Rethinking Europe

Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization

Gerard Delanty, Chris Rumford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134277933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Dominant approaches to the transformation of Europe ignore contemporary social theory interpretations of the nature and dynamics of social change. Here, Delanty and Rumford argue that we need a theory of society in order to understand Europeanization. This book advances the case that Europeanization should be theorized in terms of:

• globalization
• major social transformations that are not exclusively spear-headed by the EU
• the wider context of the transformation of modernity.

This fascinating book broadens the terms of the debate on Europeanization, conventionally limited to the supersession of the nation-state by a supra-national authority and the changes within member states consequent upon EU membership.

Demonstrating the relevance of social theory to contemporary issues and with a focus on European transformation rather than simplistic notions of Europe-building, this truly multidisciplinary volume will appeal to readers from a range of social science disciplines, including sociology, geography, political science and European studies.

1 Theorizing Europeanization

Towards a constructivist theory of society

In recent years Europe has become an object of research and consciousness, but it has not been adequately theorized. Given the number of studies that now refer to Europe this may appear to be an extreme claim. Current theorizing on Europeanization is primarily concerned with conceptualizing the emerging shape of the European polity (see Chryssochoou, 2001b; Wiener and Diez, 2004). Missing from the existing literature is a concern with European society, that is with the cultural presuppositions and societal structures and processes by which social relations are constituted. Although social and cultural issues are coming to play an increasingly prominent role in studies on Europeanization, there is not yet anything like a theory of society in sight comparable to the theory of the state. Institutional processes and policy-making overshadow anything like a theory of society. Certainly there is a strong sociological interest in comparative studies of European societies, that is in comparisons of different national societies. But a theory of society in terms of a theory of the social is on the whole absent.

In this chapter an attempt is made to outline a conception of Europeanization in terms of a theory of society beyond national societies. To achieve this it will be necessary to move beyond the limits of institutional and empirical-comparative approaches which presuppose national societies. To an extent philosophical and historical studies on the idea of Europe offer some new perspectives, but on the whole the insights from such studies have not been incorporated into social scientific theorizing (Nelson et al., 1992; Mikkeli, 1998; Morin, 1987; Pagden, 2002; Viehoff and Segers, 1999). Major social theory conceptions of Europe such as those of Castells and Habermas have not led to middle range theories. Habermas's work on Europeanization is predominantly a normative political philosophy which, unlike his earlier work, is not concerned with social scientific analysis. As a result, the normative dimension is not linked with a theory of society.

According to Julia Kristeva (2000), in a view that is now widely shared, Europe must become not just useful, but also meaningful. The normative conception of society that this entails has rarely been considered and yet is implicit in notions of cultural identity, and the European model of society. According to Jeremy Rifkin, there is now a ‘European dream’ in the making and which will rival the ‘American dream’ in its capacity to articulate a new vision of society (Rifkin, 2004). What is being implied in these views is that the European project cannot be separated from normative considerations.

The central thrust of the position advocated in this book is broadly a social constructivist conception of Europeanization. This theory of society gives particular weight to the diverse ways in which the social is constructed under conditions that are not fixed or reducible to institutional structures. Unlike neo-functionalist approaches, it does not explain Europeanization simply by reference to national governments operating within an international functional order. A social constructivist approach highlights the multiple ways social reality is continuously created in processes that cannot be reduced to either agency or structures. It is an approach that places particular emphasis on globalization and the historical process of modernity as the context in which Europeanization operates and also draws attention to the cultural foundations of politics and norm building processes.

Why a theory of society?

The difficulties with such a task cannot be underestimated. In the last two decades or so there has been a move away from the traditional concerns of social theory around a normative theory of society. Indeed, many theorists – Urry, Latour, Moscovici, Touraine, Baudrillard, Luhmann – have denied the very coherence of the idea of society. In these approaches, society as a fixed and objective reality has been replaced by global flows and mobilities, networks between diverse things, by forms of collective action, communities of interest, cultural discourses, self-constructing systems – these seem to be the messages from a variety of approaches on the fate of the social. The position taken in this book is that such developments, which are centrally concerned with globalization, do not mark the obsolescence of the social, but bring about new configurations of it (Gane, 2004: 8). The social cannot be equated with national societies for the reasons that have been most accurately spelt out in John Urry's book on mobilities; it is not a territorially bounded entity, but shaped through dynamics and processes that can take variable forms (Urry, 2000a). Although Urry declares the redundancy of the term ‘society’ in favour of an exclusive focus on mobilities, this is not the only conclusion (Mellor, 2004). Accepting the basic argument that we have entered an age in which many of the assumptions of classical sociology – the notion of the objectivity of society or the idea that sociology is concerned with objects that are to be understood only in relation to the intentions of social actors, for instance – have to be questioned in light of the contingency, transience and uncertainty that has been a feature of recent theorizing. To drop the term ‘society’ in favour of another term is not the most helpful solution. The social is changing its form rather than disappearing and is therefore open to new definitions.

In arguing for the need for a theory of society, we are not demanding a return to ‘grand social theory’, but rather looking to what Robert Merton called middle range theories to explain the current situation. Nevertheless, one important aspect of what might be called grand social theory is still of relevance: the concern with a normative foundation of society. Moreover, a normative conception of society cannot be conceived in isolation from a consideration of the cultural foundations of politics and of the historical process of modernity. The debate about post-national society in the context of Europeanization offers a particularly interesting opportunity to rethink the concept of society in a way that critically engages with the classical tradition and contemporary developments in social theory.

There are at least three reasons why we need to have a theory of society in order to understand Europeanization. First, if Europe is to be meaningful, as opposed to merely useful, there is a basic normative problem that cannot be solved without a theory of society. Classical social theory from Marx and Hegel through Spencer, Durkheim and Weber to Parsons and Habermas has always presupposed a normative conception of the social order, that is in some sense a notion of the ‘good society’. Although these conceptions of the social order have greatly varied – from critical to affirmative to speculative utopian stances – they tended on the whole to be based on what might be called national imaginaries that express the institutional and normative structures of society. Since the rise of globalization theory and postmodernism in the 1980s there has been a questioning of the assumptions of such imaginaries, along with a growing scepticism of autonomy. It was therefore inevitable that theories of Europeanization would not give a central place to the traditional normative concerns of classical social theory. While there is some evidence to suggest that there is a new interest in normative political theory applied to the European polity (Friese and Wagner, 2002; Habermas, 2001a; Bohman, 2005), there is a noticeable absence of any concern with an underlying theory of society. But these approaches in any case are exceptions. The discourse of Europeanization is dominated by superficial metaphors suggesting a teleological project legitimated by grand EU narratives, such as ‘widening’ and ‘deepening’ or ‘ever closer union’; vague, if not inaccurate, sociological terms, such as ‘integration’ and ‘inclusion’, and morphological metaphors such as ‘multi-levelled’ governance.

Second, in order to explain the cultural and epochal significance of major social transformations we need a theory of society. This was one of the basic insights of the sociology of Max Weber and, under the changed circumstances of the present time, is still of relevance. It is simply not possible to explain major European transformations alone by reference to changes in the nature of statehood, such as sovereignty, citizenship and constitutions. Obviously this is to make the assumption that major social transformations are occurring in the very nature of modernity. This seems a valid assumption to make, for there can be little doubt that the project of European integration has brought about large-scale social, economic and political change. Along with the worldwide impact of Americanization, wider processes of globalization, generational changes and major shifts in values and identities and socio-cognitive structures, Europe is undergoing significant change. The basic point made here is that a theory of changes in the nature of the state will not explain the epochal significance of the social changes that are occurring (see Balibar, 1991). For this reason a theory of society is required. A great deal of recent literature has tended to focus on citizenship as a partial attempt to deal with some of these normative and sociological issues. However, the concern with citizenship, while producing many valuable insights especially in the direction of post-national membership (see Eder and Giesen, 2001; Soysal, 1994), has tended to reduce the salience of society to late-liberal theorizing on rights and duties. The concept of citizenship has been over-worked as a sociologically useful term to fully capture the most significant aspects of the current situation, which go beyond the question of the participation of the citizen in the polity (see Chapter 5).

Third, in the context of Europeanization there is much evidence to suggest that there are new processes and dynamics occurring beyond the limits of national societies. While a European society as such is not necessarily occurring, it is evident that the European social space is becoming increasingly more salient (see Chapters 6 and 7). This emerging social order cannot be fully understood by reference to traditional comparative methods of analysis which all presuppose national societies and their convergence. It is possible to speak of an emerging European public sphere, overlapping and shared social and cultural worlds, a growing consciousness of Europeaness, transnational complexes, and interconnected economies. Such developments suggest the salience of a theory of society. The problem of, in Norman Davies's terms, ‘what is European history’ is now also a sociological problem, namely ‘what is European society’ (Davies, 1996). In an invaluable study, Cris Shore has attempted to refute the possibility of the European Union ever creating anything comparable to national society (Shore, 2000). Shore is undoubtedly correct for the greater part; however, this anthropologically based argument is premised on the assumption that Europeanization is akin to nationalization and should be judged by reference to the normative assumptions of the nation-state. So long as Europeanization is seen as another version of nation-building, that is, as an exercise in supra-nation building, the current state of theorizing on Europeanization will not move beyond a discussion on whether the European Union can compete with the nation-state. A new theory of society will need to address a wider range of issues that take account of transformative dynamics and processes, including new social models, socio-cognitive structures and normative ideals (Balibar, 2004; Eder and Giesen, 2001; Haller, 2000; Therborn, 1995b).

Following on from this, we can identify three distinctive features of the theory of society advanced here as it relates to Europeanization. First, it does not assume a necessary link between European integration/EU and European society. Approaches to the question of European society tend to assume that society exists at the national level but is absent at the European level. Recent thinking on European integration has tended to see the absence of European society as a problem (Armstrong, 2001; Closa, 2001) and that the public legitimacy of the EU and the ‘democratic deficit’ can only be improved through the institution of European society. Framing the question of European society in this way encourages the view that European society, to the extent that it exists or may exist in the future, will be a product of EU integration. In contrast, we assert that society is an area that lies beyond the scope of the EU project and we must move beyond functionalist and civil society models of society, which suggest that society exists as a corollary of the state and needs to be domesticated by it. The relationship between state and society (inasmuch as they can be conceived as separate realms) is much more complex and contradictory than suggested by the notion of civil society. Societies, even those located within nation-states, are not fixed and bounded entities but are in a constant state of transformation and becoming. Europeanization is properly identified with the dynamics of society while at the same time society is being constituted by Europeanization. In this sense there is a fundamental tension at the heart of Europeanization, which can be seen as a reflection of the fundamental tension within modernity: the tension between open and closed systems of integration and differentiation; or, between the logic of institutions and resistances from the social field, for example, EU treaties on the one side and on the other the revolutions of 1989/90 which together have shaped the face of Europe.

Second, our theory of society places Europe and the EU within the global frame. In short, the only meaningful way of studying the transformation of society is by understanding the global dimensions of society. There are several components to this. As mentioned above, societies can no longer be easily regulated or bounded by national states. There are many global influences which work to make societies less nationally cohesive, including telecommunications, flows of capital, population migrations, and transnational solidarities of ethnicity and belief. Moreover, the idea of global society has gained fresh impetus in a world in which awareness of a world risk society (Beck, 1999) is stronger than ever, and in which cosmopolitan identifications can rest on foundations more solid than an invocation of an idealized world citizenship (Held, 2002; Linklater, 2002; Chandler, 2003). In this context, it should be mentioned that the rise to popularity of the idea of global civil society (Keane, 2003) has given momentum to the notion that society has a transnational or global dimension, and the relationship between state and society is undergoing massive transformation. As such, there are many good reasons to suppose that European society cannot be conceived apart from global society. If Europeanization is located in societal transformation, the dynamics of this transformation are global rather than European. Notwithstanding the regulatory power of the EU, Europeanization is occurring within world society.

Third, we advance the position that the idea of society provides an important resource for both social theory and for thinking about contemporary Europe (see also Mellor, 2004). Society as a normative construct is the necessary social context for any debate on rights, justice, citizenship, belonging, and identity. Understandings of what constitutes society, how it can be transformed, and to what ends, will always be the subject of contested reasoning. In contemporary thinking, contestation over society has become dominated by the notion of civil society, and it is noticeable that at the core of much recent thinking on European society (or its absence) has been a presumed nexus between supra-national institutions, citizenship, and civil society (Soysal, 2001). Similarly civil society has come to dominate discussion of the ‘good society’ (Edwards, 2004). We argue, that the notion of civil society is too limiting to be of use in elucidating the nature and dynamics of European society, recent work on transnational and global civil society notwithstanding (see Chapter 10).

In sum, in order to understand the nature of European material, cultural and political realities today a theory of society is needed. In the course of this chapter the basics of such a theory will be outlined. It will suffice to mention at this point that our approach can be roughly described in meta-theoretic terms as a social constructivist one; that is an approach that sees society as constructed by social actors and public discourses under the manifold conditions of globalization. What emerges out of these processes is often unclear and highly contingent and needs to be understood more fully from the perspective of a wider theory of modernity. But we can say that Europe is being socially constructed out of disparate projects, discourses, models of societies, imaginaries and in conditions of contestation, resistances and diffused through processes of globalization. What is being claimed in this is that Europeanization is a process of social construction rather than one of state building and one in which globalization, in all its facets, plays a key role in creating its conditions. A social constructivist approach draws attention to contestation and also to reflexivity since social actors and discourses are often reflexively constituted. The argument to be developed goes beyond this in also clarifying normative issues. The thesis is that there are cosmopolitan currents evident in globalization and that these are particularly articulated in certain processes of Europeanization (see Beck, 2003).

At this point it can be stated that the term ‘Europeanization’ will be used instead of the more conventional term ‘European integration’. The latter has too strong connotations of cohesion to be useful and does not make clear the different dimensions of integration, for example functional integration in terms of market integration or democratic integration (Calhoun, 2003). Europeanization itself is a term which has been employed in many different ways in recent literature, and no consensus on its meaning exists. Although it remains a ‘fuzzy concept’ (Jachtenfuchs and Kohler-Koch, 2004) in the most common usage it denotes the processes by which national politics and/or policy processes are increasingly dominated by EU agendas and/or the ways in which EU norms are domesticated in member (and non-member) states: in short, ‘domestic changes caused by European integration’ (Vink, 2003). It is common to encounter references to the Europeanization of domestic politics and in this sense Europeanization implies the intrusion of EU issues and priorities into national political decision making (Imig and Tarrow, 2001). Europeanization is not simply a one-way process however and the extent to which national actors mobilize at a European level is also seen to be a marker of Europeanization (Ladrech, 2002; Statham and Gray, 2005).

Other usages of Europeanization point in the direction of social transformation (Tarrow, 1995). In this sense, it can denote a reorganization of territoriality and peoplehood (not limited to the EU) leading to a new social and political order (Borneman and Fowler, 1997). Alternatively, it can refer to a multi-dimensional process of transformation which goes beyond the EU's institutions to embrace a concern with networks and boundaries, the export of the EU model, and the inter-penetration of national systems (Bach, 2000; Olsen, 2002). Featherstone (2003: 20–1) sees Europeanization as a series of processes which includes, but goes beyond, national adaptation to the dynamics of EU integration. On this view, Europeanization includes the emergence of cross-national policy networks and communities and shifts in ‘cognition, discourse, and identity’. These features of Europeanization are conceived as responses to European developments within a multi-levelled polity. This highlights a general tendency to see Europeanization in solipsistic terms: a global dimension or context is absent. Whilst recognizing that the term Europeanization is becoming overused and under-theorized in much the same way as European integration has been, there are still good reasons to use the term, not least of which is the (minority) tradition of equating Europeanization with social transformation. Europeanization, as employed in this book, signals the following: a concern to go beyond institutional frameworks to examine the dynamics of society; an awareness of the importance of cultural dynamics; the centrality of contestations generated by multiple perspectives on issues central to European transformation; the importance of a global context for understanding European developments; and a dissatisfaction with the ways in which questions of European transformation have been framed within political science discourses on the EU.

Finally, it must be noted that global perspective will also entail what Dipesh Chakarbarty has called ‘deprovencializing Euro...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Rethinking Europe
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Theorizing Europeanization: towards a constructivist theory of society
• 2 History, modernity, and the multiple conceptions of Europe: European transformation in historical perspective
• 3 Is there a European identity? European self-understanding beyond unity and diversity
• 4 What does it mean to be a ‘European’? The possibility of cosmopolitan loyalties
• 5 The new cultural logic of Europeanization: citizenship, memory, and public discourse
• 6 The European Social Model: from welfare state to learning society and beyond
• 7 Organizing European space: borderlands, ‘undivided Europe’ and spatiality beyond territory
• 8 The European Union as non-state: the spatialization of EU governance
• 9 Towards a European polity? Europe meets the world
• 10 Rethinking European society: the global civil society context
• Conclusion: towards a cosmopolitan Europe
• Notes
• References
• Index