Review: Unequal Europe: Social Divisions and Social Cohesion in an Old Continent

Unequal Europe, Social divisions and social cohesion in an old continent

Author: James Wickham

ISBN-13: 978-1857285512

Publisher: Routledge

Guideline Price: £90

Major issues confronting contemporary Europe include migration, growing class, ethnic and regional inequalities, social and welfare insecurity, and how different social groups and classes have benefited or lost out from globalised and financialised markets. Following the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union in June, these issues are being brought together in analysis and commentary on how the decision will affect the future of European integration. Does it herald deepening or fragmentation? Does the British vote reflect such trends and events elsewhere in Europe? What policies would best drive these outcomes? Does the Europeanisation of policymaking manage United States-style globalisation or capitulate to it?

We badly need empirical research that is well-grounded in social and political theory to answer such questions and inform public debate, rather than leave them to be tackled only by the nostrums of hassled political leaders muddling through the crisis, or the ideological rhetoric of post-truth politics. James Wickham’s book is an excellent contribution to this task. Based on long-standing courses he taught at Trinity College Dublin on European society and politics as a professor of sociology and an expert in labour markets and migration, it brings that research to bear on how the EU has tackled the economic crisis since 2008, concentrating on who are the main winners and losers from the longer social trends which found expression in those recent policy battles. His work on employment conditions with the Tasc think tank, where he is now director, reinforces this authority.

He has a realistic take on the extent of Europeanised policymaking, pointing out that in most of the areas bearing directly on peoples’ lives – such as social security and welfare, education and health – policy and budgets are nationally based, not integrated at European level. Moreover, these policies are quite diverse, although comparative studies of welfare and capitalism show they are patterned in various significant ways, notably between northern, Scandinavian, central and eastern European, southern and anglophone regional types.

The book returns again and again to Britain’s distinctiveness in Europe, arising from its imperial past and global presence, its instrumental rather than affective approach to integration showing up in popular attitudes, where it is a systematic outlier, and its close alignment with US policy on capitalist financialisation and inequalities. In principle, the UK’s departure from the EU will make it easier to realise the European social model the book analyses and champions, but this depends on whether existing policy trends towards neoliberal market-making, and those who lead them, are capable of changing direction.

The book concludes that these groups “are thrashing everything that made Europe distinctive and they are chipping away at popular tolerance of European unity. The neoliberals appropriated the European project for their own purposes and in doing so now risk destroying it completely. Today only a social Europe can rescue Europe”.

Global setting

The book starts its journey to this conclusion by placing the European social model firmly in a global setting. It is defined as “a unique combination of market economy, parliamentary democracy and welfare states”, with mainly national and supplementary European characteristics. Wickham continually contrasts this European model with the US one, in terms of Europe’s greater comparative equality and social cohesion and less stark relations between wealth and power.

The US is the foil against which to evaluate alternative European achievements across the range of historical, sociological, political and economic realities and in terms of how inequalities play out in wealth and income distribution, social class, regions, ethnicity, gender and migration. As Wickham puts it, in all these areas “we find both the importance of differences within Europe and the contrast with the USA. In each area also we find a limited but real role for the European Union creating a small but significant form of European solidarity.” But he argues that this “backbone state” system of strong social rights, citizenships and public realms has during the last decade gone into reverse, reinforced by the economic crisis

Successive chapters examine these questions in a rich palette of empirically based analysis, drawing on a wide range of social science literature. Wickham grounds his chapters in contemporary social science theorising. This makes the book an enjoyable excursion through his accounts of Europe’s long history and wealth, its postwar creation of national welfare states achieved through historic compromises between capital and labour, and then the orchestration of these into the European social model through the institutions and shared politics of European integration.

Inclusion and cohesion became features of this model. They helped manage the transition from industrial society to a more knowledge-based society. New stratifications of class and status emerged from the 1970s and 1980s, when varieties of capitalism developed in different European regions. In later years the financialised Anglo-American form penetrated more and more, driven by the single market’s elevation of competitiveness and privatisation over other norms. A lively chapter on “Money, markets and post-modernity” tracks that transition through consumer choice, growing inequalities, new forms of lite and heavy wealth and the glamorisation of celebrity.

The changing patterns of employment, occupation and social classes are skilfully analysed, leading to the conclusion that the main beneficiary from the sociology of integration is a “service class” of educated managers and professionals whose mobility and migration defines so much of contemporary European integration’s sociological reality.

Their interests tend to drive current policies, Wickham concludes, but they cannot restore the legitimacy forsaken in recent years as other less privileged or dominant social groups lose out. It is arrogant not to recognise that the less skilled and the more welfare-dependent resent these changes and are increasingly hostile to a Europe that does not reflect their interests. The Brexit decision illustrates these wider European trends. Whether it is possible after it to retrieve legitimacy by renewing the social model is very much an open question.

Paul Gillespie is an adjunct senior research fellow at the School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin