Inclusions and Exclusions in European Societies

Martin Kohli, Alison Woodward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415463294
• eBook ISBN: 9781134510054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

European social development over the last century has been characterized by an increasing inclusiveness of people into the ever-larger collectives of the nation state, the European Union and categories of welfare entitlement. Yet recent empirical data suggests that income gaps are growing and that within the physical borders of Europe there is a greater cultural and ethnic heterogeneity than ever before. Effectively, many of the processes of inclusion are accompanied by exclusion and the creation of new borders, identities and rights.

Inclusions and Exclusions in European Societies features eminent contributors from across Europe addressing the problems of inclusion and exclusion as they affect European societies today. Amongst the topics addressed are:

• to what extent classical theory provides useful ways of reframing European societies
• which inequalities in work and welfare persist today and in what ways they have been transformed in processes of European integration
• how considerations of new identities and the pressure of globalisation affect the forms of inclusion and exclusion in Europe.

This book constitutes a unique stock-taking of many of the central issues in European social integration or disintegration today.

1 European societies

Inclusions/exclusions?

Alison Woodward and Martin Kohli

Inclusions and exclusions are not necessarily opposites. In sociological terms the two are intricately linked, leading to contradictions and paradoxes. Twentiethcentury European social development has been characterized by an increasing inclusion of its people into the expanding collectivities of nationally based welfare entitlement pools and political bodies, and ultimately European-wide citizenships. At the same time, some countries have demonstrated growing income gaps and cultural cleavages, and increasing numbers of people have been threatened by poverty, excluding them from economic and social wellbeing. At the level of differences among countries, similar contradictions can be noted. Socio-economic conditions have greatly improved for some of the newer members of the European Union such as Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain, while the drama of transformation in Eastern Europe has resulted in massive losses. Inclusion in the European process does not necessarily lead to an expansion of internal social inclusions; in countries such as Sweden and Finland it has been paralleled by a retrenchment of welfare rights. Where inclusion in the European process has raised the material well-being of a country, it may paradoxically exacerbate perceived differences. The frame of reference is no longer restricted to one’s own country but is widened to include the other European countries as well.

Many of the processes of inclusion have thus been accompanied by exclusion and creation of new borders of resources, rights and identities. Within the expanding physical space of ‘Europe’ there is greater awareness of economic, cultural and ethnic heterogeneity than ever before and a higher mobility of people from an increasingly global pool. One consequence of greater contact and awareness may be backlashing border building, as reflected in the rise of Far Right parties in countries such as Austria or Belgium and in the tensions around the enlargement of Europe and its openness to including non-European Union citizens.

In this introductory chapter we consider some of the problems raised by the terms ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’, relating them to more general issues in sociological theory and to the main lines of development in European societies in the last century. We then ask how the terms can stimulate thinking on current social change and how the contributions to this book respond to its challenge.

Inclusion/exclusion: the concepts

The concepts of inclusion and exclusion seem particularly appropriate to catch the contradictory and ambivalent nature of this change. Yet on closer inspection they turn out to be highly ambivalent themselves, and in need of clarification. We review here three of the concerns and discourses that have shaped the conceptualization of exclusion/inclusion: the discourse of social problems and inequalities, of social integration and order, and finally of institutional mechanisms of social membership (such as citizenship).

Exclusion

‘Social exclusion’ is a term that takes its inspiration from the discourse on social problems. It promises to address most or all of the social ills that our modern sensibilities deplore (cf. Goodin 1996): unemployment, discrimination, isolation, material deprivation and poverty – social suffering and ‘misery’ in all its forms (Bourdieu 1993). In France the term came to be used in this sense in the 1970s and then increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s (for an overview cf. Paugam 1996). From France, it crept into other national discourses, and most significantly, into the official discourse of the European Union where, since the mid-1990s, ‘social exclusion’ has virtually superseded ‘poverty’ as the key programmatic term on the socio-political agenda (Commission 1993, Byrne 1999, cf. Leisering and Leibfried 1999: 8, Percy-Smith 2000).

The intellectual attractiveness of the concept of social exclusion is due to its new perspective on social ills such as unemployment or poverty: it views them not as clearly delimited social problems but as part of the most basic social relation – that of belonging or not belonging to one’s society. It posits that marginalization in the labor market increasingly coincides with social isolation (Kronauer 1999: 60f). This implies a shift in the lines of social inequality: the traditional vertical model of class cleavages centered around labor market position is giving way to a polarization between ‘in’ and ‘out’. The concept thus emphasizes the dynamic interaction of structural factors with variables of social disadvantage (Percy-Smith 2000: 5).

For Europe, the concept has ‘the strategic advantage of drawing from the social policy traditions of both social democracy and social catholicism. It resonates equally with social democratic concern[s] about inequality and equal opportunity and social catholic concern[s] for social ties in the family and community’ (Chamberlayne and Rustin 1999: 33). Given its diverse origins, the concept is still coded very differently in the various national traditions of sociology in Europe. By stressing the dichotomy between in and out, it also articulates with the concept of the ‘underclass’ as developed in the US (Wilson 1996) and with the concerns of communitarianism.¹

As with other broadly suggestive and fashionable terms, however, ‘social exclusion’ pays the price of conceptual vagueness. If exclusion is defined by criteria such as unemployment, poverty or social isolation, it remains to be clarified how these criteria are descriptively and causally related to each other and to further possible criteria such as gender, ethnicity or citizenship rights (Kohli 1999a, Littlewood and Herkommer 1999). To simply speak of exclusion as a ‘multi-dimensional’ and ‘cumulative’ process begs the question of which criteria are linked in what ways. At heart are issues of cause, effect and measurement. As an example, social isolation – in the sense of the dissolution of social networks or of their reduction to other marginalized people – is sometimes seen as an independent dimension of exclusion, sometimes as the consequence of marginalization in other dimensions such as from the labor market which would then be its primary cause. Similarly, poverty can be seen as one of a multitude of dimensions of exclusion, or as a consequence of being excluded from the labor market, or as the one criterion by which exclusion manifests itself most clearly and which should therefore be the primary target of remedial intervention. The last view is that of the European Commission, whose Observatory on National Policies to Combat Social Exclusion is, in reality, an Observatory on Poverty (Huster 1997; see the chapter by Machedo and Vilrokx in this book).

These diverse views are not simply reflections of interest to theoreticians but refer to – and sometimes divert from – a basic controversy on the present-day dynamics of social inequality. The question is to what extent social disadvantage is (still) mostly the result of labor market position and experience – in other words, whether inequality is (still) to be conceptualized in the traditional terms of class or whether this has indeed been replaced by new forms of inequality according to the major categories of social ascription such as gender, age, ethnicity/‘race’ or political membership (see the chapter by John Scott in this volume; also Korpi 2001). It may be argued (e.g., Castel 1995) that speaking of the social exclusion of marginalized groups diverts our attention from what is occurring in the center of our societies and which is its primary agent, namely, the destruction of the wage-earning contract and of the welfare regime based on it. A related controversy centers around the proposed novelty of present-day inequalities and deprivations in the labor market itself. Here again, some doubts may be in order. In what ways, for example, is the ‘new’ unemployment different from the old one, except that there is more of it – and even so, is this not the case everywhere? And finally, the robustness of exclusion in terms of sustained duration is also open to debate. The new ‘dynamic’ understanding of poverty or unemployment has shown that a cross-sectional one-moment-intime perspective is highly misleading. Social and economic deprivation has to be seen as temporalized. It is a status that will apply to many more persons during their life course than can be ascertained at any one point in time, but which for most will not be a chronic condition (Kohli 1999a, Leisering and Leibfried 1999; see the chapter by Karl Ulrich Mayer). We may thus conclude that the concept of social exclusion promises to offer insight into some important current societal dynamics. But to be a meaningful term, it must be accompanied by a clear delineation of its dimensions and it must address the underlying theoretical issues.

Inclusion

The same effort is required for the concept of inclusion. It is often treated simply as the flip side of the coin of exclusion. But it is important to go beyond the emphasis on social problems that has shaped the discourse on exclusion. Inclusion should be viewed as a concept of its own that refers to a broader theoretical context: that of social integration and order, and that of the institutions of social membership. Inclusion has become a key term in the functionalist and system theoretical approaches to social integration, where it stands for a basic component of modernization. For example, Luhmann (1995) sees the transformation from traditional segmentary or stratified societies to modern functionally differentiated ones in terms of a transformation from a logic of partial inclusion to one of all-inclusiveness (cf. Kronauer 1999: 62). We will not pursue this issue except to note that the concept of inclusion as developed in systems theory does not fit easily with the perspective on exclusion/inclusion in terms of social problems, and is not able to make much theoretical sense of the current empirical phenomena of exclusion. More relevant for our purposes is another argument linked to Simmel’s view of the new place of the individual in social order (see the chapter by Birgitta Nedelmann). Individualization raises the question of how individuals are integrated into the social whole while maintaining some measure of autonomy, which, in turn, is a necessary precondition for social integration in a functionally differentiated society. The relation between individual and society is therefore one of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion – a basic motive of Simmel’s thought to which we will return below. A second context relevant to the concept of inclusion is that of the institutions of social membership. Here we may usefully distinguish between three basic dimensions of membership or inclusion – political, economic and civic inclusion – corresponding to the three societal subsystems or ‘sectors’ that today make up the portfolio of resources for well-being and social participation: state, market and civil society.² The contradictions, linkages and cumulations between these sectors and the individual ‘membership mixes’ that derive from them are critical for the overall patterns of inclusion.

Dimensions of inclusion

Political

The most obvious inclusionary movement in European societies has been that of political inclusions at both the territorial and individual level. The European territory was constructed, destroyed and reconstructed in the course of the last two centuries in a process which first involved the inclusion of many different political entities within the boundaries of the nation state. Today it has become a place of tense stability where varieties of culturally forged groups are politically cemented into place within state political borders – borders that, in many instances, are still highly contested (O’Dowd 2001). Since the middle of the last century, a new process of inclusion into a larger entity commenced with the construction of the European Communities and later European Union. Another part of this process was the drama of inclusion/exclusion originating in Eastern Europe since the late 1980s. The transformation from communist rule led to large groups being cast out of political spaces, wide-spread migratory movements and struggles for collective rights and identities (Brubaker 1996).

At the individual level, citizenship rights have become more and more inclusive, expanding from rights of freedom through those of political participation to social rights. Since Marshall’s (1950) path-breaking work, this has become a well-known and widely-shared story, even though some of its finer points remain open to debate (cf. Goodin 1996). The concept and practice of citizenship in Europe expanded from a political citizenship for male property owners only, to political rights for males from all social classes and extended later to women. By 1950 all adult citizens, both men and women, could vote in almost every European country (save Switzerland). With the construction of the welfare state another expansion took place, from a political into a social citizenship. By the end of the century, the fact that citizenship is also a category that excludes had once again become paramount. Growing populations of noncitizens either born within a polity or with long records of residence (see the chapter by Rainer Bauböck) challenge the basis of access to political and social rights. Migration has become the model case for conflicting views of citizenship, both in terms of the politics of membership and in terms of the practical salience of different kinds of rights. As to the latter issue, Soysal (1994) argues that national citizenship is losing some of its weight because of the development of supra-national rights and because social rights are mostly not restricted to those with full political membership, even if others remain skeptical about the extent of this shift (e.g., Koopmans and Statham 1998). Further fundamental questions of how included in the polity the ‘included’ actually are have arisen as many countries suffered crises of political legitimacy (Dogan 2000). Sometimes these crises were based on the lack of inclusiveness in representation in terms of gender (Phillips 1991, Saraceno 2001) or other interests, but the European process has also raised the ways that region or locality is represented (Scharpf 1999; for a general discussion, see Kymlicka 1995).

Inclusion as political actors has led to claims for inclusion as recipients of social rights and thus the processes of inclusion through social rights merit some special consideration. The development of the European welfare state is one of the fundamental social inventions of the last century. The large systems of social security in the domains of old age, health, family and unemployment have ‘normalized’ individual biographies by protecting individuals from the material deprivation following from labor market risks, illness, or family formation. Inclusion in a safety net from ‘cradle to grave’ became a reality in the advanced European societies by the 1960s. Social security has redistributed resources between the peri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• 1 European societies
• Part I: Framing inclusions and identities in Europe: Theoretical perspectives on citizenship and belonging
• Part II: Exclusions and inclusions in work and welfare
• Part III: Inclusions and exclusions beyond the nation state: Europe and the world