Social Change in Western Europe (review)

Social Change in Western Europe. By Colin Crouch. Oxford University Press. 1999. 543 pp. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $32.00.

The question "is there a developing European society?" is the most important one facing most social scientists who understand the contemporary political significance of the European Union. Nobody living in Western (and increasingly Central and Eastern) Europe now can fail to register the economic, commercial and constitutional changes happening around them, regardless of whether they are seen as threats, opportunities or, even, just as unavoidable features of the media landscape. But the issue of a common society, as distinct from a common currency or a shared political, legislative and administrative apparatus, has been strangely marginalized until recently. However, the explosion of work on current social change in general and, particularly, the focus on the very dramatic nature of contemporary globalization, has provoked some interesting accounts of how specifically European social change can be characterized and seen as special, distinctive and with an important potential.

"Ever closer union" has been the guiding motto of the European Community, (now Union) since its inception after World War II. Consider the supranational, suprastate normative institutions which have been constructed as both the result and the continuing motor of European "system integration": a political apparatus -- a Parliament, a Council of Ministers, a Commission; a Court of Human Rights embodying basic norms of democracy and fundamental human rights; a European Social Charter; the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe; the Single European Market; and, as I write, a proposal for a "European Rapid Reaction Force": in effect a European army. These are all deliberate, socially steered forms of cross-national integration. They fuse and converge what had previously been plural, variable and potentially incompatible and even confrontational institutional relations within and between state within geographic Europe. The next stage of this integration is already in train with the extension of these supranational institutions to the ex-communist nations of Central and Eastern Europe. All these mechanisms, forms and directions of institutional convergence are, in the sociologist's terms, the classic form of social system integration. These are dramatic developments and deserve a specifically sociological attention which is ironically thin on the ground in Europe itself.

Social Change in Western Europe is a particularly sober, measured, exceptionally empirically supported and, at times, modestly magisterial approach to a European "social form" and the possibilities for a European social "convergence." The whole book articulates around the thesis of what Crouch calls the "mid-century social compromise" in which industrialism, capitalism, liberalism, and citizenship achieved a distinctive balance in Western Europe after World War II. The precise and particular forms of that equilibrium explain both the diversity seen across Western Europe, and the kind of society and societies now emerging. Within a clear historical framework, Crouch uses snapshots from the mid-1960s and mid-1990s to describe social institutions and social action (but not attitudes, belief and identities) across Western Europe, compared tellingly, and using a wide range of statistical support, with the U.S. and Japan. The range of topics includes, among others, employment, the family, education, religion, ethnicity, nationalism, democracy, welfare and corporatism, all stitched into a quadripartite framework focusing on Crouch's four essential elements -- industrialism, capitalism, liberalism, and citizenship. The audience for this most useful book will be advanced undergraduates and Masters students, who will find the well organized data very useful, as well as specialist sociologists of social change and of comparative advanced societies interested in Europe.

Crouch has a number of things interesting for an American audience as well. These range from the wryly iconoclastic -- soccer is the only distinctive European cultural form now operating -- to the very sharp and pointed -- no post-U.S. hegemony is possible in a Europe which absorbed the culture of its liberators/victors in 1945. European convergence will be around those issues common to all advanced societies, globalization and individualism. European integration is already taking the form of the breaking...