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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[i] Reflexive identities need not of course be cosmopolitan and weltoffen. In conditions of advanced modernity, I suggest, misunderstanding and prejudice have become reflexive, in the sense that an awareness of the possibility that they may occur, and of ways in which their occurrence might be understood, forms part of the context underlying them. Even the internationalist, cosmopolitan, or European identity can perhaps only be defined by way of opposition. They are localists, parochial, blinkered or xenophobic, borné or borniert: we are cosmopolitan etc, at the cutting edge of the internationalisation or Europeanisation of our disciplines and of their institutional embodiment in our universities. But this universality can produce an intolerance of those who have not universalised themselves sufficiently, and this is an important root of one form at least of reflexive stereotyping. We irritatedly complain that the British or the Germans have dragged their feet or dug their heels in on some issue or other; they have been - well, German, or British, or French. In such contexts, the blame is of course placed on the others. We would never have thought of using such reductionist categories, even half-seriously, if they had not previously othered themselves, in such an inappropriate and irritating manner (cf. Outhwaite, 1995).
[ii] Hilary Wainwright (1994) has argued for the importance of knowledge in the (inherently cosmopolitan)
activity of new social movements. Building on her analysis, it is possible to construct a model of
cosmopolitan knowledge which has certain similarities with interdisciplinary
knowledge - a kind of savoir sans frontières which social movements
and political activists may find it easier to develop than state-bound
or discipline-bound party politicians or over-professionalised academics.
William Outhwaite is Professor of Sociology at the School of European Studies of University of Sussex (UK). He is currently working on books on social theory after 1989, contemporary Europe and Germany. He has been a deputy editor of Sociology, editor of Current Sociology, and chair of the International Sociological Association's Publications Committee, and he is an associate editor of the European Journal of Social Theory.