![]()
EPILOGUE
Is social transnationalism fusing European societies into one?
Ettore Recchi
Introduction: one Europe for whom?
‘Europe’ – as such – is the main intercontinental travel destination of Chinese tourists. In 2016, 12 million visited from Mainland China, six times their number in 2000 (Artl 2016). The rise continues, as 2018 was announced by the EU and the Chinese government as the ‘EU–China Year of Tourism’ (whatever this may mean). More sophisticated and diversified than in the early 2000s, still the majority of Chinese tourists set foot on the Old Continent as part of an organised group package trip. On average they stay between one and three nights per country – overall visiting between five and ten different nations (Croce 2016). The Schengen visa (which costs €60) favours such cross-border travel, as it allows access to more than 20 countries with a single authorisation, and removes the perception of frontiers. On their way from one destination to the other, typically under strict timelines, Chinese tourists hardly have the impression of crossing national borders. In their eyes, Europe is one.
Contrast this with the experience of European movers. Their perceptions along with their hosts’ resonate with persisting cultural differences, language barriers, diverse cuisines, bureaucratic rules, sexual and family mores. It is true that passport controls have been removed since the 1990s (but have been reinstated more or less systematically since the Islamist attacks in France and Belgium in 2015) and most benefits of European citizenship have resisted the anti-EU wave that culminated in the Brexit referendum of 2016 (although not entirely: Carmel and Paul 2013; Heindlmaier and Blauberger 2017), but still EU citizens moving across member states can hardly overlook national borders. At the very least, they must not forget to bring medical insurance (or the European Health Insurance Card) and plug adapters with them, as well as subscribing to roaming plans for their smartphones and laptops in order to be able to connect to the internet.1 In short, other member states are still ‘abroad’ for the average European. Experientially, Europe continues to be made up of separate national societies, rather than being a ‘society’ in its own right.
Things have even worsened, compared to the first decade of the twenty-first century, when it comes to the rights of intra-EU migrants. Most obviously, while one small country (Croatia) joined the EU club, the single most important recipient of migration flows originating from within the EU – the UK – opted out of it. The full effects of Brexit on free movement rights and practices – as well as on many other issues – remain the subject of intergovernmental negotiations. However, preliminary evidence of the post-Brexit referendum shows a 25% decline in net migration from the Continent to the UK between March 2016 and March 2017, particularly fed by mounting numbers of migrant returns (ONS 2017). Additional red tape for European free movers in Britain was introduced in the aftermath of the referendum, when episodes of hostility against European residents also escalated. But even in earlier years a number of member states adopted laws that discriminated subtly against EU workers, transposing Directive 2004/38/EC on free movement rights in a piecemeal and politically opportunistic fashion (Shaw 2015). As a result, the social rights of EU movers with different combinations of origin and destination member states end up being quite significantly diverse (Bruzelius et al 2017; 2018). For instance, the UK started to require EU citizens to have comprehensive sickness insurance to qualify for permanent residency, while Denmark is reluctant to grant them a personal identification number (cpr nummer), which is the key to access many public services (Jacqueson 2016). At the same time, the European Court of Justice adopted a somewhat narrower interpretation of free movement rights, opposing unconditional access to national social benefits (Blauberger and Schmidt 2014) and, overall, making it harder for national administrations to stick to unequivocal standards (Blauberger and Schmidt 2017; Thym 2017).
Demographics tell us that the stock of Europeans on the move – either ephemerally, as tourists or visitors, or more stably, as foreign residents – from one EU member state to another has been growing uninterruptedly since the mid-1990s, having accelerated after the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2008 (Recchi 2015). However, the paths of everyday cross-border living in Europe have become bumpier in the second decade of the 2000s. As the European Commission admits (2017, 33), ‘there has been a clear increase since 2012 in the number of Europeans who say they have experienced some form of [nationality-based] discrimination’. But is this a contingency or a trend reversal, after half a century of incremental advancements in European integration?
To address the issue, I take back a key question of the sociology of European integration (Kaelble 1987; Therborn 1995; Mendras 1997; Boje et al 1999, 2013; Bettin Lattes and Recchi 2005; Diez Medrano 2008; Outhwaite 2008; Favell and Guiraudon 2011): Are we heading towards a fusion or a fission of European societies? In search of an answer, I will examine four distinct dimensions that define the contours of established societies, bringing them more or less close to one another (and which could eventually lead to them fusing into a single one). I will then delve into empirical evidence accounting for the directions of change in each of these dimensions.
Unpacking ‘society’: four critical dimensions
If we are to assess the chances of the formation of a unified, single European society, we need first to define the basic concept we are dealing with – ‘society’. What makes a collective of human beings sharing a given territory one or more ‘societies’? This question can open a Pandora’s box of handbook-like definitions stemming from the classics of sociology (and particularly drawing on Talcott Parsons [1951]). Let us limit ourselves to highlighting two main defining criteria: boundaries (the external criterion) and functioning (the internal criterion). On the one hand, societies are (perceived to be, and thus are) finite realities; their politically constructed borders contain the bulk of social relations and are relatively uncontroversial.2 Politics, at least in the modern world, is what cuts human groupings into pieces called ‘societies’. On the other hand, not all territorially distinct pieces can claim to function as ‘societies’. Some degree of organisation is needed. First of all, any society is endowed with levels of capabilities (wealth, income, institutional support) that are distributed hierarchically among individuals and groups in a relatively stable pattern – what is sometime referred as the social structure. This reflects a society-specific management of social inequality. Alongside, there are typical norms and practices that form rather unique mixes that distinguish one society from another – for instance, nutrition, sexuality, family arrangements, intergenerational relations, religion, collective behaviours, leisure. In turn, these norms and practices, especially when persisting over time and generations, contribute to shape a sense of belonging and shared destiny – the we-ness or identification that, again, draws the line from one society to another. To sum up, a society responds to the following constitutive conditions:
1.A politico-territorial condition: finite territorial borders.
2.A sociostructural condition: established patterns of resource allocation (that is, social inequality).
3.A sociocultural condition: typical norms and practices.
4.An identitarian condition: shared sense of belonging.
These broad conditions stand out as blueprints of human societies. At the end of the day, in the modern era they largely equate with the public notion of ‘nation’ stripped of its ideological features. ‘Society’ is indeed the underlying, organised, everyday manifestation of an ‘imagined community’ of people, to use Benedict Anderson’s (1983) famous formula. The four conditions apply straightforwardly to single out, for instance, US society. Everybody knows where the borders of the United States lie, and that the borders between federal states are less salient than the borders with Mexico and Canada; the distribution of wealth, income and public benefits in the US population is quite specific – almost unique; there are rituals, lifestyle habits, celebrations that are recognised as all-American; people call themselves ‘Americans’. Briefly, these four features are sufficient to identify the conception of a given society that implicitly or explicitly is held by most ordinary people of our times.3
Correspondingly, one single European society would emerge if, and only if, we could detect:
a.EU borders as uncontroversial and symbolically more important than member state borders.
b.A common, EU-wide template of social inequality.
c.A set of standard social practices and norms that are present everywhere.
d.‘Europe’ as a widespread object of self-identification.
Arguably, none of these conditions holds as I write – as they did not about a decade ago when Díez Medrano (2008) discussed a similar set of criteria.4 These elements are not ‘black and white’, though. They are also problematic to measure, potentially including an array of aspects of social life – in particular as regards practices and norms. Before engaging in this exercise, in the next section I will outline the three sociopolitical processes that are likely to advance or push back the potential advent of one European society at some point in the future on these four crucial fronts of societal organisation and recognition.
Specifying ‘social change’: three ongoing processes
Social change is a large – maybe too large – umbrella concept that captures all trends affecting social organisation and relations. Many such trends are discernible in the contemporary world, or in some areas of it. I concentrate here on three general processes that are arguably at work across the European space.
The first one – centralisation – has to do with the distribution of political power in the EU. European integration has articulated the pre-existing picture, which hinged on the state, creating a multi-layered governance with a nested power structure from local government to supranational institutions – namely, the European Union (Bartolini 2005). To complicate things further, the latter is a bundle of organisms, some of which are not even formally enshrined in a constitutionally clear form of government – think in particular of the European Central Bank, which is nonetheless key to monetary policy all over the euro area.
In its earliest incarnation, the Coal and Steel Community of 1951, European integration was all about pooling resources and steering their access and use centrally. It was a top-down project, with a firm monitoring of economic activities and a clear political intent – controlling any temptation to funnel raw materials to nationalistic (if not military) use. Such a blueprint has never since disappeared from the history of European integration. Note that centralisation of power in Europe is only apparently at odds with the aim of ‘rescuing nation states’ (Milward et al 2000). The very existence of a coordinating super partes polity legitimates the persistence of otherwise more conflict-prone and thus vulnerable political orders – that is, European nation states. Brussels absorbs, buffers, serves as a scapegoat for unpopular policies. Whether to relieve national legislatures from painful and divisive decision-making issues, sustain market integration, or improve member states’ coordination games, the corpus of EU legislation has expanded and incorporated policy areas traditionally in the grasp of the national state. Even domains formally left to member states have been touched by the sweeping force of a top-down reformatting according to a common template. A good example is the Bologna Process: technically not a EU policy, but a coordinated EU-wide effort to align higher education’s organisational rules. As a by-product, national legislations have harmonised over time. This is ‘Europeanisation’, in the ‘vertical’ notion that is dear to political scientists (Radaelli 2003), rather than the ‘horizontal’ one on which sociologists have sought to focus (Favell and Guiraudon 2011; Mau and Mewes 2012; see also Trenz 2016). But such harmonisation is premised logically on a transfer of power to a pivotal authority – the EU. Europeanisation entails centralisation, at least in terms of coordination if not transfer of authority.
Attempts to measure and track ‘Europeanisation’ over time are prevailingly country-based and, in a nutshell, conceptually and methodologically controversial (Müller et al 2010; Töller 2010; Brouard et al 2011). Without entering into the details, however, the prevailing message of these studies point to a growing capacity of the EU to set and steer the agenda for national legislation. According to König and Ohr (2013), for instance, member states’ ‘institutional conformity’ to EU law (measured mostly on the basis of infringement procedures) has slightly increased in the EU15 between 1999 and 2010. In the long term, it is hard to deny that there has been a process of centralisation of policy making in Europe, although not in all realms or with uniform speed (Bickerton 2012).
On paper, I expect the centralisation of political power in Europe to enhance the salience of EU borders, as legal differences between member states get smoothed out; to promote norms, and consequently social practices, that are shared throughout the EU; to nurture a sense of common destiny among individuals living far apart but abiding by the same legislation. In fact, vertical Europeanisation is not necessarily an instrument of equalisation of living standards across the continent (as argued by Beckfield 2006).
The second major process of social change – imitation – takes place in part independently from political phenomena (and not only in Europe). This notion, as is well known, was first introduced into the sociological vocabulary by Gabriel Tarde (1890). In contemporary sociology, it undergirds the idea of isomorphism as a pervasive vehicle of social functioning and diffusion (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Strang and Meyer 1993). Both in Tarde’s original formulation and in more recent literature on isomorphism, imitation can work either top-down or bottom-up – if driven by elites or the wider public.
Analytically, imitation encapsulates two different but overlapping processes. On the one hand, it entails isomorphism in beliefs and behaviours: people living in distinct societies show a tendency to adopt – even without direct contact – the same ways of thinking and living. Media and advertising promote such uniform...
