In previous discussions of this topic, most recently in a short article published in Soundings (Outhwaite, 2000), I have tended to refer to civil society in Europe in an interrogative mode, using titles such as ‘Is there a civil society in Europe?’ or ‘Towards a European civil society?’. The title I am using today sounds more positive, but if anything I have become somewhat more tentative about the claims one can make for the existence of anything one might want to call civil society at a European level.  The existence of a section called ‘civil society’ on an EU website publicising relevant conferences (http://www.europa.eu.int/futurum/evpub-en.htm) provides only limited reassurance here.

Two books have had a particular influence on my thinking. One, which I discovered rather late, is Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism (1995); the other is Larry Siedentop’s Democracy in Europe (2000).  Billig points out the extent to which nation-state categories frame our social experience and our most basic assumptions. This is not nationalism in a strong sense, but rather the unthinking adoption of the nation-state frame of reference. And it is clear, as a lot of the literature on globalisation has noted, that international or supranational processes are characteristically experienced at a local (which often means a national) level. In Europe for example, customs tariffs may be a matter of European-level policy, but they must all be largely imposed by locally employed staff of member states, for reasons of convenience and tradition. So the upshot of Billig’s book, I think, for reflection on European integration, is to suggest that the road slopes somewhat more steeply uphill than we may sometimes have thought.

 

Siedentop’s very different book points in political-theoretical terms to the need both for serious constitutional debate and for gradualism in the move towards European integration. As he puts it in his closing sentences (pp.230-1)

 

The danger of premature federalism in Europe – of the rush to political integration which turns federalism into little more than a mask for a unitary superstate – is that it could put at risk the complex textures of European societies…

The attraction of federalism, properly understood, for Europe is that it should make possible the survival of different national political cultures and forms of civic spirit. But that can be the case only if federalism is approached gradually…. Federalism is the right future for Europe. But Europe is not yet ready for federalism.

 

European civil society, then, may come to appear not so much as the fertile soil in which European institutions can be expected to flourish, as a weak soil threatened by aggressive over-exploitation and requiring a good deal of nurturing before it can grow anything but the sickliest of plants.

The concept of civil society has itself come in for a good deal of critical scrutiny in recent years.   First, there has been an understandable reaction against an inflationary use of the term in the early nineties, associated with unrealistic expectations about postcommunist transition.  Civil society movements did not live up to the expectation that they would offer a new, higher form of democracy in part at least of the postcommunist world; instead, they were rapidly elbowed out by reconstituted or reinvented political movements and institutions. In Ferenc Mislevitz’s classic formulation, ‘We dreamed of civil society and we got NGOs’.  Second, these disappointments, together with others about the fate of western civil society movements, led to a rethinking of some of the implications of civil society thinking, pointing critically to its over-moralisation in ‘neat’ models which exclude anything distasteful and, on the other hand, to possibly illiberal uses in certain contexts.  Robert Fine has pointed to some of these in a chapter in Fine & Rai (1997).  More recently, Graham Pollock (2001), working in Barcelona, has argued, like Fine, that civil society theory has been constructed in opposition to a somewhat caricatural negative image of nationalism and national identity and sometimes acted as an ideological support to what he calls ‘banal state nationalism’ such as that displayed by much of the Spanish political class in its backlash against Catalan and Basque nationalism.      

It is easy to retort that partisans of civil society have rather little to offer in the way of political murder, war, deportations and genocide compared to champions of the nation or Volk and the state, but some contemporary uses of civil society theory should give pause for thought.  Despite all this, however, I continue to think both that we require some concept of civil society for Tocquevillian-Siedentopian reasons and that civil society politics in both its Western and Eastern European forms from the 1970s onwards remains one of our most fruitful political experiences and resources. 

 

Conceptions of civil society can be roughly divided into broader and narrower understandings of the term; Pérez-Días (1998) distinguishes between ‘generalists’ and ‘minimalists’. In the former conception, as for example in Larry Siedentop's book, it is principally conceived as a form of society, characterised by, inter alia, individualism, the rule of law, some sort of public sphere and so forth.

 

For what is fundamental to the idea of a civil society? It is that the equality of status attributed by states to their subjects creates, at least potentially, a sphere of individual liberty or choice, a private sphere of action (Siedentop, 2000: p.88). 

 

 In the latter, narrower understanding of the term it is presented as a form of associational life independent of the state and economy, the base of a pyramid, as it were, whose apex is formed by publicists and social movement activists.  Whereas Pérez-Días favours a broader understanding of the term, Jeff Alexander has argued for many years for a more restricted one.  My preference is for a weaker version of Alexander's usage, in which civil society is taken to mean associational life at a variety of levels, shading off into conceptions of the public sphere.  I would however be less restrictive than Alexander in that I would include low-level economic exchanges such as the reciprocal visits by market traders in the framework of the INTERREG programme, despite the fact that it involves economic activity and is sponsored by the EU.  

However one specifies these concepts, however, the important point, I think, is that a discussion of European civil society necessarily hangs between the two poles of questions about broadly conceived European cultural identities on the one hand and European-level economic and political institutions and practices on the other. My approach is therefore something like that advanced by Habermas in 1974 in an early reflection on the possibilities of social identities not tied to territorial states and their membership. A collective identity, Habermas argues, can only be conceived in a reflexive form, in an awareness that one has opportunities to participate in 

 

processes of communication in which identity formation occurs as a continuous learning process.  Such value and norm creating communications… flow out of the ‘base’ into the pores of organisationally structured areas of life.   They have a subpolitical character, i.e. they operate below the level of political decision processes, but they indirectly influence the political system because they change the normative framework of political decisions. (Habermas, 1976, p. 116).

 

I am assuming that, despite all the vicissitudes of the concept of civil society and of the reality of civil society politics (cf. Fine & Rai, 1997; Alexander, 1998), one can meaningfully talk about the existence of civil societies, however embattled, in most if not all of Europe.  Whether there is also an emergent European civil society is a further question.  Without overplaying conceptions of identity and pursuing the chimera of a European Staatsvolk, I think that to talk of a European civil society does presuppose some minimal version of a European identity, perhaps a weak or 'thin' cultural identity based on a particular modulation of modernity.  As Reinhold Viehoff and Rien Segers put it, in the introduction to their edited collection on this theme, many of the conflicts accompanying the European integration process have a cultural content, wherever they may formally be located in institutional structures (Viehoff and Segers (1999), p. 28.  At the same time, however, to frame the question of civil society in this way raises the stakes since, as Klaus Eder points out in the same collection (p. 149), to start from the premise that there should be some sort of European identity and to look for ways of adequately representing it is ‘to turn the logic of collective identity formation on its head’.  Nevertheless, Eder insists, if it is to be more than an instrumental association of nation-states dressed up as a 'community’, ‘Europe needs culture in order to found a transnational order on a consensus’ (pp.152-3) - even if, as he goes on to stress, this may be as much as anything a consensus on how to handle conflicts. 

           

            It is not enough to point to distinctivenesses or commonalities in cultural or social forms within Europe, nor even to the frequency and intensity of inter- or transnational interaction. What matters is a more reflexive shaping and incorporation of these common patterns into some sense of identity. A European identity might be seen as taking shape in opposition to, on the one hand, national or subnational identities of a traditional kind and, on the other, alternative supranational identities such as an Anglo-American atlanticist identity, a Francophone (or Hispanophone or Lusitanophone) or a Mediterranean one.  A former supranational candidate, based on the Soviet bloc or ‘socialist community of nations’ and backed up by the knout of the Brezhnev doctrine, is clearly eliminated.  But none of the others seems particularly salient either; the structural relations emerging from the European integration process have probably dealt the coup de grace to these anyway somewhat factitious identities.  For the core states of the European Union, the euro will probably be a more powerful integrative force than any of these, though even a currency union is not necessarily much more of a Heimat than was the German customs union, the Zollverein. 

            Despite 'banal nationalistic' residues of the kind noted by Billig, low levels of migration and intermarriage between the European countries and the massive presence of national infrastructures of all kinds, one should not overlook the growing affinities between inhabitants of the main metropolitan centres in Europe or within some of the Euroregions.   Border regions like Mosel-Rhine, for example, seem to have a real identity, marked in a slightly macabre fashion some years ago when after a bad motorway pile-up casualties were divided between the nearest hospitals, which happened to be in three different countries.  But my local regional grouping, East Sussex/Seine-Maritime, has more obstacles to overcome - not least the collapse over a year ago of the direct ferry service, only now to be restored with the sale of Newhaven port to Seine-Maritime.

Despite the rise of the transnational manager, the political classes of Europe remain strikingly national in their composition.  The German candidate for French political office Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Czech former MEP for Italy Jiri Pelikan, or the German-born MP for Birmingham Gisela Stuart remain isolated exceptions.  Even in the supranational EU institutions, national quotas exist for appointments, including senior positions such as European commissioner or judge in the European Court.  Siedentop's reflections about the need for a European political class are highly pertinent here; as well as more Madisons, we need more Dahrendorfs.  Social movements are somewhat less bound by nation-state boundaries, though for many of course the local nature of their concerns militates against their Europeanisation, and they may often, for good reasons, adopt a global rather than European frame of reference.  There is also no genuinely European newspaper, published in the major languages, and The European has made a poor showing compared to the Herald Tribune, Financial Times or Economist.

            But, to repeat the point with which I began, I take one of the most important elements in recent theorising about and for civil society to have been the realisation that it must be conceived not so much in opposition to as in conjunction with state and other systemic structures, whether or not the term is extended to include them, and it is to these that I now turn rather more explicitly.   I am offering therefore one element of a reply to Charles Turner’s critique (in Fine & Rai, 1997) of Gellner and Habermas for what he sees as their undue economism and constitutionalism respectively.  There may be good reasons, pace Turner, for focussing not just on the associational dimension of civil society but on its interaction with other political and economic (and even military) structures in relation to the integration process.  This is not to justify the dangerous elitism of much European integration politics, with its shameless technocratism, its somewhat sinister reference to the acquis communautaire and its neglect or patronising of the benighted natives, but it does suggest an open-minded and broad-spectrum approach to Europe-level activities.  A European identity may emerge from conflicts in agricultural negotiations and the battles against BSE & foot and mouth disease as well as from more lofty exercises in pursuit of common values; as Bernhard Giesen has suggested, we should be thinking perhaps in terms of Simmel’s model of the integrating effects of conflict rather than a more ambitious conception such as one derived from Durkheimian sociology of religion (Giesen (1999), in Viehoff and Segers (1999), p. 145).  Eder, too, has stressed the importance of (the management of) dissensus, as much as consensus.  A European identity will also be something highly mediated in the sense of virtual, where the real agents are likely to remain predominantly drawn from a limited number of social circles; as Richard Münch (1999, p. 249) puts it, smewhat brutally, ‘the elites of top managers, experts, political leaders and intellectuals...)’.

            There is of course a further issue here, that of the division between a broadly geographical and cultural Grosseuropa, stretching from the Atlantic to at least the Urals and probably the Russian Pacific, and the Kleineuropa made up of the member states of the EU at any given point in time.  I am implacably opposed to the sloppy equation of ‘Europe’ with the EU, and the concomitant neglect, for the moment at least, of the ‘other Europe’.  On the other hand it is clear that this distinction is on the way out and that the integration process within the EU is the leading edge of European integration conceived more broadly, leaving the non-members as inevitably an outer circle or set of circles.  More broadly, the EU has become, as Rainer Lepsius puts it,

 

‘an object which possesses a normative content and immediately structures behaviour in the menber states.  If the extension of a European identity presupposes a specific object relation, this has come into existence with the development of the European Union’ (Lepsius, 1999, in Viehoff and Segers (1999), p. 202). 

 

We may wish, then, for a ‘people’s Europe’ beyond the glass and print temples of the EU institutions, but this will have to develop in some sort of relation with them, rather as communists used to have to define themselves, whether positively or negatively, in relation to the Soviet Union.  The slogan ‘Yes to Europe, no to Maastricht’ was still of course a contribution to the Maastricht debate.  This puts the emphasis back again on the EU and its democratic deficit, and here I can simply associate myself with the position advanced in different ways by Habermas and Siedentop.

            With the collapse of the ‘people’s democracies’, and the eclipse of revolutionary socialism, the liberal democratic state, like capitalism, has no obvious practical alternative.  If anything, and despite very important elements of disillusionment or political alienation (Budge, Newton et al, 1997; Ch.5), it has acquired stronger roots with the democratisation of everyday life: the growing acceptance, exemplified in spheres as diverse as media interviews with politicians and child-rearing practices, that all our decisions and ways of life are in principle open to questioning.  They become in Habermas's sense ‘post-conventional’. Individualism of this kind may also, as Richard Münch (1999, pp. 230-1) has suggested, favour the development of a European identity. The more sovereign and reflexive we are in the construction of our individual identities, the easier it will be for us to foreground a European one.[i]

Once again, Europe is pioneering a mode of governance, this time transnational rather than national, which gives some practical embodiment to the current extension of democratic thinking into conceptions of cosmopolitan democracy (Held, 1995).  This development is as important, I believe, as the earlier extension of liberal democracy into social democracy; it coexists uneasily, however, with communitarian thinking both in social and political philosophy and in the practice of, for example, Clinton and Blair, and to some extent Jospin and Schröder.  In the political sphere, Habermas has of course popularised Dolf Sternberger’s conception of 'constitutional patriotism' (Verfassungspatriotismus) based not on membership of a particular ethnic or national community or Volk but on a rational and defensible identification with a decent constitutional state which may of course be the one whose citizenship one holds as well as the one in which one lives.  But as Habermas has also come to stress, if the liberal democratic nation-state has few internal enemies, it is increasingly seen as inappropriate to the contemporary reality of global processes and challenges as well as to the desire of many citizens for more local autonomy.

In this postnational constellation, as Habermas has called it, the progress of European union, combined as it is with attempts to strengthen regional autonomy under the slogan of subsidiarity’, becomes a crucial external determinant of the internal reconfiguration of many European states, notably the UK.[ii] Larry Siedentop's warning about the possible threat to civil society posed by the European integration process is clearly to be taken seriously, though I incline to a slightly more relaxed vision of these dangers. His critique of over-centralisation is well taken, but centralisation is by definition a part of the integration process, and not without benefits – especially to inhabitants of a member state such as the UK which is relatively backward, both economically and constitutionally.  And while it may be perverse to prefer to be governed by strangers (p. 22), it is equally odd in the modern world to be afraid of it. The threat to European civil society comes not so much, I suggest, from explicit political initiatives such as those by Fischer and, more recently, Schröder, as from the often more surreptitious efforts of the national governments of member states to circumvent and undermine the emergent institutions of Europe.  Why do we need European unity?  In part, as I see it, for the reason Willy Brandt gave for Germany in an explicit value-choice, that what belongs together should grow together. And finally, if there is a drift, as Martin Shaw has argued in an important recent book (Shaw, 2001), to something like a global state, it is surely at the European level that we in Europe have the best chance of getting some measure of democratic control over it.

           

           

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