Social Change and Political Transformation

Chris Rootes,Howard Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351167185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Social Change in Political Transformation is thorough examination of political transformation the book features contributors from western and eastern Europe, giving their views on how European society and institutions are changing. The themes of social change, new movements and the development of European institutions are developed within a broad framework, and are supposed by considerable empirical detail relating to the European Community and a disaggregated eastern Europe. Students of political sociology, politics and European studies will all find this a useful text providing theories and explanations, as well as summaries of recent research.

Chapter 1

European countries in a post-national era¹

Alain Touraine

I

European integration may not appear an exciting topic for a sociologist to address. For many people, this integration is just one more step towards an open world market and makes intra-European wars or protectionist barriers obsolete; for others, it means the loss of political and cultural independence of European nations and the subordination of political and social institutions to arbitrary decisions made by markets or bureaucrats. But both arguments, positive and negative, are so general and so unable to demonstrate the errors of the opposite stance that we don’t trust them. We consider them, on the contrary, as ideologies that rationalize precise but limited interests or as historical intuitions that can have extremely important effects but, instead of offering explanations of actual behaviour, need themselves to be explained. The reason for our uneasiness when we speak about Europe is that it is an indirect way of speaking about something else or, more precisely, about the opposite of European integration, namely our national states. The political process in which we are participating is much less the construction of a European state than the partial de-nationalization of European countries or their entrance into a postnational era. If this idea is accepted, a reflection on European integration becomes an interrogation of the positive or negative effects of this integration on the countries that are undergoing this process of de-nationalization for reasons that have less to do with European institutional integration than with the formation of superpowers during the Gold War and with the diffusion of an internationalized but American-centred mass culture.

In our Western tradition, the political expression of modernity is the nation state. Like modern society, according to Parsons’ sociology, it is a complex system oriented towards rational action and one in which subsystems fulfil specific functions. In it, cultural values, institutionalized norms and motivations correspond to one another, at least in principle - “in principle” because traditions, ascribed statuses and irrational behaviour are in fact never eliminated. Countries such as Britain and France, beyond their differences, have been and still are strong national states, so strong that for the other country’s citizens, their economic, political or cultural institutions appear to be first of all national and specific, even if they express common values or general processes.

Integrated Europe is not going to fit with this political type of organization; it is not going to be a big new nation-state. Partly because its main components are real nation states, it is impossible to imagine the creation of a European culture corresponding to a European economy and to European policies. On the contrary, it appears that Europe has many different faces. It is an economic unit with customs barriers, processes of internal redistribution and, in the near future, possibly a common currency. But at the same time, the European Community has a very limited political decision making capacity, and its parliament almost none; it is, moreover, culturally highly diverse and fragmented, even if the English language — which is actually a world language more than a European one - tends to be used everywhere as a lingua franca. Socially, it is true that the heterogeneity of western Europe has decreased with the rapid improvement of the situation of countries such as Spain or Portugal, but there are still striking differences among the immigration policies and the very definitions of nationality in Britain, Germany and France, not to mention Greece, as well as between union memberships in Belgium and Spain or between northern and southern countries’ fiscal policies.

To become European does not mean an English or a French man or woman adding a new broader identification to his or her former national identity; rather, it means combining a weakened citizenship with participation in a multiplied community in which economic organization, political institutions and cultural production do not correspond to one another. Nobody can imagine, within the next 20 years, a strongly integrated Europe. Jacques Delors recently estimated that the Community’s budget should represent approximately five per cent of each nation’s budget, and he insisted that social security systems as well as educational institutions should remain national.

No nation is simultaneously so deeply diversified culturally, yet so open economically to international trade, and yet so weakly developed in its political institutions, as is the European Community. European society is not likely to become either a federal or a confederal state, and will for a long period of time be called a “community”, a vague notion that does not correspond to common cultural values. In many ways, Europe is today less united and specific than it used to be during centuries when Christianity created a cultural community and when intra European wars defined a European political system strengthened by marriages and alliances. Today few, if any, cultural products are European. They are produced by the so called Western world and most of them by the United States, which is the main exporter of cultural goods and habits, or by individual nations.

It is not true that European construction has reached a point of no return. Negative attitudes are growing, and the ratification of the Maastricht agreements will not be easy in some countries. Few people are openly anti-European, but anti-Europeans have more intelligently defended the idea of a free trade zone, which would prevent Europe from acquiring a political or even an economic decision making capacity comparable to that of Japan or the United States. No economic argument is sufficient to defend European integration. Economic argument generally favours open world trade of the sort advocated in the GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) by third world countries and the United States, and opposed by the European Community. It seems essential to introduce social and political arguments, that is, a sociological analysis, to defend or oppose European political integration. And such a sociological analysis must begin with an analysis of the forms and meaning of the present crisis of national states, the process of denationalization that so profoundly transforms the lives of the European countries that created the nation state and that is an exception in a world where new nations are constantly being created and where national consciousness and nationalism are strong almost everywhere.

We must, then, conclude that European integration has to be analyzed not in itself but in terms of its effects on European nations that are suffering a process of de-nationalization.

II

The most important aspect of this process is the dissociation between mass production and the diffusion of material and cultural goods on the one hand, and the cultural meanings that are created by memory, education, self image and the material presence of the past in landscape, monuments and language on the other. The new Europe is becoming “postmodern”, if this expression is taken to mean such a separation between signs and meanings, objects and subjectivity, market and values. Systems and actors no longer correspond to one another. We could speak of future Europe as of present-day Switzerland, a country in which people live at the world level and at a local level more than at a national level. Germans often defend the image of their country as a world economic power made up of autonomous Länder, and people who dream of a new Mitteleuropa describe it not as a national state but as a collection of European Länder, such as Croatia, Bohemia or Baden Württemberg, partly unified by the predominant rôle of German companies, which can very well operate in English.

Many people will object here that the United States, in a parallel way, is at the same time the core of the world mass consumption and mass communication culture and a loose federation of communities that are more eager to define their specificity than their participation in a national society. Nevertheless, in the present period of time, the United States acts as a strong nation state that is widely recognized as the only hegemonic power at the world level and where national consciousness and pride are strong. If we add that international trade plays a limited rôle in a country whose internal market is huge, we see that the dissociation between mass culture, political power and social attitudes is much more limited in the United States than in most European countries. Only Europeans can imagine their future as one defined by a growing participation in world trade associated with a tendency of national cultures to protect themselves in a more and more aggressive way and of political institutions to remain weak and deprived of democratic legitimation.

III

If we are interested in assessing the strength or weaknesses of such a Europe, we probably have to conclude that its future will be rapidly to disintegrate; that is, to be reduced to a zone of free trade while one or several European nation states, if they are able by themselves to play an international rôle, will use this free trade zone to enhance their competitiveness with Japan or the United States. Such a trilateral system, which would most probably include Germany, would limit the importance of Europe. But if I mentioned the fragility of such a loosely integrated Europe, it was first of all to underline the fragility of a society whose political system is not able to hold together an internationalized economic activity and a particularistic cultural life. A postnational society is doomed to be politically weak and unstable.

In a post-national society, the control exerted by institutions, democratic or administrative, on social, economic and cultural life, decreases both because their power is more limited and because the distance between worldwide production, consumption or communication centres and private experience increases so much that the two universes part from each other. In this type of society, people participate in flows of money, information and decisions, but these activities are not easily transformed into value orientations. To use Riesman’s famous expressions, “inner directedness” is not substituted by “other directedness” but lives side by side with it. Moreover, the larger the gap between the two universes, the more inner directedness is oriented by cultural heritage or by psychological impulses.

If it is true that national society was the political expression of modernity, at least in its first phase, when it meant trade, enforced laws and bureaucratic authority, post-national societies appear with the passage from a modernity that was limited to the world of production to a wider modernity that penetrates the worlds of consumption and communication. Because mass consumption is based on the central rôle of consumers’ demands, which are not rational, rationality becomes purely instrumental so that complex technologies and management methods can be used to satisfy either fun activities or racist propaganda as well as the progress of productivity. In a classical industrial society, production methods and workers’ or consumers’ behaviour were supposed to be similar, and education methods emphasized the necessity of subordinating passions to reason and immediate need satisfaction to deferred gratification. Reason was supposed to be both a principle of economic and social organization and a general pattern of behaviour. Modern society meant hard work and saving as much as domination of nature by science and technology.

In our new cultural environment, production is no longer oriented by objective or substantive rationality but by an instrument of rationality that serves the satisfaction of needs that are themselves more and more defined in terms of liberation of desires, impulses, needs, and dreams, and in terms of social status and mobility. From a society of production to a society of consumption and communication, the link between culture, society and personality disappears. The Weberian image of modernity corresponded to a merchant or proto industrial society more than to a mass production society, and is very far from present-day mass culture. In France, young people say, when they enjoy themselves, that they “burst out” (ils s’éclatent). The expression is quite accurate. Pleasure means suppression not only of external social controls but of internalized repressive control. The decay of the classical concept of “I” opens the way to the separation of two opposite definitions of personality. The first one is the self, which is defined by social expectations, and more precisely built by social agencies, political or administrative. Michel Foucault has given many examples of the construction of the self by institutions. But on the other side, personality is replaced by the effort of the individual to be an actor, that is to transform his or her social environment. This “I” - this effort to be an actor - is not defined by a content but rather as a movement for itself (pour soi) and, more concretely, as a resistance against the transformation of the individual into self by central social and cultural agencies.

We are here very far from the classical idea that personality is built by internalization of social norms, by the learned capacity to participate in collective rational activities. I defend here the opposite view, according to which the subject is created by individual or collective resistance to the pressure of institutions that either try to increase their own control of the behaviour of social actors or just intend to transform behaviour into participation in economic, political or informational markets. Instead of speaking of a necessary correspondence between institutions and motivations, which should be created by socialization agencies, I speak of a conflict between two logics: the logic of the system and the logic of the actor. The actor is not the result of a socialization process but of the capacity of individuals or groups to resist their reduction to market-oriented demands.

You may wonder what the relationship is between these ideas and a discussion about Europe. The relation is a very direct one.

Europe was a continent of nation states in which culture, society and personality were tightly intertwined. We are entering, we have already entered, a world in which mass culture and personality are so deeply separated that social and political institutions are weakened and seem to be empty, to have no influence over either the economy or individual behaviour. We no longer behave according to social rôles, as citizens or workers, as we used to, especially in France and Britain, where the concept and the reality of the nation state were created.

To speak of society meant speaking of national societies in which social and political institutions worked out the integration of actors into society. Now legal and political institutions are largely replaced by markets, and social rôles by creativity, and, according to Giddens, by reflexivity. Society is no longer national, and the actor is no longer a citizen or a worker. Internationalization of markets on the one hand, reflexive individualism and what I call the process of subjectivation on the other, are not complementary aspects of a national society. They do not belong to a social system, they are independent and in many ways conflicting universes. It is obviously difficult for European countries that have been nation states par excellence to adjust themselves to this post-national era, to the growing separation between system and actors and to the fundamental crisis of the concepts and agencies of institutionalization and socialization.

IV

Before responding to these difficulties, we must make clear that a complete separation between the inner world and the outer world, between system and actors, is likely to have pathological consequences. If individuals and groups are defined only by their impulses or by their cultural heritage, that is, by their differences, there is no possible communication among them and no social life is possible, except one based on segregation and aggression. At the same time, a mass society is not just one worldwide open market. If it is not controlled by political institutions, it is a battlefield in which the most powerful impose their interests on weaker countries or individuals. In many ways, the postmodern and post-national world would be heading back to the state of nature as it was defined by Hobbes. On one side, the defence of identity can be reduced to extreme differentialism, if not to racism; on the other, a consumer-oriented society can give full power to central institutions over atomized consumers.

These dangers make it clear that the growing separation between mass society and individual subjects must be compensated by the creation of new social and political mediations. Each of the two universes tends to exclude the other. Markets can be instruments not of need satisfaction, but of accumulation of power and resources; cultural specificity can be transformed into the opposite of personal freedom, into rejection of the other. My view is that this growing separation is positive inasmuch as society recognizes that its life is based on the conflict between two value orientations: maximizing the circulation of commodities, money and information on the one hand; maximizing the control of actors, individual or collective, over their social or material environment, on the other. This conflict between efficiency and freedom must be institutionalized and limited. If not, the negative tendencies will prevail and the world will be dominated by a deadly war between world trade or military centres and fundamentalist individuals or groups.

The recent triumph of the American empire over the Soviet empire induced many people, including some political philosophers, to think that the period of basic conflicts and fundamental choices was over, that the whole world agrees today on the superiority and necessity of a market economy, political democracy and secularization. My view is just the opposite. Past conflicts were limited, even class struggles were limited, because social adversaries shared common value orientations and fought only against the social use of cultural resources and values that were accepted by all. Entrepreneurs and organized labour, for example, accepted the positive value of industry, science and progress, but each camp identified itself with them and denounced their opponent as an obstacle to rationalization and progress. Today, on the contrary, the opposition between market and identity, instrumental rationality and subjectivation, can be complete and the conflict between them can become both cultural and social, so that compromises become more difficult. Conflicts are actually replaced by total rejection of the other, and competition or class conflict by exclusion or by religious wars. Each national society tends to be internally divided: on one side are people and institutions defending the economic superiority of the market, and oriented by rational interest and technological efficiency, and on the other are individuals or groups that oppose this view in the name either of individualism or of a national or religious tradition. The liberal view attracts many people in both rich and poor countries; the individualist and the culturalist points of view are equally present in all parts of the world.

Our world is not one world. It is almost completely divided between two contradictory views. The advantage of rich countries is that they offer limited free territories to individual freedom and to cultural minorities, even if these are often closed into ghettos, while in poor countries, which feel threatened by exogenous change, defence of cultural traditions can easily be transformed into fundamentalist or assimilationist regimes.

I can now formulate my question in a more pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 European countries in a post-national era
• 2 The European Community
• 3 Harmonization and the art of European government
• 4 Theses on a post-military Europe
• 5 Changing attitudes in the European Community
• 6 Support for new social movements in five western European countries
• 7 Environmentalism in Europe: an east-west comparison
• 8 Order, crisis and social movements in the transition from state socialism
• 9 Intellectuals and democratization in Hungary
• 10 State and society in Poland
• 11 Some thoughts on trust, collective identity, and the transition from state socialism
• Index