European Societies Today

Inequality, Diversity, Divergence

James Wickham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138386907
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429761256
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Politica

This accessible new text introduces students to contemporary European societies by examining structures of inequality, making sense of the empirical and historical contexts.

Focusing on seven differing European societies (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the UK), it examines the different ways in which sociology and political economy understand the social structure of contemporary Europe. Separate chapters outline key aspects of inequality, beginning with income, wealth and poverty, followed by occupation and social class, gender, regional inequality, ethnicity, and migration. By focusing on the role of the national welfare states of Europe in restraining economic inequality, the book enables a realistic appraisal of the 'European Social Model'.

Key features:

• Examines European 'distinctiveness' and difference;
• Visual presentation of data accessibly informs the reader about distinctive features of specific societies;
• Comparative approach extends to evaluate the extent to which Europe differs from the USA;
• Illustrates how the UK's half-hearted relationship to 'Europe' is not just a matter of history or politics but also of contemporary social structure;
• Key in-text features include discussion topics and key readings.

This textbook will be essential reading for students of European studies, European politics, European societies, social inequality/structure, European welfare and policy and more broadly to sociology and public policy and administration.

1 Where is Europe anyway?

In global terms, Europe is distinctive because of the European Social Model: our unique combination of market economy, parliamentary democracy and national welfare states.

The chapter begins by tracing the emergence of Europe as a distinct place. The second part identifies some basic features of contemporary Europe in relation to the rest of the world: its wealth, its apparent demographic crisis, its peacefulness, its institutions that cross national borders. The third part outlines economic inequalities within European societies and contrasts them with the situation in the USA in the context of global inequality. The fourth section tells two contrasting stories. The European Social Model has been the specific way in which European national states have been integrated as national societies and in the past this has been consolidated by the EU. Today, however, many critics argue that the European Stability Mechanism (the economic governance of the Union) actually undermines the European Social Model. Consequently the relationship between Europe and the EU is problematic.

1.1 Boundaries

Figure 1.1 Europe and the EU 2019

Source: European Commission http://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/index_en.htm © European Union, 1995–2015 Member states of the European Union as of December 2019 Accession date in brackets; Eurozone members in bold; non-Schengen in italic Belgium (1958), France (1958), Germany (1958), Italy (1958), Luxembourg (1958), Netherlands (1958), Denmark (1973), Ireland (1973), United Kingdom (1973), Greece (1981), Portugal (1986), Spain (1986), Austria (1995), Finland (1995), Sweden (1995), Cyprus (2004), Czech Republic (2004), Estonia (2004), Hungary (2004), Latvia (2004), Lithuania (2004), Malta (2004), Poland (2004), Slovakia (2004), Slovenia (2004), Bulgaria (2007), Romania (2007), Croatia (2013). Non-EU Schengen states: Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway, Switzerland

Europe is a geographical term, and at first sight this appears comforting: Europe is ‘that place’ on the map (Figure 1.1). Yet this taken-for-granted Europe leads to a historical question: How and when did Europe become Europe? The historical emergence of Europe as a distinct social space appears to have been achieved by the Early Middle Ages. Centuries later, a brief period of global dominance entwined Europe with the very notion of global modernity. In the current epoch European distinctiveness is more prosaically interwoven with the existence of the EU.

Emergence of Europe

European history often starts with the ancient world of Greece and Rome. In this world in which Rome and later Constantinople were fed from the granaries of North Africa and Egypt, Europe as we know it today did not exist. The Islamic invasions of the 7th century finally destroyed this Mediterranean system (Abulafia 2011: 241). On the one hand, the expansion of Islam after its foundation in the 7th century isolated what would later be Europe from the more sophisticated civilisations to the East. In that sense Islam was responsible for the creation of its opposite, ‘Christian Europe’ (Davies 1997: 257). On the other, Western Europe only became a distinct area once the Islamic invasion from the South had been defeated at the battle of Poitiers in 732. In this space a distinctive socio-political system developed (Wickham 2005), expanding back into modern Spain through the reconquista and the final expulsion of the ‘Moors’ in 1492.

Unlike the empires to the East, this emerging Europe was not a single polity. However, it is clear that during the Middle Ages a common political system and a common identity of ‘Christendom’ developed in the area dominated by the Latin Church (Simms 2013). For centuries the remnants of the Byzantine Empire shielded this emerging Europe from Muslim conquest (Herrin 2008: 267). However, Constantinople finally fell in 1453. The Balkans and modern Greece were absorbed into the still expanding Ottoman Empire, which remained undefeated by Christian forces until the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. In 1683 the Turkish siege of Vienna was lifted, and in 1686 Budapest was liberated from the Turks (and its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants systematically massacred). For the next two-and-a-half centuries Europe expanded eastwards and south-eastwards as Hungary and the Balkans were reconquered. In the Danube lands and the Mediterranean, Europe continued to be defined against Islam.

Europe as the modern world

In the North and West there were other concerns, even if until the end of the 18th century British seafarers’ main fear was still that they might be captured and enslaved by Barbary (Muslim) corsairs (Colley 2002: 44). While still being invaded from the East, in the West from the 15th century onwards Europeans became the invaders. Colonisation often meant massive emigration – the ‘Great White Plague’ (Ferguson 2003: 59) in which Europeans exterminated or marginalised indigenous peoples – and created European societies overseas.

The expansion involved not only conquest but also slavery and racialisation. By the end of the 19th century the European powers claimed the right to annex any remaining areas of the world in Africa and in Asia and even in China. Europe – and its overseas offshoots – defined itself against the rest of the world: the modern world was the European world (Outhwaite 2008). Nineteenth-century colonialism even eroded the Mediterranean as Europe’s southern border. First annexed in 1830, Algeria was officially part of metropolitan France until the bloody war of independence ended in 1962 (Evans 2012).

By the end of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire had become in many ways part of the European state system. The Armenian genocide of 1916–17 (Rogan 2015: 159) prefigured the population exchanges and ethnic cleansing at the end of the Greek-Turkish war (1918–22): in the new Turkish Republic ‘nation’ and ‘state’ were to be isomorphic on the new European model. The Europeanness of Turkey is debated by Turks and non-Turks. Just as in Russia, one story of modern Turkey is its definition as Western and European, while another narrative makes this a betrayal of its true identity. De Gaulle invoked ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’ and rather later, Gorbachev envisaged glasnost ensuring Russia’s place in ‘our common European home’. Nineteenth-century Russian literature and music may have shaped the European canon (Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky) but today the Europeanness of Russia remains debated. Europe’s borders are geographically ambiguous.

Europe as the European Union

If Europe is historically created, so too are its divisions. Until 1989 the Iron Curtain bisected the continent. Within that bipolar world, the centre of gravity for the European countries of the Eastern bloc lay to the East. Their trade was oriented eastwards, their foreign language was Russian, Moscow was their political centre. For nearly fifty years cities such as Prague or Dresden were part of another world, so that for Western Europe 1989 marked a reclaiming of lands that had been lost. Countries such as Poland, Hungary or (then) Czechoslovakia ceased being in ‘Eastern Europe’ and apparently moved to ‘Central Europe’.

In the last half century ‘Europe’ has become increasingly identified with the EU. The European Economic Community (EEC) was founded in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome. The politicians who brought it into being, above all Jean Monnet, saw its original six members (France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy) as the building blocks of a political union; for them the Common Market was the first step towards a United States of Europe. They assumed that the small steps of economic union would almost imperceptibly lead to their grand objective of political union. This belief was taken up in the first academic attempts to understand ‘European integration’. The ‘neo-functionalist’ approach argued that harmonisation in one area of the states’ activities would ‘spill over’ into others (Rosamond 2000). In 2018 the EU included 28 nation states, including all of Western Europe and Scandinavia with the exception of Switzerland and Norway. The EU is now both larger and less integrated than its founders would have anticipated. At the same time, the departure of the UK from the EU signals that for many of its inhabitants the island of Britain is no longer (if it ever was) fully part of ‘Europe’.

Box 1.1 An unidentified political object?

This was the description of the EU by Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission, 1985–95.

The age of European nation states is often dated from the Treaty of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War in Germany in 1648. The Treaty established the principle that states were completely sovereign within their own territory; the borders of the state delimited a single homogenous judicial space: anyone entering this territory was subject to the laws of this state and to those of no other. Because the EU ends this complete legal autonomy of each member state, European states are clearly ‘post-Westphalian’. Yet at the same time the EU is not a ‘United States of Europe’ that is just a scaled up version of the existing national states or a federal state (like the USA). It is a novel political system.

Each new state that joins the EU has had to completely accept the acquis communitaire (the cumulative legislation of the EU). Utterly unlike Americans, Europeans participate in the rights and duties of other legal institutions ‘above’ the nation state. Europeans can appeal over the heads of their national government not only to the EU (in particular to the European Court of Justice), but also to the European Court of Human Rights, a supra-national legal system within Europe which predates the European Community and remains separate from the EU. It is a system of multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks 2001) in which power resides at different levels, from the sub-national to the supra-national, without any one level having complete power (Box 1.1).

Lines drawn on a map may be reassuringly definitive but have only limited connection to any socio-political entity that could be called Europe. And even after some place called Europe had been created, its boundaries remained moveable and curiously difficult to pin down. The empirical extent to which the people living in this place called Europe consider themselves European – as opposed to or as well as members of a nation state – will be one theme of the final chapter.

1.2 Commonalities

Historians can trace the emergence of Europe, but there are more sociological reasons for making ‘Europe’ an object of study. Firstly, it is claimed that processes such as migration and mobility (e.g. Favell 2008) now operate across the area (rather than in parallel within its different parts) and therefore comprise Europeanisation. Secondly, at least some of the inhabitants of the area may share a common identity. This sense of ‘we’ may focus on common features of the societies rather than national identity per se – it is often suggested that ‘our’ shared welfare state heritage is something Europeans know makes ‘us’ different from ‘them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Where is Europe anyway?
• 2. From industrial society to the knowledge-based economy
• 3. European capitalisms
• 4. Economic inequality and the welfare state
• 5. Money, markets and wealth
• 6. Occupations and social classes
• 7. Gender and socio-economic inequality
• 8. Spatial inequality: Europe of the regions
• 9. Mobility from/to/within Europe
• 10. Ethnic diversity and the national welfare state
• 11. Conclusion: the end of the European social model before it began?
• Index