Book Review: European Society,by William Outhwaite

It is not until its final page that this book finally confirms what it has been suggesting all along, but has avoided making explicit lest it spoil this ‘European tour’ of different peoples, cultures and traditions. The most explicitly political passage of the book calls the project of European integration a worthwhile alternative, given the failure of socialism. Of course, Outhwaite notes the eu’s neoliberal economic agenda. But he claims the emerging European polity to be ‘an exceptionally promising cosmopolitan political project in a part of the world which developed an attractive political theory of cosmopolitanism, as well as a number of practices catastrophically at odds with it’ (pp. 141). This main thesis needs questioning.

Despite this being a very engaging and enjoyable read, the troubling political stance is ultimately the most lasting memory. Many readers will surely find nothing wrong with Outhwaite’s views. After all, cosmopolitanism and the new democratic politics are widely supported, especially among mainstream liberal social theorists like Habermas, Held, Giddens, Beck, and social theorists of Europe like Delanty and Rumford. But this view rests, as Outhwaite’s final argument confirms, on the belief that there is no socialist alternative to European integration, and that the European project can ultimately be seen in a positive (cosmopolitan) light. Whatever one thinks of the eu and European integration, the general issue is the way that these approaches take a very specific political project and locate it within a sociological argument that legitimates it as an understandable consequence of the broader processes of modernity, globalisation and cosmopolitanism.

The majority of the book makes the case for why and how we can look at the European entity as a whole, and not just as a sum of its parts. Outhwaite’s task is to look at how Europe can be taken as a single, coherent entity, starting with its geographical and historical background. He is concerned with the extent to which there is a coherent European culture and society and how the more nationalistic expressions of European identity between the 16th and 19th centuries have more recently given way to a more supranational expression. Contemporary Europe is no doubt the consequence of significant geo-historical divides between North-South and East-West, and between capitalist and state socialist systems. But still there are similarities that transcend borders, such as welfare systems, secularism and democratic politics. Outhwaite views these as major contributions to modernity, and shares Habermas’s view of modernity as an unfinished project (p. 18). Self-reflection is built into the practices of building the eu, a view Outhwaite shares with theorists of reflexive modernity.

This book is a welcome change from the simplistic and reified work characteristic of the mainstream IR or European studies literature. However, given the significant number of recent challenges to these views, it seems a bit outdated to suggest this book is set in the context of the revival of historical sociology, theories of modernity and postcolonial theory. More problematic though, is the way that the book understands Europeanisation as a broad social process that is situated in the context of modernity, globalisation and cosmopolitanism. What is emerging, it is claimed, is a post-European hybrid based on the complex interaction of the local, national and global. This argument takes for granted the idea that the European project is related to things going on ‘out there’ (globalisation) or ‘deep down’ (modernity). This works to ‘naturalise’ the process and undermines the idea that Europeanisation is actually a deliberate project that is deeply contested.

There are criticisms of the European project such as the incoherence of current European policy, Europe’s structurally uncoordinated state and its self-limiting modesty. Well-meaning but arrogant elitism, it is said, has worked to generate an ‘anti-European extremism’ (pp. 98, 141). But these are criticisms made from the inside. The problem is whether the general points made about European society can be separated from support for this project. Here the question of critical theory raises its head. For Outhwaite is following a long line of critical theorists headed by Habermas, and including cosmopolitans like Held and theorists of modernity like Giddens and Beck, who have offered their support for the European Union. The alternative posed by some Marxist and Foucauldian analyses rejects their general appeal to some progressive aspect of modernity and views the European project as a more specific attempt to implement neoliberal forms of governance. While Outhwaite points to neoliberalism as one of the contending viewpoints, he would reject the idea that the European project is necessarily neoliberal in nature. There might be some truth in this, and we might have a debate about different European social models. But the worrying thing about this book and much of the tradition it represents is that by playing up the ideas of cosmopolitanism and the progressive aspects of modernity, it conceals our view of the neoliberal project and its most evident forms such as the strict targets and conditions represented by the single currency and the Lisbon Agenda. By presenting the current project as part of a deeper social or historical condition, it underplays the strategic nature of European integration and hence leaves us less scope for a politics of radical critique.