Introduction
This book, in two volumes, considers contemporary capitalism from the standpoint of national cultural politics and art worlds. Cultural politics is used here as a broad concept, in a way that distinguishes it from the concept cultural policy . Usually, the latter refers to the decisions and practices of public cultural administration or, more narrowly, of public art administration, whereas the former is based on the thought that different subsectors of political action and decision-making might have cultural implications and consequences. This thought is true, for example, of economic policy, educational policy, media policy, innovation policy, research policy, and technological policy. Besides cultural policy , all of these subsectors can shape art worlds’ habits of action and structures. Thus, cultural politics refers to the entirety of political action and decision-making that is relevant from the standpoint of art worlds. Our book aims to take this entirety into account, although it also more narrowly deals with cultural policy , that is, with the activities of public art administration. When doing so, we are aware that, in practice, the boundary between cultural politics and cultural policy is usually vague, since cultural administrations or art administrations often adopt—and they have to adopt—points of view, value principles, and ways of operation from other subareas of political action and decision-making.
As for the concept contemporary capitalism , it was at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s that the era of “organized ” or “social” capitalism, as well as “the Keynesian national welfare state ” and its cultural politics, began to come to an end in Western Europe and North America. In social sciences, the ensuing decades have often been called an era of deregulation or neoliberalist politics. Expressions like these point to the way in which the economic and political regulation mechanisms and social security arrangements built after the Great Depression in the early 1930s and, in particular, after the Second World War, have been attenuated or suppressed from the 1980s on; and, conversely, how Western European and North American societies have been opened up to market forces on a more global scale. These societies have, thereby, been ruled by a politics that attempts to treat the whole of society and the rest of the world as capitalist markets. Hence, if certain Western European countries, for example, France, Italy, and Germany, as well as the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden), were formerly state-centric and corporatist capitalist societies, now they have, to a varying degree, changed toward market-based competitive societies.
In “traditional market-liberal” countries such as Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, this shift toward a market-based competitive society and neoliberalist politics has perhaps not been equally sharp as in the above-mentioned countries, for economic liberalism was already formerly an important cornerstone in the structure of Anglo-Saxon societies, above all, of the United States. At any rate, they have changed into more market-orientated societies as well, and, within Europe and Northern America, it was precisely Great Britain and the United States that first began to widely practice neoliberalist politics during the right-winged regimes of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) and President Ronald Reagan (1981–89). To be sure, before these two regimes, neoliberalist politics was carried out by force in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. David Harvey (2005) points out that, actually, Chile and Argentina were, at that time, testing grounds for neoliberalist ideas.
After the collapse of Eastern European state socialism and comparable experimentations in traditional “underdeveloped” countries, nearly all of the individual countries have, since the 1990s, been parts of this new political–economic world order or global capitalism. It is only countries such as Cuba and North Korea that still attempt to stay outside it—at a price that, when acting in this way, at least North Korea has had to reject the principles of political democracy and human rights. Through this, capitalist economics, which was originally a European invention, seems to have victoriously spread throughout the world.
In the first instance, the contemporary political and economic world order has followed the rules of market capitalism or a free market economy. Besides American and British governments, certain powerful supranational organizations have maintained these rules globally. Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy (2013), a collection of articles edited by Vivien Ann Schmidt and Mark Thatcher , presents an overview of these sort of organizations, which include the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB), and World Trade Organization (WTO), and recent meetings of the world’s economic leaders (Schmidt and Woll 2013 , 130–32). Likewise, the states belonging to the European Union (EU) form an area that is based on the free movement of capital, labor forces, services, and commodities. Within the EU , institutions such as the European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB), and the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union (EMU) have committed themselves to neoliberalist politics (Thatcher and Schmidt 2013 , 418–21). Thus, all of the organizations mentioned here have been protectors of market capitalism or a free market economy in the world or in certain of its subregions.
The shift toward a free market economy is not the only significant transformation in the nature of contemporary capitalism . At the same time, capitalism’s internal power structure has undergone a radical change. If “rational capitalism” emerged in Europe from the fifteenth century on in the form of farming and trading capitalism , and if industrial capitalism displaced this economic formation from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on, then we have now come to the era that is dominated by finance capitalism , that is, by powerful banks and finance companies. Banks and finance companies such as these function on a global scale, and by means of an advanced digital technology, they are capable of rapidly transferring huge sums of money from one continent to another continent and, through this, also of fundamentally changing ordinary people’s conditions of living.
To date, scholars of art have not systematically described in which ways national cultural politics and art worlds in Europe and North America have moved from the protection of the traditional welfare state or state socialism to the contemporary situation in which market competition and the impacts of a global capitalist economy increasingly shape the entirety of our societal–cultural reality. Have these national cultural politics and art worlds now merged with a capitalist economy, “creative industries ,” and commercial entertainment culture, as cultural theorists such as Jean Baudrillard (1983, 1997) and Jeremy Rifkin (2000), some decades ago, predicted? Or, do we rather live now in an era when they are being replaced by global cultural flows and by expanding international or transnational art worlds, as the most eager theorists of globalization have presumed?
The first volume of this book addresses these questions by describing how the transition from traditional welfare state or state socialist cultural politics and art worlds to contemporary cultural politics and art worlds was realized in different national societies in Europe and North America. Likewise, it pays attention to the fact that, since the 1980s, international or transnational art worlds have strengthened their position in comparison with national art worlds. This implies that this book regards concepts such as national society, national systems of art, and national art worlds as legitimate tools in an analysis concerning contemporary societal–cultural reality. Thus, the book does not stand for a position that finds them obsolete. The most well-known representative of a position like this is perhaps Niklas Luhmann , who has held that it is chiefly only world society and its subconcepts that form adequate tools in descriptions of modern and contemporary society.
National Societies and World Society
Luhmann differs from sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman (1992), Ulrich Beck (1997), and Richard Münch (1998), who have tended to speak about globalization and world society chiefly in relation to the contemporary phase of societal development. Their way of conceptualizing current societal changes offers us a picture in which national societies have lost a great deal of their economic, political, and cultural sovereignty since the 1990s. And correspondingly, in the areas of economy, politics, science, education, art, sports, and mass communication, there have, according to this picture, emerged collective agents and webs which act on a worldwide scale, constituting in this way a world society. Due to this, in the contemporary phase of societal development or in “global modernity ,” nation-states and national societies would no longer be such important agents as in “classical modernity ,” which, roughly speaking, lasted from the latter half of the eighteenth century to the 1960s and 1970s.
Luhmann does not speak about world society quite in this way. His manner of using the concept at issue recalls Immanuel Wallerstein , even if the latter one is known as a Marxist theorist, whereas Luhmann has been seen as a politically conservative sociologist. Yet, both of them have argued for the view that the modern world system or world society already began to emerge at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Wallerstein (2000, 250) regards as its point of departure the late fifteenth century, when Europeans became increasingly aware of other continents and started to exploit their natural and human resources. During the next century, European states, then, launched their colonial conquests of and expansion into other continents. Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and England led this expansion, and, in a warlike manner, they competed with each other for the possession of these overseas areas. In Wallerstein ’s theory, there has, thereby, for 500 years, been a modern world system in which Western states have formed a dominating centrum of power and forced the other continents to adapt themselves to a global division of labor imposed upon them by the Western world. This modern world system has, Wallerstein emphasizes, also been capitalist by nature, as Western countries have utilized and exploited other continents’ resources as a means in economic surplus value production.
Partly in a similar vein, Luhmann starts his description of the birth of world society from the end of the Middle Ages, when Europeans “discovered” the other continents and began to interact with them. Gradually, an interaction such as this deepened and enlarged, and led to the formation of world society. In Europe, this process originally took place in the lap of the aristocratic estate society, which fell into decay by the eighteenth century. At a structural level, the primary hallmark of this aristocratic estate society was stratified differentiation : this society was divided into...