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1
EUROPEAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
1 Introduction
Why yet another book on Europe? Well, systematic attempts to discuss European society as a whole are actually rarer than one might think. There are of course innumerable histories of Europe, the best of which attempt to avoid national or regional biases in their treatment of the continent.1 There are what one might call long-essay books, such as those by Romano Prodi (2000) and Zygmunt Bauman (2004). There are excellent detailed studies of the European Union as a whole (Rumford, 2002) or, more often, specific aspects of its workings. Finally, there are books, often multi-authored, which discuss Europe piecemeal according to disciplinary or national divisions.
The genre to which this book aims to contribute is marked out by a (so far) smallish range of key contributions: Therborn (1995); Crouch (1999); and MĂŒnch (1993); more recently, Beck and Grande (2004); Delanty and Rumford (2005); and Delanty (2006b). It is one informed by the social theory of the last few decades â in particular, the revival of historical sociology and, more broadly, theories of modernity and, secondly, the growth of postcolonial theory and its application to European history. These two theoretical revolutions coincided, of course, with the anti-communist protest movements of the 1980s, the anti-communist revolutions of 1989 and the postcommunist âtransitionâ which followed. It is, in short, a contribution to what is sometimes called the new direction in European Studies (Rumford, 2007; see also Calhoun, 2003).
The main argument in this book is that it makes sense to treat Europe as a whole, rather than the sum of its component states and regions. This does not mean that there is some sort of essence to Europe, emerging historically and realizing itself through successive centuries. Rather, Europe should be seen as a region of the world, with an open frontier to Asia (of which it forms a peninsula) and close links of various kinds to the other continents of Africa, America and Australasia. The European region came to be perceived, and to act, as in some respects a single, if complex, entity. In particular, it functioned as a crucible in which social forms of production and organization, often imported from more âadvancedâ civilizations elsewhere in the world, were developed and subsequently re-exported. The technologies of textile production and warfare are examples of this, but so are democratic politics, individualism and other aspects of what is generally known as modernity. This contentious yet fundamental link between Europe and modernity means that to study Europe historically one cannot treat it as just one world region among others, even if a global frame of reference is the most appropriate one to use (Bhambra, 2007). It is only in the recent past, as the economic and political forms of modernity have spread, if unevenly, across the globe, that we can ask what, if anything, is distinctive about European modernity, modernity in Europe.
The following chapters attempt to do this. This chapter examines the geographical and historical background to European culture and society, setting the scene for the more detailed discussions which follow. Chapter 2 looks in more detail at Europeâs internal geographical differentiation and its location as a whole between East and West, North and South. The third chapter is concerned with the two economic formations found in contemporary Europe, capitalism and, for much of the past century, state socialism. Whereas the socialist economies followed more or less closely a standard Soviet pattern, European capitalism is differentiated between the extremes of Anglo-Saxon liberalism and the more statist or otherwise institutionally embedded economies of continental Europe. Chapter 4 looks, in a complementary way, at Europeâs characteristic forms of state: the liberal (and eventually democratic) state and the totalitarian or authoritarian dictatorship. The second type is found in fascist Europe in the mid-twentieth century, surviving longest in Spain and Portugal and with a brief resurgence in Greece under the Colonelsâ regime, and in the Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist state. Liberal democratic forms of rule are again differentiated according to, crudely, the greater or lesser role of the state apparatus. Here we find a third type of polity emer-ging, in the form of the European Union: one with affinities to the historical empires in Europe and elsewhere but fundamentally different in its democratic structure and what has come to be called âsoft powerâ. Chapter 5 examines the divisions and commonalities of European society and societies, according to class, ethnicity and gender and the ways in which these operate in different parts of the continent. The concluding chapter attempts to situate Europe as a region of a globalized world. This is a world substantially shaped by Europeans in the long century of European hegemony running from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth, but it has become a world in which Europe, rather like classical Greece, now has to take a more modest place.
2 What is Europe?
The question âwhat is Europe?â can be given a very short geographical answer and a very long historical one. The geography need not detain us long. What we call Europe is a Western peninsula of Eurasia, mostly surrounded by sea (and some islands, including the one I happen to live on) and with a land frontier conventionally located at the Ural mountains and somewhere between the Black and Caspian Seas. At the borders of Europe, both Turkey and Russia have small âEuropeanâ parts and much larger parts outside Europe, but both are often included as a whole.
The historical answer is necessarily much longer and more complex, since âEuropeâ is a historically developing and âimaginedâ entity. It is clearly anachronistic to talk about âBritainâ or âFranceâ in the Stone Age, and by the same token also to talk about âEuropeâ. At some point, then, the people of Europe, or what we now call Europeans, come to define themselves and/or be defined by others as Europe(an). And this definition can of course be questioned (Delanty, 1995). If we think of the defining structures and events of what we now call Europe, we need to reflect on which of them, singly or in combination, are distinctive of Europe. Ancient Greek polyarchy as a form of intra- and interstate organization clearly deserves a mention, as do the Macedonian and, much more importantly, Roman Empires. The latter of course intersects with a third crucial element, the somewhat unexpected rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire and subsequently as a defining element of Europe as a whole, just as Islam became a defining element of the âMiddle Eastâ.
Yet, just as it is artificial to separate out English history from the rest of European history before the fifteenth century, it is similarly anachronistic to think of Europe as a distinct entity before that time. Charlemagneâs empire of the early ninth century may have covered the territory of the original European Communities and lent his name to a building and a prize, but it had nothing to do with Europe as such (Fried, 2003). The Crusades of the thirteenth century are resented, with some justification, as inaugurating Europeâs continuing interference in the Middle East, but they are more appropriately seen, like the rest of the history of that half-millennium (and arguably the following one too), in a broader Eurasian context. A recent popular book (Aust and Schmidt-Klingenberg, 2003: 89) contains a map of the trading network of the Hanseatic League around 1400 labelled âThe EU of the middle agesâ, but the irony is of course intentional.
In what Europeans call the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, something distinctively European begins to emerge, marked by the conjuncture, roughly speaking, of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the beginnings of the voyages (anticipated much earlier of course by the Vikings) of discovery and conquest. These were not, to say the least, unique or endogenous âEuropeanâ developments, but they do initiate a distinctive path. This line of development runs in three directions:
(i) from the Renaissance to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment;
(ii) from the Reformation to the religious wars and the âEuropeanâ state model consecrated in 1648 after perhaps the first genuinely European war;2 and
(iii) from Columbian adventures to the European colonial and semi-colonial empires of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In the last of these, the âdiscoveriesâ were reflected in the culture shock of Europeans confronted by alterity, otherness, and perceiving themselves in its mirror.3 A different form of alterity closer to home was provided by the Turkish victory at MohĂĄcs, Hungary, in 1526.
We might, then, roughly mark out three interlocking spheres of transformation marked by the crude labels of Renaissance/Enlightenment, Reformation/state formation and world-system/imperialism. The first directs our attention to ideas, which of course are also, as Marx put it in 1844, âa material force when they seize the massesâ. The second refers us to the European national-state model, seen both in its domestic aspect and as part of a system of such states, and the third to Europeâs economic and political domination of much of the rest of the world in the second half of the last millennium. The interrelations between the first and second spheres have been fairly well discussed, though there is little agreement over the relative power of ideas or more mater-ial political or economic processes. The relations between the first two and the third, however, have received much less attention and are finally getting it under such rubrics as postcolonial theory and critiques of Eurocentrism. Did Europeans colonize America and Australasia, almost all of Africa and much of Asia because they had a sense of intellectual or cultural superiority and believed that the particular Middle Eastern religion which they had adopted as their own was the Truth, to be disseminated as widely as possible, or because of economic and/or military-strategic interests and capacities arising out of their particular state forms? Both elements undoubtedly played a part.
Let us trace these processes rapidly down to the present. It is difficult to escape from the haze of self-congratulation in which intellectual developments in Europe over the past half-millennium have tended to be discussed. In the late twentieth century there was a long overdue corrective movement, marked by a number of works which showed the dependence of Greek thought on regions to the East and South (Bernal, 1987), of the Renaissance on past and contemporary Islamic scholarship (Jardine, 1996), of Chinese anticipations of much of what has been attributed to the âscientific revolutionâ of the seventeenth century (Needham, 1969) and of movements outside Europe and its settler colonies paralleling the European religious Reformation and Enlightenment. For all that, there did develop in Europe a powerful set of syntheses of practical and speculative thought, inspiring transformations in science and technology on the one hand and forms of political rule on the other.
One quite plausible attempt to explain the dynamism of a region which had previously been rather backward stresses the combination of a common ideological and political framework (Christendom and, for much of the region, Roman Law) with the political diversity of relatively small emergent states (Mann, 1986, 1993, 1998; see also Jönsson, TĂ€gil and Törnqvist, 2000: 20). The creative tension between religious and secular power and the multiplicity of competing jurisdictions may have encouraged the development of individualistic ways of thinking and liberal political thought. The etymology of the word âlibertiesâ and its equivalents points to this: initially meaning privileges or exemptions, it comes to have a more universalistic sense in which, as the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin put it, I can be free only if all others are free. In the rather diffuse development of European conceptions of individualism and of human and political rights and freedoms, the French Revolution clearly deserves a central place as the defining feature of the European political imaginary (Furet, 1981; Best, 1988). This is no less true of the conservatives who rejected it (Mannheim, 1927), or of the socialists and communists for whom it was just a prelude to a full social democratic and anti-capitalist revolution.
Concurrently, the American Revolution inaugurated another form of republican constitutional government and, perhaps more importantly, the first major postcolonial state, what the American political sociologist Martin Lipset (1964) called âthe first new nationâ. For progressive Europeans, this was one more victory over the old aristocratic order, and the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville found in the US in the 1820s what he expected to be the democratic and egalitarian future of France and Europe. Geopolitically, the American Revolution marked the beginning of the provincialization of Europe, the relativization of its power in between the United States and Russia, which Tocqueville also foresaw less than forty years after the French and American Revolutions (and an even shorter time since Napoleonâs short-lived European empire) and when Europeâs imperial power was still on the rise.
Imperialism was of course a European transformation both of Europe itself and of much of the rest of the world, running alongside the extension, within Europe itself, of capitalist production and industrialization. From now on, though no one was yet thinking in these terms (except perhaps in relation to the contrast between the old and the new worlds), there were multiple modernities and a post-European future. What Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein called the capitalist world economy or world-system largely pre-dated systematic imperial conquests, though not of course the Middle Eastern âCrusadesâ. Debates still rage over whether imperialism should be seen primarily as what Lenin (1916) called the highest stage of capitalism or more as a matter of geopolitical competition, with economic interests secondary. (The neo-imperialist adventurism of the US in the early twenty-first century provokes of course similar disagreements.) Imperialism and colonialism also transformed the European societies themselves. On the whole they got substantially richer, whatever happened to the wealth that was accumulated; the poorer and more peripheral states of Europe such as Spain and Portugal acquired or preserved a great power status. Germany started two world wars in large part out of resentment at its lack of a âproperâ overseas empire and the attempt to catch up (in the First World War) or to colonize the East of Europe and Russia instead (in the Second World War).4 Domestically, many states (not just the fascist ones) re-imported military and policing tactics tested in the colonies. Finally, the former colonial powers tended to attract (and often to recruit) immigrants from âtheirâ territories in the âthirty glorious yearsâ of capitalism from the late forties to the mid-seventies. As a result of these flows both from outside Europe and from its poorer peripheries, Europe became more substantially multicultural, though not without a good deal of resistance and denial on the part of the ânativesâ. (The fiction was maintained, for example, that the German Federal Republic was ânot a country of immigrationâ.)
Back home, Europe experienced three further transformations, all in one or another way associated with notions of citizenship. First, there was the slow extension of political democracy, finally reaching adult women in most parts of Europe by the middle of the twentieth century. Second, the nationalism which was already implicit in the political structures of much of Europe became more forceful across the continent as a whole, in part as a reaction to Napoleon; this development, culminating in the post-First World War settlement, consolidated the (Western) European nation-state model. This model, with its prioritization of nation-state citizenship as a defining identity, swept the world wherever the European states had not established colonies or, as in South America, were expelled from them. In the second wave of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, it was considered automatic that the colonial territories, already carved up into what Europeans considered state-sized chunks, would be set up as European-style national states. Half-hearted supranational economic arrangements, in East Africa and elsewhere, rapidly succumbed to political contingencies. Third, there was the dual response to the âsocial questionâ in the form of welfare states (Donzelot, [1977] 1980, 1984) and social democracy. The former is the beginning of the âEuropean social modelâ and social conceptions of citizenship based on social rather than just political rights (Marshall, 1950). The latter, social democracy, is the source of what can be called the European political model, the leftâright division between the ostensible opponents and the all too real defenders of capitalism. This opposition structured much of European politics and tendentially the politics of much of the rest of the world until at least the end of the twentieth century. As early as 1906, Werner Sombart (1976) was taking this as the norm and asking âWhy is there no socialism in the United States?â Despite the vogue of âthird wayâ politics in the UK, Germany, and much of the rest of Europe, it is far from certain that European politics is moving âbeyond left and rightâ (Giddens, 2004).
In Russia, of course, after the Bolshevik Revolution, there remained only the left. The thoroughly European ideology of Marxism took hold in Russia, China and elsewhere outside Europe, with the Russian export version of Marxism (Stalinist Marxism-Leninism) re-imported into much of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. Russiaâs land empire had of course been a classic case of European âinternal colonialismâ, the securing of control over peripheries. The Soviet Union also presided over the last quasi-imperial structure in Europe, with the so-called âBrezhnev doctrineâ of the limited sovereignty of Warsaw Pact states. The Soviet empire differed from the ânormalâ imperial relation in that here it was the hegemonic power which supplied its more developed client states with cheap energy and raw materials in exchange for relatively advanced consumer goods.
If, then, these processes of transformation have left us with something called Europe, whose geographical parameters and defining historical events are reasonably clear, we might naturally go on to ask whether there is something like a single European culture and society, or, more probably, several forms of culture or society within Europe. We would have to take this second alternative if we were thinking, say, of Africa, with its now crucial divisions between the North and the South of the Sahara.5 The same goes for Asia, with even more massive differences between what Europeans tend to call the Middle East, and North Americans the Near East, and the huge areas of central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and East and South-East Asia.6 Europe, however, is small enough for the question of a single culture, like a single market, to be a realistic one, and the fact that it has an emergent form of state covering almost all of the West and a very substantial part of the East gives some support to the first answer. If there is something like an emergent European state and legal regime, however patchy at present, then one might perhaps expect to find something like a society and culture to go along with it.
Historically, of course, this last way of framing the question is a peculiar one. What is now called the European Union is only half a century old. If there is something like a European culture or a European society they can hardly have come into existence so rapidly, or have been conjured up by such a half-hearted entity as the EU, which has not even sought, like the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European national states, to impose a common language and culture. For all this, I think one can claim that there is something like a ...
