in order to facilitate social integration, and, perhaps even more importantly, ensure social reproduction. For example, an entitlement to employment at reduced hours, without

142

Citizenship and gender

loss of status and with employment protection, is one way in which child-rearing or other caring responsibilities may be combined with paid employment – for either parent. It is not being suggested that a standard set of solutions can simply be located and applied independently of national and local contexts. National systems of regulation still have an important impact. Nevertheless, increasing globalization and internationalization have signified the need for new institutions, as is gradually being recognized within the EU. It would have to be admitted that to date, such attempts have not met with any great measure of success – as the UK Conservative government’s opting out of the Maastricht protocol has demonstrated (Hall 1994) – but nevertheless, this does not remove the imperative of continuing to attempt to develop them (Sengenberger and Campbell 1994). Thus the employment conditions of non-standard work should be ‘normalized’ as far as is possible, and such employment should be associated with national insurance benefits, transferable pension rights, and so on. CONCLUDING REMARKS In this chapter, I have discussed a number of trends and developments which are in the process of restructuring the contours of ‘work’. Among other things, these changes have resulted in an increase in levels of ‘non-standard’ employment. The growth of non-standard employment is frequently associated with low wages, precariousness, poor working conditions, and so on. It may, therefore, contribute to rising levels of social exclusion. However, at the European level, its expansion has been accompanied by attempts to create, through the EU, labour standards which would mitigate these tendencies. Thus the social protections which have been associated with ‘standard’ employment might also be given to ‘non-standard’ work. Contrary, therefore, to those who have argued that the ‘work society’ is in decline (e.g. Offe 1985), the structure of work-as-employment might still provide a framework of social provision. However, the rights and so forth associated with ‘standard’ employment were developed in relation to the ‘male breadwinner’ model of the division of labour, and, as a consequence, women have (to varying degrees) been historically excluded from the employment-related citizenship deal. It is important, therefore, that as well as developing labour standards in respect of non-standard work, the notion of ‘work’ should, as feminists have argued, be extended beyond employment to incorporate other forms – in particular, the work of caring. We should also remember that men can care, as well as women. As a recent report has argued: Life is organised around an implicit ‘social contract’. Its two components, the gender contract and the employment contract, define the current division of family and labour market roles. Within the gender contract women assume the bulk of family care and domestic functions, while men are ascribed primary responsibility for the family’s . . . financial well-being. The employment contract reinforces this division of labour by defining as its norm the sole breadwinner in continuous fulltime lifelong employment. The social contract conflicts with the new reality of men’s and women’s lives. (emphasis added) (OECD 1994: 19)

Employment, citizenship and exclusion in Europe 143 There are a number of pressures, from the political right as well as among ‘communitarians’, for a return to the male breadwinner model. However, as we have seen, there are a number of other reasons, including both the changing manner in which paid work is organized, as well as the likelihood that women will wish to retain the rather modest gains they have achieved in respect of employment, which suggest that the universal ‘standard employment’ model is unlikely to be the norm in the future. In some European countries, particularly the UK, there has been a sustained political attempt to remove, rather than strengthen or increase, the social protections associated with ‘work’, and increased social polarization, accompanied by an expansion of nonstandard work, has been the inevitable consequence. It may be the case, as Pahl (1984) has argued, that in most societies there has been a historical predominance of flexible and insecure rather than ‘standard’ forms of employment. However, the possible return to previous conditions suggested by the growth of non-standard work should not imply a return to the ‘bad old days’, which, if the contemporary UK example is anything to go by, would seem to be implied by the removal of social provisions. History may indeed repeat itself, but we should be able to learn from it. In addition to these lessons from the past, the present has delivered new problems. The speeding up of information flows, together with the enhanced capacity to transfer capital and resources between different regions and nation-states, has enormously increased both the flexibility of larger organizations as well as the possibilities for growth of multinational and global companies. Such companies have capacities for action which transcend nation-state boundaries, and there are very real fears of their potential to move both jobs and capital, thus destabilizing national economies and employment structures. This kind of power places implicit (and sometimes explicit) constraints on national regulatory agencies. Thus there is a growing body of argument to the effect that global ‘marketization’ has generated new projects of universalism, in which non-national international organizations such as the EU will play an increasingly important part: that is, that the ‘intermediary organizations’ identified as so important by Buchmann (in this volume) are in fact emerging around the area of work and employment regulation (Alexander 1995; Hyman and Ferner 1994). ‘Work’ of all kinds remains as the most important determinant of ‘life chances’ for the majority of the population. As we have seen, it is work-as-employment which has been, in practice, the major source of the emergence of a European citizenship and associated rights. However, it is necessary to recognize that, as work and employment change, so will the manner in which these life chances and social rights are constructed, and our economic sociology has to reflect this. NOTES 1.

‘Fordism’ and the dominance of manual trade unions has also been linked to Keynesian economic policies of demand management and other forms of macroeconomic intervention (Harvey 1990). Many criticisms can justifiably be made of such binary characterizations – that Ford did not actually organize his factories along ‘Fordist’ lines; that supposedly ‘post-Fordist’ economies are in fact bastions of mass production (Sayer 1989) – but these do not negate the use of the term as a heuristic device.

144 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

Citizenship and gender

Until a recent ruling in the House of Lords (March 1994) part-timers working less than 16 hours a week required five years’ continuous service with the same employer before they were entitled to employment protection. As Beatson and others have pointed out, the relative weakness of employment protection in the UK means that there is little need to have recourse to short-term contracts. ‘Speenhamland’ describes a nineteenth-century system of poor relief in Britain in which parishes were obliged to supplement low wages to a level pegged to the price of bread. (Agricultural) employers used the opportunity to reduce further the level of wage rates. For more discussion, see Polanyi (1957). Pixley reviews evidence from a series of attempts to break the cash/work (or employment) nexus – guaranteed income schemes, communes, and worker cooperatives – which either collapsed, and/or were associated with economic marginalization. Pixley argues that work as employment remains significant both as a source of social mobilization and as a system for the allocation of material rewards. For further by way of concrete examples, see Meehan (1993: ch. 6).

REFERENCES Alexander, J. (1995) ‘Modern, anti, post, neo’, New Left Review, 210, March/April. Beatson, M. (1995) ‘Progress towards a flexible labour market’, Employment Gazette, February, 55–66. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1995) The Normal Chaos of Love, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Brown, R. (1976) ‘Women as employees’, in S. Allen and D.L. Barker (eds), Dependence and Exploitation in Work and Marriage, London: Longman. Clark, J. (1995) ‘Review article’, Work, Employment and Society, 9 (3), 593–605. Davidoff, L. and Hall, C. (1987) Family Fortunes, London: Hutchinson. Durkheim, E. (1964) The Division of Labor, New York: Free Press. Employment Gazette (1994) Historical Supplement No. 4, October. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (ed.) (1993) Changing Classes, London: Sage. EU (1992, 1995) Bulletin on Women and Employment in the EU, Brussels: EU. European Commission (1994) Growth, Competitiveness, Employment: The Challenges and Ways Forward into the 21st Century, White Paper, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Fagan, C. (1994) ‘Who wants to work nine to five?’, paper presented at the Work, Employment and Society Conference, University of Kent. Foden, D. (1994) ‘Restructuring at the European Community level’, in W. Sengenberger and D. Campbell (eds), Creating Economic Opportunities, Geneva: ILO. Freedman, M. (1984) ‘The search for shelters’, in K. Thompson (ed.), Work Employment and Unemployment, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Gornick, J.C. and Jacobs, J.A. (1996) ‘A cross-national analysis of the wages of part-time workers’, Work, Employment and Society, 10 (1), 1–27. Hall, M. (1994) ‘Industrial relations and the social dimension of European integration’, in R. Hyman and A. Ferner (eds), New Frontiers in European Industrial Relations, Oxford: Blackwell. Harrop, A. and Moss, P. (1994) ‘Working parents: trends in the 1980s’, Employment Gazette, October, 343–51. Hartmann, H. (1976) ‘Capitalism, patriarchy and job segregation by sex’, in M. Blaxall and B. Reagan (eds), Women and the Workplace, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell. Hochschild, A. (1983) The Managed Heart, Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Employment, citizenship and exclusion in Europe 145 Humphries, J. (1982) ‘Class struggle and the persistence of the working-class family’, in A. Giddens and D. Held (eds), Classes, Power and Conflict, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hyman, R. and Ferner, A. (eds) (1994) New Frontiers in European Industrial Relations, Oxford: Blackwell. Liera, A. (1992) Welfare States and Working Mothers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, T.H. ([1948] 1963) ‘Citizenship and social class’, in T.H. Marshall, Sociology at the Crossroads, London: Heinemann. Meager, N. (1991) Self-employment in the United Kingdom, Institute of Manpower Studies. Meehan, E. (1993) Citizenship and the European Community, London: Sage. Murray, C. (1984) Losing Ground, New York: Basic Books. OECD (1994) Women and Structural Change, Paris: OECD. Offe, C. (1985) ‘“Work” – a central sociological category?’, in J. Keane (ed.), Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Pahl, R. (1984) Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Blackwell. Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity Press. Pixley, J. (1993) Citizenship and Employment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press. Rodgers, G. (ed.) (1989) Urban Poverty and the Labour Market: Access to Jobs and Incomes in Asian and Latin American Cities, Geneva: International Labour Office. Rodgers, G. and Rodgers, J. (1990) Precarious Jobs in Labour Market Regulation: The Growth of Atypical Employment in Western Europe, Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies. Ross, A.M. and Hartman, P.T. (1960) Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict, New York: Wiley. Rowntree (1995) Inquiry into Income and Wealth, York: Rowntree Foundation. Rubery, J. (1978) ‘Structured labour markets, worker organization, and low pay’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2, 17–36. Rubery, J., Horrell, S. and Burchell, B. (1994) ‘Part-time work and gender inequality in the labour market’, in A.M. Scott (ed.), Gender Segregation and Social Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Savage, M. and Witz, A. (eds) (1992) Gender and Bureaucracy, Oxford: Blackwell. Sayer, A. (1989) ‘Postfordism in question’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, November/December, 667–95. Sengenberger, W. and Campbell, D. (eds) (1994) Creating Economic Opportunities, Geneva: ILO. Siim, B. (1995) ‘New dilemmas in the theory and practice of women’s citizenship’, paper presented at the Second ESA conference, Budapest. Therborn, G. (1983) ‘Why some classes are more successful than others’, New Left Review, 138, March/April. Walby, S. (1986) Patriarchy at Work, Cambridge: Polity Press. Watson, G. (1994) ‘The flexible workforce’, Employment Gazette, July, 239–47. Womack, J.P., Jones, D.T. and Roos, D. (1990) The Machine that Changed the World, New York: Macmillan.

Part III

Nationalism and ethnicity

9 Multiculturalism and political integration in European cities John Rex

Some ten years ago I set out to explore what could be meant by the ideal of multiculturalism in democratic Western European Societies (Rex 1986). Subsequently, I set out this ideal in a paper to a conference of European social scientists held in the University of Warwick, the papers for which were collected in a volume entitled Ethnic Mobilization in a Multi-Cultural Europe (Rex and Drury 1994). What these papers showed was that there were important objections made by these European social scientists to the practice, and to some extent to the ideal, of multiculturalism. As a result, it was decided to launch a series of studies of multicultural practice in large European cities in the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland. The focus was on large cities, because it was thought that it was at this level more than any other that decisions were being taken regarding the nature of institutions set up to deal with the problems of immigrant ethnic minorities and their relation to host societies. This research is still in progress and at various stages of development, but progress reports were published in a special issue of the journal Innovation in 1996 (Rex 1996b). THE IDEALAND THE PRACTICE OF MULTICULTURALISM In my original lecture I made the following points: 1. Democratic societies in Western Europe had to take two decisions about their relation with immigrant ethnic minorities. The first was that of ensuring that immigrants had equality of opportunity in their countries of settlement; the second was that of whether or not their separate cultures and forms of social organization were to be tolerated or encouraged rather than suppressed. A democratic multicultural society was seen as one which both insisted on equality of opportunity and tolerated or encouraged cultural diversity. 2. Obviously this was not intended as a description of actual societies. There were some which did not allow immigrant minorities equality of opportunity, but did allow for the cultural diversity of inferior groups; there were some which, while being strongly committed to equality of opportunity, were also committed to assimilationism and the suppression of cultural diversity; and, of course, there were movements in most societies which rejected the very presence of immigrant ethnic minorities, attacked them, or demanded their exclusion or repatriation.

150

Nationalism and ethnicity

Logically there was a fourth alternative, namely, that in which immigrants were offered neither equality of opportunity nor the recognition of their separate cultures. That this alternative rarely existed was due to the fact that the recognition of cultural diversity often provided convenient markers for inequality. 3. If the ideal of encouraging both equality of opportunity and cultural diversity were adopted, it seemed that two sets of institutions had to exist: first, those which promoted equality of opportunity for all individuals; and second, those which governed the more intimate aspects of the lives of the separate ethnic communities. As I put it, the notion of a multicultural society seemed to involve the idea of two separate cultural domains: on the one hand, that of the shared public political culture based on the idea of equality of opportunity; and on the other, that of the separate cultures of different ethnic groups, involving the speaking of different languages and the practice of different religions as well as having different family practices and folk customs. 4. This exposition of the ideal of democratic and egalitarian multiculturalism, and the notion of two sets of institutions or two cultural domains, clearly involved practical difficulties. Those committed to the idea of equality feared that the toleration of cultural diversity would permit inequality and, more generally, the violation of human rights; those committed to the values of the separate communities were often not willing to confine their range of moral interests to a private and communal sphere; and, not least, there were certain institutions, especially those of the school system, which seemed necessarily to have to straddle both spheres. 5. It was not to be expected, in any case, that national governments subject to their own indigeneous constituency would, out of benevolence, seek to foster either equality of opportunity for immigrants or to recognize their separate cultures. Rather the realization of these ideals was dependent upon ethnic mobilization and the ability of the minority communities to demand and fight for their realization. The recognition of cultural diversity therefore had a double role. On the one hand, it was a goal to be fought for; on the other it was an essential means to the realization of both the ideals of equality of opportunity and cultural diversity. CRITICISMS OFTHE MULTICULTURALIDEALAND MULTICULTURALPRACTICE Criticisms of the ideal and practice were as follows: 1. The first important criticism came from those who were strongly committed to the ideology of the modernizing nation-state. Wieviorka (1994), for example, pointed out that the very idea of ethnicity had no place in the discourse of such states. Implicitly, when we spoke of ethnicity we were talking about inferior people, rather than citizens with equal rights. 2. Such a criticism obviously rested on a liberal universalist political theory. It made no reference to social classes and class struggle. Thus it was to be expected that there would also be a more Marxist type of criticism. This had been advanced some twenty years previously by Castles and Kosack (1973) who saw a danger that the

Multiculturalism and integration in Europe 151

3.

4.

5.

6.

employment of immigrants and consequent immigrant minority political action would undermine the unity of the working class. This, of course, was really a version of assimilationist theory, except that the assimilation envisaged was assimilation, not into a unitary society, but into an ongoing process of class struggle. More complex was the social-democratic theory which prevailed in most parts of Europe. This saw modern societies as involving a plurality of conflicting interests, and particularly class interests, yet as also having institutional arrangements through which compromises between those interests could be negotiated. This was the basis of the modern welfare state. Radtke (1994) had spelled out this ideal in a complex and sophisticated way. As he saw it, however, in cities like Frankfurt, separate institutions had been set up for dealing with the problems of ethnic minorities, so that if, say, a Turk was involved in what were really conflicts of interest (e.g. with a landlord or employer), his or her only resort was to a separate multicultural bureau which diagnosed the problem, not as one of conflicting interests, but of cultural difference. Such arrangements, Radtke argued, were not helpful in dealing with the ethnic minority person’s problem, and, at the same time, actually undermined the institutions of the welfare state. They also tended to foster traditional and sometimes reactionary and regressive elements of minority cultures. Somewhat different from this criticism, yet complementing it, was one which addressed the question of the relation of new immigrant minorities, not so much to the class system, as to the status system. According to Albert Bastenier (1994), writing from Belgium, it was in the nature of modern societies that there was a delicate balance of status groups, which, though they formed a hierarchy, normally lived in a state of peaceful co-existence. In the Belgian case, he might well have added that this balance was also complicated by a double ethnic balance: on the one hand, the political balance between Walloons and Flemings which was at the heart of the Belgian constitution; and, on the other, the absorption of other European immigrants, such as Italians, into this system. In such circumstances the more distant and alien culture of the Moroccans could not be fitted into the system and produced reactions of ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’. While in no way approving this racism and xenophobia or demanding the exclusion of culturally alien immigrants, Bastenier does not suggest ways in which these minorities might be integrated into the status order. A separate contribution to the debate had also been made by Jan Rath (1991), commenting on Dutch multicultural policy. According to him, what had actually happened in the Netherlands was a process of ‘minorization’. The separate nature of minority cultures, as he saw it, was emphasized in a way which resulted in the minorities being marked for different and inferior treatment. It was essentially a manipulative policy aiming at control of the ethnic minorities. Finally there was the criticism advanced by Schierup and Alund in Sweden (1987, 1990), who addressed themselves to the paternalistic policies of the social democratic state towards minorities. In their view, what had happened in Sweden was that this paternalistic state negotiated with those (usually an elderly minority man) whom it chose to see as the leaders of minority groups. This involved a highly static view of minority cultures and was essentially manipulative. What it ignored was the fact that many younger people of ethnic minority descent had defected from the ethnic

152

Nationalism and ethnicity

culture defined by their elders, and were forming new syncretic links, both with those from other minorities and with those from disaffected sections of minority youth. The new groupings that came into existence, moreover, were part of the new social movements, which had begun to play an important dynamic role in modern societies (though Schierup is careful, unlike some other social movements theorists, not to dissociate social movements entirely from those based on class (Schierup 1995)). More generally, in the debate about multiculturalism four further criticisms were made, as follows: 7. That the best way of maximizing immigrant rights was to ensure that they had the rights of citizens. This was done in France through relatively easy naturalization procedures and by the application of the jus soli. As a result, Turks and their children, for instance, became French very easily, whereas the number of Turks becoming naturalized in Germany was tiny (Schnapper 1994). 8. That the rhetoric of multiculturalism actually almost invariably disguised situations in which immigrants were being ghettoized. This was a criticism which some French social scientists made of British multiculturalism, and no one who has experienced the processes by which immigrants in Britain are segregated and discriminated against could deny that there was truth in this claim. 9. That multicultural theory was based upon an ‘essentialist’ view of cultures, or, at least, that minority cultures were unitary and had clear boundaries, whereas there was actually great diversity of response among immigrants, differentiated in terms of class, age, gender, generation, education and length of settlement. This view was also the basis of policy in societies adopting a manipulative type of multiculturalism. 10.That the theory of the two domains, public and private, reduced the culture of the host society to simply one among many cultures, whereas, in fact, in all societies receiving immigrants, there was a whole set of institutions in the host society that claimed historical validity, and that provided the framework within which immigrants had necessarily to live. These included the economic system based upon markets, a bureaucratic system of administration, the criminal and civil law, an official national language, and, possibly, a state religion. Many of those who spoke about the emergence of new multicultural societies seemed to assume that all of these institutions would be changed in a pluralistic direction. In fact, however, living in any society of settlement was bound to involve for immigrants that they should learn to be culturally bilingual, learning to live within this institutional order, even though they might retain some of their own customs and culture. THE RESPONSE OF MULTICULTURALTHEORYTO ITS CRITICS These criticisms have led many social scientists to argue that multiculturalism should be abandoned as a basis of policy and that immigrants should simply be assimilated

Multiculturalism and integration in Europe 153 into the society and acculturated to its culture. What the critics rarely consider, however, is the cost of such a policy of forced assimilation. What I have sought to argue in a number of papers (Rex 1996), therefore, is that the preservation or encouragement of minority cultures is important for three reasons: 1. That such cultures may simply have values which are objectively worth preserving for the benefit not solely of their immigrant community, but for the whole society. 2. That, as Durkheim (1933) saw so clearly in The Division of Labour, there is a need in a modern society based upon organic solidarity for some form of grouping that stands between the individual family and the state and which can provide emotional and moral support and a psychological home for individuals and their families. Durkheim, of course, argued that this would be provided by some sort of occupational guild. In fact, in many societies it has been provided by ethnic groups. If there were no such groups the alternative, Durkheim suggested, would be ‘anomie’. 3. That all individuals in a modern society win and protect their rights, not merely by individual, but by collective, action. Indigenous people do this through class organizations, status groups and parties. Immigrant groups do it through some form of ethnic mobilization. This has been even more true among European immigrant groups in the United States where, class-based parties being relatively undeveloped, immigrant communities have played a primary role in the political system, but it is bound to play a role in European societies receiving immigrants as well. The main problem here is that of the relation between immigrant communities and indigenous classes, status groups and parties. It now seems to me that it is the acknowledgement of these three reasons for recognizing cultural diversity which should be the basis for the development of a multicultural policy of a moderate, though very important, kind. It has to be distinguished from more grandiose and romantic notions that the total structure of host societies has to be changed so that they become multicultural in their major public institutions. It would seem to be clear that, even if the multicultural movement is forced to abandon some of the romantic and grandiose ambitions such as that of making the mainstream society more multicultural, any policy of forced assimilation would meet with resistance, and, on the other hand, those who are committed to the complete assimilation of immigrants in the long run would inevitably find that they have to make pragmatic adjustments in dealing with immigrant communities in the shorter term. Thus, inevitably, institutions emerge in cities, through which negotiations between the local state and mobilized ethnic communities take place. What is necessary now is that policy-makers should get beyond the generalized ideological debate about assimilation versus multiculturalism, and should consider what the best practice in these institutions would be like if they were to fulfil the goals of both meeting the needs of immigrants – rather than merely manipulating and controlling them – and, at the same time, preserving the institutions of the democratic welfare state.

154

Nationalism and ethnicity

THE COMPLEXITY OFETHNIC MOBILIZATION A main theme of the objections to multiculturalism mentioned above was that ethnic minority groups should not be thought of as tightly organized and bounded regiments. They have to be understood as consisting of diverse individuals, differentiated in terms of age, gender, social class, education, generation and length of settlement. This does not mean, however, that the very notion of ethnic mobilization should be abandoned. What is necessary is that it should be understood in its full complexity. The basic unit in any migrant group is the extended family. Among economic migrants, such families will be seeking to survive, or beyond this, to increase the family estate. Among political migrants, including all kinds of refugees and those fleeing their countries because of political circumstances, even though kinship ties may have been shattered in situations of violence and civil war, there is likely to be some attempt to organize the escape of relatives and to reconstitute the family. Although each separate family will pursue its own interests, it will necessarily have to differentiate between those in a country of settlement on whom it has no moral claim and those who are potential allies. The immigrant family will therefore turn to fellow villagers and countrymen, and to those who speak the same language, practise the same religion and have the same folk customs. It is also likely that in dealing with the life crises of birth, marriage and death, it will mark these through festivals organized within its own religious institutions. This is not, of course, to say that the ethnic community is tightly organized. Factors such as language and religion may act as markers of boundaries, but without there being a system of differentiated roles and relations within those boundaries. In fact, there will usually be a considerable struggle for leadership between those seeking to reproduce traditional homeland structures in the land of settlement (and among these, a struggle between senior kinsmen, political leaders and religious leaders), and others who emerge as leaders because of newly acquired economic power, or through their undertstanding of the host language and their consequent ability to act as brokers in dealing with the host community. Among those whose migration is most successful in the sense of winning a rewarding place in the society of settlement, as well as among the children and grandchildren of immigrants, there will also be some kind of process of defection. At the extreme this could involve a complete loss of a sense of ethnic identity. But it is also possible that among those who appear completely assimilated there may still be some perception of the advantages of calling on the resources of the ethnic community. This is not to say that the immigrants and their descendants live in an atmosphere of psychological strain because they are caught between two cultures. It may involve a highly rationalistic calculation of advantages in particular situations, and the easy acceptance of dual or multiple identities. An important part of the whole pattern of ethnic mobilization will be its orientation to winning equal rights in the land of settlement. This is an element in minority culture which was not present before migration, but ethnic mobilization involves a changing culture which takes on new challenges, and it is this changing culture which has to be understood. Such a culture does also involve a certain dilemma. Success in winning equality of opportunity for the immigrants and their children may mean that those who

Multiculturalism and integration in Europe 155 are successful actually leave the community and defect from its culture. This, however, was also true of working-class attitudes in the past. The price of possible defection was one which working-class families were willing to pay for success, and the success was commonly won with the aid of class solidarity. Similarly, members of an ethnic community might use their solidarity to fight for individual success. What I have said so far, however, assumes that ethnic mobilization involves change in minority cultures only so far as they are concerned with adaptation to living within the society of settlement. It has now also to be pointed out that ethnic minority culture and economic and political orientations have to be retained or developed in other directions. On the one hand, there is likely to be some continued orientation to the homeland; on the other, there may be orientation to further onward migration. Homeland orientations may have cultural, economic and political aspects. Culturally, the very notion of success may be validated not merely in terms of the values of the society of settlement, but also in terms of homeland values. The migrant might feel the need to show that he or she was deserving of honour in terms of these values. Economically, the whole enterprise of migration may still involve the idea of improving the position of any particular family in the homeland through remittances or through the purchase of land or other economic goods there. Finally, politically, migrants may well remain concerned with homeland politics; they may support political parties and factions in the homeland and use their freedom from control in the homeland to provide external bases for political action there. This is clearly the case with Punjabi Sikhs in Britain who have to address the issue of independence or autonomy for the Punjab, or Kashmiris seeking self-determination for Kashmir, for Algerian immigrants in France who will be concerned about the position of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, or among Kurds from Turkey in Germany who may well be involved in one way or another with Kurdish political movements in Turkey. The continuation of these elements in the ethnic mobilization of migrants may well lead to the internal differentiation of the migrant community, and the most immediate sense of belonging for any particular migrant may be to identify, not with the community as a whole, but with some faction within it. This does not, of course, preclude the possibility that all of these factions may act together as allies in dealing with the host society. For many migrants, however, such orientations to the homeland are not the only factor affecting their behaviour. They do not simply live in a so-called diaspora, wishing always to return to their Zion; as important will often be their orientation to onward migration. Thus Asian migrants in Britain often save in order to move on to the larger economic opportunities offered by North America, and they may well already have relatives established there. Punjabi and Gujarati migrants living in Britain may well feel themselves part of a transnational community stretching from Fiji to California. In the case of short-distance cross-border immigrants, such as Portuguese immigrants in France, the situation is, of course, less complex than this (Rex et al. 1987). They can return more easily to the sending society and will continue to participate relatively actively in its institutions, a tendency which has led some sociologists in the receiving societies to fear that the integrity of their own nation-states is threatened. It would seem then that ethnic mobilization in a migrant minority group in Europe involves at least four elements:

156

Nationalism and ethnicity

1. There is some sense of social and cultural boundaries through which it is possible to recognize potential friends and allies, even though this may not involve a tightly organized system. 2. A central and important factor in the changing and developing culture will be its orientation to success in the land of present settlement. 3. Some members of the ethnic community are likely to defect as they succeed, and the wider ethnic community will have to address itself to their interests as well as to those who remain more oriented to the traditional culture. On the other hand, the solidarity which the traditional community and its culture provides will actually be helpful in promoting individual success in host society terms, even though there is a risk of possible defection. 4. Complete absorption into the society and culture of the land of settlement will be arrested by a continuing interest in homeland problems and by the recognition of an option of onward migration. A more sophisticated version of the concept of ethnic mobilization has to take account of all of these factors as will the development of policies towards immigrant minorities developed by the host society. Many of the criticisms of multicultural policy really rest upon the fact that they are based upon a too simplistic notion of ethnic mobilization. HOST SOCIETY RESPONSES TO ETHNIC MOBILIZATION The host societies which migrants enter will, as I have said, have their own established political and social institutions, usually based upon some conception of a welfare state or the social market. They may seek to preserve these institutions by keeping immigrants out or assigning them to some kind of inferior status. The ideology of the German guest-worker system, which denies political citizenship to the guest workers, is one such response, although it is possible even within this system to fight for legal and social, as distinct from political, rights for those who are denizens rather than citizens. Per contra, in those countries where immigrants have, or can easily acquire, citizenship, there still remains a problem for democrats of ensuring that they have the rights of social citizenship to which Marshall (1950) referred in his centrally important work, Citizenship and Social Class. What I wish to do in the remainder of this chapter, however, is to ask what kinds of arrangements for dealing with migrant minorities actually exist and what arrangements would be necessary to facilitate the participation of immigrants on equal terms in the host society, while at the same time giving appropriate recognition to cultural diversity during the period of a migrant community’s settlement. Citizenship and political rights The first necessity is that if the migrants are not citizens at the time of settlement, there is an easy process of naturalization available. This is usually not the case under the guest-worker system, and it is also hindered by the demand for dual citizenship on the part of migrants and the unwillingness of host and sending societies to recognize it.

Multiculturalism and integration in Europe 157 Some recognition of dual citizenship, however, would not be disastrous for host societies and would facilitate the naturalization process. Given that political citizenship exists, or could be easily acquired, the next problem is that of full political and social participation of migrants in the host society’s institutions. The first essential here is the right to vote. This is something which is available to Commonwealth immigrants in the United Kingdom and among French citizens from overseas departments in France, and has had the effect of the voice of migrants coming to be heard more and more within the mainstream political system. A number of other countries have also introduced at least a local franchise for immigrants. Paradoxically, the very segregation of immigrants leads to their voting power being concentrated and more effective. Finally, it should be noted that even where immigrants do not have the vote, they may seek to exercise political pressure by joining mainstream parties and arguing their case there. On this basis Turks without a vote themselves have joined mainstream German political parties. Where such political participation can occur, however, two further problems remain: that of ensuring that migrants have equal social rights; and whether any further arrangements need to be made to articulate the special interests of migrants or to deal with their cultural problems. Institutions for the promotion of equality Most European societies do have legal systems which operate to ensure the equality of their citizens. The problem is whether the possibility of de facto discrimination on racial, ethnic, cultural or religious grounds demands special action over and above this. In the United States this has been a major problem and, despite the laissez-faire nature of the society, there have been numerous interventions by government institutions and the courts to deal with the special problem of racial discrimination. Such a pattern of intervention has also been developed in the United Kingdom which now has elaborate structures like the Commission for Racial Equality to combat racial and ethnic discrimination. It is less developed in continental Europe where migrants have had to depend more on the ordinary legal system, or where, at most, some sort of ombudsman system has been set up. Agencies for collective consultation Where there is some system of intervention to prevent racial and ethnic discrimination the next question is whether immigrants should simply appear before such bodies as litigants or whether they should actually staff the bodies concerned. Again, in the case of the United Kingdom, many of those operating the racial equality system are individuals drawn from the minorities. Where this is the case, these minorities face a dilemma: are they to commit themselves to joining the apparatus or should they stay outside of it and retain the capacity for independent political and legal action? I have, myself, been inclined to advocate the latter alternative because the state-sponsored institutions that have been set up are often too much influenced by the interests of indigenous groups. In striking a balance, however, most ethnic minority leaders in the United Kingdom have accepted that it is better to fight for their interests within the apparatus rather than outside it.

158

Nationalism and ethnicity

What happens within the race and ethnic equality apparatus is that some individuals of ability from the minorities who might otherwise be leaders of independent organizations become absorbed into the bureaucracy. But such organizations may nonetheless exist. The question then arises of how they are to be funded. In the United Kingdom this has been done by local councils funding the welfare work of minority organizations as they do other indigenous voluntary organizations engaged in such welfare work. At this point, the financing of posts within ethnic organizations may become dependent on local authority funding, and this may obviously give the councils some measure of control over these organizations’ activities. In some other countries, notably in Germany, this welfare work, including housing, is assigned to indigenous church and trades union organizations, and control of their affairs is thus doubly removed from control by the minorities themselves, first, through their dependence on indigenous voluntary organizations, and second, through the control of these organizations by the local state. Independent action by minority groups It would be wrong to suggest that the control established over the minorities, whether by the absorption of some of their members into the bureaucratic apparatus or through the funding of their organizations, is complete. The minorities might still take independent political action either in elections through maintaining their own organizations or by more direct action such as rioting. Separate ethnic political parties have, in fact, rarely been successful. They represent minorities and cannot compete with the mainstream parties. Thus, having experimented with their own independent candidacies, ethnic minorities are likely to concentrate on getting candidates selected for the mainstream parties who are either drawn from their own members or sympathetic to their members’ interests. The maintenance of minority organizations for purposes of consultation with local councils may be important even if there are councillors drawn from the minorities, because these councillors are usually subject to party discipline and cannot speak for minority interests only. On the other hand, there is a danger that if there are consultative mechanisms available, the political parties will marginalize minority issues and keep them off the main political agenda. Police-minority relations So far as such direct action of a confrontational kind is concerned those who participate are likely to come into contact with, and be dealt with by, the police, whether the action arises out of conflict with the police themselves or through defensive action against racist indigenous groups organizing racial attacks or anti-immigrant and racist street demonstrations. Such political action and its control is often seen by the police and the indigenous community as being part of the more general problem of crime and its control. In most countries police have been accused of brutality against immigrants or with actually permitting violence against them by indigenous groups. Such relations occur independently of the institutions set up to promote equality or liaison with the minorities. Eventually, however, the police are pressed towards the notion of

Multiculturalism and integration in Europe 159 community policing, in which there is some measure of consultation with local communities, and the liaison committees which they set up supplement those set up to deal with more general matters. Relations within these police liaison committees, however, are a relatively new and uneasy development in most countries, and it may even be the case that the police come to be represented on mainstream liaison committees and bring into those committees the less equal and more punitive attitudes of their own organizations. Cultural and religious contacts Outside the framework of organizations involving liaison between the political authorities and minorities are the relations between voluntary groups in the indigenous and minority communities, particularly with the religious organizations of the minority community. So far as religious organizations are concerned, two principles operate: one is that minority religions as well as those of the host society usually benefit from religious tolerance; the other is that religious activities do not benefit from government funding. Nonetheless there are communities where religious organizations are also responsible for more secular welfare activities and where they are the main organizations with which local authorities are able to deal. Thus, where liaison mechanisms are set up they may well be based upon religious as well as secular organizations. In British cities, for example, local councils will have to deal both with secular Pakistani and with Muslim organizations. Similar problems exist in France in dealing with Algerian Muslim immigrants. Very important for minority religions is the question of their exclusion from the public sphere. In France this has led to the demand among Muslim parents that their daughters should wear the scarf in state schools, and the unwillingness in a society which values secular education to permit the use of such symbols. In the United Kingdom, Muslims have demanded that there should be legal action taken to protect their religion from blasphemous attack, but have not succeeded in winning support for this view, even though Christian religions do have such protection Integration through education Finally, the other agency through which minorities have to relate to the society of settlement is the school system. Minority parents usually want their children to be the principal beneficiaries of their own migration and they often have an instrumental attitude to education. Yet their dilemma is that the schools more than any other agency threaten to undermine their own morality and culture. There is also in some cases a different demand on the part of parents, if their situation as immigrants is insecure, that their children should be prepared for possible return to the homeland. For either of these reasons the question arises of how far education should be multicultural. The notion of ‘l’école laïque’ in France rules this question out of discussion. There can be no religious education in schools and the moral education which children receive, particularly in primary schools, will simply be that of French society. In other countries, such as the United Kingdom, attempts may be made to introduce multifaith worship and instruction, and minority communities may play a part in determining the

160

Nationalism and ethnicity

content of moral education. At secondary level the main emphasis in the educational system is on the processes of selection and certification. Some argue that for success in this process of selection it is necessary that all children should have a good selfconcept and self-esteem and that this is provided by education in their own culture. In fact, however, there is little support for this view among minorities themselves whose attitude to secondary education is highly instrumental. In England, a West Indian school teacher has suggested that supplementary schooling should concentrate on mainstream subjects and instruction in English rather than on minority cultures (Stone 1981). On the other hand, there is a strong case to be made, where there are high-level certificated optional courses, for making a place in the syllabus for the teaching of and examination in minority languages, history and culture. The availabilty of such courses does help to give recognition to the minorities and encourages not merely tolerance, but also respect between cultures. Perhaps more important than the provision of education in their own culture for immigrant groups is the introduction of indigenous pupils to the culture of minorities. The object of such education should be to foster tolerance and respect between communities and the prevention of racism. This was the main conclusion of the enquiry in Britain by the Swann Committee (Department of Education and Science 1985) which, significantly, was called Education for All, rather than ‘Education for Minority Children’. It seems clear that what has happened over the past twenty years in Europe is that complex forms of liaison and consultation have emerged, whether as a deliberate matter of policy or through pragmatic and ad hoc adjustments. We are not talking of a situation in which mobilized ethnic communities entirely outside the system confront and negotiate with that system. Indeed, as we have seen, the collective struggle for rights now often takes place within that system rather than outside it. Nonetheless, the evaluation of such systems can still be made by answering two questions: how far do the liaison institutions promote the equality of citizenship for minorities; and to what extent do they represent agencies of control, rather than the means through which immigrant interests are articulated? CONCLUSION: THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OFTHE PROCESS OF INTEGRATION OF IMMIGRANT ETHNIC MINORITY COMMUNITIES The case for multiculturalism for which I would now argue is a moderate one. It does not assume that the goal should be the transformation of European national societies into new multicultural ones. What it does assume is that there are special problems for immigrant ethnic minorities over and above those dealt with in the normal processes and institutions of the democratic welfare state or the social market. Supplementary institutions may well be necessary to deal with these problems. From what has been said above it is clear that there is always the possibility that institutions set up by local councils are likely to be designed to control and manipulate ethnic minorities, rather than helping them to protect their interests. Equally, it is clear that ethnic minorities will organize to prevent this from happening and there is likely to be a continuing struggle within liaison organizations as a result of these pressures.

Multiculturalism and integration in Europe 161 Apart from their desire to manipulate and control the minorities, however, the indigenous community does have a more legitimate concern about the existence of these minorities. They will not want the immigrant communities to get them involved in questions of homeland politics, at least if these involve international terrorism, though this should not involve a denial of the right of minorities to campaign and lobby in a democratic way to influence the foreign policies of the society of settlement. On the other hand, they will be concerned about the question of onward migration and the fact that the minorities may see themselves not simply as participants in the affairs of the national state, but also as members of transnational communities. The interest of the host society lies here in trying to ensure that insofar as minorities are making a contribution to their own development, they are positively encouraged to remain rather than move on. The problems of ethnic minorities and those which they present to the host society may not be long-term ones, at least so far as the immigrants arriving between the 1950s and the 1970s are concerned. It is a reasonable expectation that over three or four generations commitment to minority cultures and organizations will decline, though it is possible that the process may take longer where there are large differences of culture and religion. If this is the case, it will be in the interest of the host society to encourage all those who wish to become assimilated and acculturated. What is likely to remain at the end of this process is a purely symbolic ethnicity, celebrated through occasional festivals which trouble no one and may even be seen in the host society generally as a form of cultural enrichment. Of course, if there is to be renewed immigration, it will be necessary for liaison institutions to continue to exist to deal with the problems of, and posed by, new immigrants. The institutions set up to deal with the problems of those who came earlier and are now moving towards integration should be prepared to take on the problems of later immigrants, using the skills and abilities which they have developed during the past thirty years. They should become a normal part of the system of government and welfare of the host society complementing rather than replacing mainstream political and welfare institutions. A footnote on political migrants The model which has been developed in this chapter refers primarily to the problems of and those posed by economic migrants. It is therefore necessary to point out that such migrants have largely been replaced in the last ten years by political migrants, including true ‘convention refugees’, who are in personal political danger, and many thousands of others who are simply fleeing from situations of violence, civil war and economic breakdown. For these, other more sophisticated and detailed policy models may have to be developed. All that can be said here is that, at one pole, there will be those who simply need temporary protection and, literally, refuge, while, at the other, there will be those who are much closer to economic migrants. The aims of policy should be to provide minimum refuge, but also to help those among these refugees and quasi-refugees who wish it to find work, decent housing and education for their children. On the other hand, where flight and consequent settlement seem likely to be permanent, the same facilities that are available to economic migrants should be ex-

162

Nationalism and ethnicity

tended to them, rather than allow them to be classified as bogus refugees who are actually disguised economic migrants and who present an obvious target for racist attack. The danger is that if this is not done, the racist and xenophobe hostility felt towards political migrants might become generalized into an attack on all immigrants. This is something which clearly happened in Germany, where the hostility towards large numbers of political migrants came to be extended in the form of attacks on Turkish immigrants. What now seems to be needed is, first, the establishment of institutions concerned with the integration of straightforward economic migrants, and second, the development of these institutions to deal with the new and special problems posed by political migration. REFERENCES Bastenier, A. (1994) ‘Immigration and the ethnic differentiation of social relations in Europe’, in J. Rex and B. Drury (eds), Ethnic Mobilization in a Multi-Cultural Europe, Aldershot: Avebury. Castles, S. and Kosack, G. (1973) Immigrant Workers and the Class Structure, London: Oxford University Press. Department of Education and Science (1985) Education for All: Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Children from Minority Groups (Chairman: Lord Swann), Cmnd. 9453, London: HMSO. Durkheim, E. (1933) The Division of Labour, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Marshall, T. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Radtke, F.-O. (1994) ‘The formation of ethnic minorities and the transformation of social into ethnic conflicts in the so-called multi-cultural society – the German case’, in J. Rex and B. Drury (eds), Ethnic Mobilization in a Multi-Cultural Europe, Aldershot: Avebury. Rath, J. (1991) ‘Minosering: De Social Costructe van Ethnische Minderheden’, PhD thesis, University of Utrecht. Rex, J. (1986) ‘The concept of a multi-cultural society’, occasional paper, Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick, Coventry. —— (1996) Ethnic Minorities in the Modern Nation State: Working Papers in the Theory of Multiculturalism and Political Integration, Basingstoke: Macmillan. —— (ed.) (1996b) ‘Multiculturalism and integration in European cities,’ Special Issue of Innovation, 9(1), Abingdon: Carfax. Rex, J. and Drury, B. (eds) (1994) Ethnic Mobilization in a Multi-Cultural Europe, Aldershot: Avebury. Rex, J., Joly, D. and Wilpert, C. (1987) Immigrant Associations in Europe, Aldershot: Gower. Schierup, C.-U. (1995) ‘Multi-culturalism, neo-racism and the vicissitudes of contemporary democracy’, in J. Hjarno (ed.), Multi-Culturalism in the Nordic Societies, Copenhagen: Tema-Nord. Schierup, C.-U. and Alund, A. (1987) Will They Still Be Dancing – Integration and Social Transformation Amongst Yugoslav Immigrants in Sweden, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. —— (1990) Paradoxes of Multi-Culturalism, Aldershot: Avebury. Schnapper, D. (1994) ‘The debate on immigration and the crisis of national identity’, West European Politics, 19 (2). Stone, M. (1981) The Education of Black Children in Britain: The Myth of Multi-Cultural Education, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wieviorka, M. (1994) ‘Ethnicity as action’, in J. Rex and B. Drury (eds), Ethnic Mobilization in a Multi-Cultural Europe, Aldershot: Avebury.

10 Nationalism, national identity and citizenship in the new Europe Mark Mitchell and Dave Russell

INTRODUCTION In this chapter we shall address three interrelated issues. First, we shall examine the nature of the relationship between the so-called crisis of national identity across Europe and the debate on immigration and citizenship. Second, we shall consider the issue of how far the growth of a European immigration regime provides evidence of a weakening of the powers and responsibilities of the nation-state in Europe. Third, we shall assess the thesis that we are currently witnessing a convergence of policies across Europe over matters of citizenship and nationality for migrants and their descendants. We shall argue that the nation, nationalism and national identity remain cornerstones of the new European order. Using France, Germany and the UK as examples, this argument will be developed by contrasting the degree of convergence that has characterized recent immigration policy across Europe with the limited extent to which any similar convergence has occurred in relation to citizenship policies. Consequently, it will be argued that, to date, there are only limited indications of the development of a transnational form of European citizenship. A powerful and deeprooted sense of attachment persists towards the nation-state, even at a time when it is undergoing a process of partial transformation. While the sovereign power of states has been eroded by the growth of international governance in relation to immigration matters, this is much less the case in the sphere of citizenship. Access to citizenship remains largely a national question, bound up with varied social and cultural constructions of nationhood and national identity in different nation-states. A CRISIS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY? It has become commonplace to associate the renewed expression of nationalist sentiment and the resurgence of the extreme right in Europe with growing concerns over national identity in different European countries. However, arguments over the erosion of national identity and its political consequences take different forms and tend to work at different levels of analysis. Some of these are rather generalized and sweeping in character, tending to gloss over variations in the nature of the ‘crisis’ in different countries. At the most general level, there is an emphasis on the impact of ‘globalization’ and on the effects of various economic, political and cultural processes that

164

Nationalism and ethnicity

increasingly transcend or cut across national boundaries. A weakening of the nationstate has been identified as one significant outcome of this process of globalization. In particular, the interconnectedness of contemporary economic and geopolitical systems is seen to limit the capacity of any nation-state to fulfil the demands of its citizens or to exercise effective national control over policy outcomes. Consequently, crises of national identity are directly related to – and are but a small part of – a more general crisis over the efficacy of political action. This weakening of state capacities in turn threatens the legitimacy and authority of the state (McGrew 1992). A diminution in the capacity of the nation-state to secure desired policy outcomes promotes dissatisfaction and disillusionment which, in turn, threatens to undermine the basis of national identity. Thus, ‘there is an underlying crisis of national identity in most European states expressed in different forms of popular disillusionment with established institutions and elites’ (Wallace 1994: 74). This is a sweeping claim that is difficult to substantiate but which has an obvious affinity with arguments concerning the relationship between nationalism and state legitimacy. According to this thesis, nationalist sentiments of one variety or another have been fuelled by a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ in state institutions (Dunn 1994). At one level, this provides a general explanation for the paradoxical situation in which the recent resurgence of nationalism in Europe has coincided with an apparent decline of the nation-state, and where an upsurge in nationalist sentiment has occurred during a period when national identities are seemingly being eroded by the processes of globalization. However, this approach provides an insufficient understanding of the more specific conditions and circumstances that may be engendering a sense of ‘identity panic’ within particular societies (Balibar 1991: 17). There is a similar deficiency with generalized explanations for crises of national identity that emphasize the social and political problems or ‘anomic’ conditions which follow from the development of postindustrialism and the decline of traditional communities (Schnapper 1994a: 158). There is a need to clarify the context in which concerns over national identity have apparently intensified in the last decade. In addition, it is essential to examine the different ways in which ideas over national identity have surfaced within political discourse in different countries and to give proper recognition to variations in the nature of the so-called crisis from country to country (Parekh 1994). Nevertheless, concerns over national identity, even though these have taken different forms in different societies, are all rooted in a common xenophobic view of immigrants, foreigners and outsiders, who are seen as a threat to national and cultural identity (Schnapper 1994b; Husbands 1994). In different European countries, these concerns have been voiced by right-wing politicians and within the mass media, giving rise to populist fears about the growth of culturally alien minority ethnic group enclaves within the nation-state. According to some writers, cross-national evidence of a strong defensive reaction by certain elements within the dominant ethnic/cultural groups who oppose the ‘pluralization’ of national cultures and identities illustrates the appearance of a new European racism (Balibar 1991; Sivanandan 1988). Miles (1993) has offered a convincing critique of the concept of a transnational European racism that disputes both its novelty and its totalizing character. Husbands’ characterization of recent crises of national identity as ‘new moral panics’ is another potentially useful corrective to simplistic unidimensional accounts of European racism (Husbands 1994). By drawing on the sociological concept of moral

National identity and citizenship in Europe 165 panic, Husbands highlights the critically important role of the media in amplifying fears over the threats posed to ‘the nation’ and national identity by cultural aliens. The focus of this analysis is on the political and cultural representations of the ‘immigrant problem’ in different countries, and the role of the press and right-wing political groups in reshaping the political agenda around definitions of nationhood. Further, an analysis based on the concept of moral panic implies that we are witnessing a resurrection of recurrent concerns about identity and nationhood; recent surges of anxiety about nation and identity are not new as such. Indeed, it can be argued that moral panics over national identity are but one part of an ongoing process through which nations are periodically reconstructed. Therefore, following Husbands, the key question is: why do these surges of anxiety and concern occur when they do? This points to the need for a conjunctural analysis: one which, first, identifies the specific circumstances that have encouraged and sustained support for ethnic exclusionist attitudes in different European countries in recent years; and second, examines the conditions under which the political right has been able to make the running in mobilizing reactionary sentiments concerning the apparent threat posed by ‘Others’, both to individual nation-states and to an ‘imagined European community’ (Castles 1993: 29). The recent surge of concern over the apparent threat to collective cultural identities across Europe is the result of a complex set of circumstances which include: the development of a new security agenda in the post-cold war era; renewed immigration pressures across Europe and the development of an ‘asylum crisis’; and the movement towards further European integration within the European Union. Crucially, the end of the cold war has had a significant impact on the politics of ‘race’ and ethnicity inside Western Europe. In the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, a new form of security discourse has surfaced that identifies immigration as a primary threat to security and stability. The importation of ‘cultural aliens’ is represented as a potential challenge to social, political and cultural order (Wæver et al. 1993). It undermines the basis of the social and political integration of the nation-state and presents a potential threat to internal security by opening up new or latent cleavages in society. This new security discourse is characterized by an adversarial politics of identity where ‘the desire and ability of a society to sustain its traditional patterns of language, culture, association, religious and national identity are perceived as central to the new security agenda’ (Zalewski and Enloe 1995: 284). Furthermore, moves to tighten immigration controls and to secure the expulsion of unwanted aliens are often presented as a response to an internal security threat, especially in terms of the need to prevent an escalation of ethnic violence and to deprive the extreme right of potential support. More concretely, the immigration-security link is highlighted by the continuing attachment of immigrants to their countries of origin, making the receiving state more vulnerable to developments in the donor countries. The impact of the Salman Rushdie affair in the UK and elsewhere, and the effects of political instability in the Maghreb on North African minority ethnic groups in France, offer examples of this tendency. As Collinson (1993: 15) points out, it is in this sense that immigrants represent ‘the outside brought within’. Consequently, recent anxiety over immigration has to be placed within the general climate of insecurity that has emerged in the aftermath of the cold war. This has been

166

Nationalism and ethnicity

marked by a new, exclusionary and divisive definition of security and an adversarial perception of identity based on the need to provide a defence against ‘the Other’, principally represented as non-European and characterized by fundamentalism, violence and ethnic nationalism (see Mitchell and Russell 1998). In particular, the socalled Islamic threat has played a pivotal role in the new security discourse and within popular imagination in recent years through representations of Islam as inherently anti-democratic and intolerant. This has been fuelled by the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, which, in turn, has served to intensify ill-founded concerns over the internal threat to political and social stability posed by Muslim communities settled in Western Europe (Esposito 1992: chapter 6). The ‘fears’ over the resurgence of Islam are important, but constitute only one dimension of the current situation in which questions of immigration and nationality have become key issues on the political agendas of different European societies. Recent developments have also been shaped by sustained immigration pressures and, in particular, by an asylum crisis that has impacted unevenly on Western European nation-states. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a sharp increase in the number of asylum seekers attempting to secure permanent residence in Western Europe. This reached a peak in 1992, since when the numbers have declined (Salt 1995). This was due in part to the migratory pressures created through the disintegration of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the escalation of conflict in the former Yugoslavia. It was also due to political instability and demographic pressures in North Africa, which were a particular cause for concern in countries like France and Italy. However, the number of refugees and asylum seekers arriving in Western Europe from elsewhere in the less developed world has also increased substantially since the early 1980s and has contributed significantly to the moral panic over immigration. In addition, there has been mounting concern at the growth in the number of illegal immigrants, particularly in the countries of Southern Europe. All in all, the prospects for a noticeable easing of immigration pressures across Western Europe remain poor. Indeed, given the problems of political and economic stability in Eastern and Central Europe, and recurrent political, demographic and subsistence crises in the South, it is likely that these will intensify. Anxiety over immigration is therefore understandable, both in the context of the general climate of insecurity that has marked the post-cold war period and in the face of the real difficulties of exercising effective control over migration flows from the South and East. Although this anxiety has a shared basis in the imagined threat posed by various types of immigrant or foreigner, any sense of ‘crisis’ concerning national identity shows a substantial degree of variation between different countries. Parekh (1994: 501) makes the simple but vital point that there is ‘no single and homogeneous discourse on national identity’, thereby affirming the critical importance of national histories and different national political cultures in framing the present ‘crisis’ within different countries. In Britain, according to Parekh, the New Right has set the agenda in a debate on national identity, which has, in turn, been profoundly shaped by a general feeling of economic decline and the need to secure national regeneration. The ‘cultural dilution’ of the nation is represented as symptomatic of the decline of Britain and the loss of historical identity, just as a deepening of economic and political integration within the European Union is seen as a further threat to deep-rooted British national identity. In contrast, the debate on national identity in Germany has been profoundly

National identity and citizenship in Europe 167 different, prompted not by a sense of decline, but by political and moral anxieties about the Nazi past and the historical continuity of German identity at a time when strident nationalism has resurfaced within post-unification German society. In German discourse on national identity, a contradictory tension appears between a deep-rooted ethno-cultural conception of the German nation and an acute sense of the country’s historical discontinuity (Parekh 1994: 497–8). The ‘crisis’ of national identity in recent years has been as much related to the problem of creating a new political union out of divergent German national identities as it has been a response to a massive influx of asylum seekers. In comparison, recent French debate has centred on the continued viability of the ‘Republican model’ of the nation which has long underpinned policy towards immigrants. Concern has been expressed over the desirability and capability of a weakened nation-state to maintain its traditional role in fostering national integration through an assimilationist, colour-blind approach towards immigrants (Schnapper 1994b). This cursory consideration of ways in which a sense of ‘crisis’ of national identity has been differentially experienced across different countries serves to reaffirm the critical importance of the influence of particular national histories. It also suggests the need for a more empirical approach to the problems of ethnicity and identity (Rex 1995). However, this is not to deny the importance of two more general factors that have had a significant impact on this ‘crisis’ throughout Europe. First, throughout the New Europe the debate on national identity has been framed by the political right, using a problematic cultural definition of the nation, in which ‘homogeneity’ is regarded as the basis of national identity. Although the development of racialized discourses around cultural/national identities has been contested with variable and uneven effects, it is the political right across Europe that has been primarily responsible for setting the agenda over definitions of nationhood. Second, although the European nation-state continues to maintain its importance as a locus of identity in the post-modern era, its traditional role has undoubtedly been compromised under the impact of globalization and European integration (Schlesinger 1994). The extent to which the growth of transnational systems for policing immigration and asylum within the New Europe represents a fundamental recasting of the powers and responsibilities of the nationstate will now be considered. TOWARDSAEUROPEAN IMMIGRATION REGIME The simultaneous strengthening of external border controls between the EU and the outside world and the progressive reduction of cross-border immigration controls between Member States have often been referred to in terms of a strategy to create a Fortress Europe (Mitchell and Russell 1994). This metaphor, while it may have a superficial appeal, inadequately represents the complexities of the changing nature of the EU’s relationships with the outside world, particularly the post-Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Fortress Europe presents an oversimplistic view of an attempt to build a secure barrier around the EU with the gates on its eastern and southern frontiers firmly closed. In fact, the geopolitical reordering of the New Europe in the form of overlapping systems of cooperation, both formal and semi-formal, between European nation-states

168

Nationalism and ethnicity

through a variety of transnational organizations implies the need for a more complex model to represent the recent attempts to regulate and control migration into Europe (King 1994). If we are to continue to make use of the Fortress Europe metaphor, then we must recognize that different forms of economic, political, military and cultural cooperation across Europe are creating a shifting complex of bulkwarks, ditches and ramparts in which the outer defences of the fortress in particular are constantly being reshaped. The establishment of formal links between Germany and members of the Visegrad group, linking the return of ‘illegals’ and asylum seekers to the provision of aid to assist with the development of cross-border policing, illustrates the ways in which non-EU countries are becoming enmeshed in the EU’s attempts to regulate migration (Kolankiewicz 1994). It is also essential to recognize that contemporary systems for controlling and regulating immigration across Europe are far more complex than is suggested by the Fortress Europe metaphor. As yet, there is no common EU policy on immigration and asylum, with policies varying across Member States who have been unwilling publicly to cede their sovereign powers over these matters. Although it was given some new powers under the Maastricht treaty, the formal authority of the European Commission in this area remains extremely limited. Nevertheless, a variety of intergovernmental initiatives over the past decade has produced a significant degree of policy convergence across the EU and beyond in the sphere of immigration. Multilateral agreements such as the Schengen Convention as well as transnational initiatives emanating from the Working Group on Immigration are, in effect, producing an emergent European immigration regime of policies, rules and procedures governing both the policing of Europe’s external barriers and the gradual reduction of internal border controls within the EU. However, it is necessary to look beyond the EU to other geopolitical areas in order to identify more fully the edifice of a new immigration regime. This evolving regime is based on a form of international governance to which treaty organizations such as EFTA, the EEA and the Nordic Union make a significant contribution. The internationalization of migration management has also been extended by a range of readmission agreements between various Western and Eastern European states, facilitating the return of assorted unwanted immigrants in exchange for compensatory aid packages for countries accepting returnees and asylum seekers in transit. Such agreements have also had the effect of extending the geographic reach of the emergent immigration regime eastwards as well as helping to create a ‘buffer zone’ between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ Europe (King 1994). The growth of a nascent system of international governance in the sphere of immigration can be seen as a mechanism through which the nation-state continues to exercise a degree of control over these matters. Rather than denoting a weakening of the nation-state, the creation of an international immigration regime and transnational institutions of cooperation to regulate migration represent a response to a situation in which individual European states no longer have the capacity to exercise complete control over policies relating to migration. The resultant partial loss of legal sovereignty in this policy area is the price that must be paid for maintaining a measure of state autonomy in the face of mounting migration pressures (McGrew 1992). Across Western Europe, recognition of the need for a concerted response to these pressures has led to a range of policy changes, some introduced by individual

National identity and citizenship in Europe 169 governments, some resulting from intergovernmental collaboration and others from initiatives at the level of the EU itself. Together, these interrelated initiatives form the basis of the emergent European immigration regime (see Mitchell and Russell 1995). However, while there has been a growing level of coordination of immigration policy across Europe, this process has stopped some way short of full harmonization. The geopolitical ‘widening’ of the policy regime to encompass non-EU states in both Western and Eastern Europe has hampered its ‘deepening’ in terms of policy harmonization (Collinson 1994: chapter 7). Furthermore, differences of views and interests among the Member States have also curtailed the harmonization of policy. Similarities and differences between EU states over immigration control are illustrated in three areas of policy. First, in terms of the stringency of control measures, there has been a significant narrowing of differences, most obviously between the established ‘receiving’ states (Britain, France and Germany) and the new immigration countries of southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece). Either as a prelude to, or as a consequence of, joining the EU, these countries have adopted a more restrictive stance on migration. More generally, there has been a tendency for different governments to introduce immigration policies that have proved to be effective elsewhere, thus changing national practices in line with wider European norms and procedures (Soysal 1993). In recent years, this informal policy convergence has been underpinned by a series of ad hoc intergovernmental accords of which the Schengen Convention is the best known. However, the implementation of the Schengen policy on open borders has been riven with difficulties, with France deciding unilaterally to reinstate border controls in July 1995 after a trial period of abolition involving Germany and the Benelux countries. Like the British, the French view seems to be that the Schengen project is not practicable as it stands, since it cannot offer adequate controls against illegal immigration and cross-border criminal activities. Consequently, at the present time, the policy on open borders is a shambolic mess. Second, there has been a degree of alignment of asylum and refugee policies in response to the increasing influx of asylum seekers since the mid-1980s (Collinson 1994: 139–46). Effectively, governments now make less of a distinction between asylum and immigration. There has been a widespread tightening up of the definition of what constitutes a refugee, so that the majority of refugees admitted now have no legal status in international law. As part of this process, a new category of de facto refugee has been created for those who are deemed not to fit the UN definition and are given only temporary protected status. In addition, intergovernmental agreements have been critically important in the development of an increasingly restrictive stance on the admission of asylum seekers across Europe. However, there still remains a lack of harmonization with respect both to the definition of who qualifies as a refugee and to the implementation of common rules and procedures on asylum. In particular, there continues to be an uneven sharing of the asylum burden across the EU, and this remains a divisive and sensitive issue among Member States, with little prospect of a consensus on asylum policy and procedure emerging. Third, all Member States have, over a period of time, adopted greater restrictions on labour immigration, though there has been resistance to the full harmonization of policies on the admission of foreign workers. There is a continuing but variable requirement across the EU for immigrant workers, linked to the structure of labour markets in different countries. In particular, there is a demand for cheap immigrant

170

Nationalism and ethnicity

labour in certain specific sectors of the labour market in both southern and northern Europe. The use of illegal immigrant workers is certainly more common in southern Europe, but is by no means restricted to this region. Similarly, a limited form of the ‘guest-worker’ system still exists legally in both the North and South. Additionally, there continues to be a competitive and more easily regulated demand for highly skilled professional and technical workers at the top end of the labour market. Overall, an exclusionary ‘global’ policy stance on worker immigration across the EU remains subject to modification by ‘local’ labour-market conditions and interests. Within the overall parameters of the emergent European immigration regime, there remains considerable scope for national variation. Most obviously, there are clear differences between EU states regarding the status and rights of third-country nationals. This is largely a product of deep-rooted differences in citizenship and nationality policies to which there are still strong nationalistic commitments. CITIZENSHIP, NATIONALITYAND MULTICULTURALISM: TOWARDS A POLICY CONVERGENCE? Across Western Europe, there exists an enduring resistance to any fundamental erosion of the sovereign power of nation-states to determine access to citizenship rights. This contrasts sharply with the extent to which these same nation-states have resorted to the increasing use of international governance in the pursuit of more restrictive forms of immigration control. As Brubaker (1992: 180) has observed: ‘in the European setting citizenship is a last bastion of sovereignty; states continue to enjoy a freedom in this domain that they increasingly lack in others.’ In terms of access to citizenship and nationality rights, the situation of immigrants and their descendants remains highly variable across Europe. A comparative analysis of the situation in France, Germany and the UK, for instance, reveals that fundamental differences exist in relation to: the acquisition of legal, political and social citizenship rights by non-EU citizens and illegal immigrants; policies towards naturalization; and the willingness to tolerate or encourage a plurality of cultures as part of the development of a multicultural society. A look further afield across Europe reveals even more diversity over matters of citizenship and nationality, reflecting the continuing significance of deep-rooted national traditions, differences in political culture and ideology, and fundamental divergences over the significance of cultural homogeneity for the maintenance of national identity. The acquisition of citizenship and nationality is shaped primarily by the way in which the nation is defined within different national discourses in different countries. Although Western European countries have moved closer to each other, the deeply embedded nature of national traditions and national identities seems likely to preserve the differences that exist, thus impeding the incorporation of migrants into full citizenship (Çinar 1994). Recent changes in citizenship policies and in the rules for acquiring various forms of citizenship in different countries amount to changes at the margins, rather than any fundamental change to the established conventions of citizenship. In comparing different constructions of citizenship and nationality across Europe, it is conventional to divide the leading immigration countries into three categories based on different ideal types of citizenship (Castles and Miller 1993). First, there is an

National identity and citizenship in Europe 171 exclusionary or ‘ethnic’ model of citizenship which defines the nation in terms of ethnicity and deep-rooted ties of culture and language. Within this model, minorities are excluded from citizenship or allowed only limited legal and social rights. Germany, denying within official discourse that it is a country of immigration, offers the closest fit with this model. Second, most closely associated with France, there is the inclusionary republican or ‘civic’ model of the nation which offers citizenship to all residents, irrespective of ethnic origin, who identify with, and participate actively in, the national culture. Finally, there is an alternative and more recent multicultural model of citizenship that allows scope for the maintenance of cultural and ethnic differences. In the major countries of immigration beyond Europe such as Australia and Canada, the development of cultural pluralism is an accepted feature of the process of nationbuilding. A variety of groups with ethnically diverse backgrounds have been rapidly incorporated into the nation with the right to remain culturally distinct. Inside Europe, the multicultural model has been most actively pursued ‘from above’ in Sweden by an official state-led policy of multiculturalism, although the implementation of this policy has become increasingly problematic (see Ålund and Schierup 1991). A complex variety of pressures has led in practice to some blurring of the differences between these models. Multicultural issues and debates have become more prominent in all the immigration countries across Europe, while the more established ethnic and civic models have become more difficult to sustain. The permanency of new minority ethnic groups and the increased pluralization of Western European societies has politicized multiculturalism and encouraged the growth of ‘identity politics’ across Europe. However, the de facto pluralization of ethnic and cultural identities has yet to be accompanied by the development of substantial forms of multicultural citizenship, which have been inhibited by the strength of the social and political reaction against multiculturalism. These ‘genuine fears’ have found expression in recent moral panics over national identity. Reactionary ethno-nationalist ideologies, grounded in various forms of ‘cultural racism’, have been mobilized against multiculturalism and have enjoyed some success in undermining its legitimacy in different countries. Among the leading immigration countries in Europe, the UK has moved closest towards the multicultural model. A number of policy initiatives over the past twenty years have been based on the principles of multiculturalism, most notably the 1976 Race Relations Act which departed significantly from the principles of formal equality and equal treatment for different ethnic groups. In particular, the concept of indirect discrimination sanctioned the right to cultural difference by acknowledging the potentially adverse impact on minority ethnic groups of treating all individuals in the same manner, irrespective of ethnicity. Leaving aside questions concerning the efficacy of its implementation, the UK anti-discrimination legislation stands out as one of the clearest legislative expressions of multiculturalism across Europe. In Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, there exist opposed racialized discourses that present radically different views over the integration of minority ethnic communities and the desirability of cultural diversity. An unresolved tension exists between assimilationist arguments that link citizenship rights to the duties of cultural conformity and multicultural arguments where the right to be culturally distinct and to have one’s cultural traditions and practices recognized and respected is seen as an important

172

Nationalism and ethnicity

prerequisite to the attainment of wider citizenship rights. Nevertheless, it is evident that official discourse and mainstream opinion in Britain support a broad policy stance in favour of cultural pluralism and a ‘race relations’ perspective, with allowance made for minority group rights. Furthermore, a significant degree of political space has been opened up for the mobilization of a group perspective on identity and rights. For example, in the last decade ‘separatist’ minority demands concerning controversial issues like same-race adoption and separate schooling have occupied a more prominent place on the policy agenda and have achieved some degree of legitimacy. While these proposals have engendered fierce opposition both from outside and from within minority ethnic communities, their influence over policy and practice illustrates the extent to which such issues have a serious place within the politics of race in contemporary Britain. The situation in France is very different. While Britain has attempted pragmatically to combine elements of both the ethnic and multicultural models into a revised definition of nationality and citizenship, France has managed to sustain its inclusionary, expansive system of citizenship law, despite introducing some modest changes in 1993 (see Weil and Crowley 1994). Furthermore, despite growing opposition from across the political spectrum, an assimilationist perspective on nationhood has continued to prevail alongside a commitment to universalist principles and individual rights. There remains in France a deep-seated resistance towards the idea of minority group rights, with little scope for the formal recognition of cultural differences among French citizens. All the same, it is still relatively easy for immigrants to acquire French citizenship. Political opposition to French citizenship law has centred on the problem of migrants from North Africa, especially Algerian immigrants and their descendants, with the attack on the ideology and practice of assimilation finding support both on the extreme right and the liberal left. The Front National has campaigned against the automatic acquisition of French citizenship by children born in France of foreign parents and has raised strong objections to the laxity of control over naturalization. Citizenship should only go to those with French hearts and minds. To be French you have to feel French and earn the right to be treated as such (Brubaker 1992: 179). The Front National is thus able to justify its proposal to repatriate cultural aliens from the Maghreb on the grounds that they can never – nor in practice do they really wish to – be incorporated into the French nation (Silverman 1992: 167). At the same time, the French left has also been critical of assimilation and has challenged the assumption, deeply embedded in the republican model of the nation, that access to citizenship is conditional upon cultural conformity. Creeping multiculturalism, particularly in schools, has highlighted a growing gap between the assimilationist rhetoric and the ‘differentialist’ reality within French society. As a result, sections of the left have been increasingly critical of assimilation as both undesirable and unattainable, supporting instead the ‘right to be different’. Despite the trenchant nature of these attacks from both right and left, the attempted reforms of French citizenship law by successive governments since the mid-1980s have been half-hearted and largely ineffective (see Wayland 1993). For example, although the automatic right to French nationality by children born of alien parents was removed in 1993, such children are still able to acquire citizenship if they can show a desire to become French. As such, this reaffirms the underlying commitment to

National identity and citizenship in Europe 173 assimilation and to the inclusive ‘civic’ view of citizenship that is a central component of the French republican tradition. The contrast with Germany is stark indeed! Here, a deep-rooted and continuing attachment to the exclusionary ‘ethnic’ model of citizenship has severely curtailed access to full citizenship rights by non-German immigrants and their descendants. Thus over one million ‘foreigners’, born and permanently domiciled in Germany, are denied access to German citizenship. On the other hand, so-called ethnic Germans have full rights of entry to Germany and an automatic entitlement to full citizenship. Although the anomaly of permanent settlement without citizenship has been acknowledged by the mainstream political parties in Germany, little has been done to secure the citizenship rights of second- and third-generation ‘immigrants’. Thus, while there has been some relaxation of the regulations governing naturalization, dual nationality is proscribed, and those seeking to become naturalized Germans are required to renounce their original citizenship (Brubaker 1992: 173–4). Not surprisingly, this has deterred many from applying. The exceptional restrictiveness of German nationality and citizenship laws derives from a closed conception of the nation that is defined in terms of ethnic and linguistic ties and parental descent. Consequently, to become a German national it is necessary for an individual to become German in more than a legal sense (ibid. 183–4). Despite the fact that Germany is the most significant country of immigration in modern Europe, it remains tied to an ethno-cultural conception of national identity that is rooted in the past. ALIENS AND CITIZENS: TOWARDS A CITIZEN’S EUROPE? The idea of citizenship within the European Union, introduced following the adoption of the Maastricht treaty, is entirely dependent on a conception of national citizenship, since EU citizenship can only be acquired by individuals who are citizens of one of the Member States (Martiniello 1994). Consequently, the link between nationality and citizenship is reproduced rather than challenged by the current conception of European citizenship. Indeed, it can be seen as an expression of the renewal of nationalism in Western Europe. Only full citizens of the nations of Western Europe can qualify for European citizenship by virtue of their nationality and, by implication, their cultural closeness and shared ‘Europeanness’ in contrast with non-EU nationals originating from beyond Europe. Broadly, there is a threefold differentiation of the population resident inside the EU into citizens, quasi-citizens and foreigners, founded on the basis of national citizenship (Castles and Miller 1993). EU nationals who migrate to another country in the Union enjoy important employment, residence and social welfare rights, but they are not full citizens since they have only limited political rights. In addition, access to welfare rights is largely determined by their employment status. Nevertheless, the position of these quasi-citizens is normally different to that of a variety of non-EU nationals resident within Europe who have more limited citizenship rights. However, even among these ‘third-country’ nationals, there are significant variations. Permanently settled foreigners of Turkish nationality in Germany have acquired legal and social rights which stop short of the entitlement to vote; legally resident aliens in countries like

174

Nationalism and ethnicity

Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Ireland have local voting rights; while a vast array of illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and temporary workers have few, if any, rights at all. It is evident that various forms of ‘citizenship’ exist across the EU alongside an increasing incidence of dual citizenship (Hammer 1990). Recent developments have served to reaffirm the marginalized position of ‘extra-communitarian’ migrants and foreigners located within the EU. A recent draft joint action following recommendations made by the Council of Europe and the European Parliament proposes that Member States should confer permanent residential status on longterm settlers inside the EU (Statewatch 1995a). The proposal is that Member States should issue, after three years’ legal residence, ten-year renewable residence permits which would confer, in effect, settled status, thereby ensuring that resident aliens are entitled to equal treatment with nationals in relation to employment and social benefits. While offering domiciled aliens a significant degree of security, the status of permanent resident will offer only partial integration into a Member State. In effect, permanent residence will serve to reinforce the status of ‘denizen’ for these groups, offering an intermediate position between the status of full citizen and that of alien (Triandafyllidou 1995). However, the primary concern of Member States remains that of identifying and excluding illegal immigrants and bogus asylum seekers. To this end, another recent proposal is for Member States to impose a requirement on foreign nationals to carry identity and residence documents at all times (Statewatch 1995b). An intensification of internal immigration controls in this manner is the other side of the coin to the partial integration of permanent resident aliens. It is also an important part of the policing of inclusion and exclusion across Europe, already foreshadowed by the Schengen Convention and other intergovernmental agreements and the redefinition of illegal immigration as an internal security problem (den Boer 1995). In effect, clear divisions are emerging between different categories of third-country nationals. The sharpest contrast is between the relatively privileged and legally resident ‘denizens’ and illegal immigrants or ‘margizens’, who have few rights and who remain primary targets for exclusion (Martiniello 1995). In between these two, there are a variety of refugees who lack any permanent security of residence and are denied access to the full rights of citizenship (Lambert 1995). ‘Third-country’ nationals, therefore, are a highly differentiated group who are subject to varying degrees of social inclusion and exclusion in different EU states. However, they remain emphatically outside the framework of European citizenship which is ultimately founded upon a nationalist logic of exclusion. The entire population of the ‘sixteenth state’ is excluded from common membership of the Citizen’s Europe and a great many of them are routinely subjected to racialized conceptions of ‘otherness’. It can be argued that there is a racist as well as a nationalist logic to the systematic exclusion from citizenship rights of ‘cultural aliens’ deemed not to belong in Europe. The marginalization of this growing category is a logical extension of the hostile and unwelcoming attitude towards immigrants that is the hallmark of the European immigration regime. Furthermore, the intention to tighten internal controls by intensifying further immigration checks on foreign nationals is likely to have a discriminatory impact on a large number of nonwhite EU nationals with full citizenship entitlements. This will be of relatively little concern to the ‘frontier guards’ of national identity, who appear to be concerned only with the effective management of exclusion and the imposition of ever-tighter restrictions

National identity and citizenship in Europe 175 on the ideological and legal boundaries of nationality, citizenship and ‘belongingness’ (Cohen 1994). CONCLUSION Whether or not the nation-state is an outmoded form of political organization, it is clear that it continues to hold considerable sway over hearts and minds. Right across the EU, there is intense political and cultural resistance to proposals that appear to require the reconstruction of national identities or the further erosion of the power of the nation-state to determine who will – and who will not! – be granted rights of citizenship. The survival of different definitions of citizenship and nationality within the EU and the maintenance of divergent national approaches to the inclusion and exclusion of immigrants and their descendants, illustrates the current limits of transnational citizenship rights and the continuing ideological potency of national cultures. Recent ‘identity panics’ have centred on the threat to national identity from the cultural ‘otherness’ of immigrants and have legitimized the growth of a tougher European immigration regime based on a logic of racial and cultural exclusiveness. In turn, this has facilitated the development of a new geopolitical layering in Europe, with Western Europe at its epicentre, that is marked by an increasing interconnectedness between economic, security and immigration matters. As a result, the EU states appear to have moved further away from the liberal-democratic inclusionary model of citizenship. In an age of international migration, the scope for any significant reshaping of citizenship beyond the nation-state that embraces liberal-democratic principles remains limited. Recurring tensions between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ conceptions of the nation, parallelling those between universalist and multiculturalist notions of rights and responsibilities, have characterized recent political and ideological struggles over citizenship, identity and nationhood inside the leading immigration countries. However, the ‘triumph of liberalism’ remains a distant prospect in matters of citizenship and immigration. The spectre of the ‘race card’ haunts electoral politics in the immigration countries of the New Europe and is an ever-present obstacle to the development of liberal citizenship laws at the EU level. For the foreseeable future, citizenship is likely to remain a last bastion of sovereignty for the nation-state. REFERENCES Ålund, A. and Schierup, C. (1991) Paradoxes of Multiculturalism: Essays on Swedish Society, Aldershot: Avebury. Baldwin-Edwards, M. and Schain, M. (1994) ‘The politics of immigration control: introduction’, West European Politics, 17 (2), April, 1–16. Balibar, E. (1991) ‘Es gibt keinen Staat in Europa: racism and politics in Europe today’, New Left Review, 186, March–April, 5–19. Brubaker, R. (1992) Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, London: Harvard University Press. Castles, S. (1993) ‘Migrants and minorities in Europe: perspectives for the 1990s: eleven hypotheses’, in J. Wrench and J. Solomos (eds), Racism and Migration in Western Europe, Oxford: Berg.

176

Nationalism and ethnicity

Castles, S. and Miller, M. (1993) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, London: Macmillan. Çinar, D. (1994) ‘From aliens to citizens: a comparative analysis of rules of transition’, in R. Bauböck (ed.), From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe, Aldershot: Avebury. Cohen, R. (1994) Frontiers of Identity: The British and Others, London: Longman. Collinson, S. (1993) Beyond Borders: West European Migration Policy Towards the 21st Century, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs. —— (1994) Europe and International Migration, London: Pinter. den Boer, M. (1995) ‘Moving between bogus and bona fide: the policing of inclusion and exclusion in Europe’, in R. Miles and D. Thränhardt (eds), Migration and European Integration: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion, London: Pinter. Dunn, J. (1994) ‘Introduction: crisis of the nation state?’, Political Studies, 42, 3–15. Esposito, J. (1992) The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hammer, T. (1990) Democracy and the Nation State: Aliens, Denizens and Citizens in a World of International Migration, Aldershot: Avebury. Husbands, C. (1994) ‘Crises of national identity as the “new moral panics”: political agendasetting about definitions of nationhood’, New Community, 20 (2), January, 191–206. King, M. (1994) ‘Fortress Europe’, Occasional Paper No. 6, Centre for the Study of Public Order, University of Leicester: Kolankiewicz, G. (1994) ‘Consensus and competition in the eastern enlargement of the European Union’, International Affairs, 70 (3), 477–95. Lambert, H. (1995) Seeking Asylum: Comparative Law and Practice in Selected European Countries, Dordrecht: Nijhoff. McGrew, A. (1992) ‘A global society?’, in S. Hall, D. Held and A. McGrew (eds), Modernity and its Futures, Oxford: Polity Press. Martiniello, M. (1994) ‘Citizenship of the European Union: a critical view’, in R. Bauböck (ed.), From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe, Aldershot: Avebury. —— (1995) ‘European citizenship, European identity and migrants: towards the post-national state’, in R. Miles and D. Thränhardt (eds), Migration and European Integration: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion, London: Pinter. Miles, R. (1993) ‘The articulation of racism and nationalism: reflections on European history’, in J. Wrench and J. Solomos (eds), Racism and Migration in Western Europe, Oxford: Berg. Mitchell, M. and Russell, D. (1994) ‘Race, citizenship and “Fortress Europe” ’, in P. Brown and R. Crompton (eds), Economic Restructuring and Social Exclusion, London: UCL Press. —— (1995) ‘National identity, immigration and citizenship in the New Europe’, paper presented to the ECPR Workshop on Citizenship Beyond the Nation State: The Case of Immigrants in Western Europe, IEP, Bordeaux, 27 April–2 May. —— (1998) ‘Fortress Europe, national identity and citizenship’, in F. Carr (ed.), Europe: The Cold Divide, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Parekh, B. (1994) ‘Discourses on national identity’, Political Studies, 42, 492–504. Rex, J. (1995) ‘Ethnic identity and the nation state: the political sociology of multi-cultural societies’, Social Identities, 1 (1), 21–34. Salt, J. (1995) ‘International migration report’, New Community, 21 (3), July, 443–64. Schlesinger, P. (1994) ‘Europeanness: a new cultural battlefield?’, in J. Hutchinson and D. Smith (eds), Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schnapper, D. (1994a) ‘Conclusion: Muslim communities, ethnic minorities and citizens’, in B. Lewis and D. Schnapper (eds), Muslims in Europe, London: Pinter. —— (1994b) ‘The debate on immigration and the crisis of national identity’, West European Politics, 17 (2), April, 127–39.

National identity and citizenship in Europe 177 Silverman, M. (1992) Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France, London: Routledge. Sivanandan, A. (1988) ‘The new racism’, New Statesman and Society, 4 November, 8–9. Soysal, Y.N. (1993) ‘Immigration and the emerging European polity’, in S.S. Anderson and K.A. Eliassen (eds), Making Policy in Europe: The Europeification of National Policy Making, London: Sage. Statewatch (1995a) ‘EU: the sixteenth state’, March–April, 7. —— (1995b) ‘Policing immigration: UK and Europe’, March–April, 17–18. Triandafyllidou, A. (1995) ‘A supra-national European citizenship: implications for migration policy’, paper presented to the ECPR Workshop on Citizenship Beyond the Nation State: The Case of Immigrants in Western Europe, IEP, Bordeaux, 27 April–2 May. Wæver, O., Buzan, B., Kelstrup, M. and Lemaitre, P. (1993) Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe, London: Pinter. Wallace, W. (1994) ‘Rescue or retreat? The nation state in Western Europe, 1945–1993’, Political Studies, 42, 52–76. Wayland, S. (1993) ‘Mobilising to defend nationality law in France’, New Community, 20 (1), October, 93–110. Weil, P. and Crowley,J. (1994) ‘Integration in theory and practice: a comparison of Britain and France’, West European Politics, 17 (2), April, 110–26. Zalewski, M. and Enloe, C. (1995) ‘Questions about identity in international relations’, in K. Booth and S. Smith (eds), International Relations Theory Today, Oxford: Polity Press, 284.

11 Nationalism: ethnicity and gender Sheila Allen

INTRODUCTION Almost all writing on nation or nationalism begins on a cautionary note. This chapter is no exception. The vocabulary is full of pitfalls and the distinction between myth and social structures, processes and relations of power are not made as frequently as might be expected. The social functions of myth have long been recognized and analysed by anthropologists and sociologists as part of understanding how people make sense of their world and how they legitimate their actions. The analysis of the importance of myth in creating and sustaining the idea of nation and its significance to nationalism is, however, only one part of the task of understanding and explaining them. Both terms are used for what on closer analysis are shown to be different phenomena in terms of causes, consequences and meanings. Moreover, unless existing alternatives to nation and nationalism are considered, whether as narratives, belief systems or value orientations, our analysis is not likely to be very adequate. There was undoubtedly a dominant, though largely implicit, tendency among midtwentieth-century Western sociologists to equate society with the nation-state (see Bauman 1973). Few went as far as Smith in claiming that The nation-state is the almost undisputed foundation of world order, the main object of individual loyalties, the chief definer of a man’s [sic] identity . . . It permeates our outlook so much that we hardly question its legitimacy today. [It] has become an indispensable prop in our thinking . . . When we talk of ‘society’ today we refer implicitly to nations. (Smith 1971: 2–3) The elision of society and nation or nation-state was never without challenge, especially by those working in the area of development and by Marxist scholars.¹ However, it is only in the 1980s and 1990s that this has again become the subject of substantial debate among sociologists and political scientists. Although in the 1990s ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are terms in daily use, clarifying them conceptually to analyse their structures and meaning requires account to be taken of the ethnic narratives in which they have become embedded and their intermeshing with gendered processes. In social and political theory the frameworks elucidating nation and nationalism show a marked neglect of gender relations as central to understanding these forms of human organization and a growing tendency to employ an over-determined notion of ethnicity/

Nationalism: ethnicity and gender 179 ethnic community in explaining them. The focus of this chapter is an unravelling of some aspects of these observations with the intention of facilitating discussion. It may be premature to assume that in the future social scientists writing on nationalism will, as a matter of course, give due consideration to gender. Nevertheless, work which does so already has grown sufficiently over recent years for us to identify the shortcomings of supposedly gender-neutral conceptualizations and to develop more theoretically encompassing approaches. There is no one focus to this work – different disciplinary frameworks, different analytical levels and different political projects and agendas are involved. Despite this, however, some commonalties emerge. Much of the work deals, quite understandably, primarily with women, their exclusion from or differential and unequal inclusion in both narratives of nationalism and its structuring as a political project. Those I explore in this chapter are selected on the grounds of their relevance to sociological understanding and my own feminist concerns.² The ‘prop’ in our thinking supplied by nation has, I would argue, long been intertwined with the ‘prop’ of race and founded on the ‘prop’ of gender. Theorists as diverse as Foucault (1990), Mosse (1986) and Pateman (1988) have pointed to the salience of gender, and Anderson’s thesis of nations as ‘imagined communities’ makes kinship ties central to his argument (1991). Kinship and gender are mutually constituting, not separate spheres, but though integrally related to notions of peoplehood this relationship can only be understood in the context of broader historical formations. Smith went on to develop his ideas, proposing two alternative concepts of nation – the modern and the ethnic – and then adopting a concept of ethnie as central to understanding the continuities between pre-modern and modern nations (1986). In the early 1990s popular versions of these ideas gained wide currency in the media reporting of conflicts in Eastern Europe and of issues relating to Muslim minorities in Western Europe. Those working in the area of race and ethnic relations in Western Europe over the past half century had virtually ignored the issue of nation and nationalism and were therefore ill-equipped to deal with them (Allen and Macey 1994; Gilroy 1987; Goulbourne 1991; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). In the United States they were given some attention in the context of the rise of movements of black nationalism and the ‘Nation of Islam’ in the 1960s (Genovese 1972; Killian 1994).³ Genovese sets his analysis in the context of the history of the plantation slave system in the Southern states. He argues that the early national strivings in the South came from slaveholders, but these disintegrated after 1865. The growing Afro-American nationality developing in the 1960s he saw as resting on positive estimates of the genius displayed by black people under the ultimate test of bondage. Much of the cultural distinctiveness of black Americans arose from or was tempered in slave quarters. To understand it, it was necessary to understand slavery, not in narrow economic terms but as a system of social, political and cultural relations in which exploitation and resistance were integrally embedded (Genovese 1970; see also Gilroy 1993). This is for him an example of a ‘particular confrontation of the class elements’ without which ‘it is impossible to make sense out of nationalism, national culture, or national interest’ (Genovese 1972: 21). In current discussions of nationalism and nation little regard is paid to the class dimension unless it is to note its decline or fragmentation. More usually attention focuses on

180

Nationalism and ethnicity

litanies of diversity, neglecting cross-cutting ties and simply rejecting ‘modernist’ theories. This, combined with the ubiquitous use of the term ‘identity’, both on an individual and collective level, has increasingly confused and obfuscated the discussion of nationalism, of ethnicity and of gender (Allen 1994; Burkitt 1991; Jenkins 1994). Two of the most positive breakthroughs for the sociological analysis of nationalism came with the revived separation of the concepts of the nation and the state and the analysis of their interrelation (Bauman 1990; Llobera 1994; McCrone 1992) and from the work on citizenship undertaken from the early 1980s in response to what was seen as a period of significant social change. The strength frequently attributed to national allegiance may be more usefully viewed as a means by which the state seeks legitimation as a unitary polity, to which all other ties are subordinated. In multinational and multiethnic states such ties form potential sources of fission and of resistance against the state (see Oommen 1986). The conditions and commonalties for fusion and the level and degree of the forces of fission are matters for investigation within and beyond contemporary state boundaries. CITIZENSHIP: SOCIAL GLUE? Theories of social order and of social change lie behind the ways in which state or nation and the links between them are conceptualized, understood and explained. In sociology discussions around citizenship during the past decade have raised questions of the relations of state and society. Much of this discussion was premised on a nation-state model, but increasingly other perspectives have been taken which address questions of human rights in the context of movements across state borders (Baubock 1992, 1994). The discussion remains for the most part within a modernist framework and citizenship has been depicted on the one hand as democratic and inclusive in scope, capable of modifying the conflicts and alienation in heterogeneous states among different classes, racial and ethnic categories as well as across the genders; on the other its link to democracy is challenged, and as part of a ruling class strategy it lacks substance in terms of embedded political and civil rights for the majority of the members of a given state, though in some cases citizens enjoy a high degree of social rights (Mann 1987). Challenges to these modernist conceptions of citizenship have come from two separate, but broadly associated, directions. First a general challenge by feminist scholars was made on the universalist presupposition underlying the concept of liberal and social-democratic citizenship as gender-neutral. Some sought to demonstrate the maleness of its construction through tracing back to Aristotle a continuing ideological separation of the social world into private and public spheres (Elshtain 1981; Phillips 1991). Others illustrated the ways in which state laws incorporated women differently and unequally to men in terms of citizen rights and duties and the frequent occurrence of the differential incorporation of women from ethnic and racialized minorities compared to those from dominant groups (Allen 1989a, 1989b; Allen and Macey 1990; Lister 1990; Stacey and Price 1981; WING 1985). Parallel to these discussions were those taking place around the exclusion or ‘second class’ citizenship of racialized categories in British society and their Western

Nationalism: ethnicity and gender 181 European variants. While not focusing on, or even referring to, gender in most instances, these were concerned to analyse the ways in which such minorities were not full members of the societies in which they lived and worked and into which many had been born. One of the starkest measures of their disempowered position, aside from higher unemployment rates and generally poorer socioeconomic locations, was the increasing use of violence, including murder, against them (Baimbridge et al. 1994). In addition, studies were increasingly undertaken which concentrated on the development since the 1950s and 1960s of an overt British or an English nationalism as an exclusionary force to deny the black British a national (British/English) identity and equality of rights as British citizens (Gilroy 1987, 1990; Goulbourne 1991; Solomos 1989). The relevance of these analyses to discussions of nation and nationalism lies in their critique of modernist social theory and the degree to which modernist approaches create a partial, inappropriate and distorting mode of theorizing. Theories of industrialization, whether of a Marxist or liberal variety, assumed a pattern of social change and development in which all social statuses were subordinated to the market and production relations. In most accounts of the development of Western industrial economies neither capitalists nor labourers were depicted as having any gender, ethnicity, race, religion or nationality. It was not that these social attributes did not exist, but according to the models of development adopted they belonged to ‘traditional’, pre-modern societies and so became less and less relevant to understanding societal relations (Allen 1993). Over the past few years these problems have been addressed in a variety of ways, particularly with regard to relations of gender and of race/ethnicity in terms of processes which objectify as ‘other’ those categories which do not fit the white, male norm. Issues of diversity and identity within the context of debates on modernism and postmodernism have predominated (Allen 1994; Maynard 1994; Parker et al. 1992). Barker comments on the depiction of ‘national’ resistance as movements of peoples against the state, and questions the widespread assumption that ‘national and ethnic groups are popular, democratic communities, in which the ordinary citizen plays a full and powerful role’ (1995: 209). He remarks on the patriarchal forms such struggles take, an argument more fully developed by and in relation to women in two arenas. First, in Third World resistance struggles, where women’s demands are subordinated to the interests of the national struggle and then to the state which emerges; second, among minorities in many Western societies where men’s interests and perspectives are taken to be representative of the ethnic/national collectivity (Jayawardena 1986; Parker et al. 1992; Rowbotham 1972; Sahgal and Yuval-Davis 1992; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). A separate body of work has challenged the modernist conception of nation with one which harmonises less well with Western modernity. It sees nations as named human populations claiming a common ancestry, a demotic solidarity, common customs and vernaculars, and a common native history. Genealogy, demography, traditional culture and history, furnish the main resources for an ethnic view of the formation of nations. (Smith 1986: 9)

182

Nationalism and ethnicity

The primordalist view proper, that nations and ethnic communities are the natural units of history, and that language, religion, race, ethnicity and territory are the bases of human organization and have always existed, is rejected by Smith. But he disputes the claims attributed to modernists of a radical break between pre-modern units and sentiments and modern nations and nationalisms. As mentioned earlier he adopts a concept of ethnie (that is, collective cultural units and sentiments of previous times) to analyse the differences and similarities between them and modern nations and nationalisms (1986: 12–14). Furthermore, by including both concepts of the nation, he argues, allows us to explain ‘the durability and widespread appeal of nations, and the intensity of ethnic aspirations today’ (Smith 1988: 10). Such a position does not allow us, however, to problematize ethnicity as its existence, its durability and appeal are simply assumed. They deal with appearances rather than structural conditions which facilitate or hinder the progress of claims to rights, to goods or to power on the basis of peoplehood. ORDERS AND BOUNDARIES In my view order and change are integrally related; neither can be usefully conceptualized as logically prior. Each is applicable to all levels of social organization and the units selected for analysis can, unless their mutual structuring is continually examined, become ossified. The present discussion of such key concepts as the nation, the state and community, around which there is considerable debate, lacks clarity both in terms of the level of social organization to which they are being applied and the salience of diversities of ethnicity, race, class and gender. Class is largely ignored and the others either essentialized or marginalized. The Enlightenment may justly be contextualized as Eurocentric, bourgeois, male, white and Christian, and as such is open to a range of criticisms, but the ideas it formulated cannot thereby be declared as carrying no relevance or validity in explaining the current conflicts (Allen and Macey 1994). While allowing for the inadequacies of much modernist thought, it is not helpful to throw out those aspects which present ways of understanding the part played by nationalist projects in the formation and development of modern forms of social organization, including not only states but empires. Carr (1945) observes that the realms of the Habsburgs and Romanovs were not nations but empires, as was the case with realms such as those of the Hanoverians/ Saxe-Coburgs/Windsors, the Ottomans and the House of Orange. An understanding of present-day Europe, its imagined boundaries and the intensity of some of the conflicts is lost unless such previous supranational entities are taken into account. A central concern with social order has marked much sociology and political theory. By and large four different explanations have been put forward as the bases of order – coercion (or constraint), interests, common values and dull compulsion (inertia). All have encountered problems with explaining social change and with defining the boundaries of the social unit to which order applies. How social order is conceptualized depends on how society and its parts are perceived explicitly or implicitly. The dominance of some variant of structural functional models in explaining social order is welltrodden ground, as are the criticisms of its major twentieth-century exponent, Talcott

Nationalism: ethnicity and gender 183 Parsons. The main contender in conceptualizing the same problematic, but with explaining social change as a central concern, is Marxism. Both the young Marx and the early Parsons saw individuals as purposive, but interpreted the relation of individuals and the conditions under which they lived differently. Where Marx emphasized the state of alienation, Parsons stressed voluntarism. To Parsons men [sic] are free to strive, but are not free to achieve what they strive for. Men make a difference but not the difference they intend . . . But what for Marx is an historic pathology is for Parsons the unavoidable and eternal condition of man. (Gouldner 1971: 189–93) Where recent ethno-nationalist claims have secured international recognition, this has been not as ethnies or nations but as states.4 Sociologists have long conceptualized the state as more problematic than political scientists, especially with regard to the interrelation of the state and society. Both Weber and Durkheim emphasized the modern state’s role in social cohesion, but their analyses were embedded in more encompassing models of society. For Weber the state has both legal and political referents, is a continuous organisation with compulsory jurisdiction and a ‘monopoly’ of the use of legitimate force over a given territory. ‘In the end, the modern state controls the total means of political organization’ (Gerth and Mills 1952: 82). In many states of Europe this claim is now challenged from within and from outside. He describes the state as ‘organizing domination’ and recognizes the nature of domination as one source of variation between types of states. The legitimacy of domination in the modern state rests not in the personal power of princes, monarchs, or warlords, but in professionals, politicians (parties) and bureaucrats, exercising, and subject to, impersonal law. That legitimacy can be, and frequently is, allied to particularistic forms of domination, falling short of his ideal typical model of the modern state, rather than rendering his observations invalid, provides a means to analyse patterns of exclusion and inclusion in state structures (see also Bendix 1964: 105–7). The question of the bases of legitimation in different types of societies was central to the work of Durkheim (1947, 1957). It is sufficient to note here that for Durkheim the notion of value consensus, a unified system of ideas and morals, was possible only in relatively undifferentiated societies. In his quest for some grounds for social cohesion in societies with complex divisions of labour he developed a consensual model of diffuse moral values based on interdependence among those differentially located. Anomic relations (normlessness) at the individual and societal levels were a mark of periods of social transition, and a new system of moral values depended on the development of a recognition of interdependence. The state had the prime role in facilitating these processes: ‘in a society characterized by social pluralism and individualistic values, the State had “the right and the duty to play the widest possible role in all spheres of collective life”’ (Lukes 1973: 271). While stressing the state’s duty to free the individual from the oppression of local, domestic, religious and occupational collectivities, he maintained that these secondary groups form the substance of civil society, mediating between the individual and domination by the state. He argued that this conflict of social forces gave rise to individual freedoms within a moral consensus.

184

Nationalism and ethnicity

The influence of the values of the liberal Enlightenment led Durkheim and Weber to stress personal and collective autonomy against state power, but at the same time securing this was the state’s right and duty according to Durkheim. Weber was more doubtful about this benign portrayal, especially as far as the underprivileged were concerned. Carr’s approach to nation and nationalism, derived from Marxism, acknowledges the ideological importance of liberal democracy to nationalism in Europe until at least the 1870s (1945: 10). In his analysis, however, it was the growing power of British commercialism and of the British navy after the Napoleonic wars which lay behind the recognition and establishment of national units in nineteenth-century Europe. Neither of these were seriously challenged until the 1890s, but were finally broken by World War I. The success of the compromise between a closely knit world economic system, political diversity and the independence of nations was possible through two pieces of make-believe: that the world system was truly international and that the economic and political systems were entirely separate (ibid. 12–17). Such make-believe in the 1990s is found in the anodyne phrase ‘globalization of the world economy’ and in the discussion of political conflict in ethnic, religious or national terms without regard to the crucial part economic interests play.5 Whether one accepts Carr’s conclusions about the integration of the economic and political systems, it would be fair to say that there is a substantial measure of agreement among sociologists, with widely differing approaches in other respects, that account must be taken of the state’s relations to and dependence on economic structures and processes and the ways in which these are legitimated (Barbalet 1988; Parsons 1964). The analysis of these relations cannot be undertaken within the bounds of one state, the domination of capitalist interests in the world economy affects all states and the rights of citizens across and within state boundaries (Garrahan and Stewart 1992; Sadler 1992; Sayer and Walker 1992). The ability of individual states to modify the effects, if there is the political will to try, is a matter of debate among political economists. Among politicians this issue is rarely explicitly raised. The disunity among British politicians and between Britain and other Member States of the European Union over membership reflects one dimension of this problem. The political narrative is couched, as often as not, in nationalistic terms, bringing out old enmities against France and Germany and more generally using the argument that ancient English freedoms are being eroded by foreigners. WHOSE ETHNICITY?: WHOSE COMMUNITY? The emergence or re-emergence in Europe of nationalisms, and of ideologies of exclusive ethnicities reinforcing racialized and gendered structures and practices, poses a considerable challenge to social scientists. One defining element of an ethnic group is that of a system of shared values. Parsons (1937) presumed this to be a definer of society and action within societies related to the pursuit of common goals. The structural functionalist approach of a shared value system underlies the ethnic concept of nation. The existence of more than one ethnic group within one polity, the relations among them and between them and the whole, raises questions which cannot be answered within this approach. Critiques of modernist approaches to dealing with

Nationalism: ethnicity and gender 185 such questions stress difference and diversity and fragmentation but fail to explain how such societies exist. Several problems arise with much of the work which uses ethnicity to explain social relations and social actions in contemporary Europe and beyond. Much turns on the way in which ethnicity is conceived and the processes by which it is thought to endure. A myth of ethnic homogeneity is espoused both to define the in-category and to mark it off from others. Mixed or multiple ethnicities, how ethnicity is gendered or how it relates to class structuring are rarely part of the discussion of the ethnic nation. This is not to say that the myth of ethnic exclusiveness is not powerful in some conditions, nor that it is not striven for in some circumstances. Where religion is part of an ethnic definition such exclusiveness is likely to be the norm. In practice, somewhat different and much more contradictory and complex relations exist – as, for example, so many of former Yugoslavia’s citizens testify through marriage and parentage.6 Ethnically plural households, kin groups and all kinds of associational institutions exist across Europe, and, while some states, some nations and all ‘ethnic’ leaders deplore, deny and challenge this state of affairs, social science has the task of taking these, as well as the myths, into account, analysing and explaining them. Weber, in his discussion of nation, common values and culture community, is well aware of the tenuous logical and empirical grounds on which the idea of nation is based and of its complex relation to the state (Gerth and Mills 1952: 171–9). He argues that ‘In so far as there is a common object lying behind the obviously ambiguous term “nation” it is apparently located in the field of politics’, and follows this with what is currently an unfashionable view: ‘one must not conceive of a nation as a “culture” community’ (ibid. 176, 178). As a sociologist Weber demonstrates the idea of the German nation to be both geographically and culturally highly selective. Swayed by political concerns for the survival of the recently unified German state and the defence of the ‘German cultural heritage’, he ignored his own sociological analysis and maintained that the nation-state was the only polity capable of performing the task of civil society.7 This use of ‘nation’ in relation to the state remains strongly part of the narratives of some politicians (and sociologists?) in Europe. For example, British politicians opposed to European integration make demands for the ‘repatriation of rights’ from the European Union to the British Parliament, evoking the idea of national sovereignty. This ignores the multinational character of the British Parliament and its domination by England, which denies constitutional equality to the other (Celtic) nations. In the light of current discussions of inclusion and exclusion in European societies and the particularistic narratives in which they are embedded, comparative and historical studies within modernist frameworks become more, not less, relevant. Modernist thinkers may have failed to provide adequate accounts of industrialization and urbanization and their effects, and the modernist notion that societies became increasingly secular with industrialization needs re-examination in the light of recent developments; but many of the issues in contemporary Europe are those which previous generations addressed. For instance, who is included in the polity, what is the legal status of aliens and migrants, the civil status of religious minorities and how class differences articulate with other divisions are long-standing sociological questions (Bendix 1960; Weber 1958). To take one example: the degree of integration or separation of the polity from the religious order. An observation made by Weber that foreign

186

Nationalism and ethnicity

merchants and landowners were in principle accepted as full citizens in medieval Western cities as long as they were part of the communion, an association of believing individuals around the confessional, led him to conclude that ‘From the beginning, thus, the Jews remained outside the burgher association’ (Weber 1958: 103). Currently responses to Islamic minorities are confused and ambiguous. State educational institutions in France, Britain and Germany have been the locus of conflict, and in Britain local agencies rely on Imams and their lay supporters for ‘the Muslim view’ on a wide range of issues, especially family matters. The patriarchal perspective is taken as representative and women’s voices go largely unheard (see above, p. 181, and particularly Sahgal and Yuval-Davis 1992). At present Muslim women are subjected to white, Christian, stereotypical views constructed by men and are largely unrepresented in local and national political processes. Though the situation varies across Europe, the political institutions of the European Union and the British state are distinctly linked to Christianity. While religious freedom is espoused and religious observance tolerated, major institutional arrangements are linked to the Christian calendar and in England and Scotland the symbols and rituals of national unity are heavily biased towards the established Protestant churches (Allen 1989a; Troyna and Williams 1986 ).8 Secularization processes can be shown to be piecemeal and non-linear and the political use of religious narratives a substantial factor in the restructuring of Europe. Nevertheless, perspectives drawn from the vocabularies of common rights and duties of citizenship have provided alternative modes of discourse since the American and French revolutions. Anthias (1992) takes the particular case of Greek Cypriot migrant labour in Britain, and using a concept of ethnos discusses how this may be theorized along with the cross-cutting divisions of class and gender.9 She does not reduce ethnicity to these divisions, but locates its construction in combination with them, materially and symbolically. Her observation that ethnic ‘identity may be constructed from outside as well as inside the group’ is one made by sociologists and anthropologists in relation to ethnic categorization, the range of conditions under which it may arise and the variety of consequences it may have. Whether externally imposed ethnicity gives rise to group formation or to self-identity or collective identity is a matter for investigation rather than assumption. In the literature on ethnic concepts of nations these considerations largely go unasked. Empirically the crucial question is gender and the exclusion and stereotyping of women, politically, economically and socially. ‘Community’ is much used and much abused in popular discourse; its meaning is assumed to be known and shared. Its recent widespread use by politicians, including government ministers, in Britain is linked directly to policies which reduce the collective obligations of the state towards its citizens, particularly in relation to their social and economic rights, and shift these onto individuals or families and especially to women. One telling example of this is ‘Care in the Community’ policy introduced in 1990 which has not only had disastrous results in the case of the majority of the mentally ill and the elderly and their carers, but has made overt the non-congruity of community and the actualities of economic, social and political relations existing at local and regional levels. In social science, so far as it is taken to mean a moral community, sharing not only a common value system but a common way of living, then it is appropriately applied to small-scale, relatively closed and unchanging forms of social organization. Its application to all manner of categories, groups and quasi-groups within complex,

Nationalism: ethnicity and gender 187 changing, relatively open societies, stratified by class, race and gender, is inappropriate from a social science perspective. In such societies Durkheim, following Tönnies, spoke of associations as typical forms of social interaction and interrelationship, not communities. When ‘community’ also carries a categorical label such as those commonly used in Britain – Black, Asian, Irish, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, for instance, but never English, and Protestant only with reference to Northern Ireland – its meaning, though again assumed to be obvious and shared, is in fact nothing of the kind. Malik (1995) argues that ‘The rhetoric of community is shaping a new political consensus’ between liberal intellectuals, right-wing ideologues and New Labour. He gives several illustrations to substantiate his argument, including a ‘new’ policy of high profile police raids aimed at black males in the inner city, following a highly publicized claim that ‘most muggings are carried out by black men’. This social categorizing and stigmatizing is largely carried out by non-blacks, but it also draws in prominent and ‘responsible’ black people to rid ‘the community’ of criminal elements. Such processes are facets of institutionalized racist thinking and practice reinforcing a whole host of prejudices and xenophobic ideas, rather than anything to do with community, ethnic or otherwise. Much analysis of ethnicity focuses at the group and inter-group level and tends to begin with the internal content and dynamics of the group, selecting and stressing distinctive characterizations in terms of relatively static and consensual cultural norms. When these are considered in a wider context some version of cultural pluralism tends to be adopted. These approaches have limited explanatory power in ethnically heterogeneous societies where class and gender divisions cross-cut ethnic group membership. In such societies the possibilities of ethnic encapsulation is minimal, except where it is imposed from outside. Where boundaries are porous, where structures of domination are pervasive, where exchanges are marked by inequalities of political and economic resources, it is these which require theorizing and investigating in order to understand the role of ethnicity and ethnic narratives. Theorizing the bases of solidarity and cohesion in heterogeneous states, and across them, cannot leave out imaginings of peoplehood, but setting them in the overall structuring of dominance and subordination, conflict and contradiction is of crucial significance. To assume them to be major mobilizing agents hinders the analysis of the circumstances under which they appear to be so. This in turn underplays the role of other mobilizing agents and structures. CONCLUSION A contrast can be made in the discussion of nations and nationalism between the period at the end of World War II, when Carr published Nationalism and After, and the 1990s. The contrast is not with the degree of seriousness with which the subject is treated, but with the assumptions and the climate and context in which it is perceived. With guarded optimism about the prospects for internationalism Carr expressed the view that a political unit based not on exclusiveness of nation or language but on shared ideals and aspirations of universal application may be thought to be a distinct

188

Nationalism and ethnicity

advance over a political unit based simply on the cult of a nation, or even over a political unit like pre-1939 Yugoslavia or Poland, where it made all the difference in the world whether one was a Serb, Croat or Slovene, a Pole, Ukrainian or Lithuanian. (Carr 1945: 66) Today a scholarly concern with nationalism is both understandable and necessary.10 Since Carr wrote, the variety of independence struggles in the former colonies and the Third World more generally, the long-standing conflicts between, for instance, Britain and the Province of Northern Ireland or Spain and the Basque country, and the more recent secessions in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, are all seen as having some connection to nation and involving nationalist movements and ideologies. Whether these can or should be defined as a separate subject-area, a field in their own right, is likely to be as contentious as the study of race and ethnic relations was in the 1960s and early 1970s (Rex 1970a, 1970b; Zubaida 1970) or as women’s studies and gender relations continue to be. The range of disciplines involved, their lack of theoretical integration and power relations within academic institutions, partly explain the differences of view. As a sociologist working in these contested domains I remain unconvinced that they can be treated as separate subject areas. As I have tried to argue in this chapter nation and nationalism are to be understood in terms of broader social, economic and political frameworks and to be seen both as constituting and constitutive relationships at all levels of society. The present period, in which the stability and certainties of the postwar accommodations between ideological and military power blocs across and beyond Europe have been disturbed, carries with it not only new and re-emerging conflicts between groups and quasi-groups but structural contradictions at institutional and system levels. Marrying individual experience and intermediate organization with these macro forces of fission and fusion is a formidable analytical task. Abstracting and reifying nation and nationalism from these contexts makes it even more difficult. Though it is fallacious to equate the nation with the state, the use of the idea of nation was of great importance in the development of many European states (Llobera 1994). The use made of nation and of nationalism by the European and North American upper classes in the creation and maintenance of state structures from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries has been well documented, but this does not exhaust the issue. Empires too were and are complexly related to the invention and development of nations, nationalities and nationalisms (Dummett and Nichol 1990). The paramount importance of state power and state-generated nationalism to understanding nation and state are not new ideas, as Acton recognized in 1862: Nationality does not aim either at liberty or prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the state. Its course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin. (quoted in Carr 1945: 245) When particularistic narratives, such as ethno-nationalism, construct those who do not share their beliefs/traditions or ways of life not just as different but as the ‘absolute other’, exclusion logically follows (Young 1990). If rights are expressed through

Nationalism: ethnicity and gender 189 and embedded in exclusive ethno-national institutions they deny civil, political, social and economic rights to other social categories of the population and in extreme cases expel or exterminate them. ‘Ethnicity’ has become a term so broad that it embraces all manner of different collectivities and may therefore be in danger of losing any analytical purchase. Clarifying the theoretical assumptions on which the concepts of state and nation rest and the political issues which nationalism raises is a task which faces intellectuals at the end of the twentieth century, as it did at the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.11 Much of the discussion of nations and nationalisms gives little or no attention to alternative narratives and political projects, despite their being part of European social thought and political movements, as the following quotation reminds us: the combination of different nations in one state is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society . . . those states are substantially the most perfect which . . . include various distinct nationalities without oppressing them. (quoted in Carr 1945: 66)

NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

It is not one adopted by many eminent literary figures. For instance, Richard Wright claimed ‘I have no race except that which is forced on me. I have no country except that to which I am obliged to belong’ (quoted in Gilroy 1993: 146). Some see it as a eurocentric view (Joseph et al. 1990), but it is more than just this. One of the commonest words in the vocabulary of those writing on nationalism (and ethnicity), including those adopting a gendered approach, is ‘identity’. I have considered in a previous paper (Allen 1994) what I termed the identity problematic and so attempt to avoid a repetition here of the sociological questions it raises. See Scott (1992) for a discussion of these movements in the context of gender relations. As already noted, the use of the term ‘nation-state’ causes confusion and is best kept in sociological discussion for those few, if any, cases where the nation and the state are coterminous. The way in which the idea of nation is used and operates is a separate issue (Allen 1994; Carr 1945; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1984; McCrone 1992). Carr notes that ‘After 1870 the constructive work of nation-building seemed complete. Nationalism became associated with “the Balkans” and with all that ominous term implied’ (1945: 17; my italics). The 1991 Yugoslav Census contained an ethnic question which entailed giving neat bounded responses, which many found difficult and puzzling to answer as they did not see themselves in this way nor were some of them able to fit into the boxes. Nevertheless, the results are taken to be ‘real’ in political and media circles. The apparent ambiguity between his position as sociologist and as nationalist is to be found in his conceptions of reason and of value and their separation in his methodology (Jenkins 1994). The relationship between reason and morality has been raised in recent times by many social scientists. For example, it is central to the work of Bauman (1989) on modern societies and the Holocaust. The current appeal across Europe to nationalistic values in formulating and changing citizenship laws, in claiming statehood and conducting armed conflicts in pursuit of this aim, requires a similar analysis. Critical sociology does not need to abandon the Weberian split between reason and value in its enquiry. In fact there is a very strong case for retaining it. The

190 8. 9.

10.

11.

Nationalism and ethnicity

issue is whether we use sociological observations to inform our views and choices or, like Weber, set them aside in the face of political challenges and pressures. The appointment of Sir Malcolm Rifkind as Foreign Secretary in the Conservative government led to media speculation about the significance of an orthodox Jew holding that position; no such speculation takes place with Anglicans, orthodox or otherwise. The phenomenon of ethnos, though very diverse, has two commonalities: the construction or representation of a group origin which provides claims to a common identity and by an imaginary of common culture, language, territory and so on that belong as an inalienable right to the group (Anthias 1992: 27). Researchers, scholars and professionals working in the field of race relations in Britain in the early 1970s acquired the pejorative label ‘the race relations industry’ (Killian 1994). Those working in the 1990s on nation and nationalism appear to be in danger of acquiring a similar label and reputation. My understanding of the term ‘intellectual’, and the way I mean it to be understood here, draws on Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures; see especially the Introduction and chapter 1 of Said (1994).

REFERENCES Allen, S. (1989a) ‘Threats to and Opportunities for Multi-racialism in Multi-racial Britain’, Paper presented to Section N, The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Annual Meeting, University of Sheffield. —— (1989b) ‘Social Aspects of Citizenship’, Public Lecture, Queen’s University, Belfast. —— (1993) ‘Citizenship’, Paper presented to the Conference on Class, Status and Party at the Fin de Siècle, University of Leicester. —— (1994) ‘Race, Ethnicity and Nationality: Some Questions of Identity’, in H. Afshar and M. Maynard (eds), The Dynamics of Race and Gender, Basingstoke: Taylor & Francis. Allen, S. and Macey, M. (1990) ‘Race and Ethnicity in the European Context’, British Journal of Sociology, 41 (3). —— (1994) ‘Some Issues of Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism in the “New” Europe: Rethinking Sociological Paradigms’, in P. Brown and R. Crompton (eds), A New Europe: Economic Restructuring and Social Exclusion, London: UCL Press. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalisms, London: Verso. Anthias, F. (1992) Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Migration, Aldershot: Avebury. Baimbridge, M., Burkitt, B. and Macey, M. (1994) ‘The Maastricht Treaty: Accelerating Racism in Europe?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17 (3), 420–40. Barbalet, J. M. (1988) Citizenship, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Barker, R. (1995) ‘Whose Legitimacy? Elites, Nationalism and Ethnicity in the United Kingdom’, New Community, 21 (2), 207–14. Baubock, R. (1992) Immigration and the Boundaries of Citizenship, Warwick: Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, Monograph in Ethnic Relations No. 4 (new series). —— (ed.) (1994) From Aliens to Citizens, Aldershot: Avebury. Bauman, Z. (1973) Culture as Praxis, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —— (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (1990) Thinking Sociologically, Oxford: Blackwell. Bendix, R. (1960) Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, London: Heinemann. —— (1964) Nation Building and Citizenship: Studies of our Changing Social Order, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Burkitt, I. (1991) Social Selves: Theories of the Social Formation of Personality, London: Sage. Carr, E. H. (1945) Nationalism and After, London: Macmillan. Dummett, A. and Nichol, A. (1990) Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Nationalism: ethnicity and gender 191 Durkheim, E. (1947) The Division of Labour in Society, Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press (trans. George Simpson). —— (1957) Professional Ethics and Civil Morals, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Elshtain, J. B. (1981) Public Man, Private Woman, Oxford: Martin Robertson. Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality, London: Penguin (vol. 1 trans. R. Hurley). Garrahan, P. and Stewart, P. (1992) The Nissan Enigma, London: Mansell. Genovese, E. D. (1970) The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, London: Allen Lane. —— (1972) In Red and Black, Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History, New York: Vintage Books. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. W. (eds) (1952) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gilroy, P. (1987) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London: Hutchinson. —— (1990) ‘One Nation under a Groove: The Cultural Politics of “Race” and Racism in Britain’, in D.T. Goldberg (ed.), Anatomy of Racism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— (1993) The Black Atlantic, London: Verso. Goulbourne, H. (1991) Ethnicity and Nationalism in Post- Imperial Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gouldner, A. W. (1971) The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, London: Heinemann. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds) (1984) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jayawardena, K. (1986) Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, London: Zed Press. Jenkins, R. (1994) ‘Rethinking Ethnicity: Categorization and Power’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17 (2), 197–223. Joseph, G. G., Reddy, V. and Searle-Chatterjee, M. (1990) ‘Eurocentrism in the Social Sciences’, Race and Class, 31 (4). Killian, L. M. (1994) Black and White: Reflections of a White Southern Sociologist, New York: General Hall Inc. Lister, R. (1990) The Female Citizen, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Llobera, J. R. (1994) The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe, Oxford: Berg. Lukes, S. (1973) Emile Durkheim in his Life and Works, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. McCrone, D. (1992) Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation, London: Routledge. Malik, K. (1995) ‘Same Old Hate in the New Byword for Bigotry’, The Guardian, 12 August. Mann, M. (1987) ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, Sociology, 21 (3), 339–54. Maynard, M. (1994) ‘The Concept of Difference’, in H. Afshar and M. Maynard (eds), The Dynamics of Race and Gender, Basingstoke: Taylor & Francis. Mosse, G. (1986) Nationalism and Sexuality, New York: Fertig. Oommen, T. K. (1986) ‘Social Movements and Nation-State in India: towards a Relegitimization of Cultural Nationalism’, Journal of Social and Economic Studies, 3 (2), 107–29. Parker, A., Russo, M., Sommer, D. and Yaeger, P. (eds) (1992) Nationalisms and Sexualities, London: Routledge. Parsons, T. P. (1937) The Structure of Social Action, New York: McGraw-Hill. —— (1964) ‘Introduction’, in Max Weber: The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press. Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Phillips, A (1991) ‘Citizenship and Feminist Politics’, in G. Andrews (ed.), Citizenship, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Rex, J. (1970a) ‘The Concept of Race in Sociological Theory’, in S. Zubaida (ed.), Race and Racialism, London: Tavistock.

192

Nationalism and ethnicity

—— (1970b) Race Relations in Sociological Theory, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Rowbotham, S. (1972) Women, Resistance and Revolution, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. Sadler, D. (1992) The Global Region, Oxford: Pergamon. Sahgal, G. and Yuval-Davis, N. (1992) Refusing Holy Orders: Women and Fundamentalism in Britain, London: Virago Press. Said, E. W. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual, London: Vintage. Sayer, D. and Walker, R. (1992) The New Social Economy Reworking the Division of Labour, Oxford: Blackwell. Scott, J. H. (1992) ‘From Foreground to Margin: Female Configuration and Masculine SelfRepresentation in Black Nationalist Fiction’, in A. Parker, M. Russo, D. Sommer and P. Yaeger (eds), Nationalisms and Sexualities, London: Routledge. Smith, A. D. ( 1971) Theories of Nationalism, London: Duckworth. —— (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1988) ‘The Myth of the “Modern Nation” and the Myths of Nations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 11 (1), 1–26. Solomos, J. (1989) Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain, London: Macmillan. Stacey, M. and Price, M. (1981) Women Power and Politics, London: Tavistock. Troyna, B. and Williams, J. (1986) Racism, Education and the State, Beckenham: Croom Helm. Weber, M. (1958) The City, London: Collier-Macmillan. WING (Women, Immigration and Nationality Group) (1985) Worlds Apart: Women under Immigration and Nationality Law, London: Pluto Press. Young, I. M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yuval-Davis, N. and Anthias, F. (1989) Women, Nation and State, London: Macmillan. Zubaida, S. (ed.) (1970) ‘Introduction’, Race and Racialism, London: Tavistock.

12 The Balkan tragedy A universal or a particular issue? Margareta Bertilsson

As a theme of joint European sociology, although suffering from sociological neglect, I would like to focus on the present, on what has happened in our midst: the Balkan tragedy. How do we, European sociologists, confront the worst tragedy on our continent since World War II, the revival of regional wars, of ethnic cleansing resulting in the thousands of refugees now shuffled around in what they once thought was their own country? While the European Union strives for greater social integration in one half of Europe, in another not too distant part of the continent the worst imaginable social disintegration has occurred and left us with a massive destruction of history, of culture and of artefacts. Recently, a truce has come about – on the initiatives of the USA. The Dayton agreement signals, once again, the political and military weakness of Europe in dealing with ‘sovereign’ problems occurring on their own continent. Professor Touraine characterizes the European type of society as ‘political’ in contrast to the economism of the modern Asian type and the multiculturalism of the contemporary American type (Touraine, chapter 16, this volume). I agree with him up to a point; European types of society are political on the level of discourse in a degree not usually found in the other two ideal types. But the notion of political, as it applies to European societies, ought to be further qualified: it evolves primarily around the ‘social’ question which we inherited from the French Revolution. As such it seeks to balance ‘freedom and equality’ and circumscribe such achievements by closely drawn boundaries of ‘fraternity’. These latter boundaries most often coalesce with national communities. Nationalism and national politics have been the hub of twentieth-century European history. European politics is best described in terms of the double perspective of welfare and warfare respectively. European politics is very weak, perhaps non-existent, in dealing with problems which lie outside these narrow frames. Crimes against humanity, such as ethnic killing and cleansing, are not the favoured topics of European politics. The American type of society – perhaps because of its own cherished theme of multiculturalism – is more prepared to take action when perceived crimes of humanity are committed. That the latest peace move allegedly was taken in order to improve the chances of the President to secure his re-election does not necessarily diminish the US accomplishment when contrasted with the European pattern of impotence with regard to these larger issues. However, the terms of the Dayton truce have yet to be implemented in social action. That Bosnia, and what once was its multiculturalism, is the victim of the Dayton agreement does not seem to concern the Americans greatly –

194

Nationalism and ethnicity

or for that matter the Europeans. In her despair of the war, of the newly reached peace, and of the treachery of the intellectuals, Susan Sontag writes: ‘Some say that Europe is dead. Perhaps, it is more correct to say that Europe is still awaiting its ascendence: A Europe that cares for its defenseless minorities. Europe must necessarily be multicultural, or it cannot exist. Today, Bosnia is its own willful abortion’ (Sontag 1995: 3; my translation from the Danish). The question is whether it is possible for Europe, as a political society, to respect its increasingly multi-ethnical societies as part and parcel of its political orders. With the sacrificium of Bosnia we may fear that Europe has yet a long way to go in order to realize a full-fledged project of transnational civic politics (Habermas 1995). In Europe today we see a plurality of integrative forms, some of which appear very tragic in the shaping of the future of the continent; it is as if history is unfolding backwards, and the ‘nation’ is the steering principle of European politics. When moves are initiated, either from the top or from the bottom, to transcend narrowly drawn national sentiments, cleansing procedures seem to be set in motion. The imagined idea that blood unites, rather than politics, gives rise to ethnic and not civic nationalism (Ignatieff 1993). The question is to what extent these immediate tragic events in Europe have spurred European sociologists to rethink their intellectual and moral obligations. I may be badly informed, but sociologists, with a few exceptions, do not seem to have participated much in recent political debates. Artists and writers have been much more engaged, and this should be of some concern. Is it that these latter groups, moved as it were by humanity, have more to lose than sociologists, neatly embedded in their own national cultures? Is sociology – along with history itself – suffering from its own Balkanization? ON BALKANIZATION Balkanization once stood for the process of disintegration, of fragmentation, of internal oppositions, of passions ripping apart a unified reason. The term surely has a territorial origin – and has later been applied to the life of the spirit. However, in postmodern thought the term should have been upgraded. In the well-known book of Claudio Magris, The Danube, the term, although not explicitly discussed, denotes a region and a state of mind where the ‘plurality of integrative forms’ could exist side by side (1989). While Reason now appears as negative and with totalitarian overtones, especially when linked to the building process of the modern nation-state, its (Balkanized) negation assumes a positive side; not as unreason, but as reasoned modesties. I regret if my alluding to the term ‘Balkanization’ will offend. It might suggest an unevenness in the evolution of nation-states and their peaceful co-existence. But it is not my purpose to compare and contrast events in the light of a linear historical process. My aim is rather to address the immediate present: an awkward social situation which should be of concern for all of us, as it appears to affect the political process shaping modern Europe. To allude to Touraine’s keynote speech once again; as European sociologists we should take pride in furthering the political project of Europe, but we should be on our guard when the political project is contaminated by

The Balkan tragedy 195 ethnic overtones. The massive resurgence of ethnicity in Europe, not least in the former socialist countries, is a very disturbing phenomenon. That it seemingly does not disturb sociologists is yet another matter of concern. THE RESURGENCE OF ETHNICITY One of the most outstanding characteristics of present times is the resurgence of ethnicity as a mode of organizing social and territorial life. The resurgence of ethnicity is found all over Europe today, although in some parts it has sundered the legalbureaucratic edifice. Ethnic revival has strong implications for social integration: new modes of integrating social life appear, while other forms are broken down and ridiculed. Let me suggest that ‘ethnicity’ is an awkward category in sociology also. We have mixed feelings about its resurgence, as it could be linked to Volk-ideologies of promiscuous origin.¹ It is not a clear-cut political category as ‘class’ once was, or perhaps still is, or as gender is: social categories that engender collective action. But all around us, mediated via mass media, we can clearly see that ethnicity empowers men and women, allowing their sense of (imagined) origin to be a means of overcoming bureaucratic alienation. Ethnic categories provide people with a sense of belonging. With the uncertainty of a common future, alluding to an imagined past of common blood seems to help people survive the dreariness of the present. I assume that across the discipline there is an overall agreement that ethnicity is a cultural category, an ‘imagined community’, to which various degrees of physical character-traits can be linked (Hughes 1970: 93). In the Balkan case, I know of no traces of physical distinctions that divide people from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia, etc.² But as a cultural and socially constructed category, ethnic belongingness can develop as the crucial dimension of identity and of personhood. Such belongingness can assume a complex subjective/objective side: it can be consciously chosen by the individual, but it can also be ascribed to him/her as a social label with considerable impact. Recall that well-known theorem of W. I. Thomas: when we define the situation as real, its consequences are real. The social reality of ethnicity is, in terms of its cruel consequences, very real these days. In the midst of enlightened Europe, ethnicity threatens to become a ruling social category. This is an awkward sociological observation for we do not know how to handle such unorderly events. Sociological theories provide us with no blueprint. It is more comfortable to distance ourselves from the awkwardness of the present. We turn away and do other things. But can we be blind to the Balkan tragedy, a tragedy that has engaged and still engages European polity, the military, the media, the international community, etc.? Can the Balkan tragedy, as Slavoj Zizek (1995) wrote in a chronicle published in Sweden, be repudiated as an unexplainable natural catastrophe in the like nature of an earthquake or an avalanche? In sociology today there is a growing interest in seeing accidents and catastrophes as ‘social’ events. Why are we not employing this disciplinary genius in looking at the chain of escalating social catastrophes in the former Yugoslavia? What, in sociological terms, is happening there? Let me venture to suggest some possible means of interpretation.

196

Nationalism and ethnicity

THEAWKWARDNESS OF ETHNICITY The ethnic revival can be seen as a strong counter-modern attack; an assault on the universal principles of legal-bureaucratic organization required for upholding a civic political life. Let us follow this path of thought: to view the Yugoslavian tragedy as an outright assault on the principles of modernity, the most distinguishing characteristics of which are the institutionalization of formal-legal bureaucracy and universal suffrage. Yes, one could even suggest that ethnicity is a principle of negation: it is the revenge of the particular against the universal; it is the return of that which has been bureaucratically repressed. It is perhaps this component of ethnicity, its ‘otherness’, that accounts for its sociological awkwardness. Once ethnicity assumes the form of the negative, the particular against the universal, then there is, under certain conditions, an appeal in its reappearance as ‘the other’. But these conditions seem unfulfilled in the case of the former Yugoslavia. In Zygmunt Bauman’s remarkable study of ethnic cleansing in Modernity and the Holocaust (1991), the bureaucratic organization, with its effective means–end rationality, assumes the overall burden of blame. The agents of power assumed the role of diligent gardeners. With preciseness and effectiveness they executed their cleansing duties: to get rid of the weeds, of ‘otherness’. In the Holocaust, it was the Jews who were the negative others. The methods of formal-legal bureaucracy, Bauman suggests, cultivated the grounds of inhumanity and impersonality through which the ‘banality of evil’ (to use the term of Hannah Arendt) was institutionalized on European soil. While not ruling out that this mode of thought – blaming the bureaucratic principle to produce the banality of evil – can claim some relevance in the case of Nazi Germany, Bauman’s theoretical framework does not appear all that fruitful when applied to the Balkan case. There is no formal-legal bureaucracy to blame – its complete destruction seems rather to be a precondition for mounting ethnic warfare. In this case, formallegal bureaucracy seen as the administration of the principle of universality appears – along with the thousands of dead bodies – to be a primary victim. The Balkan situation seems thus very different from the one that Bauman depicts. Here it is not a question of too much bureaucracy, but, ironically, of too little or, perhaps, of its complete annihilation. What can we learn from this first rough observation? When ethnicity assumes the form of the ‘repressed other’, when its negation is efficiently impaired by formal-legal bureaucracy, then sociological accounts can identify positively with its existence – as a denial of the prevailing reality principle. When, on the other hand, ethnicity assumes the role of paramount reality, as the vital principle along which the organization of social life proceeds, then its positivity claims offend us, and we turn away in disgust. Do similar ambivalent attitudes also hold for other social categories? I can identify with the claims of women as ‘repressed others’ (i.e., as a negation of that which is), but when women add positivity to their claims then I lose interest. I do not believe that there is a feminine science, or that women are better in organizing social life than men, etc. There is thus something of a more general sociological lesson to learn from the awkwardness of ethnicity. When maintained as the negative other, as the particular

The Balkan tragedy 197 evading the universal, then we reach out with sociological sympathy and rejoice at the ‘difference’. Once the particular assumes positive presence, and claims legitimate (political) recognition, then we respond with reluctance and ambivalence. IS BUREAUCRACY TO BLAME? Ethnicity assaults our ‘sense of formal justice’: it divides men and women in a particular rather than in a universal manner. We can make a mockery of the artificial reality claims of formal-legal bureaucracy; yet we are in need of precisely these legal-bureaucratic demands in order to explicate what justice claims consist of. Since Max Weber, these have been awkward sociological questions. The formal sciences, law and normative politics, are better equipped than sociology to handle these topics. For it is quite clear, as evidenced by the popularity of Bauman’s study on the Holocaust, that the issue of bureaucracy is inflammatory in the discipline of sociology. It provides the ground of evilness at the same time as providing formal justice with its frame of reference. Hence, what I want to focus on is the (variable) relation between legal-rational bureaucracy and its corresponding subject/object. By the subject/object dimension of bureaucracy I mean the ‘political community’: in the modern nation-state the legislative organs assume political sovereignty – and the means of bureaucratic organizations ensure that the rule of law is upheld. Such administration is to secure that which John Rawls calls ‘justice as fairness’ (1972). This relation between political sovereignty and legal-bureaucratic administration is given supreme importance in Jürgen Habermas’ massive study, Faktizität und Geltung (1992). Habermas’ contribution to modern social thought lies precisely in his strong insistence that the constitution of modernity requires both these entities: rational-legal administration and an engaged polity adhering to the rule of a discursive ethics. The criticism of modernity, including Bauman’s study, overlooks the intimacy of these two modern principles: formal law and modern political sovereignty. This combination of form and substance complements and strengthens each other. Lacking the dual perspective, formal law often assumes the principle of blame. The awkwardness of ethnicity, when related to bureaucracy, then resides in the fact that the ethnic category can come to replace the political subject and assume sovereignty. The ethnic category assaults both our sense of justice and our sense of the political. The ‘discursive community’, in the meaning that Habermas gives this term, becomes defamed: it produces slanted reality constructions. The question – in the case of the Balkans – is whether the collapse of formal-legal bureaucracy will help provide the fertile soil of a disformed political subject: ethnic sovereignty. In other words, I want to focus on that sensitive relation between formallegal bureaucracy and the rise of the ethnic category already envisaged in Bauman’s study of the victims of the Holocaust. My approach is different however: it is not the rule of formal-legal bureacracy, however efficient, that breeds the ethnic category. When the exercise of formal-legal rule lacks a related discursive polity, then substitutes, perhaps in the form of ethnic subjects, are invented and recurrently enforced. The outcomes can be deadly, as victims and rulers are socially constructed and reinforced, perhaps by military force.

198

Nationalism and ethnicity

ON THE RELATION BETWEEN FORMALBUREAUCRACY AND THE POLITICAL In order to shed light on my claim that the collapse of formal-legal bureaucracy is intimately linked to the rise of a defamed political subject in the Balkan tragedy, I shall look at my claim in the light of classical social thought; and I am aware that one of the most difficult claims of modernity resides in the precarious relation of bureaucracy and polity. No wonder then that Habermas has returned to this complex and embarrassing issue of modern social and political philosophy. Criticisms of modernity often take hold of the fact that an autonomous polity cannot co-exist with rational-legal rule. The problematic relation between formal-legal bureaucracy and an absentee polity is perhaps best known from the writings of Max Weber (Mommsen 1974: 72–115). Rational bureaucracy can evolve as an eroding mechanism of political life and provide the grounds of that ‘iron cage’ which knows of no real human life. In that case, the bureaucratic machinery usurps ‘the political’ and lays the foundation of an inhuman social life. Hannah Arendt has succinctly observed how the ‘banality of evil’ grows out of normal rule following. Michel Foucault, especially in his early writings, has vividly depicted the social micro-cosmos of an omnipotent rational power which is blind to the cruelty that it inflicts on people (Foucault 1975). I assume that Bauman’s study draws on this classic European fear of modernity. Efficient means–end rationality, blind to the face of ‘the other’, can possibly, and without intention, set ethnic cleansing in motion. Hannah Arendt, one of the foremost political philosophers of our time, mounts her criticism against modernity by pointing out the erosive effects of an anonymous bureaucracy (Arendt 1983). By adhering to the existence of rules, men and women are freed of personal responsibility, and they need to take no consequences for their action. Her criticism of bureaucracy is, however, adjoined to her equally sharp criticism of the ‘social’ category. The sociological discipline is adjacent to modern bureaucracy. In this light it is curious that Bauman insists on formulating a ‘sociology of evil’. In the more thorough conceptual framework of Arendt, the discipline of sociology is part and parcel of the modern bureaucratic complex, and thus responsible for the creation of modern evilness. The existence of the social as an anonymous category destroys, Arendt claims, the categorical distinction between private and public. When spoiled by the social category, political life erodes from within. This is so because political life, and its corresponding idea of rational human actors, holds men and women responsible for their actions. In Arendt’s philosophy, modern social science, along with bureaucracy, threatens to erode the classic idea of political sovereignty. Bureaucracy, with its social science complex, becomes the vehicle of blame. While claiming bureaucratic innocence, the neutrality of social science claims replaces rational political dialogue. In that sense sociology was not, and is still not, an innocent discipline! Habermas’ contribution to modern social thought lies, as already suggested, precisely in his attempts to reformulate the tragedy complex of classic modern thought. He attempts to rescue the rationality claims of formal-legal authority by bringing it under the governing rule of a discursive polity, claiming that these two constituents of modernity require one another. In his theory, the discursive community of political rule

The Balkan tragedy 199 assumes the role of the missing (modern) subject. I suggest drawing upon this line of thought in analysing the Balkan tragedy. The absentee political subject, a discursive community, feeds its own disformed replacement: the ethnic category assumes the role of a political subject. The primacy of the ethnic subject destroys in turn the principle of rational-legal administration: it creates its own ethnic victims. In the end, ethnicity gains omnipresence and the universality claims of law and of polity collapse in turn. BUREAUCRACYAND ETHNICITY: THE CASE OFTHE FORMERYUGOSLAVIA It may be suggested that the massive ethnical revival, such as we see it today in the former Federation, is better understood as the violent means of opposition directed against modernity itself. From such a point of view, ethnic resurgence may be seen as a means of overcoming bureaucratic alienation and disempowerment; as a means of seizing political subjecthood after decades of socialist rule. Without suggesting that the former Federation of Yugoslavia fulfilled the criteria of a rational bureaucracy in Weber’s sense, one cannot overlook the fact that among all the former socialist countries in Eastern Europe, the former Yugoslavia was quite modernized. In fact, Western sociologists once travelled frequently to Yugoslavia in order to study its means of organizing workers’ collectives. I myself travelled numerous time to Dubrovnik, where I participated in the once legendary seminar on the philosophy of social sciences. I gained many insights from these seminars as I listened to the talks of the Praxis-philosophers, to the wisdom of von Wright, Habermas, Gadamer, Taylor, Bernstein – I cannot even recall them all. Where has all the wisdom gone today? Where are we, the social philosophers and the sociologists, who once looked at Yugoslavia as a model example of a socialist country? True, not everything was perfect in Yugoslavia: some professors were not allowed to teach at their universities (although they were still salaried); workers were not allowed to organize opposition against the socialist doctrines. But we did return to Yugoslavia again and again, and we did not have bad consciences. Why is Yugoslavia – one of the most modern of socialist countries at the time – the one country today where (bureaucratic) social organization has collapsed completely and where recurrent war(s) against former neighbours have become the theme of the day? I cannot give a satisfactory answer to this question, but it seems to me to be the paramount question haunting Europe and European sociology today. In line with what I have suggested earlier: is the Balkan tragedy a massive counterattack on modernity itself? Is it a way of reclaiming political sovereignty after having had it bureaucratically imposed for decades? Can the revival of ethnicity, in the form of war escalation, be viewed as the massive means of overcoming previous disempowerment and lack of political sovereignty? Someone may oppose my suggestion and point to the fact that the former Yugoslavia was not at all as rational as it seemed on the surface – its inner political life perhaps sealed the fact that ethnicity in the former Federation still played a role in the organization of power and authority. In that case, rational bureaucracy had not been achieved: ethnic categories and/or the nomenklatura denying the realization of rational-

200

Nationalism and ethnicity

legal principles. One cannot then speak of the ‘return of the repressed’ as causing the violent breakdown of social order, but of the revengeful actualization of what was latent under the rule of socialism. If such a perspective in the analysis of the Balkan tragedy is adhered to, it requires the illumination of history: the analysis of the failure of the socialist principles and their breeding of irreconcilable social antagonisms. A UNIVERSAL ORA PARTICULAR TRAGEDY? The question that I am now raising is delicate: is the Balkan tragedy to be understood as a particular or a universal tragedy? Is it an assault on a particular (and perhaps disformed) modernity, or is it an assault on modernity – on the universality claims of political and legal rule? If it is a particular case then we have to account for the tragedy in a historical and ethnic vocabulary – in the Balkan failure of building a stable form of modernity. If it is a universal case – and thus a universal tragedy – then the Balkan tragedy anticipates what could happen at any place: the breakdown of the social principle (as it was called in classical sociological textbooks). Either the violent rise of ethnic categories is viewed as the ‘return of the repressed’ in the Balkan case or, even worse, ethnic resurgence is not at all ruled out by modernity but, rather, is contained within it as a potential threat and its actual negation. I assume that the critical voices of modernity, and among them Bauman, anticipate the latter perspective: the absentee political subject can, under certain conditions, arise in the form of hatred and deadly war. The revival of the ethnic and of ethnic modes of integrating social life, while occurring on a large scale in the case of the Balkan tragedy, can also be seen in the frequency of its occurrences all over Europe at the present time. Young people turn to extremist parties cultivating the themes of ethnicity and race. This awakening to a defamed political sovereignty is shocking to my own generation, as we were raised to think in universal categories. Perhaps the whims of youth will come to an end; but assume that they do not, and that in the midst of the rich Western states today currents of ethnic terror acts, ‘eventualized’ against migrants, become normal events. Which perspective are we going to employ in analysing these more or less randomly occurring rallies? Are these outbreaks to be seen as particular counter-attacks on modernity, means of empowering the already powerless, which eventually can be kept under control – or is modernity itself under acute threat? This difference of perspective is important. In the case of the former (particular) perspective, there is a hope that universality can triumph, despite temporary losses; but in the case of the latter (universal) perspective, the negative and thus particular assumes universal rule. Then one can speak of Balkanization as the universal principle of negation assumed by modernity itself.³ THE RESURGENCE OF POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY I would think that my initial reference to Habermas’ study of the interrelation between rational-legal administration and modern political sovereignty contribution, as the

The Balkan tragedy 201 discussion has evolved, becomes more urgent. Habermas provides us with a very different entrance to modernity than does Bauman. It is not rational-legal rule as such which produces the conditions of evil. However, when such rule is void of a political discursive will, of a controlling discursive subject, then its own rational principles are threatened. The loss of a political subject can, given certain conditions, reclaim its defamed substitute. I have suggested that the resurgence of the ethnic category, as now seen on a large scale in the case of the former Yugoslavia, be understood as a mutilated substitute for real political sovereignty. Whether or not this tragic outcome could have been foreseen already in the former Federation, I do not know. But the present tragedy forces us to reflect on the very conditions of modernity itself. The awkwardness of the ethnic category, I have suggested, arises because of its negation of formal-legal bureaucracy, of our sense of justice. When viewed as a principle of opposition, ethnicity – as a threatening other – is a creation of bureaucracy. So far the claims of Bauman are correct, but what he overlooks is the complex relation between rational-legal administration and political sovereignty. The Balkanization of discourse, the fragmentation and defamation of thought, threatens to break out at any place and at any time. I have used the Balkan tragedy as an illustration of a universal tragedy inherent in modernity: of what can become the deadly war of an absentee political subject. As a final note, and with reference to Touraine’s classification of modern societies, one could ask if the tragedy I have outlined is more prone to afflict the European type of society precisely because of the role that democratic politics play in these countries. The realization of the democratic political project assumes indeed the plurality of integrative forms existing side by side. Political integration of men and women in modern European nation-states (perhaps united in a EU Federation?) builds on the legal principle that individuals as citizens have equal rights and assume, according to their abilities, equal burdens. The modern abstract notion of citizenship easily threatens the age-old culturally derived notion of who we are and where we come from. Ethnicity, religion, race and even sex provide men and women with a collective identity, the sentiments of which may be considerably more forceful than the abstract notion of individual citizenry. The tragedy of this modern political notion has, since its conception in the wake of the French Revolution, been its abstracted character: citizens do not necessarily know one another and they have little in common apart from the fact that they reside in a political territory. Nationalism once provided a powerful sentimental base of political integration and was helped, as we noted already in the opening paragraphs, by the national wars that we Europeans then mounted against one another. Today all of us live in societies which are increasingly multinational and multiethnic. In keeping with the promise of (a political) Europe, we expect even more of such social and cultured pedigrees in the future. It is in this light that the case of Bosnia, not least as a consequence of the Dayton truce, seems a ghostly return to our burdened past. We all want a future, I assume, that furthers the political project of state-and citizenmaking which Europe proudly gave birth to. But in this regard we want a future that can cleanse itself from its tragic past, and allow the political (achieved) project to stand free of decayed and/or imagined (ascribed) cultured, ethnic, nationalist, religious categories. As Susan Sontag puts it, political Europe still awaits its full ascendence.

202

Nationalism and ethnicity

NOTES 1.

As a point of illustration, I was recently told that the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation received an application for financial support for establishing a gene-pool in Estonia – in order to identify all ‘true’ Estonians. 2. The former Norwegian Foreign Minister, Thorwald Stoltenberg, once made a controversial comment suggesting that the Balkan people were all of the same mixed origin. This comment was much criticized. 3. True, in some cases particularity can be kept under (ironic) control and thus marginalized. As an example of the latter, let me give some illustration from my Nordic vista: the Danes laugh at the Swedes, while the Swedes make jokes about the peculiarities of the Norwegians, etc. But to imagine that such discursive ironies were to slip into nationalized wars between neighbouring countries would generate much laughter among us. Thus I am not pleading for the disappearance of differences among people, but for the institutionalized control of their discursive use. I suggest that the sociological challenge ahead lies in the better understanding of the complex relation between modernity and difference; between the historically situated relation between universality and particularity; between the political universal category and its ethnic negation.

REFERENCES Arendt, H. (1983) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1975) Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, Paris: Gallimard. Habermas, J. (1992) Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. —— (1995) ‘Kampen för ömsesidigit erkännande i den demokratiska rättsstaten’, in A. Gutman (ed.), Det mångkulturella samhället och erkännandets politik, Göteborg: Daidalos (from the 1994 German edition, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). Hughes, L. (1970) ‘That Powerful Drop’, in G. Stone and H. Farberman (eds), Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction, Waltham, Mass.: Xerox College Publishing. Ignatieff, M. (1993) Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, London: BBC Books. Magris, C. (1989) The Danube, London: Collins. Mommsen, W. (1974) The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Rawls, J. (1972) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Sontag, S. (1995) ‘Klagesang over Bosnia’, Weekendavisen (Kultur), 15 – 21 December. Zizek, S. (1995) ‘Chronicle’, in Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 30 July.

Part IV

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

13 The cultural core of postcommunist transformations Piotr Sztompka

POST-REVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES: TWO DUALITIES OF TRANSITION As a major break in historical continuity, the revolutions of 1989 have terminated some social processes, deflected others, and most importantly initiated some new social processes. There are various ways in which the post-revolutionary processes may be classified. In the burgeoning field of scholarship which has already received the somewhat mocking name of ‘transitology’ (van Zon 1993), two such processes are analysed most often: the emergence of political democracy and the spread of the economic market. And perhaps most original contributions of ‘transitology’ focus on the tensions and contradictions engendered by building democratic polity and market economy during the same time-span (what was called the dilemmas of ‘simultaneous transitions’, or ‘double transitions’) (Centeno 1994; Armijo et al. 1994; Rose 1992; Schmitter 1993; Sztompka 1992). The flow of changes coming in the aftermath of the year 1989 may also be approached in different ways. Then another, and perhaps more basic, dualism will be spotted. Some processes run at the level of institutions and organizations, they embrace the hard backbone of society and produce new tangible structural arrangements. Such processes are most often instigated from above, by the government or its agencies; they become articulated by legislatures, safeguarded by laws, and enforced by state power. Institution-building usually proceeds by design, with varying degrees of efficiency, varying measures of success, and varying scope for unintended and even unacknowledged side-effects. The parliament, political parties, constitutional court, Ombudsman, private corporations, stock exchange, banks, broker firms, etc., are examples of such institutions appearing in East-Central Europe after 1989. Most often they are not original inventions, but rather emulations of quite old social arrangements, well established in the modern societies of the West. But there are other processes. They run at the level of culture and civilization. Cultural processes embrace the soft tissue of society, intangible assumptions, premises, understandings, rules, values. Alexis de Tocqueville spoke of the changing ‘habits of the heart’ (de Tocqueville 1945), Emile Durkheim of the ‘manières d’agir et de penser’ (Durkheim 1895). Such changes originate in the spontaneous push from below, proceed in crescive, incremental manner, and produce shared, taken-for-granted routines of

206

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

social life, safeguarded by what William Sumner called the ‘folkways and mores’ (Sumner 1906), or which modern authors describe as deep normative structures: codes, frames, themes or discourses. Cultural precepts tell societal members what ought to be done and believed in, either because it is good, or because it is done and believed by most people, or because it has always been done and accepted. In other words, culture invokes the authority of righteousness, normalcy, or tradition, and derives its legitimacy from these sources. By civilization, on the other hand, we shall mean a socially produced, shared universe of objects, materials, artefacts, utensils, technologies, beliefs, manners, etc., consciously entertained by the actors (though with various degrees of articulation) and adopted as instruments for reaching their goals or satisfying their needs. Civilizational processes provide the reflection of deep cultural changes at the observable, surface level of everyday life: in the lifestyles, aesthetic preferences, forms of conduct, typical utensils and technical devices, interpersonal manners, etc. Culture is the more fundamental, deepest, invisible layer; civilization is the more superficial, directly perceivable layer. Culture-building and ‘civilizing process’ (to use the term of Norbert Elias (1978)) do not proceed by design, but as emergent, learned responses to the conditions in which people live, the entire context of their ‘life-world’. The opposition of institutional and cultural–civilizational levels of change may be thrown into sharper relief by means of a metaphor borrowed from the politologist Zbigniew Brzezinski (Brzezinski 1989): building a house is not the same as establishing a home. The former is only the shell, the empty framework ready for habitation but not inhabited yet; it is the concern of architects. The latter is the living arena of social actions, interactions and human relations unfolding within that shell; it is the concern of sociology. The more or less explicit recognition of that distinction – of institutional and cultural–civilizational spheres – is also indicated by other terms. Alternative names are: public sphere versus civil society, system versus life-world, structure versus agency. The shades of meaning may differ, but all of those oppositions point in the same direction and sensitize us to the same fundamental opposition. The dichotomy of institution-building and culture-building is equally relevant for political and economic domain; therefore it may be cross-tabulated with the more common dichotomy of democratization and marketization mentioned earlier. Table 13.1 Dichotomy of institution-building and culture-building

Democratization Marketization

Institution-building

Culture-building

E.g. parliament, elections, political parties, ombudsman E.g. private firms, corporations, banks, stock exchange, brokers

Civic culture, citizenship Entrepreneurial culture, work ethic

The relationship between institutional and cultural level must be treated as twosided, reciprocal. Institutions are one of the most important forces shaping prevailing culture. They provide the frame for actions of participating individuals and demand specific conduct: they distribute rewards and punishments for conformity or deviance. Lessons from individual instrumental learning become shared by societal members and in this way cultural demands reach the level of ‘social facts’ sui generis, in the

Cultural core of post-communist transformations 207 sense of Emile Durkheim (Durkheim 1895); they become seemingly given, external and constraining rules of social life, no longer the distributive property of each individual member but a collective property of a whole society. At the same time the internalization of certain cultural codes, rules, values by societal members is the prerequisite for their meaningful actions within institutions. I propose the concept of ‘civilizational competence’ (Sztompka 1993) to describe the set of such cultural premises indispensable for modern society of democratic and market type. Culture is not given, rather it is socially produced: a construct, a contingent achievement of human beings. There are three sources from which culture is generated: institutions, tradition and diffusion. The actual context of institutions elicits appropriate cultural responses (rules, values, codes, etc.) via socialization and social control (sanctioning of conforming and deviant conduct). Causality operates across levels: from institutional to cultural. But in both of the latter cases – tradition and diffusion – causality operates at the same, cultural level. Thus, tradition is the direct influence of the culture of the past, which persists due to generational inertia. Diffusion is the direct influence of alien, external cultures, which are adopted, imitated or emulated due to their pervasiveness, salience, attractiveness or power of imposition (‘cultural imperialism’). Thus, at any given moment the culture is a co-product, a combined result of institutional pressure, inherited tradition and diffusion from influential external cultures. The relative proportions of those influences will, of course, vary from case to case. The institutional and cultural levels may fit together: then they mutually reinforce each other. In such situations we may speak of a true consolidation of institutions and adequacy of culture. But both levels may also manifest the lack of fit, incongruence, contradictions. For example, in the political domain new democratic institutions may not be matched with adequate political culture. This seems to be the case in postcommunist societies where the widespread rules still dictate pervasive suspicion towards authorities (Sztompka 1995), reluctance to get involved in public life, ignorance and neglect of public issues, political apathy and electoral absenteeism. Similarly in the economic domain, capitalist institutions may already be there but the ‘spirit of capitalism’ (to use Max Weber’s phrase (Weber [1920–21] 1958)) may be missing. Again taking the case of post-communist societies, the focus on security rather than risk may prevail, reliance on governmental support rather than on oneself may be typical, system-blame rather than self-responsibility may accompany failures, there may be reluctance to invest in long-range enterprises, and general lack of discipline and diligence. In the diagnosis of Richard Rose: ‘Virtually the whole of the labour force, from managers to the factory floor, are inexperienced in the workings of a market economy’ (Rose 1992: 382). More generally, the divergence of institutions and culture presumably accompanies periods of rapid and radical social change. It is one of the common traits of revolutions. And it certainly applies to the revolutions of 1989. I claim that the multiple processes initiated then are far from being harmonized or consolidated. The revolution is in an important sense unfinished, because there is the continuing incongruence between institution-building and culture-building. The discrepancy of institutional and cultural spheres makes for another, perhaps even more important, ‘duality of transition’, cutting across the duality of political and economic processes.

208

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

THREE CULTURES IN THE COMMUNIST PERIOD With these theoretical points in mind let us turn back to the year 1989 and analyse the essence of cultural break that had occurred at that moment in the societies of Eastern and Central Europe. First, let us look at the situation obtaining before the break. For several decades the cultures of real socialist societies were shaped under the cross-impact of three culture-generating sources. First, the common institutional framework of autocratic polity and command economy imposed from the core of the Soviet empire: Russians are not only Russian, nor Poles Polish, Germans German, nor the lot of them simply human. They are residents of societies which all underwent between 40 and 70 odd years (very odd years) of communist rule. This was something special that they had in common, and that other societies did not have. (Krygier 1995: 7) The cultural response was ‘a philosophy of dependency instead of self-reliance, of an all-embracing collectivism and conformity over individualism, of commitment to the equalization not only of opportunities but also outcomes, of rigidity and extremism in beliefs, and of intolerance’ (S. Bialer, in Reisinger et al. 1994: 195). This may be labelled as characteristic ‘bloc culture’. Second, there were the indigenous cultural traditions, different in various societies of the region, often linked with dominant religion. They were responsible for great cultural variety among the countries politically enclosed within the same communist bloc; Poland was not the same as GDR, Hungary not the same as Romania, etc. Some of those local cultures were better prepared for democracy, more congruent with democratic and market institutions (e.g. the Czechs); some were fundamentally at odds with democratic institutions (e.g. Russia, see Reisinger et al. 1994: 188). ‘You can neither buy nor sell the spirit of capitalism and a sense for individual justice in a society which has never known a market economy nor experienced legal procedures comparable to those of the civil societies in the West’ (Lepenies 1992: 3). Third, there was the impact of so-called Western culture, originating in the most developed, industrialized, urbanized mass societies of Western Europe and America. To some degree that culture was smuggled unwittingly with the institutions of modernity implanted by force in communist societies: industrial production, urban settlements, mass education. Even if modernity was strangely incomplete, missing some of its crucial political and economic components, even if it was only the ‘fake modernity’ (Sztompka 1993); and yet: Changes sometimes dubbed as ‘modernization’ produce fundamental shifts in people’s values and behaviours . . . Industrialization of the economy, collectivization of agriculture, the resulting migration to the cities, as well as increased literacy and access to higher education all changed Soviet societies, making them more ‘modern’ and therefore more open to democratic and market reforms. (Reisinger et al. 1994: 200–1)

Cultural core of post-communist transformations 209 This may be labelled as the ‘convergence theory’ mechanism. Apart from that, some components of Western culture were penetrating directly from the West to various societies of the region (through mass media, personal exchanges, tourism, etc.), though with various intensiveness depending on the rigidity of cultural gates raised by local authorities (again Poland differed markedly from Bulgaria, Yugoslavia from DDR, etc.). This may be labelled as the ‘globalization theory’ mechanism. As a result, in each of real socialist societies we may speak of three cultures in mutual tension: the bloc culture, the national culture and the Western (globalized) culture. It was a peculiar case of the ‘cultural clash’ internal to a society and manifesting itself along three axes. The proportional significance of each of these culture-generating sources, and therefore the relative strength of three cultures, differed not only among EasternCentral European societies but also internally among various segments (classes, communities, groups) within each society. We may expect that those individuals, or groups, or social categories which are most prone to fall under the impact of alternative cultural pressures – whether national or global – will be most insulated from the grip of communist culture and they will become the natural avant-garde of cultural deconstruction and reform. They will act as the leaders of the civilizational advancement, spreading the cultural message to other groups and social categories. As a matter of fact three cultures were not evenly distributed in the populations of Eastern and Central European countries. There were groups most intimately involved in the operation of socialist institutions, and therefore most vulnerable to their cultural imperatives: political elites, party activists, managerial groups, professional officers, secret policemen, privileged nomenklatura. But there were also groups relatively insulated from the impact because of apolitical occupations (e.g. scientists), the relative autonomy of self-employment (e.g. farmers or artists), participation in the private sector (e.g. shopkeepers or artisans), the security of professional expertise (e.g. medical doctors or lawyers), and by the same token more exposed to alternative culturegenerating influences. Some were sensitized to indigenous traditions (e.g. Catholicism, nationalism, aspirations to sovereignty, contestation against foreign rule), resulting in cultural localism, provincialism, ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In Poland, some segments of the peasantry were typically the carriers of such traditions. Some others were oriented towards the Western culture (e.g. work ethics, secularization, personal freedom, civil rights), resulting in cultural cosmopolitism, liberalism, tolerance. In Poland such a cultural syndrome was most often found among professional groups, intelligentsia, some private entrepreneurs, who had skills and resources (cultural and economic capital) to penetrate the gates raised against the cultural flows; they had the requisite level of education, foreign language competence, international contacts, surplus of money for cultural consumption or foreign tourism. Society-wide, the bloc culture was of course prevailing. It emerged either as adaptive patterns necessary to survive (or to succeed) in the given institutional environment (e.g. political apathy, submissiveness, lack of entrepreneurial initiative, opportunistic double standards, virtue of mediocrity, disinterested envy against all achievers, interpersonal distrust), or as a response to direct indoctrination by controlled mass media and educational apparatus (e.g. primitive egalitarianism, acceptance of paternalism of the state, anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, anti-capitalist stereotypes).

210

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

The significance of indigenous traditions and Western (globalized) influences was limited, sometimes deeply experienced only by narrow minorities. But it is in those relatively marginal groups which managed to escape the grip of communist culture that democratic opposition against the system was born. Taking an oppositional stand initiated a sort of self-fulfilling process. People who opposed the socialist system self-consciously raised a mental barrier against its ideological and cultural impact, and they were more sensitive to the evidence of its counter-civilizational implications. Those who coupled their oppositional beliefs with actions, entering conspiracy or participating in anti-communist movements (‘Solidarity’, Czechoslovakian ‘Charter 77’, Hungarian ‘Democratic Forum’, etc.), not only strengthened their attitudes by deeds but provoked rejection and stigmatization by the authorities (discrimination, harassment or outright oppression). In effect they were pushed to the status of outsiders, remaining at the margins of official culture – which in this way unwittingly saved them from its grip and allowed them to preserve personal autonomy and selfidentity. Obviously, they manifested growing readiness to embrace alternative cultural orientations: national or Western. THE CULTURALLAG IN THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD What happens at the miraculous year 1989? The revolution occurs primarily at the institutional level. The winning of power by the democratic opposition, able to mobilize massive popular movement in its support, opens up the opportunity for major institutional changes. At that time ‘the copying of institutions’ becomes a dominant approach (Offe 1993: 46). The political and economic system is rapidly reconstructed by means of legislative decisions implementing Western institutions (or better, Western institutions as imagined by the legislators, usually in their pure, pristine forms, no longer to be found in the institutional practices of the contemporary West). The clock of the lawyer, to use Dahrendorf’s metaphor (Dahrendorf 1990), runs quickest. New institutions emerge: the legal skeleton for democracy and market is put in place. Then, the civilizational surface of the life-world is touched relatively quickly. The ‘queuing society’ (with the producer’s monopoly and endemic shortages of goods and services) changes into a consumer society. The drabness and greyness of life gives way to colour, vitality and pluralism of options. The security and certainty of mediocre life-standards safeguarded by the state turn into risks and insecurities of self-reliance, competition and unlimited aspirations. The personal dependence and pervasive state control is released, considerably enlarging the experience of liberty. Uniformity of the media evolves into enormous pluralism and variety of messages. But to follow the new ways of life, to operate successfully within the new institutions, the people require new cultural resources: codes, frames, rules, new ‘habits of the heart’. This demand is not easily met. And therefore the viability of institutions is put at risk. ‘Copied and transplanted institutions that lack the moral and cultural infrastructure on which the “original” can rely, are likely to yield very different and often counter-intentional results’ (Offe 1993: 46). This happens for two reasons. First, because at the cultural level what Ralf Dahrendorf calls ‘the clock of the citizen’

Cultural core of post-communist transformations 211 (Dahrendorf 1990) runs much slower, and lags behind institutional developments. The cultural ‘habits of the heart’ show surprising resilience. Even if no longer adequate to new institutions, they persist and present the most important barrier to smooth and rapid transition. ‘The one consequence of social trauma absolutely precluded by culturalist assumptions is rapid reorientation’ (Eckstein 1988: 796). And second, due to that cultural lag, the bloc culture leaves the lasting heritage of ‘trained incapacity’, the inability to make proper use of new institutional and personal opportunities. I have referred to that legacy as the syndrome of ‘civilizational incompetence’ (Sztompka 1993). The typical, widespread culture is incongruent with the adequate culture (i.e. the culture supportive for new institutions). This, in my view, is the main secret of our constant surprises: the disappointments and frustrations with the processes of postcommunist transitions. We may conceive this situation as another, more polarized ‘culture clash’: between the new, pro-democratic and pro-market culture – cosmopolitan, secular and proWestern, bound with new emerging institutions – and the anti-democratic and antimarket culture, linking in a strange alliance the conservative, nationalist, provincial, isolationist, xenophobic themes of the traditional, indigenous culture, with the antiWestern, anti-capitalist, egalitarian and populist orientations of the bloc culture. Several years after the revolution the post-communist societies are still internally split, torn between those two cultural options. Why does the domain of culture show such persistence? Why are strong habits, accustomed codes, mental frames so hard to unlearn, to eradicate, to dismantle? The plausible answers refer to the mechanism of socialization and generational effect. The bridge between the influences of the past and the future is provided by generations; congeries of people who – in their formative years – have been exposed to similar, significant social forces, to have lived through similar, significant social events. There is a ‘generation effect, when a particular age cohort responds to a set of stimuli . . . and then carries the impact of that response through the life cycle’ (Almond and Verba 1980: 400). The earliest lessons are best remembered. The strongest socializing impact is effected during the period of youth. As long as the majority of the population consists of the people whose young, formative years, and therefore crucial socializing experiences, fall under the rule of a communist regime one can expect the continuing vitality of the bloc culture. This explains how the influences of some former, and already replaced, structures may still be felt in the present. And this is why Dahrendorf estimates that the changes at this deep cultural level will demand generations (Dahrendorf 1990). The generation maturing under socialism seems to be damned. THE CHANCES FOR CULTURE TO CATCH UPWITH INSTITUTIONS First of all, though it is not necessarily the whole generation which is damned; second, that generation, as all generations, is drifting through and leaving the historical stage relatively quickly. Those considerations make the present incongruence of institutional and cultural levels not entirely hopeless.

212

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

As we indicated before, the real socialist society was not evenly affected by communist indoctrination and the adaptive pressures of communist institutions. After all it is from within that society that the democratic opposition emerged, spread and was able to mobilize large masses in the struggle against the system. It is within those groups, relatively insulated from the impact of the system and open to the influence of indigenous national tradition as well as Western values, that by means of some sort of ‘anticipatory socialization’ the alternative cultural complex was shaped, pre-dating the actual emergence of democratic and market institutions. With the victory of the revolution, the carriers of that cultural complex, so far limited in appeal, acquired political power. They advanced from dissidents to the political elite. That raised the expansive potential of new culture due to four mechanisms. First, immediately after the revolution the new democratic and market institutions were legislated into being and started to exert their socializing and controlling impact. Second, the indoctrination ‘à rebours’ was initiated, both in the negative way (directed retrospectively against the communist past; unravelling the immorality, corruption, inhuman face of the defeated system; debunking communist ideology, and therefore undermining the bloc culture); and in the positive way (idealizing the Western institutions and ways of life – a good example is provided by the sudden career of liberalism in its classical form, with the already anachronistic ideas of entirely uncontrolled market, unrestricted competition, extreme individualism, etc.). Third, the pre-communist national traditions were revived and glorified (this is why Jürgen Habermas calls the events of 1989 ‘the rectifying revolutions’ (Habermas 1990)). This significantly raised the influence of indigenous culture (Catholicism, nationalism, regionalism). Fourth, the full opening towards the West was proclaimed and in some measure effected (under the slogan of ‘returning to Europe’). This dramatically enhanced the diffusion of Western culture (globalization, Americanization, Westernization). At the same time the proportional distribution of population resistant to the new culture-generating pressure as against those susceptible to such a pressure undergoes a twofold change. First, new demographic cohorts replace the older generations at the central positions in a society. They are the people maturing already in the period of decay of the communist system, when its cultural grip was much weaker and the awareness of its failures much wider, as well as those maturing already after the collapse of communism in 1989. Young people born and raised at the period when the socialist system was already crumbling and approaching its demise have had the good luck to escape the most efficient and pervasive indoctrination and habituation. Youth gives a chance of independence. The proportion of those irreparably tainted by communist experience and resistant to new cultural demands is quickly diminishing. Second, with the progress of democratization, marketization and privatization, large segments of the population become involved in the operation of new institutions, link their vested interests with their development and hence fall under their culture-shaping impact. The political class, the aware and responsible citizenry, the entrepreneurial middle class, the professional groups – all grow in scope. They become the avantgarde of the new culture, and from them it emanates to other groups, still linked to the vestiges of socialist institutions (e.g. working class in state-run, huge industrial enterprises; bureaucratic personnel in public administration; employees of socialized medical services or state-run schools, etc.).

Cultural core of post-communist transformations 213 SOME REASONS FOR RESTRAINED OPTIMISM With the benefit of hindsight, wiser with the experience of the years that have passed since the revolutions of 1989, we may attain more realistic appraisal of the ongoing processes of post-communist transition. Maybe we could get rid of the ‘surprise syndrome’ which has been haunting us all that time (Lepenies 1992). And thus: 1. We should abandon romantic hopes and elevated aspirations that the new social order can be constructed immediately. ‘The most one can say with much certainty’, says Przeworski (1993: 62), ‘is that the transformation will take a long time, requiring a complete period of history.’ 2. We should abandon the illusion of simple solutions, e.g. the belief that legislative reforms from above are enough to change social life entirely. Philippe Schmitter predicts: ‘Political future, instead of embodying “the end of history”, promises to be tumultuous, uncertain and very eventful’ (Schmitter 1993: 1). 3. We should recognize that societies are as their members: what they think and do. The people are the ultimate movers of reforms, but also – paradoxically – ‘the main obstacle to reform is the people’ (Przeworski 1993: 185). And therefore the crucial target of transformation must be the human agents, their dominant ways of thinking and doing; briefly – the realm of culture. 4. We should notice that there are preconditions for the slow fading away of the vestiges of communist culture, and the slow ascendance of new cultural complex, fitted to the demands of new insititutions: political democracy and the economic market. 5. We may therefore indulge in long-range optimism that the consolidation of political and economic institutions with the requisite cultural foundations is the feasible, though distant, prospect. We may envisage the situation when ‘acceptance of a given set of constitutional rules becomes increasingly widespread, valued and routinized’ (Haggard and Kaufman 1994: 6), or when ‘the ensemble of rules and institutions jells into regular, acceptable and predictable patterns that can reproduce themselves over time and command the allegiance of citizens’ (Schmitter 1993: 8). When that happens the revolutions started in 1989 will be completed. But – to repeat – this will not happen overnight. As Bronislaw Geremek, the veteran of Polish opposition, wisely remarks: ‘Democracies are built only over time, through the forming and functioning of democratic institutions . . . The process is one of gradual maturation, both of democracy itself and of people in the ways of democracy’ (Geremek 1992: 15). NOTE 1. An extended version of this paper has been published under the title ‘Looking Back: The Year 1989 as a Cultural and Civilizational Break’ in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 29, No. 2, 1996, 115–29.

REFERENCES Almond, G. A. and Verba, S. (eds) (1980) Civic Culture Revisited, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

214

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

Armijo, L. E., Biersteker, T. J. and Lowenthal, A. F. (1994) ‘The Problems of Simultaneous Transitions’, Journal of Democracy, 4, (4), 161–75. Brzezinski, Z. (1989) ‘Toward a Common European Home’, Problems of Communism, November–December, 1–1. Centeno, M. A. (1994) ‘Between Rocky Democracies and Hard Markets: Dilemmas of the Double Transition’, Annual Review of Sociology, 20, 125–47. Dahrendorf, R. (1990) Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, London: Chatto & Windus. Durkheim, E. (1895) Les règles de la méthode sociologique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Eckstein, H. (1988) ‘A Culturalist Theory of Political Change’, American Political Science Review, No. 3 (September), 789–804. Elias, N. (1978) The Civilizing Process, vols 1 and 2, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Geremek, B. (1992) ‘Civil Society and the Present Age’, in The Idea of a Civil Society, National Humanities Centre, Warsaw, pp. 11–18. Habermas, J. (1990) ‘What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need for New Thinking on the Left’, New Left Review, No. 183 (September–October). Haggard, S. and Kaufman, R. R. (1994) ‘The Challenges of Consolidation’, Journal of Democracy, 5 (4), 5–16. Krygier, M. (1995) ‘The Constitution of the Heart’, Sydney (mimeo). Lepenies, W. (1992) ‘Social Surprises. Germany in Europe – Three Years after the Revolution’, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung (mimeo). Offe, C. (1993) ‘Designing Institutions for East European Transitions’, Krakow: Academy of Economics (mimeo). Przeworski, A. (1993) ‘Economic Reforms, Public Opinion, and Political Institutions: Poland in the Eastern European Perspective’, in L. C, Pereira, J. M. Maravall and A. Przeworski, Economic Reforms in New Democracies: A Social Democratic Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 132–98. Reisinger, W. M., Miller, A. H., Hesli, V. L. and Maher, K. H. (1994) ‘Political Values in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania: Sources and Implications for Democracy’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (2) (April), 183–224. Rose, R. (1992) ‘Escaping from Absolute Dissatisfaction: A Trial-and-Error Model of Change in Eastern Europe’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 4 (4), 371–93. Rueschemeyer, D., Stephens, E. H. and Stephens, J. D. (1992) Capitalist Development & Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Schmitter, P. C. (1993) ‘Dangers, Dilemmas and Prospects for the Consolidation of Democracy’, Krakow: Academy of Economics (mimeo). Sumner, W. G. (1906) Folkways, Boston: Ginn & Company. Szacki, J. (1994) Liberalizm po komunizmie (Liberalism after Communism), Krakow: Znak. Sztompka, P. (1991) ‘The Intangibles and Imponderables of the Transition to Democracy’, Studies in Comparative Communism, No. 3, 295–312. —— (1992) ‘Dilemmas of the Great Transition’, Sisyphus, 2 (VIII), 9–28. —— (1993) ‘Civilizational Incompetence: The Trap of Post-Communist Societies’, Zeitschrift fur Soziologie, No. 2 (April), 85–95. —— (1995) ‘Vertrauen: Die Fehlende Ressource in der Postkommunistischen Gesellschaft’, in B. Nedelmann (ed.), Politische Institutionen in Wandel (Sonderheft 35/1995 Kolner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie), 254–76. Tocqueville, A. de (1945) Democracy in America, vols I and II, New York: Alfred Knopf. Trevor-Roper, H. (1989) ‘Europe’s New Order’, The Independent Magazine, 30 December, p. 14. Weber, M. ([1920–21] 1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Scribner’s. Zon, H. van (1993) ‘Problems of Transitology: Toward a New Research Agenda and New Research Practice’, Krakow: Academy of Economics (mimeo).

14 The rise of managerialism The ‘new’ class after the fall of communism1 Iván Szelényi

This chapter is a rather bold attempt to conceptualize what – if anything – is unique in the post-communist system emergent in Eastern Europe after 1989. My goal is twofold: I would like to offer a set of hypotheses concerning the characteristics of the political economy of post-communism; I also make an effort to describe the class structure of post-communist societies. The key hypotheses I propose are the following: 1. In terms of its political economy post-communism can be described most accurately as managerialism – a system which is distinct both from the socialist redistributive economy and from market capitalism as we know it from Western Europe or North America. In socialist redistributive economies appropriation of surplus was legitimated by the teleological knowledge of central planners. Under market capitalism expropriation is justified by private ownership of capital. Managerialism is a system under which control over the key factors of production is claimed on the basis of the technical know-how of managers. No identifiable owners or groups of owners are capable of exercising effective control over strategic economic decisions. 2. In terms of class structure my main hypothesis is that under post-communism cultural capital became the major source of power and privilege; it is only complemented by possession of economic capital. Rather than being identical or convergent with modern capitalism the class structure of post-communism is its mirror image. The dominant class of post-communism is the intelligentsia which is divided into three fractions, broadly speaking. Its dominant fraction is the managerial elite, which is closely allied to the new politocracy. The dominated fraction of the new dominant class is the humanistic intelligentsia – the scientific and artistic intellectuals and the mediacracy. For the time being the propertied bourgeoisie is restricted to the role of a middle class. POINT OF DEPARTURE: STRUGGLE FOR OWNERSHIP OR CONTROL? My point of departure is David Stark’s insightful criticism of the ‘theory of transition’ (Stark 1992). Stark claimed that even the language of transition is teleological. It assumes

216

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

what ought to be demonstrated: namely, the destination post-communist societies are heading towards. Those who operate within the paradigm of ‘transitology’ explicitly or implicitly assume that after the fall of communism societies have to proceed towards the kind of market capitalism and democracy we know from Western Europe and North America. Stark recommended that socioeconomic change in Eastern Europe ought to be thought of as path-dependent transformation. To paraphrase him: these societies are not building capitalism by design ‘on the ruins socialism’, they are creating some new, workable economic system ‘with the ruins of socialism’. An eventual convergence of the former communist countries with the West European model is quite possible, and it is certainly desired – not only by the new political class which came to power after 1989 but also by the majority of the population of these countries. Our task at present, however, is to describe empirically as accurately as possible what the actual institutions and what the real class relations in these societies are at the present time. The teleology of the theory of transition, however, is damaging for social analysis because arguably it makes us ask the wrong questions (which may indeed be worse than just giving the wrong answers). One central claim of this chapter is that most analysts of post-communism – myself not excluded – tend to ask wrong questions. To put it more mildly, they ask questions which may be relevant but are not the most crucial ones if the intention is to comprehend the socioeconomic nature of the societies after the fall of communism. Some of the central issues many social analysts have been concerned with during the past few years were the following: who benefits from privatization; who are the ones who become the new propertied class or the new grand bourgeoisie; is it indeed the former communist nomenklatura which succeeds to convert its political capital into private economic wealth? The study on changing patterns in elite recruitments in several post-communist countries, initiated by me in collaboration with Szonja Szelényi and Donald Treiman, was greatly influenced by concerns of conversion of capital. One of the intentions of this study was to gather systematic data about the real extent of the growth of nomenklatura bourgeoisie. These questions are central for the so-called Market Transition Debate too. Victor Nee, in his seminal ASR paper (Nee 1989), claimed that the main beneficiaries of market transition are the ‘direct producers’, and that a class of new entrepreneurs is emerging from among them. His theory was challenged by experts on China – for instance Andrew Walder (Walder 1995), Yanjie Bian and John Logan (Bian and Logan 1996) – and also by experts from Eastern Europe – most eloquently by Ákos Rona-Tas (RonaTas 1994) – who all claimed that the former communist nomenklatura is using the transition to establish itself as a propertied class. This concern of the Market Transition Debate has its equivalent in East European scholarship – the power conversion or political capitalism thesis, which also claims that former communist office holders have managed to become the new grand bourgeoisie. This thesis was proposed as early as 1988–9 by Elemér Hankiss (Hankiss 1990) and Jadwiga Staniszkis (Staniszkis 1991). In my earlier publications I called this approach the elite-reproduction theory (Szelényi and Szelényi 1990). This theory assumes that there are no real limits on the ability of political elites to convert their former political or redistributive privileges into private economic wealth. Sometimes

The rise of managerialism 217 this process is referred to as ‘primitive accumulation of capital’, a sort of functional equivalent to what the ‘enclosure movement’ was during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this chapter I would like to present the hypothesis which suggests that the main object of struggles may not be property, but is likely to be control. It may be an error to put the questions of ownership into the centre of our analysis. We may do so not because the empirical evidence leads us this way but because we may wrongly assume that the future of post-communism is inevitably Western-style capitalism. At least some observers argue that in those economic systems where ownership is indeed highly concentrated it is possible to identify those individuals or group of individuals who by virtue of their ownership of economic wealth can control the economic decisions which regulate the logic and dynamics of economic reproduction. Guided by the somewhat deterministic – and possibly excessively optimistic – vision of transition we more often than not are looking for the emergent class of private proprietors which, we assume, will perform identical functions to those its counterpart in the West does. We never really question whether such a class will, or can, emerge at all. Instead we explore whether such a class is already in place or not, how far its formation has progressed and which social groups its members are recruited from. As a thought experiment I suggest we should try to think about this issue in a somewhat different way. What if the important question is not who owns what but who controls what? What if it is not a new grand bourgeoisie which is in the making but a managerial society – that is, it is the managers and not the owners who are the ones at the apex of economic power? Due to our obsession with private ownership we may put too much emphasis on rather petty corruption. Undoubtedly here and there a couple of million dollars were converted from public assets into private wealth – ‘commons’ were ‘enclosed’ into ‘private hunting grounds’ – but is this the most essential story? Is it not conceivable that managers in post-communist societies today are exercising power far in excess of the property they own? Is it not conceivable that these very managers may also be more interested to maximize their power by becoming proprietors of rather risky property? We have survey data available to us from five countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia), from a random sample of the CEOs of the 3,000 largest firms. In all countries the overwhelming majority of these CEOs – about 90 per cent of them – were already in managerial positions in 1988. Most of them were not top managers. On the highest levels of economic management there was substantial change in personnel, but most of the current key players of the economy were already in decision-making positions before the fall of communism: 1989 primarily meant an accelerated promotion for many of the socialist managers. In retrospect we may think about 1989 as the successful revolution of the managerial elite, which finally defeated the redistributors, the bureaucratic fraction of the communist ruling estate. True, a substantial proportion of current CEOs own private property, but by all indications their property is rather trivial. The managers typically do not own the firms, or a sufficiently large proportion of firms – they manage firms to qualify as owner-managers. It is best to refocus our analysis. Post-communism may have a crucial new feature: managers may have exceptional powers to control the economic process; they defeated

218

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

the redistributive bureaucracies but so far haven’t passed the key decision-making powers onto owners. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MANAGERIALISM I would like to try to sketch a positive theory of the characteristics of the economic institutions of post-communism. Virtually all theories – and there are only a few of them – which try to conceptualize post-communism either tell us what this system is not, or at best explain why it cannot work and why it is incapable of expansion. Let me take the two theories I admire the most to show their shortcomings in this respect. David Stark, in his brilliant paper on ‘recombinant property’ (Stark 1995), tells us that under post-communism property is neither private nor public, but assumedly some combination of those two. But what is it? What kind of combination? He writes about East European capitalism (a strange species indeed if it is capitalistic without private property), and he claims that it is distinct from classical capitalism because it produced a new type of property. But if the novelty of this property is that it is mixed, what is its mix, where does public end and private begin, what are the dynamics of boundaries between these two forms, and what is the indication that it will remain such a mix before turning into proper capitalist property? Michael Burawoy’s ‘merchant capitalism’ thesis (Burawoy and Krotov 1992) does a better job in this respect. Burawoy, by claiming that post-communist economy is ‘merchant capitalism’, is able to describe how in his view this system works: it is parasitic, wasteful, incapable of accumulation. But if this is all true, how could it reproduce itself? Will it have to wither away? Are we back at a theory of transition? In my view if we really want to avoid the pitfalls of the teleological vision of transition we need a theory which gives us a set of positive statements – testable hypotheses concerning the new institutional constellation of a system which is potentially capable of reproducing itself. I will make a first attempt to try to develop such a set of propositions about managerialism – the main ones being summarized in Table 14.1 with a comparative outlook at the institutions of socialist redistributive and market capitalist economies. Table 14.1 Characteristics of managerial society Social formation

Economic coordinating mechanism

State socialism

Redistribution

Managerialism

Market

Private capitalism

Market

Ownership relations State ownership leading to property vacuum in which decision-making power is appropriated by redistributors Diffuse ownership with no identifiable owner who makes decisions; decision-making power is appropriated by managers Identifiable owners, or groups of owners who legitimate economic decision-making with ownership

The rise of managerialism 219 If indeed managerialism is on the rise after the fall of communism we should already be able to identify the key economic institutions of this system and we should be able to speculate to what extent and in what ways they reproduce themselves. I have developed eight theses concerning the political economy of managerialism; they are somewhat loosely connected for the time being. Thesis 1 Post-communist economies are based on diffuse property relations. At the present time we do not see indications that identifiable individuals or groups of individuals would emerge who would own a sufficient amount of property to exercise owners’ control over economic management. These diffuse property relations are created by different mechanisms and take different forms in various post-communist countries, but what is striking is that the diffuseness – with the exception of East Germany, which was successfully ‘colonized’² by West German capital – seems to characterize all countries. In the Czech Republic the diffuseness of ownership was promoted by a system of voucher privatization and it is being managed by a system of investment funds. In Hungary and Poland it was spontaneous privatization which resulted in diffuse ownership: a mix of ownership by management, state-owned banks, crossownership between so-called private firms, state-owned banks and privatization agencies. The consequence of this diffuseness appears to be similar too: it creates the material base for real managerial control. Thesis 2 Ironically it was the so-called privatization which created these diffuse property relations. Privatization was the mechanism used by management to destroy redistributive control over their firms, but they achieved this without substituting this by ownership control over themselves. In this sense ‘privatization’ is a misnomer: in the case of corporation there is no sign so far that it produced identifiable owners. It results in property rights which are even more opaque than state ownership was. No conspiracy theory is implied though. This may be an unintended, but possibly inevitable, outcome. Some (or even most?) economists during the later stages of socialist reforms argued that nationalization is an irreversible process.³ Though the same economists had changed their positions by the late 1980s, ironically history may have proved them right. Unless there is influx of foreign capital similar in its extent to the capital inflow into East Germany4 it may not be possible to convert public ownership into genuinely individual private property. Even the ‘most primitive’ (and most brutal) accumulation of capital may not be fast enough to generate the wealth which would be necessary for individual private ownership in the corporate sector of the economy. Thesis 3 Dispersion of property rights is a universal phenomenon, but it faces strict limits in market capitalist economies with an established propertied bourgeoisie; no such limits exist under post-communist managerialism.

220

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

The idea of managerialism was with us for half a century5 – I believe not without foundation, though with major overstatements. The theorists of managerialism correctly noted the trend towards dispersion of ownership, but their critics6 were right as well when they pointed out that this theory underestimated the power and influence of the propertied bourgeoisie. I am inclined to believe that managerialism was a failed New Class project in the Western advanced capitalist countries, but that in postcommunist Eastern Europe where the managerial class does not have to deal with a powerful enemy such as the class of private proprietors the managers may be successful in their attempt to gain ultimate control over the economic processes. Thesis 4 There may be disincentives for the managers, or for that matter for any other actors, to become individual private proprietors in post-communist economies. Uncertainties in these economies are too high; risk-averse actors may find it rational not to acquire property. For the economy may be rational to diffuse risks among many proprietors, especially if there are public agencies among those proprietors – financial or privatization arms of the governments which in case of failure may be able to bail the concerned economic units out. According to David Stark (1995), post-communist privatization is a process by which liabilities and assets are separated. Liabilities are unloaded on government budgets and assets are appropriated by private actors. Managers – even if they had the financial resources necessary for real ‘management buy-outs’ – may therefore prefer to leave most of the ownership of the firms they run in the hands of banks, other firms, or workers, and reward themselves with high salaries instead of shares of property. Thesis 5 In times of economic uncertainty it may be rational for managers to try to diversify. During the process of privatization most managers did acquire some property, possibly creating the misleading impression that they therefore became the new grand bourgeoisie. Their property, however, is likely to be relatively small and their major ownership is not necessarily in the firms they manage. Members of management teams have been busy since the late 1980s setting up small subcontracting firms (Stark 1992) which were owned by themselves or by members of their families. They subcontracted the most profitable activities to these operations, even selling some of the more valuable assets of the parent firms to their subcontracting units at undervalued prices. Still, it is probably the exception and not the rule that managers retire from their main firm altogether, ‘jump the boat’, and just run simply the subcontracting firms of which they are the sole or majority owners. The reasons for this reluctance may be manifold. Why should they change a major managerial job for the position of being owner-manager of a minor operation which employs only a handful of people? Why swap membership in the new ‘dominant class’ just to become a ‘petty bourgeois’? Furthermore, having both positions is advantageous: especially if their spouse is the nominal owner of the subcontracting firm, enabling a continuation of the ‘privatization of assets and nationalization of liabilities’ game. They can turn it from a one-act show into a selfreproducing system. They may also have an interest to be more than just managers. In

The rise of managerialism 221 managerial society the managerial elite is closely intertwined with the politocracy, this making them more dependent on politics than managers in a market capitalist economy are. In post-communist societies state bureaucracies often have the power, through direct or indirect shares of state ownership, to appoint and to dismiss managers. There is a curious double patronage between managers and the politocracy – they depend on each other. It seems to be a wise idea, therefore, for managers to have their own small private firms in the background as long as their position of manager can be threatened by the political elite.7 Thesis 6 The hegemonic ideology of managerialism is monetarism. If there is a new managerial class its key figure is not the manager of the industrial firm but the financial manager (Stark 1995).8 The main success story of the post-communist era is the rise of bankers. Bank managers, managers of investment funds, experts of the Ministry of Finance, advisers of IMF and the World Bank, experts working for foreign and international financial agencies, are the most powerful figures of the post-communist world. It is reasonable to assume that their power is primarily attributable to possession of cultural capital, rather than to their ownership of shares in the banks they manage. These financial experts, who used to be obscure figures working in universities, research institutes or government bureaucracies during the socialist period, are the high priests of post-communism. They are monopolistic owners of some very special, to some extent almost mystical, knowledge. Managing budget deficits, negotiating international loans, setting exchange rates and the amount of money in circulation – the relationship of all of these with the health of the economy and living standards seems to be something only they know. This offers them extraordinary power, and this is reflected in their exceptionally high salaries. The body of this knowledge is known as ‘monetarism’. Monetarism is for the new class of managers what Marxism – Leninism was for the ruling estate of state socialism. There are indeed interesting analogies between the structure of monetarism and Marxism. Monetarism is also a holistic worldview – there is no sphere of life which is not affected by it, which could not be regulated with its tools. Like revolutionary Marxism, monetarism also offers simple and fast solutions. The solutions come in ‘500 days’;9 what used to be the revolution for the communists is now shock therapy for the monetarists. With the use of a rather simple set of instruments (reduction of budget deficit; setting the correct inflation and exchange and interest rates), after a brief period of suffering the economy, and in fact the whole society, will be on the right track. Monetarism, like Marxism, is universalistic. The solutions will not only come soon but will serve everyone. The effects of the growth which results from financial discipline will trickle down to all – though at the beginning some will win big and others lose big, in the long term everyone will be a winner. Monetarism also takes the moral high ground; it is a self-righteous ideology. Those who disagree with monetarist policies are not only wrong they are also evil: they are populists, demagogues; they are irresponsible, xenophobic. There are indeed analogies between the good old New Left and the New (neo-liberal) Right, the old New Class and the new New Class. It should not be that surprising, then, that there is some overlap in personnel as well. Finally, monetarism is an international ideology; it is indeed the hegemonic world-view of today. This gives particular stability and breadth to managerial power.

222

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

Thesis 7 Can managerialism survive or is it only a phenomenon of transition? It may survive. From a transitory phenomenon it may turn into a system which is capable of reproducing itself. Managers may have an interest to turn this into a system; they maximize their power this way. Turning themselves into proprietors may be out of reach, and being an owner may be a much riskier existence too. In post-communist countries managers also face little competition. The statist class of redistributors discredited itself and there is no propertied bourgeoisie, at least yet, with any significant clout. Incidentally, managerialism rooted in monetarism is also a very effective system of control. The power of finance managers is not as well targeted as the power of the redistributors was, but it is a sweeping power – no one, nowhere, can escape it. Thesis 8 Is managerialism an alternative to, or a new form of, capitalism? The answer to this question obviously depends on our definition of what capitalism is and how useful the concept of capitalism may be after the fall of communism. In the broad, Weberian sense of the term, ‘managerialism’, being a market-integrated system, is a version of capitalism, while certain narrow versions of the Marxist view of capitalism, which focuses on individual private property as the essence of the capitalist mode of production, may question the capitalistic nature of the post-communist system. The most accurate concept is probably managerial capitalism. I have no Thesis 9 or Thesis 10, but my (Weberian) version of ‘Thesis 11’ is: so far, intellectuals have pursued their mission to change the world; now our task is to understand it – a task so complex that it may be beyond our power.10 THE CLASS STRUCTURE OF POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES Conceptual framework What is the class structure of a managerial society? How did social structure change during the transition from socialism to managerialism? Over the past half a century, the people of Eastern Europe have experienced unusually frequent and deep changes in the system of social stratification. The rules which regulate social life; the criteria which define what is up and what is down in social space, and what assures success and what leads to failure have changed quite radically over this historically brief period of time. I conceptualize the changes in social space and in the logic of the system of social stratification, by relying on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (Richardson 1983; Bourdieu 1984).11 I define the characteristics of social structures at different time-points by identifying the types of ‘capital’ (economic, social or cultural) which play roles in defining those positively and negatively privileged under any given regime of stratification.

The rise of managerialism 223 Bourdieu describes the social structure of contemporary French society, for instance, as a social space in which economic capital (possession of material wealth) is the most important asset in defining the locations of individuals. Possession of cultural capital (measured usually by educational credentials) and social capital (usually described by the density of social networks) complements economic capital. To put it crudely: ownership of cultural or social capital creates fractions within the classes formed by economic capital. Thus professionals – for example, those who possess some economic assets but whose privileges are primarily based on educational credentials, who managed to acquire rare and sought-after degrees – in France today constitute ‘a dominated fraction of the dominant class’. This is a reasonable – some may argue even trivial – proposition for the study of modern capitalist societies. Bourdieu’s framework, however, becomes even more insightful, leading to even more counterintuitive hypotheses when it is applied for the comparative and historical analysis of societies and for the description of social change. In Figures 14.1 and 14.2 I present two snapshots on East European social structure: one on reform socialism, the other on post-communism, both structures being fundamentally different from Bourdieu’s conceptualization of French class relations. My purpose in this chapter is to address the issues presented in Figure 14.2, but in order to do so in a dynamic way I would like to present a few hypotheses as to where the current class structure is coming from. Class structure under reform socialism Under the classical, or Stalinist, system of state socialism it is reasonable to argue that the major source of power and privilege was political capital, 12 which was complemented by cultural capital. In order to be able to climb to the top of the social hierarchy one had to join the Communist Party and keep demonstrating loyalty to the political bosses. State socialism, however, was also a credentialling society – since loyalty was difficult to measure, educational credentials were important, though clearly secondary as criteria of promotion and reward. Working-class cadres who were promoted to positions of high authority on the basis of political loyalty typically were expected to acquire educational credentials – sometimes through rush-courses or in institutions of ideological education. Highly skilled intellectuals were on their way to positions of power, though typically they were expected to join the Party first and prove the seriousness of their loyalty before they were appointed to real high offices. The purpose of Figure 14.1 is to show how far-reaching changes took place in those state socialist societies which had entered the road of reforms (the most obvious examples being Hungary and Poland since the early 1960s, or China after 1977). With the decay of Stalinist authority the socialist ruling estate experimented with two types of compromises: (1) it opened up to the intelligentsia, revalued education and even hinted at its willingness to share power within the framework of a rationalized socialist system with intellectuals broadly defined; (2) it relaxed its regulations on small-scale private activities, thus creating opportunities for workers and peasant-workers to earn incomes, thereby improving their living standards from ‘second economy’ activities and eventually from full-time private businesses. Thus, while political capital retained its primary importance under reforming socialism, cultural capital began to approach political capital as a source of power and privilege. Economic capital re-emerged as a dimension of the stratification system as well.13 As a result the distance between

224

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

intellectuals and the bureaucratic estate narrowed, and at the same time a new class appeared (called ‘socialist entrepreneurs’ by me elsewhere – see Szelényi 1988) who used an alternative channel of upward social mobility to ascend the bureaucratic ladder – namely, market success. In my earlier work, around the early 1970s, my position was that a merger between the bureaucratic estate and the intelligentsia was possible at that historic conjuncture, and as a result power could have shifted from the socialist ruling estate into the hands of a new class of intellectuals (Konrád and Szelényi 1978). During the 1960s it appeared that the Stalinist bureaucracy may have believed that its only way to preserve its power was to share it with the intelligentsia, and particularly with the technocratic intellectuals, by rationalizing and humanizing socialist socioeconomic institutions. I also believed at that time that intellectuals were responding to this call from the bureaucracy; they were ready for the power-sharing arrangements, and many expressed enthusiasm with the rational social order of redistributive economies – particularly so if such a system could have been given a human face.

Figure 14.1 Social structure of reform socialism.

The rise of managerialism 225 As the reform progressed the formation of this new class of intellectuals was eventually blocked, or one may even say sabotaged, by the bureaucratic estate (Szelényi 1986–7). Instead of sharing power with the intellectuals the bureaucracy relaxed the economic regulations on private economic activities. The class of intellectuals was not formed; instead, more by default than by design,14 socialist entrepreneurs carved more and more room out for themselves. During the 1980s, instead of intellectuals moving ahead on the road to class power a petty bourgeoisification took place in late socialist reform societies. The punchline of Figure 14.1 is the following: during reform socialism a complex stratification system evolved. The socioeconomic distance between the bureaucratic estate and the intelligentsia narrowed as the significance of cultural capital was revalued and political capital lost some of its importance. The bureaucracy and the intelligentsia did not merge into a New Class, however; instead economic capital became an alternative source of social advancement, of which the peasant-workers and certain segments of the working class in particular could take advantage. Class structure after the fall of communism Figure 14.2 is an attempt to show the changes brought about by 1989 in the social structure of the former socialist societies. My key proposition is that post-communism can be described as a social system in which cultural capital is the major source of power and privilege – though this time it is complemented by social capital, which instead of being political capital of the communist type functions more like networking capacity and by a newly emergent economic capital, which is gaining significance rapidly but so far is unable to challenge the dominance of cultural capital. In other words the most daring hypothesis of this chapter is that under managerial post-communism a new dominant class is in the making, which is primarily constituted by ownership of cultural capital. Two groups can be found at the core of this class: the technocracy and the politocracy. As Bourdieu put it, they constitute the ‘dominant fraction of the dominant class’. The relative power of these two groups is similar. The new politocracy may possess more of the major capital asset of post-communism: cultural capital. One unique feature of post-communist politics is that members of the political elite are recruited to a historically unprecedented degree from among the most highly skilled intellectuals – not just from ‘professional types’ (lawyers, economists and engineers) but also from among the humanistic intellectuals (Coleman and Bourdieu 1991).15 Historians, sociologists, philosophers and playwrights have a larger share of political position in the post-communism system than in other democratic systems. The most powerful fraction is still the managerial elite. Not only are the managers well endowed with cultural capital, but they control the most valued component of post-communist cultural capital: the ideology of monetarism. Furthermore, the managerial elite has a stronger base than the politocracy – it has substantial economic wealth, even though its power is not primarily derived from its ownership. Furthermore, the managerial fraction of the new dominant class has been typically very successful in converting its former political capital into social capital, into networks which are particularly important in getting things done under post-communism.16 The technocracy moves like a fish in water in the post-communist society (this is, after all, a managerial

226

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

Figure 14.2 Social structure of managerial society.

society), while the politocracy, despite its crucial role in shaping the directions and dynamics of socioeconomic change, is somewhat insecure and uncomfortable in its new role. Members of the politocracy keep wondering whether politics is really what they want to do, and whether they wouldn’t feel more comfortable in returning to their real jobs as professors, writers or researchers. The relationship between the technocracy and politocracy so far can be still described as one of power-sharing rather than contestation or competition. The victorious technocracy leaves political power to the politocracy and the new political elite is unable or unwilling to challenge the economic power of managers. Erzsébet Szalai17 was among the first, if not the first social analyst who conceptualized the sociopolitical dynamics of late reform socialism as the struggle between what she called the ‘old elite’ (she used this term to describe what I call the

The rise of managerialism 227 ruling bureaucratic estate) and the ‘new elite’ (in my terminology the managerial technocracy). Szalai pointed out that the new elite’s victory over the old elite came rather late. In Hungary this happened around February 1989, and she also believed that this victory was short lived. By mid-1989 the technocratic elite was challenged by a new political class, or a new political estate. I am greatly influenced by Szalai’s analysis. I only would like to add that the newly emergent politocracy – while it indeed tried to squeeze the managerial technocracy, even to replace them with the clients of the politocracy – did not score a real victory. The relationship between the new politocracy – be it of Left-liberal, or Right-wing patriotic, Christian type – and the managerial technocracy was one of tension and suspicion. After all most members of the political elite which came to power around 1990 were anti-communists and they saw the managerial technocracy as communists, or at best as fellow travellers, collaborators of the communist regime. Eventually, however, the politocracy had to learn to compromise with the managerial elite in order for them to live together, or else lose its political power. The Hungarian Right-wing patriotic-Christian government, which attempted more than the Polish or the Czech post-communist regime to move the former economic elite out of power and push their own clients into economic command positions,18 suffered a humiliating electoral defeat in 1994. To a large extent it had been perceived as incompetent and arrogant, and the electorate preferred to bring back to government the former communist ‘experts’. The managerial elite, even after achieving cooperation with the new politocracy, may be unable to establish a consolidated, legitimate system of domination. It needs further allies. I use again Bourdieu’s terminology: the new dominant class is capable of consolidating its domination since it contains a dominated fraction: the humanistic intelligentsia, academics, social scientists, artists and, probably most importantly, the mediacracy. One of the unique institutions which plays a crucial role in the cooptation of humanistic intellectuals into the new power structure is the foundation.19 Foundations spread like prairie-fire with the fall of communism. One important function they performed was to rescue those public funds which had been allocated from the government budget by redistributive means for educational, scientific and cultural purposes into endowments; these will be safe from budget cuts and will be controlled by the members of the elite intelligentsia. This way the new dominant class were able to preach the water of monetary restrictions and at the same time drink the wine by continually funding itself from financial resources rescued into foundations. Gáspár Miklós Tamás, the Hungarian philosopher-politician, once wrote: while in the West the purpose of foundations is to use the private funds of unselfish individuals for public purposes, under post-communism the aim of foundations is to use public funds for the private interest of self-serving individuals. It may be a mistake, however, as in the case of abuses of privatization, to put too much emphasis on corruption. While one could cite cases when members of boards of directors of foundations reward themselves or their clients with excessive resources, such corruption is one part of the story. Foundations are about power. A sort of ‘foundationocracy’ rules post-communist culture. The boards of directors of these foundations are firmly controlled by the humanistic intelligentsia. While in the West such boards of directors are usually composed of businessmen, community leaders and the like, the post-communist

228

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

foundation boards of directors are professors, novelists and movie directors. There is a system of ‘interlocking directorates’ in terms of the command posts of funding culture – but the personnel of this directorate do not come from the business and propertied bourgeoisie areas; instead they are recruited from among leading professionals. Incidentally, it is also notable that besides the foundations created by government agencies from public funds, or parliament foundations of financial institutions, banks in particular seem to be playing an unusually important role in funding culture. The financial managers of banks seem to be using tax-loopholes to allocate funds to support culture – often the media – and assumedly to gain the loyalty of humanistic intellectuals in this way. The cooptation of humanistic intelligentsia seems to have been rather successful. As a result managerialism produced more of a ‘one-dimensional’ mind than Marcuse ever dreamt for advanced capitalism. The hegemony of laissez-faire market capitalism is complete; its contemporary expression, monetarism, is unchallenged. The critical imagination of East European intelligentsia seems to have been lost. If indeed managerialism is some kind of victory of the New Class, in Gouldner’s sense of the term, the main irony of this victory is that it is exactly the culture of critical discourse (Gouldner 1979) which the intelligentsia has sacrificed in exchange for power. If post-communism is a transition from socialism to capitalism it is indeed a curious type of capitalism which is in the making this way. As Figure 14.2 suggests, property in managerial society may not be sufficient to get someone to the top of the social hierarchy. A propertied bourgeoisie is being formed, but it is more likely to find itself somewhere in the middle fields of social spaces, rather than on the top. It is a propertied middle class, and not a grand bourgeoisie, which is in the making. Eric Hanley (1997) pointed out that two distinct economic classes are formed under post-communism, one around the position of corporate management and the other in small business. A class of self-employed – who start small and, if lucky, grow eventually larger – is also in the making. Hanley showed from data from our East European survey that the formation of these two classes is regulated by very different sociological laws. Typically, the key players of the corporate world were already in positions of authority during state socialism. They are likely to have been members of the Communist Party, be highly educated, and (typically) first-generation technocratic intellectuals coming from upwardly mobile working-class or peasant families. It is difficult to move from small private business into this world: even in Hungary or Poland where substantial private economic activities were allowed prior to 1989 only about 5 per cent of the managers of the largest firms were entrepreneurs before the fall of communism. Former party membership on the other hand is negatively associated with the odds of becoming small businessmen during post-communism. The best predictor of success in starting new business is experience with the second economy during socialism and pre-communist entrepreneurship in the family of the new entrepreneurs. Small business is rather small indeed. In 1993 slightly over 10 per cent of the adult population was self-employed in countries like the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. About half of them had employees, but the number employed by each was modest – on average two in Hungary and Poland, and on average four in the Czech Republic, worked for self-employed entrepreneurs with employees.

The rise of managerialism 229 There is some indication that small business may become an increasingly diversified phenomenon. During reform socialism self-employment, no matter how small, and even if it was only part-time, was typically a source of respectable income.20 Under managerial capitalism small business faces real competition, and has to learn how to act in real markets. As a result some of those who did well in the second economy during the socialist epoch are now in severe difficulties. This is probably most obvious in agriculture, where with the transition to a market economy there has been a shift from an economy of shortages to an economic system which is suffering from problems of overproduction. Under these circumstances the largest, most efficient agribusinesses have a better chance to survive, and production for markets on small private plots becomes unviable. I tried to demonstrate this shift with the changing location of peasant-workers and peasants on Figures 14.1 and 14.2. During post-communist times, after the affluent 1970s and early 1980s, peasant-workers are drifting down to the bottom of the social hierarchy. In Hungary, and to a lesser degree in Poland, there is indication that some of the self-employed are earning very modest incomes. As in other market economies, under managerial capitalism pop-and-mom shops can be survival strategies – an alternative to unemployment rather than a way to compensate for low incomes in the redistributive sector. There is of course a certain fraction of small businessmen – particularly in the tertiary sector (Burawoy and Krotov 1992)21 – which is growing and earning high incomes. In all the countries we studied, being self-employed helps gain access to the top income quintiles. The most striking lesson we can learn from comparing Figures 14.1 and 14.2 is that the big winner of post-communist transformation is management. Entrepreneurs who try to run the businesses they own themselves are differentially affected; some can even be seen as losers in the transition, and most of those who are winners have only managed to climb into or hold the middle positions in the system of social stratification. In the late 1960s and early 1970s I believed intellectuals to be on their way to class power. During the 1980s I revisited this theme and found that intellectuals had been defeated by the bureaucratic estate, but unexpectedly a new class of socialist entrepreneurs emerged and they seem to have been the main beneficiaries of market reforms. The year 1989 indicated a change in the relative fortunes of the two groups. With post-communism, socialist entrepreneurs have seemed to slide, only a few of them being able to use the new opportunities which opened up. The big winners are those who used to be socialist managers, not those who were socialist entrepreneurs. In conclusion let me reiterate: post-communism is managerial society; it is managerial capitalism. The post-communist transition to capitalism is different from the making of modern capitalism in the West. After the fall of communism the rule is not that some small businesses grow big. Small businesses may stay small and the economic power of the corporate sector is firmly in the hands of managers. CONCLUSION New Class: for the fourth time The idea of the New Class has been ridiculed over the last century, since the term was first used by Bakunin in 1871. Still, the idea has haunted the social sciences ever since.

230

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

There have been at least three waves of New Class theorizing (Szelényi and Martin 1986) since the anarchists accused Marx of promoting the blueprint of a society in which the socialist scholars would establish themselves as a new dominant class. The anarchist theory of the class project of the socially unattached intelligentsia was followed during the inter-war years by the theories of a new techno-bureaucratic class and finally by the knowledge class theories of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Elsewhere (Szelényi and King?) we suggest that these theories may not simply be the misguided speculations of social theorists, but may point to renewed attempts and new projects by different groups of intellectuals to occupy the key command positions of the economy and politics; to constitute themselves as the universal class – though rather ‘flawed’ in the Gouldnerian sense of the term (Gouldner 1979). Is it possible that with the fall of communism we see the fourth such major effort in modern history, this time spearheaded by managers, using monetarism as its ideology? We suggest this should at least be considered as a real possibility. Berle and Means, Burnham or Galbraith were probably not wrong in their assessment of the New Class potentials of the managerial stratum; their diagnosis was merely premature. The managerial technocracy did not come of age before the 1990s, and it established its dominant position in a different site than previous theorists expected. Rather than becoming the New Class of advanced capitalism it used the window of opportunities offered by post-communism. We can only speculate that after three failed attempts the New Class after all may succeed. Some of its earlier attempts were rather close calls. Think of 1968: wasn’t the East European intelligentsia at least just an arm’s length from power? This fourth project, by all accounts and judging from all the evidence at our disposal, appears to be even closer than the previous ones. This time no one has to be overthrown – there seems to be no alternative to the rule by managers under post-communism. This time the New Class does not have to fight for power; it is offered to them on a silver plate. Will managerialism last? We know little about post-communism. Is it a transition to some destination we know? Is it just a transformation, a transfiguration of existing elements into a new Gestalt, the form of which we do not know? We are shooting at a rapidly moving target, and social scientists are poor shooters even when the target does not move. What do we know about the future, or even possible futures? Next to nothing. Still, let’s at least consider that managerialism is not just a passing phase on the way to private capitalism. Let’s take David Stark’s advice seriously and let’s not assume that we know what the destination is – namely, that it is private, market capitalism. Thus all we have to do is to look for signs of its gradual making. Social scientists may be committing this mistake by being obsessed with the question: who is grabbing property? Is it the nomenklatura which is becoming the new grand bourgeoisie, or are they the clients of the new politocracy? Or someone else? What if no one? What if this is a new ball-game in which the point is not to become proprietors but to achieve power and reward oneself with high, and relatively secure, income instead of insecure property?

The rise of managerialism 231 Managerialism with national and international fiscal banking institutions has powerful institutional bases, and with monetarism has an ideology which is as holistic and scientistic as Marxism used to be. The appropriate positions are ready; the adequate ideology, consciousness, has been prepared and the actors feel comfortable in these positions and are deeply committed to the ideology. Furthermore, in post-communist societies the alternative seems to be difficult to achieve. Nationalization of property has been a process with far-reaching implications and may be in some way irreversible. As the old joke puts it: we know how to make fish soup from an aquarium, but how can one make fish which can fill an aquarium from a bowl of fish soup? East European economists liked to cite this before 1989, but they fast forgot it after 1989 and believed that this sort of miracle can be achieved – and virtually immediately. Managerialism is based on the almost impossible task of converting former public property into identifiable individual property. Managerialism beyond post-communism Over the past few years we often asked questions like: ‘Is Latin America the future of Eastern Europe?’, ‘Is East Asia the future of communism?’, ‘Is Russia the future of China?’ Now we ask: ‘Is Eastern Europe the future of the West?’ Or is East European managerialism all that different from the way Western capitalism operates today? As we have already noted, these questions about the future are tricky ones and we are very unsure of the answers to them. We would rather pose the question this way: if managerialism was a project during the inter-war years and it failed, why did it fail? Approaching the issue this way is likely to make us sceptical about the spread of managerialism around the world. If Zeitlin, Domhoff and other critics of the managerialism thesis are correct then managerialism in the United States and in Western Europe failed because it confronted a strong propertied bourgeoisie. We are inclined to believe that this is a reasonable proposition and there seems to be evidence that concentration of economic wealth did not come to an end at all. If anything, during the past decade – both in the United States and in Western Europe – concentration of the wealth continued, with fewer people owning more of the productive assets than ever before. Our point earlier was that managerialism was successful under post-communism because it did not have enemies to defeat. It may be able to reproduce itself because there are no challengers. If that is correct the future for managerialism in advanced capitalism is about as gloomy today as it was before. NOTES 1. I developed the key ideas of this chapter in collaboration with Gil Eyal. I am grateful for comments on earlier drafts from David Grusky, Elemér Hankiss and Szonja Szelényi. 2. No value judgement is intended with this choice of term. The East German transition was a success: the former GDR is the fastest growing region of Europe – but one which was only made possible by the influx of West German capital.

232

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

3. I interviewed Márton Tardos, a leading Hungarian economist, during the Summer of 1984 and asked him the question whether the reform scenario he proposed – namely, a property reform which would transfer ownership rights of state firms into the hands of several competing investment banks – is not a ‘restoration of capitalism’. He said: no. Nationalization once it took place is irreversible: there is no way back from public ownership to individual private ownership. Though Tardos later became one of the more ardent advocates of privatization he may have had it right. Indeed the property reform in both Hungary and Poland rather closely followed Tardos’s reform scenario: ownership by banks, which in the last instance are publicly owned or at least state controlled. 4. Since East Germany, with a population of 17 million people, received well over $100 billion in five years in investment and aid this does not look like a feasible scenario for the rest of the formerly communist world. 5. Berle and Means took this position first in their The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932). James Burnham, in The Managerial Revolution (1941), expanded this thesis into an ambitious sociological theory. In the recent economic and sociological literature Galbraith addresses the issue in his The New Industrial State (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), and the Ehrenreiches (1977) arrive at similar conclusions. 6. In particular Maurice Zeitlin and William Domhoff. See Zeitlin (1974). 7. I am grateful to Elemér Hankiss, who in personal communication reminded me how dependent management is on the politocracy in post-communist formations. 8. Stark (1995) offers important insights about the crucial role of the financial sector in his analysis of the bank consolidation process in Hungary during the early 1990s. 9. Soviet economists promised successful conversion into a market economy in just 500 days. 10. The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach by Marx was: ‘Philosophers so far interpreted the world, now the point is to change it.’ 11. See particularly Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’ in Richardson (1983) and Bourdieu (1984). 12. I interpret political capital as a highly institutionalized form of social capital. Under socialism the simple measure of political capital is membership of the Communist Party. 13. Victor Nee, in his market transition theory, claims that market reform reduces inequalities: the gap between political cadres and those with high education on the one hand and cadres and ordinary workers narrows. He was strongly criticized for this position by several authors, most recently by Bian and Logan and Yu Xie, but I believe that Nee is quite correct for the early stages of socialist reforms – the kind of social structure which is presented in Figure 14.1. 14. I suggested that the more accurate way to understand reform in Eastern Europe was to think about it as happening ‘by default’ rather than by design of the bureaucracy in my ‘Socialism in an Epoch of Crisis’, in David Stark and Victor Nee (1988). 15. In an earlier paper we focused our attention on this fraction. See George Konrád and Iván Szelényi, ‘Intellectuals and Domination under Post-Communism’, in Coleman and Bourdieu (1991). 16. According to our survey on elite circulation, a sizeable proportion of current top managers (about half of them) were members of the Communist Party, and this is a significantly smaller proportion among the new politocracy. The results are similar in all countries. 17. See her Gazdaság és hatalom (Budapest: Aula Kiadó, 1992). She spotted the crucial role of economic managers in the reform process during the early 1980s in her work on large socialist corporations, and wrote about the struggle between the ‘old’ and ‘new elites’ as early as the Spring of 1989. 18. About half of the Hungarian 1988 economic nomenklatura was in retirement by 1993, while in Poland and the Czech Republic a much larger proportion of earlier top economic managers remained in positions of authority. See Szonja Szelényi and Iván Szelényi, ‘Circulation or Reproduction of Elites in Post-Communist Transformation: an Introduction’, Theory and Society, 1995, 24 (5), 615–38. See also papers on this subject in the same special issue of Theory and Society by József Böröcz and Ákos Rona-Tas (pp. 751–81). 19. I am grateful to Miklós Haraszti and Elemér Hankiss, who in various conversations brought to my attention the importance of foundations. 20. In this respect I again agree with Nee’s market transition theory. Before markets became dominant mechanisms all market activities generated good incomes. Even people with little skills, entering part-time, second-economy type of activities, did well. They did not get much competition from the rather uncompetitive redistributive sector. Small was beautiful – and profitable indeed. 21. Michael Burawoy’s point about post-communist ‘merchant capitalism’ is well taken – it is the tertiary sector, and for small business trade where most business opportunities open up. See Burawoy and Krotov (1992).

The rise of managerialism 233 REFERENCES Bian, Y. and Logan, J. (1996) ‘Market Transition and the Persistence of Power: the Changing Stratification System in Urban China’, American Sociological Review, 61 (5), 739–58. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge. Burawoy, M. and Krotov, P. (1992) ‘The Soviet Transition from Socialism to Capitalism’, American Journal of Sociology, 57, 16–38. Coleman, J. and Bourdieu, P. (eds) (1991) Social Theory for a Changing Society, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Ehrenreich, B. and Ehrenreich, J. (1977) ‘The Professional Managerial Class’, Radical America, March–April, 7–31. Gouldner, A. (1979) The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hankiss, E. (1990) East European Alternatives, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hanley, E. (1997) ‘Privatization and Marketization in Eastern Europe’, Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA. Konrád, G. and Szelényi, I. (1978) The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich. Nee, Victor (1989) ‘A Theory of Market Transition’, American Sociological Review, 56, 663– 81. Richardson, J. G. (ed.) (1983) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich. Rona-Tas, Á. (1994) ‘The First Shall be the Last? Entrepreneurship and the Communist Cadres in the Transition from Socialism’, American Journal of Sociology, 100, 40–69. Staniszkis, J. (1991) The Dynamics of Breakthrough, Berkeley: University of California Press. Stark, D. (1992) ‘Path Dependence and Privatization in East Central Europe’, East European Politics and Societies, 6, 17–51. —— (1995) ‘Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism’, American Journal of Sociology, 101 (4), 993–1027. Stark, D. and Nee, V. (1988) Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Szelényi, I. (1986–7) ‘Prospects and Limits of the East European New Class Project’, Politics and Society, 15 (2), 103–44. —— (1988) Socialist Entrepreneurs, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Szelényi, I. and King, L. (forthcoming) Theories of the New Class. Szelényi, I. and Martin, B. (1986) ‘The Three Waves of New Class Theories’, Theory and Society (September), 645–67. Szelényi, I. and Szelényi, S. (1990) ‘Az elit cirkulációja?’ (Circulation of elites?), Kritika, No. 9, 8–10. Walder, A. (1995) ‘Career Mobility and the Communist Political Order’, American Sociological Review, 60, 309–28. Zeitlin, M. (1974) ‘Corporate Ownership and Control: the Large Corporations and the Capitalist Class’, American Journal of Sociology, 59 (5), 1073–119.

15 Second thoughts on the transformation in Eastern and Central Europe Michal Illner

INTRODUCTION Societal transformation in the former socialist countries of Eastern and Central Europe has entered its seventh year. It has also been seven years since the processes of the transformation in this region became a major focus of interest in the social sciences. The first generation of comments and analyses brought many relevant ideas, mostly of a general character, on the nature, problems and potential future course of transformation. They were inspired by perceptive observation, theoretical reflections and sometimes by analogy with the earlier democratic transitions in Latin America and the Southern European countries (Ash 1990; Dahrendorf 1990; Habermas 1990; Musil 1992; Offe 1991; Sztompka 1992; Staniszkis 1991; Stark 1992). The different aspects of transformation quickly became the subject of empirical research and a rich body of data and data-based knowledge has been accumulated, shedding light on the individual components of transformation and their interlinkages, on the temporal aspects of transformation as well as on the specific features it has acquired in the individual countries of the region. Many were comparative multinational projects which linked the findings from Eastern and Central Europe to the existing Western ‘transitological’ knowledge. In this way, the Eastern and Central European ‘transitological’ studies, as some have called the study of societal transitions or transformations, have become better informed. Attempts are made to verify and to elaborate further the initial observations and to propose new hypotheses. In addition, the societal development in Eastern and Central Europe itself has brought some new twists, not foreseen by the first generation of transitological studies, which call for explanation.¹ In this chapter, I wish to sketch several general propositions concerning the more advanced stage of the post-1989 societal development in Eastern and Central Europe. The propositions were inspired by the recent development in the region as well as by some more recent studies, both theoretical and empirical (Bauman 1994; Gorzelak et al. 1994; Machonin 1994; Mateju 1995; Srubar 1994; Sztompka 1993; van Zon 1994). In particular, the ideas expressed by van Zon on the study of the transformations in Eastern and Central Europe and the results of the comparative research project EastCentral Europe 2000 (cf. Gorzelak et al. 1994; Illner 1993) were helpful in this context. My propositions are of a hypothetical character and are intended to stimulate discussion.

Second thoughts on Eastern and Central Europe 235 THE TRANSFORMATIONSARE MORE COMPLICATED, MORE CONFLICTUALAND LENGTHIER THAN ORIGINAL LYEXPECTED Although the post-communist transformation was viewed from the beginning as a formidable task (R. Dahrendorf’s ‘valley of tears’ – cf. Dahrendorf 1990), the real-life difficulties of this process were underestimated by the analysts, the general public and politicians. Let us discuss some of the problems. The political, economic, social and cultural components of transformation are so tightly intertwined that they have to be considered jointly, both in analysis and practical policy. While on the analytical level – in the context of research and theoretical discussions – the three processes can be taken separately, in reality they are interdependent. Sensu stricto there is no such thing as a purely ‘economic’, ‘constitutional’, ‘political’ or ‘social and cultural’ transformation. The real process is always multi-dimensional – sociocultural, economic and political at the same time (cf. Sztompka 1992; Musil 1992). While it is possible to model transformation as a series of consecutive stages – first the political and constitutional changes, thereafter economic changes and finally sociocultural changes – R. Dahrendorf’s ‘hour of the lawyer’, ‘hour of the economist’ and ‘hour of the citizen’ (Dahrendorf 1990) – in reality the three processes occur in parallel and are parts of one stream of change. The simultaneity is a major source of difficulties, of a ‘mutual blockage of solutions to the problems’ (Offe 1991: 873), as the progress in any of the above respects depends on the success of the remaining ones. This circulus vitiosus can only be broken by stepwise changes on all the above fronts. Typically, three kinds of fallacies threaten if the multidimensionality of transformation is neglected. The ‘institutional fallacy’ consists in overestimating the importance of changes of formal institutions within the overall context of the postcommunist transformation. Some legislators believe, for example, that, once proper institutions have been built, social behaviour will automatically follow along the established formal channels. Obviously, that is an illusion. While institution-building is an inevitable component of post-communist transformation – new political and economic institutions (political parties, parliaments, local governments, administrative bodies, private firms, financial institutions, etc.) had to be established during the early stages of transformation – it does not by itself guarantee the proper functioning of the new system. For institutions to function properly, social and cultural prerequisites, such as supportive social interests and a corresponding democratic political culture, administrative culture and a culture of economic relations (the entrepreneurial culture) must as well be available. It is certainly true that institutions can to a certain degree stimulate, channel and mould social behaviour, but it is equally true that incompatible cultural patterns may make institutions ineffective or may even undermine them. The problem of civilizational competence or rather civilizational incompetence (cf. Sztompka 1993) in the postcommunist societies has, therefore, assumed foremost importance in the latter stages of the transformation. While the new institutions (though not all of them) are mostly in place, their proper functioning, determined in a great part by social and cultural factors, is endangered by the lagging social and cultural transformation.

236

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

In turn, the ‘economic fallacy’ consists in overestimating the economic component of the post-communist changes, in assuming a deterministic causal chain between the new economic relations and other aspects of transformation. Changes of ownership structure, liberalization of prices, re-creation of the market, structural changes of the economy – such processes are considered to be the sole and primary movers of transformation, with social and cultural changes following automatically in a more or less passive manner. Championed by many professional economists and by economiststurned-politicians, some of them theoreticians and designers of economic reforms in the former socialist countries, this approach neglects the fact that economic measures are filtered by culture and that there is a powerful feedback between these measures and the social system. Beside being a manifestation of ‘professional blindness’, this stance is sometimes doctrinally rooted in neoliberal economic theories. Finally, the ‘voluntaristic fallacy’ means that the successes and failures of the post-communist transformation predominantly depend on the configuration, behaviour and strategies of political actors (political parties and movements, the leading politicians: the Havels and Walesas; foreign political and economic institutions: NATO, the European Union, the World Bank, the IMF, German capital; the conspiracies of the former nomenklatura, Mafia, ethnic minorities, etc.). Situational and organizational factors, personal qualities, the behaviour of key individuals and small groups and good luck, play an exaggerated role in this view, while the hard societal factors are disregarded. In Eastern and Central European politics, this voluntaristic approach is usually embraced by populist political parties and is attractive for large segments of the less educated public. Transformation also takes more time and brings more hardships than was expected by the general public; more, in fact, than the public is willing to tolerate (it might have been the guilt of the first cohort of post-1989 politicians who promised more, sooner and easier results than they could realistically expect). The length and the difficulties of transformation tend to exhaust the patience of the population, especially where living standards have dropped dramatically and for a protracted length of time, where high unemployment prevails and upward social mobility stagnates. The social legitimacy of the reforms is weakened and with it political support for the reform parties. Leftturns may then follow in national elections, as was the case in several countries of the region (Belorussia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia). Dissatisfaction with the development may also be the result of a contradiction between the population’s expectations of the reform and its perceived outcome. This relative deprivation may have a political impact similar to the objective handicaps (cf. Mateju 1995). NEW SOCIAL SYSTEMS ARE CREATED DURING THE POSTCOMMUNIST TRANSFORMATION The majority of the ideas and institutions which are being brought to life during the transformation are neither entirely new nor untested. They have been the cornerstones of Western democracy and of the market economy, and many of them were anchored in the pre-war life of the Eastern and Central European countries. Ash (1990) has observed that the ideas emphasized in the Eastern European countries after 1989 were

Second thoughts on Eastern and Central Europe 237 the old, well-tested ideas of democracy and liberalism. The absence of novelty in the programmes of post-communist transformation, the emphasis on restoration rather than innovation, the fact that no influential new ideas about social organization, no ‘ex ante’ revolutionary theory (Offe 1991) was advanced, have led some observers of the Eastern and Central European scene to the conclusion that recent developments are simply bringing these societies back towards a normal situation, that they mark the end of a ‘long and tragic historical deviation which had begun in 1917’ (Dahrendorf 1990). In this sense, the changes in 1989 have been labelled as ‘rectifying revolutions’ (Habermas 1990) and it was assumed that the post-1989 changes would be a transition to some well-known target situations. While this observation is mostly correct as far as the stated goals and ideologies of transformation are concerned, it may prove wrong in terms of the policies used to implement such goals and the changes themselves. (Even the goals of transformation occasionally included non-traditional ideas – cf. the idea of ‘non-political politics’ promulgated by anti-communist dissidents in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, with Václav Havel as one of its foremost adherents.) The ‘rectifying’ forces interact with the legacies of the communist system as well as with those of the more distant past of the Eastern and Central European countries to produce problems, solutions and a new reality that is occasionally different from both the Western and the pre-war situations in the countries involved. Forty or so years of totalitarian, redistributive and paternalistic systems have had a heavy impact on social networks, behavioural patterns and the cultures of Eastern and Central European societies, and it would contradict sociological wisdom to suppose that this heritage will vanish without leaving any trace. There is an ongoing interaction between the forces and models transferred from Western democracies, the heritage of the ‘realsocialist’ society, the more distant past of Eastern and Central European countries and the innovative solutions called for by the unprecedented situation of the ‘exit from communism’. The ‘lost-child-returning-home’ model of post-communist transformation is simplistic and ahistorical. Irrespective of the intentions of the designers, politicians and intellectuals, the societies that are developing in Eastern and Central Europe on the ruins of the communist regime will not just become late-arrivals to the family of the Western liberal capitalist states and will not be simple copies of some of them. Nor will they be reproductions of what Eastern and Central European societies used to be before the communist takeover or before World War II.² The process of transformation is apparently producing a new and unprecedented social reality of its own. It is still too early to predict the final shape which the new societies in Eastern and Central Europe may be taking as the result of the many, often contradictory influences currently being exerted. Their development options are open, and the outcome may prove difficult to subsume under any of the known societal types. The emerging societies may be as specific as is the process of transformation itself; almost certainly they will not correspond to the blueprints of the reformers. The declared goals of the reformers – the (re)introduction of pluralist democracy, civil society, market economy and the rule of law – while certainly an important driving force, do not fully determine the actual course of the development in the Eastern and Central European societies. This development is more complex and contradictory than mere implementation of the ‘democracy and marketization’ programme package. We

238

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

would also hesitate to endorse W. Zapf’s view that the transformations are an underlying process of modernization (Zapf 1991: 46; 1994). This may be so, but other than modern outcomes of this process are still possible.³ THEREARE STRONG ELEMENTS OF CONTINUITY IN THE POST-1989 DEVELOPMENT As a consequence of the fact that the post-communist development is co-determined by factors anchored in the recent as well as the more distant past, there is much more continuity in this development than has often been admitted. Both public opinion, politicians and many social analysts at first primarily perceived and stressed the elements of rupture and disconnectedness in the transformation, the profound differences separating the post-communist and the communist situation, the ‘sudden, radical break with the past’ (Sztompka 1992: 11). The influence of the past was disregarded and for some time the feeling prevailed that the reforming societies would enjoy a wide freedom of choice when redesigning their political, economic and social systems. It took some time before the grip of history made itself felt. As all revolutions, that of 1989 was not quite as radical as it purported to be. The continuities are both structural and cultural and reach to the more recent as well as to the distant past. Sztompka wrote about the ‘burden of liabilities’ encountered by the transforming societies in social consciousness, economic infrastructure, ecology, administrative system, demographic structure and other areas (Sztompka 1992). Stark (1992) introduced the concept of ‘path-dependency’ to express the fact that innovation is constrained by the institutions inherited from the past which limit the space of potential action and, in fact, induce some continuity. What was meant was mainly the limiting role of the institutions of the communist regime for the post-communist development. Sztompka (1993) and others before him (Dahrendorf 1990; Musil 1992) drew attention to the limiting role of the cultural legacies of communism. For the new institutions to function properly, cultural prerequisites have to be fulfilled: the democratic political culture, the administrative culture and the entrepreneurial culture. All three degenerated during the years of ‘really existing socialism’, so that a ‘civilizational incompetence’ has developed, as Piotr Sztompka called the syndrome (Sztompka 1993), which severely complicates the progress of transformation. The political changes of 1989 and the restructuring of institutions that followed were to a much lesser degree accompanied by the change in people’s patterns of behaviour, values and attitudes that had been moulded during the relatively long period of ‘really existing socialism’. Beyond the communist legacy, and on a deeper level, the processes of transformation seem to be as well influenced by long-range factors stemming from the more distant, pre-communist past of the respective societies. Such legacies, ‘frozen’ during the years of the communist regime, have been re-activated since its collapse.4 So far, the long-distance continuities have been frequently overlooked as the search for legacies focused mainly on the handicaps inherited from the communist society. It is, for instance, in the territorial structure of political behaviour that, in some countries of the region, the pre-war patterns have been reproduced.5 Other analyses suggested that family

Second thoughts on Eastern and Central Europe 239 traditions mattered in post-1989 economic and political entrepreneurship (cf. Illner 1992). Unfortunately, little is known about the social and cultural mechanisms which are facilitating this transmission.6 The legacies of the past – of the socialist one, as well as of the earlier, pre-socialist era – co-determine the space available for transformation. The methodological lesson is that there should be more historical thinking in the analyses of the post-communist transformation. The societal changes after 1989 can hardly be understood without the knowledge of the genesis and functioning of the ‘real-socialist’ system and of the social and economic development preceding the communist takeovers. THE ‘REALLY EXISTING SOCIALISM’ HAS TO BE VIEWED ASA FUNCTIONING SYSTEM WITHACERTAIN DEGREE OF SOCIAL LEGITIMACY When tracing the legacies of the ‘real-socialist’ societies, one would be ill-advised to paint them simplistically as the ‘empire of evil’ into which the societies of Eastern and Central Europe were dragged solely by external forces, entirely against their own will, and in which nearly everybody, with the exception of the nomenklatura, suffered. Such an over-politicized ideological approach tends to ignore the social roots of the socialist system and makes it impossible to understand its functioning as well as its legacies. The socialist option, although not a majority choice, was embraced in these countries during and after World War II by significant parts of their population (there were differences between the countries) also as a reaction to the economic and social deprivation accompanying the pre-war capitalism and, in particular, to the social stress of the economic crisis in the 1930s, the political disappointment resulting from the appeasement policies of the Great Powers towards Nazi Germany (this was a powerful factor in the Czech Lands) and the war experience which led to the determination to arrange things differently so as to prevent any such conflicts in the future. The ‘really existing’ socialist societies, although politically oppressive and, in the long-term perspective, economically untenable, functioned for several decades. This would not have been possible without some degree of social legitimacy. The legitimacy was attained by trading political democracy for an egalitarian social welfare system. Numerous social groups and strata profited from such conditions and were, for quite a long time, interested in maintaining them. Not surprisingly, some of them may still be regretting the loss of former privileges and advantages after 1989. In the Czech Republic this applies, for example, to the rural and semi-rural population with combined sources of income from agriculture and industry and which had profited from the highly subsidized, socialized form of agriculture as well as from the semi-formal supportive networks in rural communities. They enjoyed a sharp increase in their standard of living during the forty years of communist rule. Most advantages of this sort are now being lost, which creates disillusionment. A similar situation applies to the population in those regions that were most subsidized in the past and which lost their preferential status after 1989. Similarly, in Slovakia, legitimacy of the system was supported by the rapid modernization of Slovak society during the communist rule, bolstered by the assistance, financial and other, obtained from the Czech part of the former Czechoslovakia (cf. Musil 1993).

240

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

When analysing the present transformation, one should, therefore, be aware that the experience with ‘really existing socialism’ is not viewed as entirely negative by all groups within the populations of the Eastern and Central European countries. Moreover, the experience of that time established the high popular expectations towards the role which the state should play in providing and guaranteeing social welfare and social services. The society of ‘really existing socialism’ is further idealized as the passage of time contributes to a selective memory forgetful of its hardships, and as the social and economic costs of post-communist transformation become heavier. From among those who lost after 1989, either in the objective sense or in their own minds only, the discontented are recruited who may express their disappointment by the rejection of the reforms, by the pledge to choose the ‘third way’ or by leftist or rightist extremism. When compiling the balance sheet of the old system, it is not only its burdensome legacies which should be considered but also the assets it might have left that could be used as resources in the transformation. It is debatable what exactly such assets are, but universal literacy, general education and skilled labour force are certainly among them (cf. Sztompka 1992). LONG-TERM STRATEGIC FACTORS HAVE BECOME INCREASINGLY RELEVANT IN THE POST-COMMUNIST TRANSFORMATION At least three overlapping sets of factors can be distinguished which are relevant in determining the transformation. The first set has to do with the more immediate circumstances of the regime change in the individual countries, among them the social and political parameters of the change itself. These include the relative strength and composition of the institutional actors in the power struggle (for example, the consolidation of the anti-communist opposition, its experience and determination, the morale of the Communist Party), the character of the coalitions they formed, the programmes and strategies which they applied, the personalities of the political leaders, the immediate international situation, the mood of the masses, etc. In their majority, such factors were situational, short term and volatile, and frequently also decisional. They characterize the relatively narrow time-span surrounding the collapse of the communist regime, extending over several months, or perhaps a year or two. Some political scientists would attribute a decisive role in shaping the transition to just this kind of ‘exit causality’. While we agree that such circumstances were indeed highly relevant in shaping the political exit from communism when power was being transferred, we would hypothesize that their relevance has been decreasing during the later stages of transformation. The second set of factors are the structural and cultural legacies of the system of ‘really existing socialism’, i.e. the more recent ‘elements of continuity’ mentioned above. Their influence will also gradually weaken, but we believe that these factors will leave a permanent imprint on the shape of the post-communist societies. The third set of factors – one, the importance of which we wish to highlight here – are the long-term ‘strategic’ characteristics of the countries and societies involved which result from their history and are determined by their geopolitical position.

Second thoughts on Eastern and Central Europe 241 Although socially produced, their pace of change is only slow. Such characteristics define the relevant environment not only of the post-communist transformation: they also influenced the ways in which the communist regimes were assimilated in these countries. What we have in mind here are, for example, the following strategic characteristics: the geopolitical situation of the countries involved (their size, geographic location, strategic importance, proximity to the developed world, etc.); the economic resources of the countries (their natural resources, human resources, infrastructure, level and kind of industrialization, structure of the economy, etc.); the level and kind of modernization; their political and social history (previous experience with a democratic political system, with independence, with the role of being either subjugated or dominant countries, the history of their social structure, etc.); their cultural tradition (e.g. the technological, industrial, political cultures, the prevailing traditional value orientations as either individualistic or paternalistic, meritocratic or egalitarian, religious or secular, achievement-oriented or complacent, etc.). Such strategic characteristics do influence the ways in which the individual societies of Eastern and Central Europe manage the post-1989 transformation and how they cope with the social and political tensions and conflicts associated with it. They influence the behaviour of the elites, the level of social integration, the political culture, etc. Perhaps the term ‘historical causality’ can therefore be used in this context. Probably one of the most important strategic characteristics of the Eastern and Central European societies is the mutual timing of their modernization7 and of the beginning of the communist rule. On the one hand, there are countries which did not experience any major wave of modernization prior to the communist takeover or whose modernization was not finished until that time. Another group are countries which had already been modernized before the communists seized power. Modernization of the former was accomplished or completed by the communist regimes as a component part of ‘building socialism’. No matter how problematic, the ‘really existing socialism’ played a modernizing role in these countries and the benefits of modernity are associated here with the era of the communist rule, contributing to its legitimacy in the eyes of the population. In the latter group of countries, where the major part of modernization had occurred independently of the communist regime, the era of ‘really existing socialism’ can be considered as damaging the modernization already attained and interrupting its further progress.8 As a result, the exit from communism should be easier in these countries. It is certainly one thing to build democratic political institutions in a society which had already some experience with democracy before the communists seized power, and another one to do that in a country where the only pre-communist political experience was a semi-feudal system or an authoritarian regime. The market economy is easier to introduce in a society with a history of urban capitalism than in a former agricultural society urbanized and industrialized only during the years of the communist regime. The post-communist transformations can hardly be understood without considering these strategic factors. The recent developments must be analysed in a much broader time perspective than the post-1989 period alone or the four decades of the communist regime, and within a much wider sociocultural space than the individual societies. The proper time-scale is the whole modern history of Eastern and Central

242

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

Europe, within which the communist era was a relatively short, although highly relevant episode. The appropriate sociocultural scale is that of civilizational orbits determined by shared cultural and political experience (e.g. by common religion or by a long former appurtenance to supranational political units, as was the case for the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman or the Russian empires). The strategic factors of transformation, being socially produced, are, of course, subject to change such that the burdens of history and geography are not irreversible fatalities. Yet, they change sufficiently slowly to be considered the givens in the context of post-communist transformation. We propose the hypothesis that, with the passage of time since the breakdown of the communist regime, the relevance of the strategic factors (of the ‘historical causality’) in determining the societal development of the post-communist countries emerges more clearly, while that of the communist legacies and of the ‘situational’ factors (the ‘exit causality’) decreases. However, the influence of the legacies will probably fade away much more slowly than that of the ‘situational’ factors. In other words, it is less and less important how the revolutions were performed, and increasingly important what resources (economic, social and cultural) can the transforming societies mobilize. INDIVIDUALCOUNTRIESAND THEIR CLUSTERS, NOT EASTERN AND CENTRALEUROPEAS THE WHOLE, FORM THE PROPER FRAMEWORK OFANALYSIS AND PREDICTION Much of transitological research has generalized on the transformations in Eastern and Central Europe as one whole, including the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic states, the Balkan states and the countries of the Visegrad group. The generalizing approach has been based on the implicit assumptions that (1) there is a certain geopolitically determined historical and cultural commonality among these countries that makes them all ‘Eastern European’ or ‘Eastern and Central European’, (2) there are structural and cultural similarities among all these countries given by their common communist past (the ‘legacies’) which are very important in the analysis and prediction of their post-communist development, (3) that all the countries aim at the same target, i.e. political democracy and a market economy, (4) that on their way towards that target they will follow more or less the same path. Such assumptions are justified only to some degree – and so are the generalizations which are based on them. The generalizing approach may have been legitimate before 1989, when the otherwise widely different societies of Eastern and Central Europe were amalgamated by the external pressure of the Soviet dominance and forced into the procrustean bed of the uniform institutional structure (yet even then, there were many divergences), but has become less and less adequate since the Soviet grip was released in 1989. ‘Historical causality’ is reasserting itself in the post-communist development and, with it, all the differences among the Eastern and Central European countries and their clusters that were forcefully overshadowed by the uniform institutions of the communist system. The ‘historical episode’ during which societies with entirely different historical backgrounds and systems of social organization and belonging to different sociocultural orbits were assembled under one roof is over, and these societies are again embedded within their traditional contexts. Thus it is probably

Second thoughts on Eastern and Central Europe 243 legitimate to generalize on the transformations in clusters of kindred Eastern and Central European countries (the Visegrad four may be one of them), but less so on the post-communist Europe as a whole. In fact, the concepts ‘Eastern and Central Europe’ or the ‘post-communist countries’ are increasingly useless as tools of analysis and prediction. CONCLUSION The above propositions have not touched upon all the important characteristics of the post-communist transformation in Eastern and Central Europe – certainly many more could be mentioned (and, indeed, are mentioned in the literature). The propositions were meant to highlight some of those features of the transformation that, we believe, were not so clearly visible in the early phases of the process and have been emerging only in its later stages. Awareness of the complexity and social risks of the transformation, of the bonds linking it with the recent as well as the more distant history of the transforming countries (the logic of which cannot be easily escaped), awareness of the contradictory perceptions and evaluation of the communist experience by different social groups, of the open-endedness of transformation as well as of its uneven and unequal course in the different countries, of the importance of the strategic characteristics of the Eastern and Central European societies for the process of transformation, should all contribute to a more balanced and realistic analysis and evaluation of what is happening in Eastern and Central Europe. Of course, much of what we have proposed is tentative and must be further documented and verified. Moreover, we agree with Bauman (1994) that it is still too early to make any definitive conclusions as the societal changes induced by the fall of communism in Eastern and Central Europe are still going on and their destination and direction are uncertain. Anyhow, it can be expected that new phenomena will occur that will challenge the existing theories of transformation. NOTES 1. Among the surprises which call for explanation are the recent left turns in several countries of the region. A possible interpretation was proposed by Mateju (1995). 2. Those who claim that the countries of Eastern and Central Europe should nowadays be inspired by what they were before World War II or before the communist takeovers, would do well to remember that, with the exception of former Czechoslovakia, the countries in question had authoritarian or even semi-fascist regimes and retarded agrarian or semi-agrarian economies. Certainly nothing to be copied 60 years later. 3. Cf. the critical discussion on the modernization-based model of transformation in Srubar (1994). 4. In fact, the pre-communist legacies were not entirely ‘frozen’ during the communist era. They co-determined the particular shades which the regime adopted in the individual countries of Eastern and Central Europe as well as the ways it was digested by the respective societies. 5. In analysing the regional structure of the Czech parliamentary elections in 1990 and 1992 and comparing it with the pre-war and early post-war elections, Jehlicka, Kostelecky and associates found that there is a secular tendency in some regions to support the Communist Party (Jehlicka et al. 1993; Kostelecky 1994). Analogically, Surazska found that in Poland the territorial structure of political activism on the local level (measured by turnout in the

244

Transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe

parliamentary elections) followed to a certain degree the former partitions of the country among the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian and Russian empires (Surazska 1995). 6. In an entirely different setting (Italy), the transmission of political culture across large span of time was documented by Putnam (1993). According to this author, persistence of patterns of civic engagement was rooted in the history of various regions. 7. By modernization we understand here the complex process of societal change driven by industrialization, technological progress, urbanization, secularization, political participation and the massive increase of literacy. Cf. Bendix (1969) or Smelser (1966). 8. The difference in the mutual timing of modernization and the beginning of the communist rule was used to explain the post-1989 tensions between the Slovak and the Czech parts of Czechoslovakia that led eventually to the split of this country. Slovakia belonged to the group of countries where modernization and the rule of communism overlapped, while the Czech Republic was modernized already some 50 years earlier. In Slovakia, the communist era was associated with progress, whereas in the Czech Republic it meant stagnation. Cf. Musil (1993).

REFERENCES Ash, T. G. (1990) We the People. The Revolution of 1989, London: Granta/Penguin. Bauman, Z. (1994) ‘A Revolution in the Theory of Revolutions?’, International Social Science Review, 15 (1), 15–24. Bendix, R. (1969) Nation-building and Citizenship, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books. Dahrendorf, R. (1990) Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, London: Chatto & Windus. Gorzelak, G., Jalowiecki, B., Kuklinski, A. and Zienkowski, L. (eds) (1994) Eastern and Central Europe 2000. Final Report, Brussels: The European Commission. Habermas, J. (1990) Die nachholende Revolution, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Illner, M. (1992) ‘Continuity and Discontinuity. Political Change in the Czech Village after 1989’, Czechoslovak Sociological Review, Special issue, August, 79–91. —— (ed.) (1993) Czech Republic – Transformations After 1989 and Beyond. Scenario of Change Until the Year 2005. National Report, Prague: The Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Jehlicka, J., Kostelecky, T. and Sykora, L. (1993) ‘Czechoslovak Parliamentary Elections in 1990: Old Patterns, New Trends and Lots of Surprises’, in J. O’Loughlin and H. van der Wusten (eds), The New Political Geography of Eastern Europe, London: Belhaven Press, 235–54. Kostelecky, T. (1994) ‘Economic, Social and Historical Determinants of Voting Patterns’, Czech Sociological Review, 2 (2), 209–28. Machonin, P. (1994) ‘Social and Political Transformation in the Czech Republic’, Czech Sociological Review, 2 (2), 71–87. Mateju, P. (1995) In Search of Explanations for Recent Left-Turns in Post-Communist Countries, Working Paper WP 95/1, Praha: Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Musil, J. (1992) ‘The Exit from Communism’, Daedalus, 121 (2), 175–95. —— (1993) ‘Ceska a slovenska spolecnost. Skica srovnavaci studie’ (The Czech and Slovak Societies. Attempt at a Comparative Study), Sociologicky casopis, 29 (1), 9–24. Offe, C. (1991) ‘Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in Eastern Central Europe’, Social Research, 58 (4), 866–92. Putnam, R. D. (1993) Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Smelser, N. (1966) ‘The Modernization of Social Relations’, in M. Weiner (ed.), Modernization, New York: Basic Books.

Second thoughts on Eastern and Central Europe 245 Srubar, I. (1994) ‘Variants of the Transformation Process in Central Europe. A Comparative Assessment’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 23 (3), 198–221. Staniszkis, J. ( 1991) The Dynamics of Breakthrough in Eastern Europe – the Polish Experience, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Stark, D. (1992) ‘Path Dependency and Privatization Strategies in Eastern-Central Europe’, Eastern European Politics and Societies, 6 (1). Surazska, W. (1995) ‘Theoretical Perspectives on Central Europe’, Czech Sociological Review, 2 (2). Sztompka, P. (1992) ‘Dilemmas of the Great Transition’, Sisyphus, VIII (2), 10–27. —— (1993) ‘Civilizational Incompetence: The Trap of Post-Communist Societies’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie 22 (2), 85–95. van Zon, H. (1994) Problems of Transitology – Towards a New Research Agenda and New Research Practice, Report written for the project Eastern-Central Europe 2000, Mimeo. Zapf, W. (1991) ‘Der Untergang der DDR und die soziologische Theorie der Modernisierung’, in B. Giesen and C. Leggewie (eds), Experiment Vereinigung, Berlin: Rotbuch Taschenbuch. —— (1994) Modernisierung, Wohlfahrtentwicklung und Transformation: Soziologische Aufsatze 1987 bis 1994, Berlin: Sigma.

Part V

Conclusion

16 European sociologists between economic globalization and cultural fragmentation Alain Touraine THEABSENCE OFAEUROPEAN CULTURALUNITY It is extremely debatable to conclude from the existence of common cultural or scientific traditions that Europe is a cultural unit, that we can speak of a European culture. Even from a historical point of view, the frontier between Rome and Byzantium or the opposition between Reformation and Counter-Reformation countries are as important or even more important in European cultural history than the influence of Christianity, or of modern rationalism, or of revolutionary social and political movements in all European countries. The myth of a culturally unified Europe refers to a period prior to the Industrial Revolution and the development of national states. I am not implying by these elementary remarks that Europe is not a meaningful cultural, social or political ensemble, but that it is necessary not to take it for granted and to analyse seriously the definition of ourselves as Europeans and, more concretely, as European sociologists, and to compare it with more usual definitions of ourselves as members of the international sociological community – that is, members of a profession; members of national academic, scientific or professional organizations; and, finally, as members of a school or intellectual tradition. The cultural, social and political diversity of Europe is deeply rooted in its history. Differences between old national states like Britain, France, Sweden (and, in a different way, Hungary or Poland) and new national states like Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia, which have had extremely different national histories, or city-centred states like the Netherlands (and to a certain extent Italy), make it difficult to accept the existence of a European political model. It is even more difficult to speak of a European pattern of development, as some European countries have been modernized by their bourgeoisie and others by the state. Britain, for example, has been dominated by the alliance of the aristocracy and the people against the king; France by the alliance of the king and the people against the aristocracy. All these patterns of differentiation are important. Europe is so diverse that it is impossible to identify European sociologists with a specific type of society; a realistic definition of European sociology, therefore, must be abandoned. These remarks aren’t intended to negate the definition of ourselves as European sociologists – on the contrary, they lead to the hypothesis that Europe, which has no cultural, social or political unity, could very well have an intellectual one. This chapter, then, will be devoted to an analysis of the possibilities, conditions and difficulties of the invention of a European intellectual civilization.

250

Conclusion

THE WEAKENING OF NATIONAL SOCIETIES The situation that European sociologists face and try to analyse is not entirely specific, but it is necessary to identify some basic social trends in Europe before trying to understand the particular preoccupation of European sociologists. It is at the level of concrete social organization that we observe the decline of national societies. This fact is more important in Europe than in other parts of the world because the ideas of nation and nation-state have been created there. The citizens of most European countries have long since accepted the idea of a correspondence between economic organization, political institutions, cultural rules and even patterns of personality within each nation. Even if we accept easy-to-use general terms such as ‘capitalism’, ‘industrialization’, ‘Rechtsstraat’, and so on, national realities are of much greater importance: a comparison between British and German industrialization is much more illuminating than a general discussion of capitalism or modernization, for example. When sociologists referred to society, they were almost always referring to national societies. While economists tried to isolate formal relationship between variables, sociologists emphasized the interdependence of economic, political and cultural factors within a given country. That has been even truer during the twentieth century than during the nineteenth because of the growing importance of the social policies and of the welfare state on the one hand, and of the political control over economic activity in authoritarian and totalitarian countries on the other. On the contrary, what we call the construction of Europe can, to a large extent, be considered part of the denationalization of European economies and as the triumph of the global market – a market which is dominated partly by transnational companies and, during recent years, by financial flows which are largely independent from industrial or trade activities. The international circulation of goods and services represents only a tiny percentage of international flows of capital in OECD countries. Economy is more and more financial rather than industrial; this is true even of Japan, only Germany remaining primarily an industrial country. In a parallel way, mass culture is rapidly denationalized, but it is less internationalized than finance capitalism because it is mainly Americanized. Mass media products are the second, and could rapidly become the first, item in American exports. American movies and videocassettes, toys, clothes and food – especially for children and teenagers – are distributed all over the world and the imagination of the new generation is almost completely denationalized, except in some closed authoritarian countries. National consciousness itself is in crisis. For obvious reasons, in Germany and even more in Italy, it has been rejected by postwar generations, although German intellectuals or ecologists, in thinking it had definitely disappeared, made a serious mistake. In minor countries, the national language tends to be used only for private life, English being the major language for professional and intellectual life. In many countries, regional minorities have rejected more or less radically the nation-state. An indirect consequence of the partial disintegration of nation-states is the growing importance of communities and ethnic groups in countries like Britain or the Netherlands, and everywhere women’s groups, religious sects or churches, and gay and lesbian organizations are creating new transnational identities. Identity becomes more cultural than national; ascription, which had long been marginalized by

Economic globalization and cultural fragmentation 251 achievement, is becoming more important again. In Europe, as in many parts of the world, the reckoning of the nation-state results from a growing separation between a global economy and fragmented cultural communities. We live now in an objectified universe of material or cultural mass-produced goods and in an age of obsessive search for identity. This evolution has direct theoretical consequences. Classical sociology, including the liberal political philosophy which preceded it, from Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau down to de Tocqueville and Stuart Mill, had been based on the anti-religious idea that the definition of good and evil and of morality was based no longer on tradition or God’s will and the decision of its religious interpreters but on social utility and the functionality of personal and collective behaviour. The particularistic spirit of communitarian traditions had been replaced by the universalistic idea of a rational society and of irrational obstacles to a modernization which was identified with rationalization. Even today, in many handbooks, sociology is defined as the study of institutions and socialization, social control and deviance, functions and dysfunctions, institutionalization of demands or collective behaviour in a Smelserian sense. From Durkheim to Parsons, this classical sociology has studied national societies and its most central principle has been the correspondence between social organization and internalized motivations, between systems and actors. This classical sociology, if it is still widely taught, belongs to an already distant past. Contemporary sociology could be better defined as a series of post- or anticlassical analyse which corresponds largely to the study of disintegrated national societies. Among the main post-classical sociological schools, it is important to mention the structuralist school, which eliminates the subjective elements which remained present in the ideas of function and value and which studies systems without actors. The so-called interactionist school, on the other hand, considers actors without systems. Third, there are studies of conflicts or social movements, which substitute central conflicts for values and norms as the basic element of social systems; finally, there are community-oriented sociologies which identify themselves either with radical multiculturalism or with the defence of dominated and alienated identities. This decomposition of classical sociology corresponds directly to the process of decomposition of national societies and to the decline of the central role of rationalization in the process of modernization. Now, the hypothesis I want to submit to you is that today a type of society and its sociological self-image must be defined as answers to this waning of both the rationalist image of modernization that we called, first, Enlightenment and then the philosophy of Progress, and of the classical, that is functionalist or institutionalist sociology. It is out of question to consider here all aspects of these complex processes, but in order to be able to identify the specificity of European society’s self-image (that is, of European sociology) it is necessary to mention very briefly the main elements of a post-classical, post-rationalist and postnational society. Four of them are particularly important from the point of view of the present analysis. First, the state, which was conceived of as a principle of societal unity, as a central rational agent, creating and implementing impersonal and rational rules, is now, in present-day sociology, considered as a complex political system in which different interest groups and political parties compete to control resources and advantages. Second, the Weberian, inner-directed image of the entrepreneur has been replaced –

252

Conclusion

first by the image of a bureaucratic technostructure and more recently by the image of strategists who try to dominate a market, either through the control of technology or through the management of financial resources. Third, dependent or dominated groups, which were defined by ‘social relations of production’, to use a Marxist expression, are now defined as consumers more than as producers, by their identity and culture more than by their occupation and status of economic achievement. Finally, as I said at the beginning, a society is no longer a concrete, territorially defined social unit but a set of loosely connected processes of social change. Many sociologists go as far as saying that society, which was defined as a set of processes of order and integration, must now be conceived of as a process of change. AMERICANANDASIAN SOCIETIES Such a rapid description leads directly to the construction of two completely opposed ideal types of societies. Let’s call the first one the American type. It is defined as an extreme decomposition of the classical type, by an almost complete separation of the former components of a social system: the former ruling class is now a world-wide financial network which controls most mass culture material and symbolic products; the unity of the nation has been replaced by a fragmented plurality of cultures, and America is now the most multicultural country. On one side it is a loose and changing set of interest groups, lobbies and local constituencies, and, on the other, an hegemonic world power which imposes, in spite of the breakdown of its Soviet enemy, its leadership on Japan and Western European countries. Finally, America is much more than the United States; it is a world-wide network of economic and social agents, and nobody is surprised to see so many non-American children all over the world wearing tee-shirts with the American flag and so many youngsters considering Disneyworld as their capital city. Few elements of the old American society remain alive and they correspond more and more to the nostalgic and reactionary view of an integrated society. The idea of a moral majority, based on the defence of religious values, habits of the heart and legal processes, is nothing but a reactionary ideology. This type of society is not easily interpreted by an integrated sociological theory. It produces segmented self-images – first of all because of the extreme separation of a system which is reduced to a series of markets, and second because of actors who, on the contrary, define themselves by their own subjectivity, their traditions and their struggles for recognition and liberation. American sociology appears, to its own eyes, as equally liberal and repressive, as both local and cosmopolitan, as unified and pluralist. America is the main production centre of symbolic goods which are consumed everywhere, but at the same time is a country of local communities and ethnic or moral minorities. It it thus difficult for her to create a unified self-image. She is obviously not completely fragmented but she can no longer consider herself as a society which is shaped by her Constitution, the Supreme Court decisions and the Federal government. Finally, American society is very far from accepting the idea of a central, structuring social conflict. After World War II, during the long period of Pax Americana which ended with the Student Movement, the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam war, classical sociology, and especially Talcott Parsons’ thinking, acted as an almost official self-image of American sociology. This

Economic globalization and cultural fragmentation 253 time has gone and American sociology has created elaborate images of systems without actors and actors without systems. It is practically impossible for Americans to connect the universe of objectified power with the universe of fragmented cultural identities, to connect markets and sex, highways of consumption and communications and ghettos. The American type of society tends to marginalize or even to exclude the very notion of society conceived as a concrete national, territorially defined, society. Everywhere in the world, the American model or ideology corresponds to this extreme separation of interests and feelings, of economy and cultures, and is considered as a liberating force by people who live a tightly controlled and integrated national or local society. The societal type which is the most different from the American type is no longer the communist type which, for many years before it disappeared, had been an empty shell in which official rules and ideologies had entirely lost their capacity to be transformed into motivations. We can observe, in many parts of the world, the rapid development and the great strength of a different model of society, which is voluntaristic and nationalistic and which combines market economy, political authoritarianism and cultural nationalism. This type of society is even more different from the American one than Bismarckian Germany was from Victorian Britain, because it mobilizes more actively not only nationalist feelings but deeper cultural resources. What characterizes this type of society is the extreme integration of economic growth with cultural resources by a powerful and more or less authoritarian state. In various countries, where this pattern of development prevails, it is labelled as the Asian or Eastern model. This expression is largely inaccurate because it does not correspond to the present situation of the three major Asian countries. We can even see that some Asian countries, like South Korea and more recently Taiwan, not to mention Japan itself, have drifted away from this authoritarian cultural nationalism. Nevertheless from nationalist regimes like Indonesia, Malaysia or even Singapore, and from Egypt, Morocco or maybe Peru, to fundamentalist regimes like Saudi Arabia and to neocommunitarian dictatorial regimes which are very different from the fundamentalist ones of Iran or Sudan, we observe the growing importance of ideologically controlled and mobilized countries. While American social thought is characterized by an extreme dissociation of the universe of economic flows and universal values, cultures and discourses, countries which are influenced by this Asian model develop a voluntaristic nationalist view of social change. It could even be said that American multiculturalism is a form of social subjectivism which corresponds to that prevalent in dominant countries, while cultural nationalism is pursued by those countries which want to emancipate themselves from the Western hegemony and religious neo-communitarian movements which, I repeat, are different from fundamentalism and are the responses of political elites which try to control cultural resources to build their own authoritarian power. One of the most interesting debates in the field of applied sociology today deals with the future of Japan: on the one hand, it is more and more attracted by the American model, especially now that American industry, headed by Microsoft, has won an important battle against Japanese companies, avenging the defeat suffered 20 years ago by General Motors and the invasion of the American market by Toyota, Sony and all other Japanese companies; on the other hand, a new Japanese nationalism is visible, distinct from the old militarist Shinto ideology but based on a communitarian image of Japanese society defined by its cultural uniqueness even more than by its technical achievements. The future of this Asian model will be largely determined by the evolution of China. This

254

Conclusion

country may break down because of the rapidly growing inequalities between the coast and the interior, between the Beijing-governed country and the regions at present under the influence of Hong Kong; but it may keep or build a modernizing authoritarian regime to protect the unity of the country. It is, at least, likely that the American model of society will not spread all over Asia. Even more likely is that in the near future the former Soviet Union, especially Russia and Ukraine, will not be incorporated into one type or another of liberal and democratic societies. NEITHER FUKUYAMANOR HUNTINGTON This opposition of two types of economic and political development is so extreme that it allows us to eliminate two opposite but equally integrated views of the world evolution. The first one, which has been presented by Francis Fukuyama, is based on the neoHegelian idea of the end of history. It says that after the defeat of the communist model, the whole world accepts, at least in principle, market economy, representative democracy and cultural tolerance. But this hypothesis cannot be accepted. The globalization of markets and of mass culture does not mean that all countries are sharing more and more completely the same type of social organization and following the same process of change. The majority of the so-called Asian emergent countries are not becoming liberal democratic, and their economic elite is more directly linked with the state than the American one. However, the opposed Weltanschauung, which describes the present-day world as dominated by cultural or religious conflicts which are deeper and more radical than previous national conflicts, is equally false. Most of the international conflicts which are defined as religious or cultural must be analysed in a very different way. It is unacceptable to say that the former Yugoslavia has been destroyed by traditional cultural conflicts between Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosnians. The truth is that this dramatic conflict opposes an aggressor, the Milosevic regime, and aggressed Croatians and Bosnians, the central aim of Milosevic being to transform his communist dictatorship into a nationalist one. Cultural conflicts, including the growing influence of Muslim cultural nationalism in Bosnia and Croatian authoritarian nationalism, are a consequence, not a cause, of this conflict, and the conflict between Croatia and Serbia is a national not a cultural one. It seems equally far from reality to define Saddam Hussein’s policy as religiously oriented, while the Ba’ath tradition, both in Iraq and Syria, has never been religious; Saddam Hussein’s policy was aiming at controlling oil resources and at directly threatening Israel more than at defending Sunnite Islam. In the same way, in Algeria, religion is not the driving force of a popular fundamentalist movement. In this country, both the military dictatorial elite and the FIS use religion as well as frustrated expectations as instruments of their own power. Fukuyama’s theory is one-sided because it perceives only factors of international integration. The second theory, expressed especially by Samuel Huntington, is equally one-sided because it perceives only cultural fragmentation. I propose a different view: the main feature of present-day world evolution is the growing separation and even dissociation between the world market and fragmented

Economic globalization and cultural fragmentation 255 cultural identities. This process can be observed in different forms in rich and poor countries. In dominant or central countries, which control the world markets, we observe an internal cultural fragmentation which is best represented by American multiculturalism, while peripheral or dependent countries mobilize cultural resources in the hands of authoritarian regimes to achieve a voluntaristic, neo-Bismarckian type of industrialization. Nowhere does economy, culture or religion rule the entire society. Everywhere the central element of social organization is the political system, which is extremely ‘loose’ in the American case and extremely ‘tight’ in the Asian case. It would be as superficial to analyse the Spanish Golden Century as Catholic or Bismarckian Germany as Protestant. No national or regional society today is integrated by a central driving force – economic, political or cultural. All nations represent efforts, partly successful, partly failed, to combine opposite and even contradictory trends, the objectivation of a ‘world of merchandise’, as Marx used to say, and a ‘subjectivization’ of cultures which are more and more separated from social organization which is itself transformed by the influence of world markets. This view is the only one which takes seriously the idea of globalization. This idea does not mean the homogenization of the world and does not entail the growing integration of national societies. On the contrary, it creates wider and wider social inequality and exclusion within each country and a wider and wider distance between the ‘open’ and hegemonic societies which control the world market on the one hand, and ‘closed’ dependent societies whose authoritarian leaders mobilize cultural resources to resist ‘Western’ hegemony and ideology on the other. EUROPEAS THE POLITICALCONTINENT This critique of the two opposite theories of the world situation is indispensable to an analysis of European society, which must be understood as a different combination between the internationalization of markets and the fragmentation of cultural identities. But the difficulty here is that Europe cannot be directly compared to the United States or Japan, even if the European Union tends to be one of the economic poles of a tripolarized world, because there is no unified European State – that is, the social, linguistic and cultural differences evident in Europe are very far from being on the wane. We must therefore answer a double question: is there a general European type of social organization and of social change?; and second, is it possible to define in a coherent way intra-European differences or variations within this general type of society? The answer to the first question is relatively simple: what characterizes Europe is the predominant role of the political system as an instrument of integration between economy and culture. While, in the United States, cultural communities can be defined independently from their role in internationally oriented economic activities, and while in the Asian type of development economic policies are tightly linked with the assessment and defence of a cultural identity, in Europe political categories are more centrally important than in the USA and in Japan. Europe is the part of the world where the problem of the social distribution of costs and advantages among social categories which are defined in hierarchical terms plays a central role and acts as a link between

256

Conclusion

mass consumption and cultural identities which, on the contrary, are separated in the USA or merged in Japan. Europe is the political continent; it is defined by the central role of social political processes, and in particular by the direct link between interest groups and political parties. This definition reveals, at the same time, the present-day weakening of the European model, because, in most European countries, this correspondence between social categories and politics is declining and blurred. Nevertheless, Europe remains dominated by the welfare state, by the central importance given to social integration more than to cultural identity or to an internationalized mass culture. That is not only true of Western Europe. Post-communist societies, after a more or less limited economic shock (the most brutal in Poland from 1 January 1990 on), have rapidly reconstructed their political system which maintained social, national or cultural interest groups within certain limits. Hungary is the most interesting case. Because of the large proportion of the Magyar population which lives outside the Hungarian frontiers, it would have been possible for nationalist or irredentist movements to transform Hungary into another Serbia, struggling to create a Great Hungary against Romania, Slovakia or even Serbia. In fact, nationalist campaigns and movements appeared but they were stopped rather easily by the political system and limited to a marginal role. Active social movements were even able to fight discriminating attitudes against gipsies. Different parties and coalitions have governed Hungary but, in spite of dangerous tensions and growing social inequalities, its political process never collapsed. The same can be said of Poland which, after the decline of the Solidarnosc government which had launched the liberal economic policy, was ruled by a conservative Catholic government and then by neo-communists without political ruptures and without a complete dissociation between the process of liberalization of the economy and cultural movements oriented towards the defence of traditional Polish values. The four Visegrad countries, to which Bulgaria must be added, have been successful in rebuilding their political systems and maintaining social policies which combine a rapid incorporation into the world economy with the defence of a national identity which has never been reduced to a cultural communitarian identity. In Western Europe, in a parallel way, we do not observe an American-like dissociation between an internationalized economy and fragmented communities. Even if Britain or the Netherlands recognize or encourage the communitarian organization of immigrants, the distance between these countries and France, for example, is much more limited than their differences with the United States, because in all European countries the idea of national integration remains predominant. A recent comparative study on Britain and France has clearly demonstrated that the common features, comparable successes and failures of apparently different policies are much more important than their contradictory ideological references. It is true that until now Germany has maintained a very different concept of nationality which makes the national integration of immigrants impossible in principle, but in this case, too, practices are becoming more similar to those of other countries in spite of different legal principles. On the whole, poverty remains a more central problem in Europe than segregation, especially where unemployment is the lot of a high proportion of the labour force. Even in Britain it is appropriate to speak of an underclass defined in socio-economic terms rather than of ethnic minorities. In France, for example, the attention has been focused on underprivileged urban districts, but in these districts whites, blacks and beurs (that is, people of Algerian origin) live together without major clashes.

Economic globalization and cultural fragmentation 257 Let us conclude that Europe remains a political region and that, in spite of its great variety of governments and regimes, it is still identified with a welfare state and a nationally integrated political system. This central idea helps us to understand differences among European countries, because these differences can be expressed in terms of strong or weak institutional processes of integration between two apparently opposite processes: on the one hand, the internationalization and liberalization of economic activities and, on the other, the spreading of autonomous and self-centred communities. It would be an oversimplification to classify countries along a general scale, because they can be compared with each other in many different ways. Nevertheless, it is necessary to emphasize the positive aspects of German society from the general point of view we are considering here; instead of underlining the strength of German industry and of its export capacity, or even the high real wages of its industrial workers, I want to emphasize the high degree of institutional treatment of social problems in Germany. This has two main bases: the participation of the two major political parties in the formation of the social policies thanks to the federal system which allows the SPD, a minority party at the national level, to be in charge of important social policies in several Länder, and, second, the excellent results of a nationwide system of collective bargaining which extends beyond industrial activities as has recently been demonstrated by the successful negotiation about controlling the growth of health expenses. At an even more global level, the capacity of Germany to spend huge sums of money to integrate the former DDR into the Bundesrepublik has permitted the negative reactions of the population of these Länder, and especially of professional elites which have been deprived of any influence on the transformation of their lives, to be limited to a very tolerable level. Although I must mention again the existence in Germany of a very negative concept of nationality which maintains a Völkisch and non-democratic image of the nation, on the whole the German political process is able to control and limit the dissociation of economy and culture. This control is obviously not complete, and observers are preoccupied with the predominance in Germany of an instrumentally oriented culture and the existence, especially in Berlin, of an alternative counterculture which has been linked in the past with political violence and is now more marginal than radical. But Germany, on the whole, has a more active political system than most European countries. This picture shows the extreme opposition between German and British society. The latter has traditionally been the most class-divided and class-conscious of European societies, and is deeply dualized, especially as a result of the economic policy of the last 15 years: part-time and temporary jobs, low wages creating a vast underclass and, especially at the beginning of the 1980s, open conflicts among immigrant groups. It is difficult for Britain to integrate into a political process one of the most powerful financial centres of the world with marginalized or excluded groups. And the British population seems to be very eager now to get out of this brutal process of structural adjustment and to reconstruct a political control of the processes of social change. The French situation is equally different from the German and the British ones. The French reaction to the weakening of the nation-state, to a serious political crisis and to mistaken economic policies between 1974 and 1984 has been a defensive general orientation. Its most important aspect is not the exceptional importance, in France, of an extreme right-wing and racist party because the wide influence of this party has as

258

Conclusion

its counterpart a surprisingly low level of racist incidents; it is the fact that the main political forces have identified themselves more and more consciously with a ‘republican’ ideology which is used as an ideological defence of middle-class vested interests, either in the private or in the public sector. This ideology can very well appear as a positive emphasis put on political integration, but in fact it is more and more right-wing and conservatively oriented. Universalistic principles are used to reject minority groups and cultural differences; centralized and bureaucratic institutions have permanently favoured the interests of the most influential groups. France, more than any European country, exaggerates the role of institutional processes and creates an unfavourable situation both for a national mobilization of cultural resources of the Asian type and for a flexible culturalism similar to the American one. The same conclusion can be applied to a fourth major Western European country, Italy, with the difference that the role of the political system, which is overestimated in France, is underestimated and becomes isolated in Italy – a country whose political system, the consociativismo, has broken down and where a government of technicians acts quite efficiently, but where social and economic processes are not politically controlled and leave the road open to corruption, to a delinquent economy and to risks of a rupture of national unity. Italy and France, in opposite ways, are examples of the overpoliticization of European societies, while Germany represents a higher level of integration of political institutions with social processes and Britain a more dangerous form of disintegration in spite of a strong national consciousness which is, in many ways, similar to the French ‘republican’ spirit and exceptionally solid political institutions. There would be no difficulty in studying with the same instruments of analysis countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark or new members of the European Union. It would probably be more difficult to apply the same categories to Southern European countries or to Ireland which have deep economic differences with the bulk of Western European countries, or even to Spain which has rapidly been incorporated into the European pattern of society but is still half way between its own tradition and this European pattern. THE EUROPEAN SOCIOLOGY These rapid and necessarily superficial observations are introduced here only to give a concrete image of the heterogeneity of Europe and, by way of consequence, to explain the absence of a unified European theory of social organization and social change. I am not referring here to national intellectual traditions – to the strong link between sociology and philosophy in Germany, or between sociology and anthropology or economics in Britain, or between sociology and political philosophy in Italy – but to the existence of a plurality of European schools of thought, which are transnational more than national but whose co-existence represents the complexity of a societal pattern which is less coherent than the American or the Asian models. I see three main components of the European intellectual universe. The first one is the effort to transform what appears as mass society in America into a system of power and domination. While American sociology has studied in depth the social, cultural

Economic globalization and cultural fragmentation 259 and psychological implications of mass consumption and mass communication, the Europeans, since Adorno, have criticized the cultural industries in a post-Marxist way. It seems to me that the more empirical American approach has been more fruitful than a social criticism which falls easily into nostalgic elitism and does not define clearly the relationship between class and mass. And we can observe that Michel Foucault’s influence has been deeper and more rapid in the United States than in Europe, partly because Europe has tried hard to maintain a Marxist approach, especially in Germany and in Britain. In France and Italy, on the other hand, where the influence of Marxist thought had been much more extended and had been strengthened by powerful communist parties, it has almost disappeared; in France, for example, very rapidly after 1974–5, in the wake of the Portuguese revolution and the publication of the first part of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Industrial sociology, which had played a central role in the rebirth of sociology after World War II in many European countries, from Britain to Italy, from Germany to Belgium and particularly France, and which had always been dominated by a conflict-oriented view of society, declined from the 1970s on. It has been partially replaced by studies of industrial relations which have been equally active in the United States and Europe, especially in Britain and in Belgium. European sociology – and Latin-American sociology even more so – has been so deeply influenced by nineteenth-century evolutionist thought, either in its optimistic or in its pessimistic version, that it frees itself only with great difficulty from the identification of some social actors with Progress or Rationality and of others with the defence of irrational traditions, customs or privileges. European thought has been predominantly materialistic, at least since the British and French dominance in the eighteenth century, and this tradition, together with the ideas of modernization, imperialism and dependence, is a serious obstacle to the definition of sociology as the study of the personal and collective control and interpretation of social change. The same conclusion is valid for the second basic element of European sociology. While American sociology has extensively studied not only the political system but has given central importance to the conflict between liberals and communitarians, Europeans, when they did not follow the American example, maintain a central interest in the theory of the state and in political philosophy, especially in Great Britain and in Italy. In France, where political studies were generally very limited in scope and depth, the main recent development in the field of social sciences is the revival of political philosophy and political history. It is possible that the construction of a European federal or confederal power acts as an incentive to develop political studies. Nevertheless, and in spite of the prominent role of highly creative personalities, I cannot conclude that political studies are especially innovative in Europe. On the contrary, I would say that the growing autonomy of communities and the importance of multiculturalism in the United States have brought about more creative ideas. These two relatively negative conclusions are complementary. European social thought has great difficulty getting away from the nineteenth-century model of a national society in which the state is the real sovereign, imposing or maintaining a high degree of social integration, in spite of deep or even radical social conflicts. American thought is more sensitive to social realities which result from the decomposition of this classical model.

260

Conclusion

But European social thought is as conscious as the American in that institutional processes of integration are less and less able to combine an open economy with a plurality of different communities and identities. Sociology is faced everywhere with the fact that contemporary societies are less and less regulated by norms and rules, that they are what some people call tolerant and others disoriented and confused. In front of this reality which makes obsolete the classical definition of society as a system of values, norms, forms of authorities, statuses and roles, it seems to me that American sociology, because it is more sensitive to the growing separation between economy and cultures, between the universe of objectivation and the universe of subjectivities, offers no answer to the problem of their integration or combination. On the contrary, it seems to me that the central effort of European sociology is devoted to the discovery of such a central principle. However, the problem is entirely different from what it was during the long period of sociologism. It is no longer the aim to integrate individuals and groups into a unified social system, into a modern society which could be conceived of as ruled by instrumental reason and universalistic values; it is, on the contrary, to combine cultural diversity with the unifying effects of instrumental rationality. In simple words, the problem concerns how we can live together with our differences. This question has been clearly put forward by the May 1968 movement, and even more conspicuously in France at the beginning of the 1980s by the march for equality which was organized by young people of Algerian origin whose motto was: ‘Let’s live together with our differences’. The core of European sociology is a debate around this question; all its major contributors reject the call for institutional devices of integration because they destroy diversity and they are not satisfied with the system of regulation by markets and legal rules which satisfy most American sociologists. European thinkers emphasize the necessarily central role, not of institutions but of actors, of the will and efforts of individuals or groups to be actors – that is, to combine in their own lives strategic action with their Lebenswelt (to take Habermas’ formulation), to integrate structure and agency (as Giddens says), to combine instrumentality and identity (to use my own words). All these formulations combine two complementary elements: on the one hand, the reference to a self-created subject which cannot be reduced to the role of a social actor; on the other, the recognition of the other as actor. On both sides, there are meaningful differences among sociologists. While Charles Taylor insists on the recognition of the other, Jürgen Habermas concentrates on intersubjectivity, the role of language and communication and procedural rules, in a more liberal way. Among people who put a more central emphasis on the construction of the subject, Giddens insists more on the positive and rational action of a subject which frees itself from an instrumentalized and violent world, while I put more emphasis on both the social conflicts and the cultural orientations which direct its action. This is the reason why the debates around the concept of social movement are so important today. This concept has been often used in contexts which are distant from the approach I have just referred to. For philosophies of history, a social movement was a subjective expression of an objective transformation of history – a strange idea which relied on organized action to suppress actors and let reason or polymorphic libido create a world of liberty. For the now declining classical sociology, a social movement was the result of the insufficient capacity of a political institution to deal with the social demands on it, demands which often seem wild, a conception which marginalizes social movements and defines them as deviant. Finally, a pure

Economic globalization and cultural fragmentation 261 individualistic theory of rational choice defined a social movement as a collective pursuit of rational personal interest; but this conception is self-destructive as Olson’s idea of the free rider has demonstrated. Very far from these three traditional approaches, the concept of social movement is now identified more and more directly with the active construction and defence of individual and collective subjects as forces which limit both the influence of the market and the power of the main decision-making centres, especially the state. These remarks show that sociology is everywhere more and more tightly connected with moral philosophy; but while American sociology is more sensitive to the destruction of the traditional Eurocentric view of action which gave complete privilege to the educated male adult and rational individual and has accepted an almost limitless multiculturalism, making it difficult to understand the communication among actors or to accept the market as the only instrument of regulation of social exchanges, European sociology is constantly preoccupied with integrating universalism with particularism. It recognizes the other as different from ego, but, at the same time, it refers to universalistic orientations which can be described either in Enlightenment terms or as constructions of a free subject, a subject which creates and defends its own individuality against mass society and financial, military or political power in its capacity to organize its own life history. If we follow this line of analysis we can conclude that European sociology is fundamentally unified, not because its main contributors all accept the same ideas but because their writings can be considered as elements of a European dialogue, of a Streit, in the German tradition, even if this has never been formally organized. CONCLUSION My conclusion can now be presented succinctly. Europe, which has no political, social or cultural unity, which is a continent of internal diversity and oppositions, will exist, not as an heritage but as a project, to use the traditional opposition between the conflicting definitions of a nation given by Mommsen and Renan – not only if it is able to create a common currency or to acquire a political decision-making capacity but inasmuch as it favours a dialogue between intellectuals who contribute in different ways to define the central debates of our time: how can we combine unity and diversity, an open market regulated economy with the search for individual and collective identity? Europe, because it is not and will not become a nation-state, needs a high degree of reflexivity to be able to create an original coordination of unity and diversity. If its political institutions, its media and its social scientists themselves are not able to recognize the necessity to create a new civilization, Europe will be rapidly reduced to a set of economic and institutional devices which favour free flows of capital in world markets more than a European society. If Europe is satisfied with such a low profile image of itself, part of it, probably the most active and liberal one, will be incorporated into the American system of scientific and cultural production; the weaker parts will then look backward to forlorn ideas, and will become nationalists or involve themselves in a purely literary discourse, abandoning the field of social sciences to countries who want to create links between theory and practices. The construction of Europe as a political society or as a civilization depends on us to a large extent.

262

Conclusion

It is difficult for us, as for all sociologists, to get rid of a society-centred sociology and to build an actor-centred sociology, to pass from the study of social determinants to the understanding of the conditions of individual and collective freedom, from the correspondence between actor and system to the idea that the actor builds her/himself through a double struggle: against the world of markets and technology on the one hand, and against obsessive and authoritarian communities on the other. European sociologists are not better prepared than others to contribute in a creative way to the construction of the new human sciences, but the situation of Europe – half-way between a multiculturalist America and a culturally nationalist Asia – makes it more essential for us European sociologists to devote our main efforts to the rearticulation of a globalized economy with fragmented identities.

Index

abortion law 129 acculturation 153, 161 Acton, Sir John 188 Algeria 254 Algerian immigrants in France 155, 172, 256, 260 Allen, Sheila ix, 14–15; author of Chapter 11 Alund, A. see Schierup, C.-U. America 252; see also United States ‘American’ model of society 193, 252–4 Amsterdam air crash (1992) 84 Anderson, B. 179 anomie 153 Anthias, F. 186 Arato, Andrew see Cohen, Jean Arber, Sara ix, 10–11; author of Chapter 4 Arendt, Hannah 196, 198 ascription 250 Ash, T.G. 236 ‘Asian’ model of society 7–8, 193, 252–5 assimilation 14, 151–4, 161, 171–2 asylum seekers 86, 165–9, 174 Australia 15 autonomy, personal and collective 184 Ba’ath tradition 254 Bach, Maurizio 56 balkanization 194, 200 Barker, R. 181 Basque separatism 188 Bastenier, Albert 151 Bauman, Zygmunt 15, 18, 196–8, 200–1, 243 Beck, U. 134; and Beck-Gernsheim, E. 141 Belgium 151, 169 Beretta report 42 Berlin 21, 257 Bertilsson, Margareta 15, 18; author of Chapter 12 Bian, Yanjie 216 Bijlmermeer disaster 84 black nationalism 179

bloc culture 208–12 Boje, Thomas P. viii; co-editor border controls 2, 167, 169, 174; see also Schengen Convention Bornschier, Volker ix, 7, 9–10; co-author of Chapter 2 Bosnia 193–4, 254 Bourdieu, Pierre 96, 222–3, 225, 227 bourgeois society 109–12 bourgeoisie, the 219–20, 225, 228, 230 Braun, Lily 108 Britain see United Kingdom Brubaker, R. 170 Bruges speech (1988) 44 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 206 Buchmann, Marlis ix, 10, 143; author of Chapter 3 Bulgaria 256 Burawoy, Michael 218 ‘burden of liabilities’ of transforming societies 238 bureaucracy, collapse of 196–9 Cacciari, Massimo 25 Canada 15 capitalism, spirit of 21–3, 207–8 Care in the Community 186 caring responsibilities and resources 4, 11, 76–9, 126, 140–2, 186 Carr, E.H. 182, 184, 187–8 Castles, S.: and Kosack, G. 150; and Miller, M.J. 97 Chandernagor, A. 39 Charles, N. and Kerr, M. 70 child care facilities 122–4 China 223, 231, 254 Christianity 249 citizenship: ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ models of 170–5; modernist conceptions of 180; national or European 15, 173–4; ‘second class’ 180–1; see also dual citizenship; social citizenship

264

Index

citizenship rights 6–7, 62, 79–80, 108, 111, 139, 172, 175, 201; of immigrants 152; tied to employment 140; of women 12–13, 105, 108–9, 139, 180 civil rights movements 112–13 civil society 17, 22, 105–7, 110–15, 185, 206; see also public and private spheres civilization, meaning of 206 civilizational competence 207, 211, 235, 238 class conflict 138 class divisions 1, 16, 222–5, 257 Cloward, R.A. and Ohlin, L.A. 94 Cockfield, Lord 42 Cohen, Jean and Arato, Andrew 106, 112–14 Collinson, S. 165 command economy 208 Commission for Racial Equality 157 communist rule 119–20, 208, 241–3 community: meaning of 186–7; sense of see identity community-oriented schools of sociology 251 community policing 158 consumer society 210 convergence theory 208 corruption 227, 258 Council of Europe 174 Council of Ministers, European 56–7, 59 crime 93–5, 158 Croatia 254 Crompton, Rosemary ix, 11–12; author of Chapter 8 cultural capital 17, 215, 221–5 cultural diversity and pluralism 115, 149–50, 153, 171–2, 187, 208 cultural identity 165 cultural nationalism 253, 262 culture: adequacy of 207; ‘European’ 249 culture-building 206–9 Czech Republic 22, 219, 228, 239 Czechoslovakia 17, 237 Dahrendorf, Ralf 16, 210–11, 235, 237–8 Däubler, W. 48 Davignon, Etienne 33, 35 Dayton agreement 193, 201 Dekker, Wisse 33 ‘delayering’ of organizations 132 ‘Delorist project’ 46–8 Delors, Jacques 10, 37–48 ‘Delors package’ (1988) 43, 45 democratic deficit 10, 55, 58, 62 democratic institutions and processes 17, 62–4, 213, 237; shortcomings of 49

‘denizen’ status 174 Denmark 53, 57, 67, 76–7, 141 deregulation 4, 6, 9, 12, 42, 44, 48, 138; in the labour market 69, 136 differentiation, societal processes of 1; see also fission in society direct democracy 62–4 disablement 78–80 disadvantaged groups 133–4 discrimination, legislation against 9, 171 distribution of income (for elderly men and women) 74–7 distribution of wealth 231 domestic chores see housework Domhoff, William 231 Dooge Committee 38 double transitions 205 drug trade 93–5 dual citizenship 156–7, 173–4 Durkheim, Emile 19, 22, 55, 138, 153, 183–4, 187, 205, 207, 251 early retirement 122, 126 earnings differentials according to gender 67–8, 69–71 East-Central Europe 2000 project 234 Ebbinghaus, B. and Visser, J. 48 Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), European 137 Economic and Social Committee of the EU 42, 44 economic culture 23 ‘economic fallacy’ 236 economic rights 54 education systems 16, 159–60 Egypt 253 Einhorn, Barbara 18, 115, 118 Elias, Norbert 206 élite-reproduction theory 216 ‘end of history’ 213, 254 Engbersen, Godfried x, 10; author of Chapter 5 Enlightenment, the 182, 184, 251, 261 environmental issues 14, 54 equal opportunities 4, 47, 149–50, 154 equality: ‘basic human equalities’ 134; index of inequality 136–7; social inequality 2–3, 5, 8 ESPRIT programme 35 ethnic communities, defection from 154–6 ethnic conflicts 5, 14–15, 18, 196, 199 ethnic identity and homogeneity 185–6, 189 ethnic minorities 149–51, 180–1, 256 ethnic mobilization 14, 150, 153–6; host country responses to 156–60 ethnic organizations 158

Index ethnicity: awkwardness of 196–7, 201; resurgence of 195, 201 ethnie 179, 182 ethnos 186 ‘Europe’, definition of 7 European Centre of Public Enterprises 37 European Commission 5–6, 10, 35–6, 41–2, 45, 47, 168; functions of 56, 59 European Community, relaunch of 34–5 European Council 33–4 European Court of Justice 4, 42, 47, 141 European identity 8, 23–5, 53–61 passim, 64 European Parliament 42, 174 European Regional Development Fund 137 European Round Table of Industrialists 33, 35 European Social Fund 137 European social policy 9–10, 24, 35–47, 137 European Sociological Association 1–2 European state 49, 255 European Trade Union Confederation 37–8, 43–4 ‘European’ type of society 193 European Union 2–4, 23–4, 165, 184–5, 255 European values 8 ‘Europeanization’ of policy 42 evolutionist thought 259 extended families 154 Fagan, C. see Rubery, J. family life 5, 69, 106, 109–10, 113–14, 154; and family-based economy (in Hungary) 118–27 family life cycle 141 family wage 111, 134–5 Farkasová, Etela see Kiczková, Zuzana feminism 18, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 118–19, 127, 135, 139–40, 179–80 ‘feudal’ pattern of gender relations 134, 141 financial managers and experts 221–2 Finland 66 fission in society 1, 5, 15, 115, 180 flexible labour markets 69, 132–40, 143 food consumption, inequalities in 70 Fordism and post-Fordism 132–3 ‘Fortress Europe’ 2, 167–8 Foucault, Michel 198, 259 foundations 227–8 fragmentation, cultural and societal 8–9, 14, 254–5 France 15, 53, 57, 87, 152, 155, 159,

265

165–73 passim, 222–3, 249, 256–9; ‘republican’ ideology 258; Socialist Party 39–41, 47 Frankfurt 151 free movement of goods, persons, services and capital 54 French Revolution 108, 193, 201 Fukuyama, Francis 254 fusion in society 1–2, 115, 180 GDP, changes in 26 gender inequalities: in the labour market 67–9; in marriage 69–71; amongst older people 72–81; in relation to nationalism 178–80; see also ‘male breadwinner’ model; women: equal pay General Household Survey 70, 75 generational effects 211 genocide 14 Genovese, E.D. 179 George, Stephen 44 Geremek, Bronislaw 213 Gerhard, Ute x, 12–13; author of Chapter 6 Gerhards, Jürgen 58, 60 Germany 15, 87, 108, 114, 152, 155–8, 162, 166–73 passim, 185, 219, 250, 256, 258–9; treatment of social problems in 257 ghettoization 152 gipsies 256 globalization 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 14–15, 49, 142, 163–4, 167, 184, 254–5, 262 globalization theory 209 de Gouges, Olympe 108 Gouldner, A. 228 Greece 135 Greek immigrants in Britain 186 guest workers 156, 170 van Gunsteren, H. 84 Gyllenhammer, Pehr 35 Habermas, Jürgen 16, 25, 53, 107, 197–8, 200–1, 212, 237, 260 ‘habits of the heart’ 210–11 Haiti 23 Hankiss, Elemér 216 Hanley, Eric 228 Hansenne, Alan 43 Hartmann, H. 135 Havel, Vaclav 236–7 Havelková, Hanna 114 health and safety, occupational 39, 47 health standards 78 hegemony 34–5, 47, 49 Hesli, V.L. see Reisinger, W.M. high technology 35

266

Index

‘historical causality’ 241–2 Holocaust, the 196–7 Hong Kong 254 housework 69–70, 110, 113 human rights 7, 14, 24–5, 108, 180 Hungary 13, 17–19, 114, 219, 223, 227–9, 237, 256; 1956 revolution and its aftermath 120 Huntington, Samuel 254 Husbands, C. 164–5 Hussein, Saddam 254 identity see cultural identity; ethnic identity; European identity; national identity; transnational identities identity politics 115, 171 ideologically controlled countries 253 illegal immigrants 84–97, 166, 168, 170, 174; numbers of 85 Illner, Michal 16; author of Chapter 15 immigration: attitudes to 27; see also illegal immigrants; political migrants immigration policy 10, 86–8, 165; and actual practice 89, 96; for Europe 167–70, 175 Indonesia 253 inequality see equality informal sector of the economy 13, 18, 120–7 informal social institutions 13 information technology 132–3 institution-building 205–7, 235 ‘institutional fallacy’ 235 integration: momentum of 54–5; ‘systemic’ and ‘social’ 3, 10, 24, 53–6, 63; see also social integration; women: intelligentsia 215, 223–30 interactionist school of sociology 251 interest groups 256 intermediary institutions 10, 55, 143 internal market see Single European Market internationalization of economic activities 257; see also globalization intersubjectivity 260 Iran 253 Iraq 254 Ireland 258 Islamic fundamentalism 166 Islamic minorities 186 Israel 254 Italy 250, 258–9 Japan 35, 85, 87, 250, 252–3, 256 Jewish communities 186, 196 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 137 ‘just-in-time’ production 133

‘justice as fairness’ 197 Kadarism 120 Kashmiris 155 Kempeneers, M. and Lelievre, E. 66, 69 Kerr, M. see Charles, N. Kiczková, Zuzana and Farkasová, Etela 113 knowledge class theories 230 Kornai, Janos 213 Kosack, G. see Castles, S. Kriesi, Hanspeter 60–1 Krygier, M. 208 Kurds 155 Kureishi, Hanif 27 ‘labelling’ processes 97 labour market: gender inequalities in 67–9; participation rates 4, 11–13, 66–7, 114, 135; regulation of 3; segmentation of 134; see also flexible labour markets labour movement 106 Land, Hilary 111 Lange, P. 46 Latin America 231, 259 ‘lean’ production systems 133 legitimacy of institutions 63, 164, 183, 239 Lelievre, E. see Kempeneers, M. Lepsius, M.R. 48 liberalization of economic activities 257 life cycle employment patterns 66 life cycle of the family 141 living standards 2, 16 lobbying activities 61, 161 Lockwood, David 24 Logan, John 216 Luciani, Giacomo 88 Maastricht Treaty 9, 46, 53, 57, 62, 168; opt-outs from 142 Maghreb, the 165, 172 Magris, Claudio 194 Maher, K.H. see Reisinger, W.M. Malaysia 253 ‘male breadwinner’ model 134–5, 138–43 Malik, K. 187 management buy-outs 220 managerial capitalism 17, 138, 222, 229 managerial society, characteristics of 218 managerialism 17, 215–31 Mannheim, Karl 26 Market Transition Debate 216 marketization 2, 132, 136, 138, 141, 143, 206, 237; social destructiveness of 22 marriage 69–72, 109

Index Marshall, T. 134, 139–40, 156 Marx, Karl (and Marxist thought) 138, 183, 259 May 1968 movement 260 media, the 10, 58–60, 165, 210, 250; national perspective of 61 Meehan, E. 140 ‘merchant capitalism’ 218 Michalski, K. 112 Microsoft Corporation 253 Miles, R. 164 Miller, A.H. see Reisinger, W.M. Miller, M.J. see Castles, S. Milosevic, Slobodan 18, 254 ‘minorization’ 151 Mitchell, Mark x, 14–15; co-author of Chapter 10 Mitterrand, François 40 modernist social theory 15, 18–21, 25, 27, 112, 180–2, 185, 196–201, 208 monetarism 17, 221–2, 225–31 Monnet, Jean 23 Moore, R.J. 86 moral majority 252 moral panic 164–6 moral philosophy 261 Moravcsik, Andrew 35 Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands 95 Morocco 253 multiculturalism 7–8, 14–15, 27, 149–50, 160, 193–4, 252–5, 259–62; criticisms of 150–2, 156; in education 159; politicization of 171; responses to criticisms of 152–3 Münch, Richard 19, 55, 57 Musil, J. 238 myth, social functions of 178 nation state, the 14, 163–4, 168, 170, 175, 178–89; modernist conception of 181–2; resistance to 181; and society 180, 183 national consciousness 250 national identity 163–7, 171, 175, 256 national societies 250–1, 259 nationalism 14–15, 20, 164, 167, 173, 178, 181, 184, 187–9, 193; cultural 253, 262; ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ types of 179, 194; sociological analysis of 180 nationality, alternative concepts of 256–7 nationalization 219, 231 NATO 24 naturalization 156–7, 173 Nee, Victor 216 Netherlands 10, 69, 135, 151, 169, 256;

267

illegal immigrants in 84, 88–97 New Class 229–30 New Right 166 nomenklatura 216, 230 norms and normative institutions 8, 24–6, 122, 260 Northern Ireland 188 Ohlin, L.A. see Cloward, R.A. older people, gender inequalities amongst 72–80 ombudsman system 157 opportunity structures 94–5 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 25 Ortoli, François-Xavier 33 ‘outsider’ class 97 ownership of property, dispersion of 219–20 Pahl, R. 133, 143 Parekh, B. 166 Parsons, Talcott 23, 183–4, 251–2 part-time work 135–7, 257 participation in public affairs 62–4, 106, 157, 207; see also women: integration into public life Pateman, C. 139 path-dependency 216, 238 patriarchal practices 72, 122, 135, 181 peasant communities 123, 229 pensions 66–7, 75–7, 81 ‘permissive consensus’ on European integration 57 ‘personal is political’ 111 Peru 253 Pixley, J. 141 Poland 22, 188, 209, 219, 223, 228–9, 256 Polanyi, Karl 22, 138 polarization, social 136–7, 143 police forces 158–9, 168, 187 policy initiation 56 political activism 61 political culture 57–60, 64, 150, 207; national and transnational 57 political entrepreneurship 34–7, 41 political migrants 161–2 political society 193 political studies 259 politocracy 225–7, 230 Port-au-Prince 23 post-communist transformation 215–18, 221–2, 225; continuity of 238, 240; geopolitical situation of 240–1; problems of 235–6

268

Index

poverty 256; amongst women 11, 70, 74–5, 76 private sphere see public and private spheres privatization 2, 219–20; spontaneous 219 public and private spheres 10, 57–64, 111, 180, 206; national and transnational 58; see also civil society public and private standards 124–5 public expenditure control 3 qualified majority voting 39 quasi-citizens 173 queueing society 210 RACE programme 35 Race Relations Act, UK 171 racism 5, 151, 162, 164, 187 Radtke, F.-O. 151 Rath, Jan 151 rationalization 251 Rawls, John 197 referenda on European integration 46, 53, 57 reform socialism 223–6 refugees 166, 169 regional conflicts 5 regulation, need for 54–5; see also deregulation Reisinger, W.M., Miller, A.H., Hesli, V.L. and Maher, K.H. 208 religious affiliations 185–6, 254–5 religious organizations 159 remuneration packages of men and women 66–7 repatriation 172 residence permits 174 residential care of older people 79–80 Rex, John x, 14; author of Chapter 9 right to work 139 rights see citizenship rights; economic rights; human rights; voting rights; workers’ rights Rights of the Child, Convention on 25 Rodgers, G. and Rodgers, J. 135 Rona-Tas, Ákos 216 Rose, Richard 207 Ross, G. 37, 41 Rotterdam 89 Rubery, J.: with Fagan, C. 67, 68; with Fagan, C. and Smith, M. 68–9 rural populations 16, 239 Rushdie, Salman 165 Russell, Dave x, 14–15; co-author of Chapter 10

Russia 17, 208, 231, 254; see also Soviet Union Saint-Simon, Henri de 19–20 Saudi Arabia 253 Schengen Convention 168–9, 174 Scheppele, K.L. 97 Schierup, C.-U. and Alund, A. 151–2 Schlecht, O. 42 Schmitter, P. 213; see also Streeck, W. secret societies of illegal immigrants 88, 95–6 ‘secret society’, the 85 security policy 165–6 self-employment 136–7, 228–9 Serbia 254 service industries 132–3 sex discrimination see gender inequalities Sikhs 155 Simmel, G. 84–5, 88 Singapore 253 Single European Act 33, 35–9, 42, 44, 46–7 Single European Market 2–3, 6, 9, 33, 37, 42, 44, 53, 57, 132, 137 slavery 179 Slovakia 239 small businesses 228–9 Smith, A.D. 178–9, 181–2 Smith, M. see Rubery, J. social capital 223 social care 79–80 Social Change and Economic Life Initiative (SCELI) 68 Social Charter 44–6, 141 social citizenship 134, 139–40, 156 social disintegration 26, 258 social division 26–7 social dumping 137 social exclusion 3, 5–9, 87, 96–7, 132, 136–8, 142, 174; in history 86; of older people 73–4, 80–1; of women 10–12, 73–5, 80–1 social integration 195, 256; impediments to 58–80; promotion of 62–4, 141 social justice 6–7 social movements 61, 105–8, 115, 152, 260–1 social order: bases of 182–3; world market for 34 social partners in industry 137 social policy see European social policy social protection 2–3, 6–7, 12–13, 143, 240; traded for political democracy 239; two-tiered 111 social space 222

Index social sphere 37 social work profession 110 socialism 223–6; see also state socialism ‘socialist entrepreneurs’ 223 socialization 211–12; political 63 society: different types of 193, 252; seen as a process of change 252 sociology 19–25, 28; American 252–3, 258–61; applied to the Balkan tragedy 194–8; definition of 251–2, 259; European 249–51, 258–62 solidarity 138, 155–6; see also identity Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 259 Sontag, Susan 194, 201 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de 26 South Korea 253 sovereignty 41, 163, 168, 170, 175, 185, 197–201 Soviet Union 18, 22, 165, 188; see also Russia Soysal, Nuhoglu Yasemin 62 Spain 258 Springer, B. 46 ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’ employment 132, 135–43; in the United Kingdom 136–7 Staniszkis, Jadwiga 216 Stark, David 215–16, 218, 220, 230, 238 state socialism 113, 118, 132, 165, 223 van Steenbergen, Bart viii; co-editor von Stein, Lorenz 106 Streeck, Wolfgang 46; and Schmitter, P. 48 structuralist school of sociology 251 subcontracting 220 subsidies, loss of 239 Sudan 253 Sumner, William 205 Swann Committee 160 Sweden 151, 171 Switzerland 60–1 Syria 254 system-building 21 Szalai, Erzsébet 225–7 Szalai, Julia x, 13, 16, 18, 114; author of Chapter 7 Szelényi, Iván 16–17; author of Chapter 14 Szelenyi, Szonja 216 Sztompka, Piotr xi, 16–17, 238; author of Chapter 13 Taiwan 253 Tamás, Gáspár Miklós 227 Taylor, Charles 260 Teague, P. 43 temporary work 135–6, 257

269

Thatcher, Margaret 43–4 Therborn, Göran xi, 7–8, 14–15; author of Chapter 1 Thierry, Augustin 20 Thomas, W.I. 195 de Tocqueville, Alexis 20, 205 tolerance between communities 160 Touraine, Alain xi, 7–8, 10, 14–15, 18, 193–4, 201; author of Chapter 16 trade unions 41–8 passim, 129, 134, 136, 139 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 43, 45 transitology 205, 216, 234, 242 transnational corporations 10, 14, 34–5, 250 transnational identities 250 transnational institutions 168 Treaty of Rome 9 Treiman, Donald 216 tripartite institutions 41 Turkish immigrants in western Europe 95, 152, 155, 157, 162, 173 Ukraine 254 underclass, concept of the 96, 134, 256–7 underdeveloped societies 23 unemployment 27, 125–7, 256 Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations (UNICE) 37–8, 44 United Kingdom 9, 15, 42, 67, 74–5, 77, 132, 136–7, 141, 143, 157–9, 166, 171–2, 180–1, 184–6, 249, 256–9 United States 7–8, 25, 35, 85, 87, 92, 96, 153, 157, 179, 231, 252, 255–6 ‘Unknown City’ research project 89–96 unknown society, concept of the 84–5 value consensus 183 Venturini Report 37 Visegrad countries 168, 243, 256 Visser, J. see Ebbinghaus, B. ‘voluntaristic fallacy’ 236 voluntary organizations 55, 125 voting rights 108–9, 157, 174 voucher privatization 219 Walby, Sylvia viii; co-editor Walder, Andrew 216 Wallace, W. 164 Weber, Max 20, 23, 138, 183–5, 198, 207, 251 welfare policies and the welfare state 3–6, 110–11, 256–7 Western culture 208–12 widows 72, 77, 79–80 Wieviorka, M. 150

270 Index women: equal pay and treatment for 9, 141; in informal economies 126–7; integration into public life 1, 3–5, 9–13, 18, 105, 113–14, 127–8; labour market participation of 11–13, 114; poverty amongst 11, 70, 75, 77; see also gender inequalities women’s movements 106–15; ‘historical’ and ‘new’ 107; history of 108–12 women’s rights see citizenship rights of women ‘work-rich’ and ‘work-poor’ households 137 workers’ rights 9, 74, 137–8 working hours 141

xenophobia 151, 162, 164, 187 young people 25–6, 211–12, 260 Yugoslavia 5, 14–15, 18, 166, 185, 188, 254; the Balkan tragedy 193–201 Zapf, W. 238 Zeitlin, M. 231 Ziltener, Patrick xi, 7, 9–10; co-author of Chapter 2 Zivilgesellschaft 105; see also civil society Zizek, Slavoj 195 van Zon, H. 234