Unequal Europe

Social Divisions and Social Cohesion in an Old Continent

James Wickham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781857285512
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317265825
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This wide-ranging and comparative text reviews the major theoretical and substantive debates on social inequality in Europe. It provides a valuable dual focus on European society and individual societies while placing Europe in its wider global context.

Demonstrating the continued importance of national difference within Europe, the author argues that nonetheless the European Social Model has softened social inequalities such as those of wealth and income distribution, social class, gender and possibly even ethnicity. However these achievements are now being undermined, partially by the European Union itself. The book also challenges conventional wisdom on Europe's alleged need for immigration and highlights the UK's distinctiveness within Europe, explaining the country's uneasy relation to the European project.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Politics, European Societies, Social Policy and Comparative Studies.

1 Where is Europe anyway?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315636702-2

In global terms, Europe is distinctive because of the European social model: its unique combination of market economy, parliamentary democracy and welfare states. Indeed, abandoning this European social model could ensure that Europe itself disintegrated as a distinct polity. This chapter lays the basis for this claim.

The chapter begins with some basic features of Europe in relation to the rest of the world: its geopolitical location, its wealth accompanied by slow economic growth, its apparent demographic crisis and, above all, the European Union itself. However, the second part argues that a key feature of Europe now is its national welfare states and their problematic relation to the European Union. The third part shows how the concepts of social inclusion and social cohesion allow us to locate Europe in relation to the rest of the world: Europe is an area of the world that, within the framework of parliamentary democracy and on the basis of a market economy, has relative social equality, economic citizenship and a strong public sphere maintained by its national states.

1.1 Definitions of Europe

Europe as a place

Europe is a geographical term, and at first sight this appears comforting: Europe is ‘that place’ on the map (Figure 1.1). Europe is also a long settled place: Europeans have lived in Europe for a long time. This apparently banal fact does make Europe in many ways very different to the USA and to the other extra-European countries of the Anglosphere, and makes Europe much closer to China and India. An even closer parallel is Japan at the other end of the Eurasian land mass: whereas China and especially India had ‘foreign’ dynastic rule, this has never been the case for Europe or Japan.

The historical connection with a particular geographical place has a more immediate aspect. Compared to the inhabitants of the USA, and even taking into account variation by class, region, ethnicity and gender, Europeans tend to move house infrequently. When they do move, they usually stay within the same country. Of all the many geographical divisions within Europe, the borders of the European nation states remain the most socially relevant. To a surprising extent, these national state boundaries still enclose different societies. Most Europeans live their lives within one nation state, which they only leave for holidays or, increasingly, as part of their studies in late adolescence. Although geographical mobility is increasing, it has increased far faster within European countries than between them.

Figure 1.1 Europe and the European Union (adapted from_www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/cia15/european_union_sm_2015.gif).

NotesMember states of the European Union (accession date in brackets; Eurozone members in bold; non-Schengen in italic): France (1958), Belgium (1958), Italy (1958), Luxembourg (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), Poland (2004), Slovakia (2004), Slovenia (2004), Bulgaria (2007), Romania (2007), Croatia (2013).Non-EU Schengen states: Iceland, Norway, Switzerland.

The problem of course is that the geographical boundaries of ‘Europe’ continually shift. 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’; since 2004 they have become simply part of Europe. Indeed the EU’s current eastern boundary is now the traditional religious boundary between the Western and Eastern versions of Christianity, between Rome and Constantinople, between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox. With the accession of the Baltic states, the Union now includes territories that were once part of the Soviet Union itself.

As in the nineteenth century, the ‘Europeanness’ of Russia itself has become a matter of debate. Opposing the division of the Continent, de Gaulle invoked ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’, thus defining Russia as both European and Asian. Rather later, Gorbachev envisaged glasnost ensuring Russia’s place in ‘our common European home’, thus defining Russia as firmly European. Today, other parts of the former USSR, especially of course Ukraine, turn to ‘Europe’ rather than ‘Russia’.

Equally, the Europeanness of Turkey is debated by Turks and non-Turks. As in Russia, one story of modern Turkey is the attempt to define itself as ‘Western’ and ‘European’, while another story is that this is a betrayal of its true identity. And contemporary Turkey brings up the whole relationship between Europe and Islam. The expansion of Islam for the 500 years after its foundation in the eighth century shut Europe off from the rest of the world, cutting connections to the east and south. In that sense Islam was responsible for the creation of its opposite, ‘Christian Europe’ (Davies 1997: 257). Halted at Poitiers in 732, the threatened Islamic conquest of Europe was pushed back in the West over the next centuries, and modern Spain was defined through the completion of the reconquista and the expulsion of the ‘Moors’ in the fifteenth century. However, in the same period Asia Minor, present-day Turkey, was conquered by the Ottomans and lost to Christendom. Constantinople finally fell in 1453 and 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; 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 define itself against Islam. In the north and west there were other concerns, even if until the end of the eighteenth century British seafarers’ main fear was that they might be captured and enslaved by Barbary (Moslem) corsairs (Colley 2002: 44). Today Romania and Croatia are part of the European Union and Turkey itself could eventually be a member. If only a tiny part of present-day Turkey is in ‘Europe’, if Europe geographically ends at the Bosporus, then we might remember that much of Asia Minor was part of the ‘European’ Christian world until the fifteenth century.

And finally there is Europe overseas. While still being invaded from the east, from the fifteenth century onwards Europeans in the west became the invaders. Most European countries have a shared history of colonisation. This meant not simply political rule over foreign territories, for colonisation often meant massive emigration – the ‘Great White Plague’ (Ferguson 2003: 59) in which Europeans exterminated or marginalised indigenous peoples – and the creation of European societies overseas. Indeed, much of British exceptionalism within Europe is because its links with the world beyond Europe were so strong: its colonies, its British societies overseas in Australia, New Zealand and (more ambiguously) southern Africa, its close connections with the USA (Belich 2010; Darwin 2009). By contrast, nineteenth-century Spain was much more introverted, despite the Latin American connection (and Cuba remained a Spanish colony until 1898). Nonetheless, so long as Algeria remained legally part of metropolitan France, the political boundary of Europe remained on the southern shore of the Mediterranean until 1962. Even today, a French Département Outre Mer (Overseas Department) such as Martinique in the Caribbean is legally part of France and hence European Union territory.

The ambiguity of boundaries is not simply a question of faulty terminology. Purely geographical boundaries turn out to be less use than one might expect: Morocco’s application for membership of the European Community in 1987 was turned down because it was not a ‘European state’, yet Turkey’s application is officially being processed, while Cyprus, well to the east of Istanbul, is already a member. Europe is a place, but where exactly it ends is impossible to define.

A land of plenty

In global terms Europe is rich. Compared not just to the masses of the ‘global South’, but also to the inhabitants of nearby middle-income countries, Europeans have a high standard of living. The living conditions of ordinary Europeans are those that represent the normality to which it seems the world’s population now aspires.

Europe’s wealth is the inheritance of its leadership of the world economy in the nineteenth century. In 1850, 56 per cent of all steam horse power in the world was in Europe (32 per cent in Britain). In 1896 the total had increased more than fivefold, but the European share had even risen to 61 per cent (Great Britain had fallen to 21 per cent) and the US share was approximately a quarter (Landes 1969: 221). The twentieth century is marked by the relative rise and then decline of the USA. At the start of the last century over one-third of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was produced in Western Europe, as opposed to 15 per cent in the USA. In mid-century the US share had risen to just over one-quarter, while that of Western Europe had fallen; by the end of the century the share of both these established industrial areas had fallen further to around 20 per cent (Figure 1.2). By then the first Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea) had effectively caught up with Europe. More recently there has been the sudden emergence of China and even India, countries so large that their growth makes an impact on the overall shape of the world economy long before their average living standards have approached that of the ‘West’.

Figure 1.2 GDP as proportion of world total: Western Europe and the USA (derived from Maddison 2003: 233, 259).

Europe has been living on inherited wealth in another sense. One alleged reason for slow economic growth has been Europe’s relatively low level of innovation compared to the USA. This is clearest in the IT and software industries: the new wave of multinational companies linked to the internet are almost all American (Amazon, Google). European companies with global reach in this sector are few and far between. As Chancellor Merkel commented in a recent interview: ‘Ich freue mich, dass wir noch SAP haben’ (Merkel 2013). Despite such patches of success, Europe as a whole has become less important in the world economy.

What has mattered for ordinary Europeans is not this relative decline, but rather the staggering improvement in their living standards that occurred during the second half of the twentieth century. The years from the end of World War II to the first oil crisis in 1973 have been named the trente glorieuses (thirty glorious years) (Judt 2005: 324). The pace was set by the German Wirtschaftswunder with growth averaging 5.9 per cent between 1950 and 1973 (Maddison 1987; also Wehler 2013) but many other parts of Western Europe were not far behind. In Western Europe, but much less so in the increasingly different Eastern Europe, economic growth translated into unprecedented improvements in people’s lives. It was during these years that most ordinary people in countries such as Britain for the first time could realistically expect to live in a dry and warm home with separate bedrooms and their own bathroom; they could expect access to medical care; they could afford holidays away from home; they could probably afford their own car. In 1951 in Britain, then the richest country in Europe, in England and Wales 21 per cent of the dwellings still had only outside toilets (General Register Office 1952). This normality, it is important to remember, is less than half a century old.

The enlargement of the EU has increased its internal diversity. All the original six member states were unequivocally some of the wealthiest countries in the world, but GDP per capita in some of the newest member states is similar to those of medium income countries. For example, a household defined as at risk of poverty in Germany has a better living standard than the median household in Romania (see especially Section 4.2). Such differences fuel the argument that denies any commonality between European countries (e.g. Baldwin 2009). There are two responses. First, the overwhelming majority of Europeans live in the richer states. Second, the European Union is a distinct polity, however difficult to classify (more than a nation state, less than a federal super-state). A country such as Romania is a poor member of a rich person’s club, not an outsider looking plaintively in. Equally member states have been very differently affected by the post-2008 global economic crisis: at one extreme in Germany the export boom means rising living standards and effectively full employment, while in Greece average real incomes have plummeted and unemployment in June 2013 had reached fully 27.9 per cent (Eurostat 2013). Nonetheless, to date Greece remains part of the European Union: it is a poor member of a rich person’s club.

Old Europe: demography

In world terms, the European age is over. Europe’s share of the world’s population, wealth and military power is sm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Where is Europe anyway?
• 2 From industrial society to the knowledge-based economy
• 3 The political economy of contemporary European capitalism
• 4 Money, markets and post-modernity
• 5 Employment, occupations and social classes
• 6 Spatial inequality: Europe of the regions
• 7 From labour immigration to European mobility
• 8 Ethnic diversity and the national welfare state
• 9 Gender equality and social inequality
• 10 Conclusion: the end of the European social model before it began?
• Appendix: statistical sources
• Index