European Social Problems

Stuart Isaacs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317418368
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

European Social Problems is the first book to examine social issues in Europe from the perspective of the social sciences. It considers many of these social problems following the UK's 'leave' vote. Key topics examined here include:

• immigration;
• multiculturalism and religion;
• health;
• inequalities;
• education;
• riots and protest;
• drugs and crime;
• sexuality.

These core issues run as a thread through Europe and are experienced by Europeans themselves as social problems. As such, this text facilitates students' direct engagement with some of the problematic constituents in their own lives. This text is suitable for those studying social policy, sociology, politics, international relations, criminology and education studies. In this way it functions as an accessible 'reader' for final year undergraduates as well as postgraduate students.

Chapter 1
Introduction

What are European social problems?

Stuart Isaacs

1.1 Introduction

It is the morning of June 24^th, 2016. The UK has just voted to leave the European Union. This is one of the most momentous historical events to occur in Europe since the end of the Second World War. It breaks a pattern of European integration that many hoped would ensure that conflict, bloody or otherwise, would disappear from the continent. For Britain, in particular, the consequences may radically change the direction of the policies that has shaped its institutions for decades. Furthermore, it could lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom (UK) and the possibility of an independent Scotland.

The last time that the UK suffered a crisis of global identity and insecurity was over sixty years ago. This followed the well-known withdrawal from Suez. The Suez crisis triggered an awareness that Britain’s global power status was fading and with it control of the Empire. Churchill’s famous ‘three circle’ strategy, denoting Britain’s intention to maintain influence in the three spheres of Empire, Europe and the Atlantic alliance, suffered a terminal break-down. From this point onwards, reluctantly and dragging its feet, the UK recognised that Britain’s primary economic and political interests resided with its European neighbours. As the Empire collapsed in the 1960s European integration grew as it moved from a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) to the European Economic Community (EEC). The UK was pragmatically drawn towards the EEC and yet remained politically sceptical of joining a pan-European organisation with the potential to override its own sovereignty.

There has always been a political and cultural ambiguity about the British relationship with Europe. Significant as the referendum decision of the British people (soon no longer to be citizens of Europe but solely subjects of the Crown) might well prove to be, the outcome should perhaps not be a surprise. Despite a shift towards the European ‘circle’ after 1956, Britain did not join the original ECSC and fudged membership of the EEC in 1961/2 and 1967/8. When they did finally join, in 1972, a referendum was soon called (by 1975) to see whether or not they ought to stay in the then renamed European Community (EC). On this occasion the vote was a resounding ‘Remain’.

The history of the UK and it relationship with the various political institutions of Europe (which today, of course, we know as the European Union (EU)), has been a turbulent one. Most of the arguments that finally won over the British politicians and public to accept full membership of the EEC in the 1970s had been pragmatic. Being closer to Europe politically was a necessary evil in order to gain economically. This argument finally fell apart in 2016. Yet despite the UK apparently wrenching itself from the Common Market, as well as the political and legal framework of the EU, this historic change of direction has much less impact on social issues. The social problems which the whole of Europe still faces, ‘Remain’. Despite the potential economic and political upheaval of ‘Leave’, the social issues which have emerged as pan-European since the Second World War will not change. They are not dependent upon the UK’s membership of the EU or on the EU itself staying as it currently is. Whether it is Brexit or Nexit or any other change to the organisational structure of the EU, the construction of social problems as European problems is now sedimented. Organised crime, social protest, migration, religious tension, poverty, unemployment, homophobia, health and educational inequalities, and each of the many topics you will find in this text all have a European dimension to their character, proliferation and possible policy resolution that will not suddenly go away.

As we have argued in our first text, Social Problems in the UK: An Introduction, (Isaacs, 2015), social problems, while intertwined with economic and political problems, may be distinguished from them. This is because the types of issues discussed in this context require an understanding of their historical construction, policy development and sociological dimension. For (a simple) example, approaches to migration will differ according to the historical-cultural acceptance of ‘Others’, constructing a particular discourse around immigration. So it is that the language that surrounds debates about immigration needs analysis from a social science point of view. In the UK refugees have gradually come to be defined in predominantly negative/sceptical terms as ‘asylum seekers’. The exception to this is when tragedy occurs. Then the term ‘refugee’ tends to be restored. In countries where there is a different social context a subtly different discourse emerges. So we find that in Ireland the more positive/accepting terms ‘Asylum finders’ and ‘New Irish’ are often deployed.

Discussions about the social construction of migrants or, indeed, any of the topics set out here, requires not just an economic or political analysis to understand them but one from the point of view of the social sciences too.

In this text, then, you will find an argument that European social problems are a distinctive set of issues, entangled with but relatively autonomous from economic and political debates. European social problems are also not defined here as issues that are only found within the EU’s member states. In the chapters that follow it is maintained that European social problems may be separate from the policies or organisational concerns of the European Parliament, its courts, the European Commission, and so on. Just as in our previous text it was argued that UK social problems are not defined by what government prioritises or what might be newsworthy debates, so here European social problems are defined as a matter of social research concern, identified by the authors. To go further it may be added that while the idea of a ‘social Europe’ has been a much discussed issue in academic literature over the past twenty years or more, the reality is that the EU barely touches upon social issues except where they affect labour laws within its jurisdiction. Therefore, any meaningful discussions about European social problems must go well beyond the limited horizons of the EU. The understanding of ‘Europe’ used in this book is much broader and opaque than the boundaries provided by the EU, so much so that it could be argued that while this text is the first to examine European social problems from a social science point of view, it does so while arguing it is not possible to have a catch-all definition of ‘Europe’ at all.

1.2 Europe: a theory

There is no such thing as Europe. But there are European social problems. How can these two statements make logical sense? The premise of this text is that Europe is an unstable, contingent, shifting entity. A brief history of Europe, even over the last thirty years or so, would be enough to illustrate this. Nation-states come and go. Territorial boundaries change regularly. The volatile Balkans is often the most graphic example of this. This instability goes back over 500 years (Larrabee, 1992; Ascherson, 1995) and was accelerated after the end of the Cold War with a rebirth of nations and the break-up of Yugoslavia. But it is not merely geographical boundaries that alter with such changes. The constitutive and fluid dynamic of regions brings into question the integrity of the state. If the state cannot be relied upon to be a focus for continuity then a broader framework of analysis is needed to understand regional political and social issues. This has been recognised across the social sciences, even in the normally conservative and realist area of security studies (Buzan and Hansen, 2009).

The internal coherence of countries also resides on shifting sands. In the 1920s during the Weimar period, social theorists like Weber and Heller were desperate to establish liberal democracies in Europe as a way to avoid war and political extremism. Weber argued that only a limited ballot-box democracy – that allowed for the expression of a very narrow range of political views – could do this. Heller maintained that a basic social homogeneity was necessary in order to make the stability of modern democracies possible. Ultimately they both admitted that such a project was unlikely to succeed given the increasing heterogeneity of Europe. This can be illustrated today by the Scottish independence movement in the UK, Basque regionalism and the Catalan call for autonomy. The federalism of France and Germany are set up to try to negotiate this lack of social homogeneity. Elsewhere, in countries like Italy and Ireland the lack of state penetration builds in tensions between polities and ‘clients’.

Institutional and cultural haziness are also characteristics of modern European states. The ability of state institutions to make unilateral decisions has been highly questioned in relation to globalisation and localised decision-makers. The implementation of state policy is similarly fragmented in practice. Cultural heterogeneity is an influence on the way that centralised state prescription fails to function universally. In some regions this may be partly due to the increase in multicultural and multi-faith identities, as well as changes to occupational roles and social class. The rise of a fragile sense of identity, as Guy Standing has noted in his work on the ‘precariat’, is prevalent among European populations.

To write of ‘Europe’, then, as simply and transparently synonymous with the EU would be a reduction of a complex truth. ‘Europe’ is a construct, a meaning for an empty vessel that is bounded only by a hazy regional boundary and abstracted only generally from the continents it does not geographically define. In this text the contestation is that any notion of Europe must be open to particular contextual understanding. Many European states are connected by formal, legal and institutional ties, not only through the EU. However, internal tensions within states at a political, institutional and cultural level means that these formalised arrangements are not sufficient to synthesise Europe into a single fixed object of study. It could not be otherwise, unless we were to ignore the heterogeneous make-up of Europe at multiple levels: local, national and regional.

For any thorough comparative analysis of European countries to take place different levels of analysis are needed. A monolithic notion of ‘Europe’ would be a very crude perspective indeed, one that does not mirror the diversity of experience of modern Europeans. Rather, at the very least a sense of the inter-relatedness of local, national and regional analysis has to be part of any discussions around ‘Europe’ given that we can only speak of and analyse parts of what is associated with Europe in particular contexts.

This argument impacts upon social issues and social problems as it points us towards a position where the most pressing European social concerns can be said to be based around diversity and this fragile sense of definition and identity: issues of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, poverty, wealth, health, housing and all the related social problems to be found in this book. All these social problems have at their heart the question of convergence and difference. In other words, it is the very lack of a homogeneous, single objectifiable Europe that makes an understanding of European social problems all the more urgent. A recognition of the diversity, heterogeneity and need for various levels of analysis is a necessary context for exploring social problems that appear common across Europe.

Many decades ago Michael Oakeshott, writing as a political philosopher, noted that the character of the European state, since its modern emergence in the sixteenth century, had never had a complete or fixed identity but was always, ‘an association in the making’ (1975: 196/7). By this he did not mean that Europe was still incomplete as a single political entity, or that it was on some kind of teleological journey to become whole. Rather, he was voicing the very same non-foundational point of view set out here: Europe will always be, ‘in the making’. It can never be complete because politics is never complete. It resides, as Oakeshott famously stated, ‘on a boundless and bottomless sea’ (Oakeshott, 1991: 60).

Perhaps the most well-known thesis that best captures the sense of Europe that is being proposed here is in Benedict Anderson’s notion of nation-states being ‘imagined communities’. This classic argument maintains that nation-states are socially constructed entities based around the same core perception of a people, however different the nuances of their ideas about nationhood might be (Anderson, 1991). Without wishing to diverge into discussions about the theoretical premise and arguments of Anderson’s work, of which there have been many, suffice to say that here the social construction of ‘Europe’ is taken as a matter of perception among individuals, social cleavages, political actors and the media in the same general manner that Anderson understands nation-states. These perceptions may differ and clash in many respects but these overriding arguments do not disrupt the underlying foundations upon which the debate engages. So, for example, for all the differing points of view about the EU from the ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ camps in the UK, both camps were able to converse because they shared a basic common ground regarding their construction of the role of the EU.

Philosophically, historically and conceptually it has been argued above that ‘Europe’ is a construct. Speaking more recently, with the voice of political practice, the great German sociologist Jurgen Habermas has similarly stated that nation-states in Europe are becoming more and more fragmented. This, he argues, also affects their capacity to act politically (IPPR, 2014). Since the periods when Oakeshott and Anderson were first setting out their arguments it has become more and more of a mainstream position in political theory and political science to assume that nation-states are not singular political actors. Rather, theories of governance have arisen that understand political and social change being enacted in terms of a network of policy-making institutions operating at various levels from local to global. Alongside this sit NGOs and informal networks of power, be they social movements or organised criminal gangs. This myriad and non-linear understanding of how policy and practice emerges can be said to be the broad working model of contemporary studies in European politics and society. It is into this body of literature that this text on European social problems fits.

It is, then, argued here that Europe ought to be understood as constructed and contextualised in particular debates. The discourses on European social problems can, it reasonably follows, include or exclude particular nation-states without setting limits or boundaries as to what constitutes ‘Europe’. In this text you will find that countries including Kazakhstan and Turkey may be included in ‘Europe’, while at other times Europe appears as Western Europe or North, South, West but not Eastern Europe. Europe is throughout this text taken as a fluid, ambiguous construct of which, say, the EU is just one construct, a ‘nodal point’ (Laclau,1990) but not a foundational one. There is, in this sense, no such thing as Europe. What we take to be Europe (and what each author in this book means by Europe) is a matter of debate and contestation around particular sets of issues.

Such an understanding of Europe goes against realist, empiricist, legalistic and political constitutionalist views. It opens up a more creative debate for the range of social sciences that are presented in this text. It also paves the way for a discussion of social problems away from narrow economist terms and towards issues of social justice that dominate debates within the social sciences. In this way this text continues the perspective of our previous book on UK social problems and issues (Isaacs, 2015). The methodology of social construction that framed that text is still to be found here in the notion of Europe given above. However, the emphasis here is now much more on the problem-solving, policy dimension of social problems and the role of social science in analysing these (see section 1.3). Authors in this text diverge in terms of their explicit application of social construction as an overriding theory or methodology, although it is consistent in relation to the notion of ‘Europe’ that is articulated in each chapter.

1.3 Social problems

The approach to Europe as an ‘imagined’ fluid construct that arises out of the acknowledged heterogeneity of European actors, institutions and structures can also be associated with the societal failure of Europe in the twentieth century. This failure provoked two world wars. As mentioned above, the subsequent desire to aspire to an ideal of a stable integrated Europe where mutual interests and enterprise would mitigate armed conflict led eventually to the EU. However, this new Europe became an ideological battle-ground itself between politicians, polities and parties. Many saw the new post-war Europe as more or less able to solve a range of social issues around inequality, social justice and citizenship. This increasingly became the hope of many social policy commentators (Ginsburg, 1997). However, just as the idea of a ‘social Europe’ was emerging so too was the influence, first, of the New Right and then neo-liberalism which began to dominate the agendas of many European countries from the 1980s. As the contemporary European political and social debate grew on all ideological sides the discourse about social issues began to generate the problems it sought to fix. Issues of work, crime, poverty, health, immigration, education and so on were seen to have a core thread as common European experiences, as European institutions, research and communications spread. Whatever the varied political views that play out in today’s European debates, sceptics and pro-Europeans, and all those between, all argue on the same grounds with the assumption that there are European social problems. As Brexit has revealed, across Europe there are those that seek to mitigate these European social problems by co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: what are European social problems?
• PART I Immigration and multiculturalism
• PART II Inequalities
• PART III Education
• PART IV Social controversies
• Index