Exploring the Sociology of Europe

An Analysis of the European Social Complex

Maurice Roche

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780761940722, 9780761940715
• eBook ISBN: 9781446242773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The sociology of Europe is a growing and diverse field. This book addresses it in a direct, wide ranging and up-to-date way.

Exploring the Sociology of Europe:

• clearly maps this new and emerging field

• challenges and renews the sociological analysis of European modernity

• provides an understanding of Europe as an historical, social and civil complex

• develops and applies new interpretations of the key sociological themes of globalization, citizenship and cosmopolitanism to contemporary European society

This is a discerning and relevant book providing an informed analysis of European society which identifies and defines contemporary issues and engages with key social theoretical perspectives.

Covering the substantive historical sociological aspects of Europe (Part 1), the historical and comparative sociology of the nation-state (Part 2), and the comparative sociology of welfare capitalism (Part 3) Maurice Roche sets out a clear and effective framework for understanding the sociology of Europe.

The book will be of interest to all students, researchers and academics involved in studying, teaching and researching the expanding field of modern European society.

1

APPROACHING EUROPEAN SOCIETY

Introduction

This book aims to introduce, to develop and to explore the sociology of Europe and this chapter, together with Chapter 2, sets the scene for this project. The book as a whole aims to make the case that we need a sociological perspective on Europe, if only to counter-balance and contextualise dominant and often misleading political and academic conceptions of Europe and of the European Union in particular, which reduce them to being mainly economic or international legal entities. However, the ground on which to develop such a sociological perspective has not yet been secured by the discipline. It has certainly not been well trodden and it remains significantly unexplored.

Evidently, Europe, even in its EU form, is not a nation-state, which is the dominant form taken by societies in the modern period. So maybe, then, it is not a society either, in which case there would be no basis on which to set out to develop a ‘sociology of Europe’. Perhaps this is why, by comparison with other social science and historical disciplines which have developed active specialisms addressing the EU in particular, there has been little comparable effort of this kind in sociology, the discipline devoted to the study of ‘societies’.¹ The first section (below) reflects on this negative view.

The book is organised into three parts concerned with Europe’s societal history (Chapters 3 and 4), its development of nation-state-based societies (Chapters 5 and 6) and contemporary social change, particularly with respect to welfare and the social economy (Chapters 7 and 8). These will be previewed later in more detail (third main section below). First, it is necessary to review some of the senses in which both Europe and the EU can be reasonably conceptualised and studied as forms of ‘society’, and this review will be taken further in Chapter 2. There are some ambiguities and dualities about understanding Europe as a society, and these are recurrent features of this field. They will be reflected on throughout our discussion and two of them need to be recognised from the outset. First, there is the ambiguity that contemporary Europe is not identical to the international organisations claimed to represent it, particularly the EU. Secondly, there is the important ambiguity that the EU can be seen either as an aggregate of nation-state societies and their differences, or as a sphere of commonalities, although it cannot easily be seen as both of these things simultaneously. The commonalities view provides some ground for seeing Europe and/or the EU as forms of society, but the aggregate-of-differences view appears to provide little ground for this. Before we go much further we need to try to clarify these two ambiguities.²

In relation to the first duality between Europe and the EU, it is worth bearing in mind that in 2005 the EU contained only 27 member states (as of 2008). This was fewer than the total number of nation-state societies occupying the area of the European sub-continent (among others, Norway, Switzerland and various Balkan countries remain outside the EU), and it is fewer than other relevant international organisations such as the Council of Europe (47 member states, as of 2008). That said, the EU remains the most organisationally developed and influential project Europeans have ever generated in the modern period to create a legally integrated and operational corporate European entity, an entity which has both international and also transnational features. Given this, and also given the fact that the EU possesses an expansionary dynamic which is likely to lead to the incorporation of many of the remaining non-EU states on the sub-continent over the coming generation, it is not unreasonable to view the EU as being significantly representative both of the sub-continent’s societies and of Europe’s society more collectively. So, while recognising the difference between Europe and the EU throughout this book, it is intended, and indeed is inevitable, that this difference will also be elided at various points in the discussion.

In relation to the second and more consequential duality noted above, Europe has always presented an enigmatic Janus face to those seeking to reflect on it and understand it, certainly throughout the modern period but also in preceding periods. That is to say, on the one hand Europe has appeared as characterised by its commonalities, as for instance in the recurrently influential concept that Europe is a ‘civilisation’. Indeed, from some perspectives, both objective and ‘Eurocentric’ perspectives, it has been the world’s most important civilisation.³ However, on the other hand it has also recurrently presented itself as little more than an aggregate of a variety of differences, whether ethnic, religious or national. Indeed, throughout the modern period it has regularly been an arena of often violent conflict over the (assumed) deep differences between its nation-states and their associated ideologies and collective identities.

This fundamentally dualistic character of Europe does not provide secure ground on which to base a claim that Europe is a society. ‘The Europe of commonalities’ might provide such a basis, but ‘the Europe of differences’ does not. So from the outset we need to be aware that the project of developing and exploring a sociology of Europe, of the kind undertaken in this book, must involve a willingness not only to navigate between, but also to live with, both aspects of this duality, which is a fundamental characteristic of Europe and of Europeans’ experience of ‘the social’ in the sub-continent over two millennia. With this in mind, in the following two sections we begin to consider the positive view that Europe is a society and also what this might mean.

The first section looks at commonsensical (that is, everyday and administrative) senses in which it is meaningful to speak about Europe as a society. It then goes on to consider some more general sociological and social theoretical discourses on European society, and in doing so it argues that the potential sociology of Europe needs to be intellectually located in the context of the broader challenges facing contemporary sociology.

Arguably, the discipline of sociology in general is in a period of radical overhaul and renewal of its mission and its theoretical and substantive research agendas. To face the challenge of developing the new field of the sociology of Europe involves engaging with this ‘renewal agenda’. The second section outlines an analytic framework to help conceptualise the work in this new sociological field, which is opened up in more detailed and substantive ways in the main parts of the book. This framework is concerned with societies understood in terms of structure and change, that is structurally as social formations (of what will later be referred to as ‘societal dimensions’ and ‘deep structures’), and in terms of social change (understood as transformations of these structures through processes of modernisation, globalisation and associated Europeanisation). This sociological framework is applied throughout the book both in terms of its general intellectual strategy and also in terms of the questions and debates to which its various parts and chapters are designed to be responses and contributions. As such it provides a basis for the preview and outline of the structure and content of the book, which is then provided in the third section.

In this book, then, we are concerned, among other things, with sociological aspects of historical and contemporary processes of ‘Europeanisation’ in European nation-state societies.⁴ Some of these processes derive from the special and powerful contemporary dynamics of EU integration, and others derive from various sources, including those of history and globalisation, which influence both European and non-European societies. To weight the discussion towards Europeanisation processes is not to underplay the persistence of the consequential European duality noted earlier, that is the persistence of a Europe characterised as much by its differences as by the commonalities with which they coexist. As indicated above, overall the discussion in this book aims to navigate between the two sides of this duality. To begin with, then, we can encounter commonsensical and social scientific views of Europe as a potential society (first main section), before turning to outline the more developed sociological framework which will be employed to structure and guide the book’s discussion (second main section).

Perspectives on European Society

The idea that Europe in general and the EU as its core contemporary expression can be seen as being in some sense a ‘society’ has some credibility in both commonsensical and social scientific perspectives. However, by contrast, sociology, the discipline which claims the remit to study ‘society’, has had all too little to say explicitly about Europe.⁵ So in this section we will do two things. On the one hand, we briefly note the non-sociological ways in which Europe and the EU can be credibly seen as a society together with the limitations of these views. And on the other hand, we briefly rehearse and reflect on the curiosity of sociology’s traditional apparent indifference to Europe as a form of society.

‘Commonsense’ views of European society: everyday and administrative perspectives

Two non-sociological perspectives, which we can refer to as ‘everyday’ and ‘administrative’ perspectives, provide some initial positive views of the idea that Europe and the EU in particular can be seen as a society.⁶

An everyday perspective

From an everyday perspective a great range of categories of people across the EU member states interact with, or take account of the existence and relevance of, the EU in practical, routine and everyday ways. This is particularly so for people working in farming, in the fishing industry, or in the tourism, travel and transport industries, or who live in areas dominated by these industries. Periodic crises in these industries (involving such things as contagious diseases among animals, or the decline of fishing stocks, or safety and environmental problems in the tourism and transport industries), together with EU-level policies and actions to manage them, can be covered in the media across Europe and provide for cross-European public debate. Such crises also serve to shine a light on the extent of the routine cross-European interconnections and interdependencies which operate unnoticed or at least uncommented upon in non-crisis times.

An everyday pragmatic perspective which routinely takes account of the EU as part of ‘the furniture of the social world’ clearly is present in the life-world of members of all of the EU states which are involved in the euro currency system.⁷ Currencies are an ineradicable element of production, of consumption and of many of the transactions of everyday life in market-oriented and capitalist societies. Such a perspective is also present across Europe in such organisations as local and regional public authorities, large multinational companies, universities and law firms, employers’ organisations and trade unions, social movements and lobby groups. Indeed, many of these kinds of industries and organisations, either themselves or through their associations, have established bases in the heart of the EU policy-making system in Brussels, or they have access to cross-European networks which, in turn, have such bases.⁸

People in these spheres interact with the EU in ways not dissimilar to the ways they interact with national states and governments in a national society. In summary, many people across Europe routinely organise their activities with reference to the existence of the EU as a broadly legitimate authority which contributes to and regulates a significant part of their social environment and which provides them with sets of rules and resources, constraints and opportunities to consider, use or engage with in the course of their activities and projects. They do this irrespective of whether they are politically opposed to or supportive of particular EU policies or indeed the EU as a whole, in the same way that people routinely orient their actions to the existence of their state as a governance system without reference to their political view of particular national governments. Having said this, the everyday view is clearly limited. It is pragmatic and largely unreflective beyond a limited instrumentalism. Also, it is essentially partial and fragmented, and thus at best it implies a picture of European and EU society as an umbrella for a bewildering mosaic of specific groups and their spheres of interest and activity.

An administrative perspective

From an administrative perspective EU agencies such as Eurostat gather and interpret comparative social data derived from a range of official surveys conducted on an annual cycle in the 27 current EU member states on such things as employment, unemployment, income, family structures and household composition, political attitudes, gender and age inequalities, and so on. In the course of communicating this to publics, users, and the media across the EU they often refer to this information as being about ‘European society’. This is comparable to the ways that official statistical administrators in nation-states publicise their information as being about national societies.

The administrative view addresses national societies as self-contained units and provides us with a picture of the EU and EU society both as an ‘aggregate’ of these units and also as an artificial domain characterised by the ‘averages’ which can be constructed between national datasets. Beyond this, such a perspective, consistently maintained over time, can either reveal or construct social trends (depending on one’s epistemology) among European national societies. These cross-European trends can be interpreted to have potentially problematic medium- and long-term implications for the continent’s national societies; European citizens and policy-makers can come to see themselves as facing common social problems. This is the case, for instance, in relation to such trends as the decline in fertility and population replacement rates, or the general ageing of the population (both of which we consider further in our discussion of European welfare and social policy in Chapters 6–8 later). The identification of such trends in aggregate European society can provide common topics of public and political debate across Europe and also incentives for European states to coordinate their policy responses, particularly through the EU.

However, neither the everyday perspective nor the administrative perspective on Europe as a potential society provides for a perception and understanding of the EU as containing elements such as a common cultural identity, an integrated social structure, and an intra and intergenerational socialisation and social transmission system, which are among the elements typically taken, particularly in the discipline of sociology, to characterise what counts as a ‘society’. Before we consider aspects of the sociological view of Europe further we can briefly turn to some of the various reflective but non-sociological views of Europe that are present in other social scientific and humanities disciplines.

Disciplinary perspectives on European society: humanities and social sciences

The sociological framework outlined later (second main section) recognises societies as having a number of dimensions, each of which can be the object of particular social science and humanities studies. Thus sociological perspectives on societies need to remain open to and informed by a range of disciplinary studies. Indeed, it can offer some elements of a more integrated perspective (a ‘meta-perspective’) capable of contributing substantially to the intellectual coherence of the multi- and interdisciplinary studies needed by multidimensional social complexes and processes in the contemporary period.

Humanities disciplines, such as history and also archaeology, have tended to present a picture of Europe as at least a long-evolving, continent-wide arena of interconnected social movements and institution-building projects...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• 1 Approaching European Society
• 2 The European Social Complex: Europe as Network and Empire?
• PART 1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EUROPEAN SOCIAL COMPLEX: CIVILISATIONS AND NATION-STATES
• PART 2 THE MODERN EUROPEAN COMPLEX AND SOCIAL CHANGE: A EUROPE OF NATIONS, WARFARE STATES AND WELFARE STATES
• PART 3 THE EUROPEAN COMPLEX IN THE 21ST CENTURY: CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL CHANGE AND EUROPEAN WELFARE CAPITALISM
• Bibliography and References
• Author and Name Index
• Subject Index