William Outhwaite

Social structure

2000

global library

In the contemporary context, globalisation [definition in box?] makes it harder than ever to decide what is specific to the European version of modernity and to European culture and social structure. What in any case should we understand by modernity? The concept has dominated social theorising in the 1980s, replacing the previously fashionable terms 'industrialism' or 'industrial society' in the 1950s and 1960s and 'capitalism' in the 1970s. The underlying rationale of the shift to the term 'modernity' was, I think, to move attention away from what in Marxist language would be called the forces of production or the social relations of production towards more cultural and political dimensions of modern societies. It remains true, however, that one of the defining features of European social structure is the early development (compared to the rest of the world) of capitalism and industrialism, reinforcing and transforming other processes of modernity.

This is not the place to answer the question, raised most insistently by Max Weber (1864-1920) of ‘why it happened here first’. [Weber GAR quote in box?] What is clear is that in Europe we are still living with the results, both positive and negative, of having ‘started first’. Michael Mann (1986, 1993) may well be right that what counted in Europe is the competition between smallish political units under the unifying umbrella of Christendom. This, and the religious diversification of early modern Europe may, as Weber argued, have contributed to the rise of capitalism. This in turn, for example, reinforced an existing inclination in much of Europe towards nuclear family structures (Laslett, 1971; Seccombe; 1992). As the Swedish Sociologist Göran Therborn (1995, p. 24) puts it, ‘West of a line from Trieste to St Petersburg, there...existed, already on the threshold to modernity, a distinctive family type, characterised by late marriages, a considerable number of people never married, and nuclear family households’. This, together with capitalist wage-labour and industrialisation and made Europeans less religious in many ways than other inhabitants of the world. British and then European capitalism enjoyed an early advantage, before being eclipsed (though still not definitively) by North American and then East Asian variants. Similarly, the European nation-state system spread across the world and helped to pull apart the world’s remaining big imperial structures, including of course in the end those which European countries had established overseas (or, in the Russian/Soviet case, overland). The European states successively and to an increasing degree supervised and shaped the development of capitalism and industrialism on their territories (Barrington Moore, 1969), leaving European capitalism much more regulated than in the US or Asia (Albert, 1991; Crouch and Streeck, 1997). There are of course exceptions to this tendency in the far West of Europe (the UK) and to some extent now the former communist East.

The socialist countries, whose political and cultural version of modernity was strikingly different in the half-century following 1945, appear in retrospect as in many ways simply carrying through many of the same processes by other, more visibly authoritarian means (cf. Therborn, 1995, pp. 121-2). They took control of capitalism to the extent of replacing it with a centrally planned economic system, they pushed through industrialisation policies and got rid of their peasantries, they urbanised in similarly drastic ways, to the point of tragic absurdity in Romania, and incorporated their populations into (centrally managed) political, educational and media systems. In the USSR and Eastern Europe, however, the modernisation process gave rise to economic, political and cultural strains which the systems could not control. Unable to innovate successfully in any of these domains, the ruling elites yielded to gentle but compelling external and internal pressures and stepped down into the dustbin of history, where many of them found a lucrative second career recycling the garbage.

The modernisation and industrialisation process produced ultimately (though not really until the 1950s for most of Europe, with the partial liquidation of its independent peasantry and other self-employed people) an ‘employment society’ or Arbeitsgesellschaft (Offe,) whose alleged end is still a matter of controversy. Here again, the socialist countries were simply more radical in abolishing (except in Poland and Yugoslavia) independent peasant agriculture and (again to differing degrees) independent commercial activity. In the capitalist countries of ‘Western’ Europe, the integration of what Alain Touraine (1961) called ‘ouvriers d'origine agricole' and of independent proprietors was followed by the integration of immigrant workers and, increasingly, their families.

In the course of the 1970s, which one has to see as a crucial turning-point in the development of Western European social structures and ideologies, these two processes of integration began in part to run backwards. The doubling or, in some countries, much worse than doubling of unemployment rates excluded large parts of the populations from labour markets and other forms of social participation, bearing heavily on women, except in the UK and Ireland (Therborn, 1995, p. 63), the old and the young. At the same time, and relatedly, many natives of western Europe rejected so-called immigrants (though many were second-generation) who were ‘here for good’ (Castles, 1984). Discrimination against ethnic minorities in the labour market could no longer be explained away by language or other difficulties of integration, but racism became more politically entrenched in many countries.

It is therefore not surprising that what came to be called social exclusion has become a growing proccupation in sociological relection and political discussion, particularly in France, where, as H. Silver et F. Wilkinson put it (in G. Rogers et al, 1995, p. 285), ‘In line with the Republican ideology of solidarity, problems like long-term unemployment and rising poverty were construed as manifestations of ‘social exclusion’ or ‘a rupture of the social bond’. In the UK, which came late to these ideas, the ‘New Labour’ government which came to power in 1997 briskly inaugurated a ‘social exclusion unit’.

The theme of a crisis in the Western European welfare state (Rosanvallon, 1981) and of the work society which underpinned it, is of course a long-standing one. In the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas’s early version in 1973, economic crises of capitalism metastasize into the political and cultural sphere, producing irrational state responses or ‘crises of crisis-management’ (Berger, 1981) and eroding individual motivation. What strikes one in looking comparatively at Western Europe are again the diverse political and cultural responses to socio-economic and social structural processes which were common to most of the major countries. In Western Europe, it is tempting to offer a state-centred analysis of these differences, rather than the society-centred approaches common to much Marxist and non-marxist sociology in the seventies and eighties. In Eastern Europe, of course, it is inescapable; it was the states which ran most things, and the states which imploded, bringing down the deformed societies they had dominated.

In what follows, I shall examine some of these proceses in a bit more detail. Rather than taking traditional structural concepts (family, class, etc) as the organising principle, I have chosen to use more abstract terms to refer to processes and structures of contemporary Europe. Borrowing from Hermann Schwengel’s conception of four ‘pillars’ of European social structuration, I shall focus, as he has done, on capitalism, constitutionalism, rationalisation and individualism (Schwengel, 1999).

Capitalism

Europe was the site where capitalism in its modern form first developed, and as it spread through trade, agriculture and what Marx called ‘manufacture’ into industrial production it transformed European society in all kinds of ways. Note however, and this is a point I shall repeat ad nauseam in the rest of this chapter, that the spread of capitalism was extremely uneven and partial. Reading Marx, who of course was writing in the most advanced corner of Europe, it is easy to get the impression that almost all men, as well as a lot of women and children, were factory workers, and later historians have often encouraged this misapprehension. Barrington Moore (1978), in another excellent book, has shown how small was the proportion of the German population in the industrial proletariat, and how small the units in which they mostly worked, right into the twentieth century. A French-German comparison (e.g. Kaelble,1991) is also instructive on France’s relative backwardness in social structural terms in the early post-war period (large peasantry and independent sector, etc.) and its rapid transformation thereafter in what the French sociologist Henri Mendras (1988) called ‘the second French revolution’. And the industrial and productive core of Western Europe, the banana-shaped region centred roughly on the Rhine and running from south-east England to Northern Italy and including bits of Southern France, Northern Spain, and Scandinavia, was very different from the peripheries [map in Therborn, 1995, p.184; cf. also op. cit., Ch. 10]. Fairly soon, of course, bits of the banana rotted, with the decline of traditional industries in Wallonia, the Ruhr, and so forth, and new centres and types of production came to replace them. The main political axis of the EC/EU remained however Paris-Bonn, the UK having joined only in 1973 and thereafter substantially excluding itself from decision-making by its politically irresponsible half-heartedness. Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, despite a somewhat standardised development strategy which suited the more backward parts of the empire better than it did East Germany or Czechoslovakia, combined this with a quite substantial degree of sectoral specialisation by country. Here, the postcommunist shake-up and shake-out of the 1990s also shows some states and regions becoming relatively prosperous and others likely to remain disaster areas for decades to come. (On divisions within Europe as a whole, see, for instance, Hudson and Williams, 1999.)

Continental European industrial capitalism developed in tandem with the welfare state, and this continues to give it a different shape from that of other world regions (Albert, 1991; Crouch and Streeck, 1997; Mendras, 1997, Ch. 7). Even the UK, where what strategic thinking there is tends to follow the US rather than the rest of Europe, is still recognisably within a European pattern, and further European integration is likely to sustain and even enforce this. On the other hand, Europe is not immune from global pressures and its own internal tendencies away from ‘organised’ and towards ‘disorganised’ capitalism (Offe, 1985; Lash and Urry, 1987; Crouch, 1993). Like so many of Europe’s contemporary predicaments, this is a mixture of the old and the new. Theorists of capitalism have always been pulled between emphasising its organised, predictable calculating character and its unpredictable, chaotic aspect, and as Fordist mass production gives way to more flexible post-Fordist forms this dualism returns in new forms. Some jobs, for example, become more specialised, skilled and professionalised; others are further down-graded, routinised and casualised into ‘McJobs’. Once again, Eastern Europe throws up these issues in a particularly stark form. Bureaucratic and technical skills which were valued under socialism are now devalued; ‘cultural capital’ in the form of western languages and contacts becomes a crucial resource.

Some regions of Europe seem better placed to profit from these developments than others, but it is hard to be confident about predicting developments which often seem to result from happy combinations of luck and entrepreneurship and rapidly become self-sustaining. How far EU policies will follow the imperatives of capitalism itself and encourage regional specialisation, along the lines of a map [fig] which attracted some attention in 1999, or pursue more differentiated redistributive strategies which however have largely failed at the level of nation-states, is also an open question.

Capitalism, whatever its virtues (Saunders, 1995), is of course predicated upon inequality and class division, and Europe has been the prime site for anticapitalist movements based more or less solidly on working class support. As a general rule, paradoxically, it has been the relatively prosperous North of Europe which had the strongest social democratic parties, often ruling parties, and trade unions. The South, suffering from greater poverty and more severe strains resulting from industrialisation, has been more fertile ground for minority communist parties, these however being mostly excluded from power by one means or another. One way or another, Europe developed a characteristic pattern of association between class and voting which has persisted even when class seems to have become merely a variable influencing electoral preferences rather than something directly addressed in political debate. (On class and voting, see Inglehart, 1990; Therborn, 1995, pp 284-9.)

In East Central Europe, of course, communist minorities were able to seize power after W.W.II and establish a version of socialism which was probably doomed by the circumstances of its birth, its association with a generally unpopular (even in Germany and Bulgaria) hegemonic power, the USSR, and the means by which it was maintained. Once stalinized, they could never fully de-stalinize - ‘path-dependence’ if you like. It was in Eastern Europe, once again, that the rise and fall of social movements or civil society was most abrupt and striking. The regimes in their final days were mostly confronted by broad coalitions of oppositional forces linked largely by the mere fact of their opposition and an awareness that this was now after all possible. The image of movements of civil society filling the vacuum left by discredited and imploded states was a powerful one on both sides of the falling Iron Curtain. Almost as soon, however, the movements substantially disaggregated, in a fast-forward version of the life-cycle of many western European movements, into orthodox parties on the one hand and grumpy outsiders on the other. In East Germany, disneyfied copies of the main West German parties were rapidly cobbled together by ex-stalinist stooges and western carpet-baggers; politics in much of rest of the former bloc took on a vertiginous back-and-forth between neoliberals on the one hand, sometimes in alliance with clerical conservatives, and rebadged communist parties on the other, benefiting on the rebound from rapid disillusionment with neoliberal economic policies. And this was in the relatively more fortunate states; elsewhere, the old nomenklatura elites have managed to preserve their position, with catastrophic results in, for example, the former Soviet and Yugoslav republics respectively of Belarus and Serbia. This brings us, in a somewhat negative way, to the theme of constitutionalism which is discussed in the following section.

Constitutionalism

The constitutional and eventually democratic state is another of those European creations better known in its export model - in this case, the USA. Whatever one thinks about the reality of American democracy, it remains a powerful ideal, deeply entrenched in attitudes and everyday practices, including the defence of free speech in circumstances where even liberal Europeans tend to reach for the penal code. From a North American, and perhaps from and East Asian point of view, Europeans seem somewhat state-centred, waiting for state provision rather than turning to individual or collective self-help. The long-lasting effects of the 1968 protests have however sustained a variety of social movements within Europe and increasingly operating on a global scale. Generall, though, one can conclude that twentieth century Europe produced some of the most decent and attractive states in the world, especially in the North of Europe, but it also provided the two most repellent and destructive ones: Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR.

If one takes advanced modernity to include not just industrialism and capitalism, urbanism, mass education and so forth, but also certain traditional Euro-American conceptions of citizenship and the public sphere, with roots in the French and American revolutions, these are not always, at least for the moment, part of the export package when modernity becomes global. There has, for example, been a good deal of debate about whether the state socialism developed in the USSR and imposed on large parts of the rest of Europe should be understood as a variant of modernity, just as it was in previous decades as a variant of industrial society (Aron, 1962), or as in some sense insufficiently, incompletely or unstably modern, in its socio-political structures no less than in its automobile industry. On this view, for example, the 1989 revolutions could be seen as a process of catching-up or rectification (Habermas, 1990; cf. Arnason, 1993).

One of the most important recent social and political transformations in Europe has of course been the destruction of these ‘socialist’ dictatorships. Whether or not one calls these regimes totalitarian [definition] in their practice, it is fairly clear that they pursued an essentially totalitarian ideal of centralised control of economic, political and cultural processes, hidden behind a facade of democratic participation. The rapid democratisation of most of these states is a dramatic instance of a world-wide trend towards democracy in the later twentieth century (Fischer, 1996; Nagle and Mahr, 1999). In the European case, the more or less realistic prospect of accession to the European Union acts as a powerful external stimulus to further democratisation and a brake on possible regression towards authoritarian rule.

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.), 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’. In the political context, Habermas himself has, for example, 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 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 Daniel Bell’s classic phrase, it is ‘too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life’ (Bell, 1987, p. 14). 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. 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 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. The opposition, described by Tönnies (1887), between the large-scale anonymous and formal structures characteristic of modernity and the survival of localised or now sometimes de-localised communities of co-residents or co-thinkers remains a feature of contemporary Europe. This brings us to our next theme, that of rationalisation.

Rationalisation

The great German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) used the term rationalisation to refer to processes of systematisation in a wide variety of areas of modern societies: the economy, law, bureaucratic organisation, religion and everyday conduct. Entrepreneurs, and increasingly their employees, in early modern Europe began to calculate their economic benefits and losses more precisely and to seek a more predictable environment for their acivity. This meshed in neatly with a trend to the codification of law, notably in the Code Napoleon which was imposed in the wide-spread territories he ruled in Europe and elsewhere. State administrations and other large organisations began to rely more on paid officials in complex hierarchies and with clearly defined tasks and routines: the ‘fonctionnaire’ or ‘Beamte’ in public service and the ‘organization man’ in the large corporation (Whyte, 1960; Crozier, 1964). Religious belief became more systematic and streamlined, with the partial displacement, especially in Northern Europe, of the saints and intercession rituals of Catholicism by the more austerely monotheistic and formal protestant versions of Christianity. With industrialisation and urban migration, religion became increasingly marginalised. Contemporary Europe appears 'modern' in relation to the US and many other regions of the world in the extent of its secularisation: whatever the difficulties of measurement in this domain, it is clear that religious belief in Europe has mostly ceased to have the kind of importance for social life as a whole which it has retained elsewhere, even in ostensibly secular states like the US. Scandinavia and East Central Europe have gone furthest in this direction, though France, despite a historically strong Catholic tradition, displays an equally strong secular emphasis in matters of state policy (laicité) and a relatively high level of disbelief in God (Therborn, p.275). Individuals, too, have increasingly to ‘manage’ themselves: their time, their careers, their life-choices and so forth (Beck, 1988). In Eastern Europe, again, this has come as something new to citizens who might have had difficulties in acquiring consumer goods but who were largely cushioned by the state from the bigger risks of life: prolonged illness, unemployment, homelessness and so forth. Women, again suffered particularly from this shake-up and shake-out (Einhorn, 1993) Many East German victims of the 199? floods were surprised to find that their new all-German insurance policies left them unprotected.

Once again, the processes Weber described at the beginning of the twentieth century, and whose origins he traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth, continue in new forms at the dawn of the twenty-first, in management practices of personal appraisal and individual or collective self-management or self-help (Giddens, 1991; Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994). These are at once liberating, in the way they throw us onto our own resources to define our goals and strategies, and disciplining, in the sense of what Michel Foucault called surveillance. We are constantly under observation, by others and by ourselves. Are you reading this chapter carefully and efficiently? Is it giving you the information and ideas you need? Will it count towards my research output and that of my University? And so on.

Some thinkers have argued that the rationalisation processes characteristic of modernity have given place to a more disorganised and chaotic postmodern world of disorganised capitalism, franchised welfare services and utilities, unstructured belief, chaotic lives made up of juggling a variety of short-term part-time jobs, and so forth. This is I think a mistake. What we find instead in what some people have called a second modernity is an accentuation of many of the same processes under conditions where structures have become more complex and virtual, though no less efficacious. Class structures, I suggest, remain crucially important determinants of individuals’ life-chances, even if they no longer find a direct embodiment in huge working-class occupational communities or mass organisations. The effects of gender, too, have remained pervasive, even as fewer and fewer occupations are explicitly segregated. In this newly rationalsed world, issues of individual identity return in new but still recognisable forms.

Individualism

[definition]

Asking what is distinctive about European modernity, the French sociologist Henri Mendras (1997, p. 53) offers a historical answer which emphasises the

longue et lente conquête de l’Europe [by which he means Western Europe] par un modèle idéologique. Ce modèle est fait d’innovations idéologiques: l’idée individualiste de l’homme; la distinction entre trois légitimités, religieuse, politique et économique; la notion de capital; la conjugaison de la science et de la technique, le pouvoir de la majorité; la force du contrat et du rapport de confiance qu’il suppose; l’état de droit; le droit de propriété a la romaine. Tels sont les éléments fondamentaux de la civilisation d’Europe occidentale ...qui sont uniques dans l’histoire des civilisations.

We have encountered these themes already in the previous section, but the first of these deserves special attention. Modernity is, as the German historical sociologist Norbert Elias described it, essentially a ‘society of individuals’ (Elias, 1988), and, as Durkheim recognised, individualism has become something of a substitute for religious belief in modern societies. Parents’ views on the desirability or otherwise of encouraging independence rather than obedience in their children are, as Therborn notes (p. 292), an interesting marker of differences across Europe. There are striking differences between the value placed on autonomy in the North and Central region (Austria, West Germany, Netherlands and the Nordic countries) and the emphasis on obedience in the South and West (UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain.) Similarly, between some parts of Eastern Europe (Hungary, East Germany, and the former Soviet Baltic republics, but also Bulgaria in the south-east) and others (authoritarian Czechoslovakia, Poland Belorussia and Russia). As in the case of work organisation discussed below, it is interesting that the traditional stereotype which contrasts a libertarian or anarchic France with a rigid and authoritarian Germany is contradicted by the evidence.

There can be little doubt about the further advance of individualistic values in the late twentieth century (Inglehart, 1977). However, we must remember that an ‘ideal type’ of modern individualism should not be taken in an exclusive sense. People, particularly women, continue to be defined and to define themselves in relational terms as someone’s child, wife or parent. Patronymics are widely used both as names and as descriptions in many parts of Europe, and families remain very important, even in the North. In the south, clientelism often persists in quasi-familial forms, and in many countries university professors, for example, surround themselves with a small ‘family’ of assistants. (This chapter, I should stress, has not benefited from such assistance...)

The important point, however, is that it is increasingly easy for individuals to define themselves in other ways, choosing between a repertoire of identities and foregrounding one or another according to context. (The frequent adoption in internet chat groups of a fictitious identity or the opposite gender is one of the most recent examples.) Here again we see the inseparable interplay of structural and cultural elements in defining identities. Sexual identity is fairly clear-cut, but its salience in social contexts is highly variable. A homosexual identity may be given a central place by its bearer and his or her associates, or it may be kept in the background by both. Some women may change their names to mark their distinctness from their fathers or parents.

Modernity is characterised, then, by a weakening of traditional identities in the anonymity of cities and individual wage-labour. At the same time, we see a desire to categorise and classify, of which Foucault gave the classic examples in his studies of the emergence of the ‘mad’, ‘sick’ or ‘homosexual’ identity. More particularly, the European nation-states became concerned to count and measure their populations, and to impose a common national identity at the expense of regional ones (Eley and Suny, 1996). Boundary changes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and migration flows within and into Europe have increasingly subverted the latter process, but many European states continue to try to preserve a traditional line. France, in particular, has resisted expressions of cultural difference in public institutions, in particular the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools, and is currently opposing a European agreement reached in 1992 to support minority languages.

There seems however to be an emergent consensus in the multicultural societies of contemporary Europe that it is up to individuals to define their identities, choosing what weight they wish to attach to each, and that ‘outing’ and ‘othering’ are unacceptable. Members of ethnic and religious minorities, in particular, have resisted attempts, no doubt well-meaning, to increase their political representation through the incorporation of traditional elites or ‘community leaders’. What strikes me, and here I differ from Therborn (p.242) is how relatively hard it has been for Europeans to move to a North American pattern where ‘Italian-American’, ‘African-American’ and so on are recognisable identities and where it is understood that the bit before the hyphen will have different degrees of salience for different individuals. There are of course significant fundamentalist counter-movements, calling forth in their turn responses such as that by Samuel Huntington (1993) which manage to be both hysterical and cynical. More seriously, the fundmentalisms of the ‘others’ are matched by a ‘majority’ fundamentalism which refuses ethnic and cultural difference and for which a black person, say, can never be ‘really’ British or French. The extent to which European or regional identities (Scottish, Breton etc.) have displaced the traditional primacy of national identities is again highly variable between and within states. [tables] In the remainder of this chapter, I shall sketch out some of the forms taken by these processes and elements across European society.

Conclusion

We have learned from thinkers like Elias, Touraine and Giddens to avoid reifiying ‘societies’, defined by the boundaries of particular states, and it is no less important to avoid reifying ‘Europe’. It is clearly an entity with fuzzy edges, and not just because some European states include overseas territories or because Turkey and Russia stretch into Asia. What can be said in the end about the residual distinctiveness of Europe as a region of the modern world? A familiar theme, invoked even in an advertising series by Shell a few years ago, is diversity, notably the diversity of languages. Compared to the largely anglophone societies of North America or the area sharing Chinese pictograms, or even large regions such as India or the former USSR with an established lingua franca, Europe looks rather a mess. One may wonder how far such a perception rests on overlooking linguistic diversity elsewhere in the world, but it is at least true that in the European case a pattern of linguistic variation, largely coexisting with the boundaries of developed modern states, creates powerful entrenched structures and interests which in turn, act as obstacles to cultural and political integration. (It is obvious, at least to this particular English-speaker, that the official language of the European Union ought to be English, just as it is obvious that its principal institutions should all be centralised in Brussels, but no-one quite dares to say so.)

The contours of Europe's main divisions are shifting in dramatic ways. It is not just that the old political East/West division has now been replaced by an economic one. The cultural North/South divide within Europe, marked for example by the line between potatoes and pasta [map], remains important, but is changing in many ways, with the modernisation of (parts of the) southern European societies. It is now for example Italy, rather than the Protestant Northern countries, which (in the absence of adequate child-care provision) apparently puts work before having children. The North-South religious divide remains an important structural principle in Western Europe, as does, further East, that between Orthodox Christainity and Islam. The East-West line also remains crucial, as Germans on both sides (but especially the East) will confirm, and many central Europeans would also continue to stress the distinctiveness of their societies from ‘Eastern’ Europe as well as from Russia. There are also many similarities between Scandinavia and parts of East Central Europe, despite their diverse political histories for much of the twentieth century.

Göran Therborn’s recent book (1995) is an exceptionally useful attempt to document these and other variations across post-1945 Europe, showing how the country and broader regional groupings vary according to the dimension chosen. The following discussion is heavily indebted to his pioneering work, and I shall be guided by the questions which he poses:

Have the societies of Europe become more similar to others on the globe? More distinctively European? More differentiated or more similar among themselves? (Therborn, 1995, p. 30).

A clear area of difference from most of the rest of the world concerns population. Several European countries have indulged in panics about their low rates of reproduction - France more or less endemically. [table from Observer 8.8.99?] Europe as a whole has become a low growth area, an effect mitigated by immigration and the greater fertility of the small immigrant populations. [table] Although these have been relatively small overall, their concentration in particular regions, notably the larger cities, and manual occupations, has increased their visibility. ln some countries, such as Switzerland, a large proportion of the working class is foreign and unable to vote. Elsewhere, as in Britain, many foreign residents from the Irish Republic and the Commonwealth do have the vote, even if their numbers have not been sufficient to generate substantial ethnic politics of a North American kind.

There has of course been a huge amount of confusion and double-think around issues of immigration and ethnic relations. Many European countries which had not had substantial colonial empires persisted in the pretence that they were merely receiving temporary ‘guest workers’ rather than immigrants and that they were not ‘countries of immigration’. State policies switched abruptly from active recruitment to attempts to stem the migrant flows; a second wave of immigration occurred in the 1990s with immigrants from the former Communist countries and refugees from there and elsewhere.

The differences between European countries in their labour force structures are substantially explained by their positions on the historical trajectory from agrarian to industrial and post-industrial society (Therborn, pp 65ff). Europe was unique in the thoroughgoing nature of its industrialisation and the primacy for a time, in many countries, of industrial employment. As Therborn (1995, p. 70) notes, ‘Sixteen out of ... twenty-five European countries had a period of (relatively) predominant industrial employment. Outside Europe this has only happened in Taiwan...’ This to some extent cuts across the East/West divide; some communist and postcommunist countries have large agricultural populations and others do not. The gender division of labour is fundamentally shaped by economic factors, in the sense of predominant types of production, but with significant differences between countries which one might expect to be more similar in their structures and attitudes. Conversely, the former state socialist societies of Eastern Europe, though they had much higher rates of female participation in paid work than most Western societies, averaged similar rates to Finland and Sweden (Therborn, p.63).

Working practices and workplace cultures display considerable diversity in Europe. Broadly speaking, the contrast between corporatist Rhineland capitalism and the neoliberal British version (Albert, 1991; 1993) intersects with that between managerially top-heavy and authoritarian French (and other Latin) enterprises and those in Germany or Scandinavia, where workers have tended to be more skilled, participation more institutionalised and managers less numerous (Therborn, p.79; cf. Lane, 1989). How far these differences will persist, against a background of globalisation of both economic structures and managerial cultures, is an open question, as is the future shape of Eastern Europe in the European and world division of labour. Here, of course, E.U. membership in the short, medium or long term is a crucial factor. But if there is, as Colin Crouch (1993) has suggested, a European model or set of models of industrial relations, this may well appeal to other regions of the world. (In the European context, the UK governments of Thatcher and Major were out on a limb in wanting to abandon some of the benefits of the European system and adopt largely misunderstood Asian models instead.)

Welfare state structures again display a clear contrast between Scandinavian and Eastern European patterns of state-based provision on the one hand and insurance-based private or semi-private systems in most of the rest of Europe, with the UK, Ireland and Italy in an intermediate position. On the whole, the state-based systems provide more as a proportion of GDP, though the insurance-based systems in France, Belgium and the Netherlands are also major providers. Generally speaking, Europe is characterised by generous welfare states, partly though not exclusively because it tends to be rich. ‘In three countries’, Therborn (1995, pp. 155-6) notes (the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, with France close to the same position), ‘the welfare state has become more important than private property as a source of household income.’ This in turn, of course, relates to broader issues about forms of production, private versus public ownership and class relations in European states (pp.123-6). Europe comes out as relatively equal, compared to North America and Australia, but with significant variations between the egalitarian Northwest and East and the unequal South (Therborn 1995, p. 153; see also Bailey, 1992,1998; Lenoir, 1994).

Social mobility [definition] has attracted a great deal of often technical social research, though within Europe the contrasts are not particularly dramatic, with structural changes such as the liquidation of peasantries and the increase in white-collar and service jobs accounting for much of the mobility in European societies. In terms of social openness or fluidity, there are not particularly significant differences between countries. The former socialist countries, which of course actively pursued redistributive policies in the 1950s, have remained rather more open than the capitalist west of Europe, but not dramatically so. Partial exceptions to this trend in their respective camps are Sweden, where mobility is relatively high, and Hungary, where it is relatively low. Japan, the US and Australia all score higher for openness than any of the major European countries except Czechoslovakia (Therborn, 1995, p. 174; Eriksson and Goldthorpe, 1992, p. 381). Another important parallel between eastern and western Europe is the importance of ‘cultural capital’ in the transmission of advantage. Whereas the children of the traditional European bourgeoisies might hope to inherit land, factories or large amounts of money wealth from their parents, in the twentieth century what has been called the ‘service class’ of professional and managerial employees in public service and the private sector tend to transmit their advantages through the educational system, by paying for their children to attend exclusive fee-paying schools or by pushing them into and through elite establishments like some of the French lycées and the ‘Grandes Ecoles’, open to all but in practice heavily populated by bourgeois Parisians (Bourdieu, 1970; Marceau, 1977; see also Bottomore and Brym, 1989). In Eastern Europe, once again, the threat to traditional forms of inheritance, family succession and educational privilege was more drastic, but old elites often managed to preserve a privileged position through the years of high Stalinism into advanced socialist and then again capitalist conditions (Szelenyi, 1988; Eyal, Szelenyi and Townsley, 1998). With the devaluation in postcommunist societies of many traditional occupations and qualifications, connections with foreigners and an ability to speak foreign languages may be worth years of university or work experience.

Looking more broadly at the cultural sphere, it is clear that Europe's continuing position as a major cultural producer is one of the effects of its previous world hegemony, partly preserved in that of its world languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and to some extent even Dutch. It has also stood up in many ways to the challenge of North American imports. This applies not just to cultural commodities such as films but also to material aspects of life such as the car-based civilisation; despite everything, most European cities remain less car-based and suburbanised than US ones. For a time these might have seemed like cultural lags. Now, however, it appears that in many ways parts of the US are returning to more 'European' modes of life, including railways and urban mass transit systems, delicatessen food (even cheese) and niche markets for cult movies in the larger cities.

On the issue of compatibilities and incompatibilities of various structural and cultural forms, Max Weber borrowed from Goethe what remains perhaps the most useful concept for addressing these issues: the chemical concept of elective affinity (Wahlverwandtschaft). But if this provides a useful way of thinking about such relations, it does not give us much of an idea about just what fits with what. What is clear, however, is that human societies are much more ingenious in their cultural bricolage or pick-and-mix than we can predict (see, for example, Gilroy, 1993). The current attention to conceptions of hybridity is helpful here, though even this term risks implying a certain reification of the initial entities between which hybridising occurs. It seems fair to expect, however, that despite the Americanising pull of the mass media, reflecting and reinforcing the appeal of North America and to some extent Australia to many young Europeans, Europe will remain culturally distinct from other world regions, with local differences persisting against a background of common European and global systems. The washing powder, for example, may have instructions in many languages and contact addresses in half a dozen countries, but the fine detail of domestic work will continue to display interesting differences across the continent. The interrelations between post-conventional post-national identities, themselves competing with more atavistic traditional national identities, and a European identity, whose ambivalence Gerard Delanty (1999) has rightly stressed, will form the broader social and cultural background to the ups and downs of the political and economic project of European integration in the early twenty-first century.

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