A Social History of Twentieth-Century Europe

Béla Tomka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135067977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

A Social History of Twentieth-Century Europe offers a systematic overview on major aspects of social life, including population, family and households, social inequalities and mobility, the welfare state, work, consumption and leisure, social cleavages in politics, urbanization as well as education, religion and culture. It also addresses major debates and diverging interpretations of historical and social research regarding the history of European societies in the past one hundred years.

Organized in ten thematic chapters, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach, making use of the methods and results of not only history, but also sociology, demography, economics and political science. Béla Tomka presents both the diversity and the commonalities of European societies looking not just to Western European countries, but Eastern, Central and Southern European countries as well. A perfect introduction for all students of European history.

1

INTRODUCTION

During the last couple of decades, new social relations have emerged and strong ties have been established among people from different societies in Europe. Although economy has clearly been the most advanced part of the integration, very little of national social life has remained unaffected by intensive and often new forms of interaction across the continent. People travel not only for business purposes but also for vacation; they work and study abroad; they purchase food and other products and consume news, music and television programmes coming from abroad, which inform them about what is happening in other countries. It is without doubt that the growing contacts and cooperation do not equally influence all social groups and countries in Europe, and people from different countries largely maintain their own languages and cultures. Still, as a result of these comprehensive and intensive links and the high level of interdependence among European countries, Europe has become a major element of people's lives on the continent, and many citizens consider themselves as Europeans.¹ It falls upon historians to respond in their own ways to these changes and synergies by considering not only the past of national societies, but also by examining Europe as a whole, even if this endeavour clearly implies several pitfalls. This volume attempts to do this by covering most of the regions and major aspects of social life of twentieth-century Europe, as much as possible and plausible in a single-volume historical work.

In recent decades, surprisingly few studies have undertaken this or similar tasks, and those facing the challenge often covered the social history of twentieth-century Europe only from a particular point of view. Although several accomplished scholars have produced valuable research and insights regarding social changes in Europe, no publication exists that synthesizes these discrete aspects to give a comprehensive account of social developments in twentieth-century Europe. A brief overview of the most prominent related publications from the past two decades in English might illuminate the case in point. The books co-authored by Frank B. Tipton and Robert Aldrich are easily accessible to students, but do not provide a systematic overview of social history, because there are major topics (such as family, social mobility and social policy) that hardly surface in the two volumes.² The work published in 1989 by Gerold Ambrosius and William H. Hubbard is more comprehensive and also offers important textbook features, such as incorporating figures and tables that show key historical processes. That book discusses the social history of the continent by focusing primarily on integrating forces and conflicts in society and successfully considers those social developments in the individual societies of twentieth-century Europe that either contributed to social cohesion or resulted in social frictions. A further merit of the volume is that it includes Central and Eastern European countries in its analysis; nevertheless, its major emphasis lies on economic history and tracks changes only up to the 1970s.³ Among the most renowned social histories of twentieth-century Europe is that written by the German historian Hartmut Kaelble, which centres around the problem of social integration on the Western half of the continent (his more recent volume covers most of Europe in the post-war era),⁴ along with Göran Therborn's work, which mainly explores the historical meaning and significance of European modernity in the decades after 1945.⁵ The list would not be complete without Colin Crouch's book that provides the most comprehensive analysis available of the social changes in post-war Western Europe.⁶ These approaches are discussed later in detail.

There exist several other works offering introductions to distinct aspects of the social history of twentieth-century Europe, but they almost exclusively deal with Western and Southern Europe in the last decades of the century.⁷ Besides monographs, related contributions include edited volumes as well.⁸ Another major tool for students of social history is a multi-volume handbook covering European social history from 1350 to 2000 containing some two hundred distinct entries. However, in these articles, twentieth-century developments appear in a relatively subordinate position, and the selection altogether does not provide a coherent picture about the social history of Europe in the past one hundred years.⁹ There are numerous reasons for this lack of overall accounts of the social history of the continent in the last hundred years. The poverty of appropriate sources and research in the case of several fields and societies, the circumstance that historians are still averse to cover more than one or a couple of societies, and the fact that political upheavals had a profound impact on the twentieth-century history of the European continent appear high on the list. Most importantly, the development of twentieth-century European societies was so diverse and complex that any synthesis necessarily simplifies these histories to a great extent and thus for many might seem a pointless endeavour.

The significance of Europe as a subject of historical analysis, as well as the relatively low number of systematic works and overall accounts on the continent's twentieth-century social history, together with their thematic, chronological and other limitations (and above all, the neglect of the first half of the century and an approach that might qualify for ‘Western Europe-centrism’) all seem to justify the ambition of writing a social history that attempts to offer insights into long-term social trends and devote attention to regions outside the Western half of the continent within a comprehensive overview of Europe. This is, therefore, our objective in the following chapters.

An undertaking like this poses intricate questions to be answered and forces the author to make hard choices while writing the book. Thus, a few further remarks seem necessary concerning the approach and the subject as well as the limitations of the current volume. A major concern in such a work is how to conduct the analysis and present the results. One option is to focus on Europe at a supranational level and, thus, to use references to the particular societies to illustrate general tendencies. This method, often applied in historical overviews, allows us to highlight and elaborate on social trends and phenomena that we consider most crucial. But in this case, the argumentation necessarily lacks convincing empirical evidence and is hardly adequate for illuminating differences within Europe. Therefore, we do not consider this method fully adequate for our purposes. Another approach aims at a systematic analysis of the developments in various segments of particular national societies and even regions in order to draw conclusions with regard to general trends of development, as well as similarities and differences. This latter approach basically implies the consistent application of the comparative method. We consider comparisons to be useful for writing a social history of Europe, and the topics as well as the questions discussed do provide space for, and even require, such perspectives. However, it is obvious that the systematic application of the comparative approach to many societies multiplies the difficulties and even pitfalls inherent in comparisons, and also requires considerable technical apparatus and space. The number of societies in Europe is well beyond the scope that can be handled effectively by systematic comparisons, all the more so because the results are to be conveyed to the readers in an accessible way. Thus, with these considerations in mind, we strongly rely on comparisons, but they often cannot be applied systematically in the volume. Accordingly, we aim at a kind of combination of, or rather compromise between, the two approaches referred to above.

The study largely focuses on national societies, which undoubtedly raises significant concerns. This approach cannot account for several developments taking place within regional boundaries. Other processes, quite on the contrary, are of a transnational or supranational nature, crossing borders and superseding the authority and domain of nation states and individual societies. Thus, they can be comprehended only by focusing on the interaction and interdependence of particular national societies. At the same time, the nation state had a decisive role in the formation of many social institutions in the twentieth century, and there also exist practical reasons for relying on it as an essential unit of analysis. Information on most of the social phenomena is available with regard to nation states: they do not apply to the entire continent, nor are they broken down into regional units. Furthermore, building up from the regional level, to see if nation states can really be considered social units, would overburden the text, and thus, cannot simply be performed in a single volume. Still, we are aware that primarily dealing with nation states, and, nolens volens, assuming that they are societies, it is an approach that cannot account for significant dimensions of social change.

Another major question that the author of a social history of the continent should answer concerns the spatial scope of the coverage. Geographical definitions and boundaries are of little help in this case. Historical works tend to select their objects of analysis on the basis of social patterns, rather than by relying on geographical criteria. Moreover, if we want to keep the volume manageable, it seems necessary to set up certain limits in terms of the range of societies and regions discussed. The most important among these is that we focus on Western Europe, in a wider sense, together with East Central Europe, but Southern Europe and the Balkans are also included in the analysis as much as possible.

The inclusion of Russia/the Soviet Union and the Baltic states would definitely be justified as well. However, Russia/the Soviet Union constituted a world of its own, with sizeable internal diversity throughout the twentieth century, the analysis of which would require a lot of space and would further increase the complexity of the argumentation and would strain the structure of the work. In addition, for these regions, we simply do not have sufficient and reliable comparative data and other information in several social areas. Thus, the Baltic States, the Soviet Union and its successor states are not covered. This self-constraint is not unique: neither of the major social histories of Europe considers Russia/the Soviet Union and often even more general histories of Eastern Europe fully neglect Russia/the Soviet Union and the Baltic states.¹⁰ Nevertheless, we obviously do not intend to deny that the past of these regions constitutes an integral part of the history of Europe. Even within these constraints, a full coverage of European regions is not possible. Even if we intend to include as many societies as the availability of historical information permits, the logic and accessibility of argumentation also set limits, and we determine empirically, subject by subject, which societies are to be considered.

At this point, it is necessary to define the regions referred to in the volume. As a general rule, Western Europe includes North Western Europe (United Kingdom/ Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Ireland), Central Europe (Germany/FRG, Switzerland, and Austria) and Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland). Southern Europe refers to Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece; East Central Europe involves Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and South-Eastern Europe coincides with the Balkan region without Greece. We are well aware that these regional conceptualizations are artificial in many ways, because they fail to fully represent the common characteristics of societies as well as their relations, which were moreover prone to change over the twentieth century. However, the length of the examined period and the diversity of themes did not allow the concepts of regions to be fully consistently applied. Most of all, this is prevalent in the case of Southern Europe; Italy and Greece are the countries in case. However, these altogether negligible alterations are indicated if necessary.

Interdisciplinarity, as a due extension to the methods already referred to, is intended to be one of the most important approaches emerging in the work, that is, the discussion relies on the methods and results of a number of disciplines. In addition to history, these branches include, above all, sociology, demography, economics and political science. The ambition to be comparative and interdisciplinary also presents itself in the mode of presentation. The most obvious consequence is that we analyse the trends of European social history by extensively making use of quantitative evidence. In the meantime, we have to keep it in mind, on the one hand, that they might entail shortcomings concerning the comparability of available data, and on the other hand, that formal and quantitative similarities or differences are often misleading in terms of social functions. Besides statistical material, it is obvious that we apply the relevant research literature of the related disciplines mentioned above, which is sometimes scarce, although in other cases incomprehensibly abundant for a single author. The unevenness of research obviously surfaces in the volume as well. Finally, because of the limits of the study, we can cover the diverging positions present in the scholarly literature or the controversies about particular research issues only in a highly selective manner.

When structuring the book and choosing the aspects and themes of social history for analysis, we have not been led by the concerns of a particular social theory or approach, but intended to pragmatically include aspects prominently present in international research. Even if it is far from obvious which subjects qualify for this status, a review of the major publications and conferences of social history clearly identifies the themes most frequented by social historians. As the list of the chapters and subchapters reveals, we failed to fully cover all the important aspects of social history. In some cases, the author's expertise was responsible for this, in other cases already written chapters fell victim to limits of space. Last but not least, the particular subjects also had to lend themselves to empirical and comparative study, which excluded some topics as well, most importantly some cultural aspects, including changes in values and mentalities.

Temporal change is obviously a major concern of every historical work. Social historians are more committed to studying the long-term processes rather than focusing on specific events, and tend to emphasize that various historical processes operate on diverging scales of historical time. As a result, they do not necessarily expect any close alignment of periods of social history and other branches of the discipline, most eminently including political history. Thus, periodization in social history is usually not a keystone of research and, thereby, while selecting the demarcations of the book, we adhered to expediency again. The period discussed primarily covers the era between the First World War and the end of the century, but we aim at addressing the most important antecedents, as well as (mostly in a separate sub-chapter) the developments around the turn of the millennium.

As it may have already become clear from the above mentioned concerns, covering the social history of twentieth-century Europe in a single volume by a single author is a challenging task for a number of reasons. The period covered is long, and (even if we focus on the Western European and East Central European regions, with the limitations discussed above), the number of societies involved in the study is high. These circumstances alone make certain reductions necessary in terms of the depth of the discussion. Therefore, we hardly have to emphasize that there are limits to our analysis, some of which are consciously observed, whereas others are unintended. As has already been suggested, we could obviously not make up for the deficits of the available literature. The most conspicuous imbalance is of a chronological nature: because of the lack of available sources, we could devote less attention than necessary to how social trends evolved in the interwar period. In a number of fields of social history, no sufficient research has been conducted about the entire continent or at least major regions with regard to the first half of the century.

There have been several diverse and imaginative attempts by historians and particularly by other social scientists to conceptualize the social development of Europe in the twentieth century. We obviously cannot offer an overview, however brief it may be, of the relevant interpretations, because their number and complexity are extremely high. Referring to the end of the twentieth century alone, the terms surfacing most often in research and the public discourse include post-industrial society,¹¹ network society,¹² multi-cultural society,¹³ organiza...