The struggle about the social dimension in the post-crisis European political field : a political sociology of the relation between ‘the social’ and ‘the economic’

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The Struggle about the Social Dimension in the Post-Crisis

European Political Field

A Political Sociology of the Relation between ‘the Social’ and ‘the Economic’

Student: Nina Haerter Student ID: 10073213

Research Master Social Sciences University of Amsterdam

Supervision: Julien Jeandesboz Second reader: Ewald Engelen Amsterdam, August 17th₂₀₁₅

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Abstract

Crises are often theorized as critical junctures for paradigm shifts. In this article, I analyze why the crisis in Europe has not led to a delegitimization of the dominant economic rationality but instead only strengthened it. In particular, I raise the question how and why social policy objectives have been subordinated to economic priorities in the framework of the European Semester. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels including interviews with relevant actors - especially Social Protection Committee members – this article offers a Bourdieusian field analysis of the causes and mechanisms behind the continuous subjugation of ‘the social’ under ‘the economic’.

1) Introduction

When I first started diving into European politics and the crisis, I perceived a clash between the successes in crisis-management that certain politicians claimed for themselves and for Europe on the one hand, and the reality of deteriorating social conditions for millions of Europeans on the other hand. When I turned to academic texts, I was shocked by the overly optimistic academic theories of EU politics and integration. The news certainly gave a different impression about the practice of EU politics than the theories did. I did not understand how it was possible that many politicians and academics were so positive about European politics and the manner in which the crisis was tackled, at a time in which an ever larger share of the population saw their well-being decreasing year after year. To me, the crisis had been a crisis of society: of unemployment, of rising poverty, homelessness, child mortality and suicide rates, of declining access to health care, of decreasing minimum social standards, of the rise of racist political parties and supporters. What did these people in politics and academia actually mean when they spoke about the crisis? And what were they talking about when they claimed they had already put measures into place that would lead Europe out of the crisis and prevent another one? This was the riddle I set out to explore.

Typical theories in the field of EU studies do not lend themselves to study domination within politics. There are a few scholars, however, who conduct political studies through a political sociology-lens, following French sociologist Pierre Boudieu’s work. This perspective conceptualizes all of social action to take place within different fields, and the involved actors as constantly struggling with each to improve their position in the field. Initially, EU studies had involved many sociological theories, but they disappeared after time. I hope to show the value of reconnecting EU studies with its sociological foundations. In particular, I will analyze how and why social policy objectives are subordinated to economic priorities in the reaction to the 2008 crisis.

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4 The article will begin with the theoretical framework. I will show what the differences between a sociological and a political science approach to EU politics entails, and then move on to describe Bourdieu’s field theory and his key concepts, and illuminate why a focus on language and reflexivity are so important. After the theoretical part, I will construct the history of social and economic policies. Understanding the genesis of these institutions and classifications will help us to overcome contemporary, entrenched ideas about crisis, welfare, and the economy and therewith create new theoretical space to understand the status quo. I will describe why the social question first emerged in the 19th_{century, how European countries developed into welfare states and how those were} dismantled again in the past decades. The 2008 crisis land the question whether it’s a new era will form the last part of the history, after which I will motivate my research design. Finally, I will turn to the analysis the interviews and observations I conducted in Brussels. This will entail an exploration of the subjugation of what the EU calls “the social dimension”. I investigate the causes for and mechanisms at play in the

subordination of social objectives to economic objectives of fiscal discipline and budgetary austerity. The aim of this study is to illuminate the mechanisms at work in intra- and

inter-institutional struggle over dominant priorities and definitions in EU legislation. While this research project will search for an answer to a specific post-crisis governance architecture (the European Semester), it will also give broader insights into mechanisms and processes of political struggle that take place more generally.

2) Theoretical framework

EU politics and integration have been predominantly studied by political scientists and legal scholars (Kauppi 2011: 150; Favell, Guiraudon 2009: 550). Their body of literature tends to be only thinly empirical and focusing on institutional design, thereby remaining largely theoretical with results such as “neat functionalist flowcharts showing how democracy, accountability, and decision-making ‘work’” (Shore 2006: 49; Fligstein 2008: 26; Ripoll Servent, Busby 2013: 3-5). Such studies typically fail to look at the involved actors; but even when they do, they take actors’ preferences or perceptions at face value. They therewith fail to move beyond the embeddedness of actors by not looking at the formative dimension of their identities, their roles, values, world views, resources, and networks, as well as education and career patterns in their social trajectories (Poehls 2009: 36-40; Quaglia et al. 2008: 159-160; Kauppi 2011: 150-151). There are some exceptions focusing for instance on education and career patterns or social resources of policy-makers, but typically without connecting the analysis of their identity formation to that of their political decisions (Rhodes et al. 2007: 5-6).

Some scholars, especially sociologists and anthropologists, have attempted in recent decades to reconnect EU studies with its sociological foundations (Favell, Guiraudon 2009; Keeler 2005). Their research tries to go beyond institutions to discover what is

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5 sometimes called ‘the social basis’ of different processes or institutions. (Favell, Guiraudon 2009: 550; Mudge 2014). The term ‘social basis’ usually points to the people who embody the respective institution.

A sociological account makes clear what should be self-evident: the EU does not do anything by itself; it is people as everyday political agents who make the EU happen. To understand the EU as a distinctive form of social organization and power structure, its influence and the effects of its policies, one has [to] get inside the politics to know who the individuals and groups making up the EU are, where they come from, what kinds of resources and networks they have access to, how they perceive their roles, the institutions in which they work and, more broadly, the social world around them (Kauppi 2011:150-151).

Besides focusing on individuals that make up institutions, sociological and anthropological approaches throw light on meaning and meaning-making, especially when constituted through symbols and rituals (Kauppi 2011: 159; Kertzer 1988; Saurugger 2009; Shore, Wright, Pero 2011). Symbolic and ritualized action and speech are central features of politics and yet they are usually overlooked in academic studies of politics. Ethnographic studies of organizations can also reveal lived power relations and emotions (Ybema 2009). They adopt an interpretative style, drawing on the

verstehen (as opposed to erklären) tradition of Max Weber to understand what

motivates individuals’ behavior, how actors justify their actions, how their preferences are formed, how they see the world and their place in it (Weber 2010[1922]: 6-8; Ripoll Servent, Busby 2013: 5-7; Hooghe 2004; Rhodes et al. 2007:1-4; Kuus 2012: 117; Wedel, Shore, Feldman, Lathrop 2005). However, researchers must be careful not to get trapped in some of the dangers of such approaches, neither in empiricism, or what Cris Shore calls secondary ethnocentrism, where researchers take the respondents’ points of view at face value, nor in excessive theoreticism, “an over-reliance on abstract models and disembodied positivistic theories” (Shore 2006: 147).

In order to overcome the shortcomings of such EU studies while avoiding anthropological pitfalls, I will employ a Bourdieusian approach to politics. This entails three aspects: (1) field theory based on a relational ontology including useful concepts such as field, habitus, capitals, and homology, (2) an attentiveness to language and classifications, and the world views they impose, and (3) reflexivity.

2.1 Field theory and key concepts (field, capitals, orthodox and heterodox

pole, habitus)

The first essential element of a Bourdieusian approach is his field theory and the relational ontology that underlies it, as well as its accompanying key concepts. According to Bourdieu, the social world consists of fields of action, for instance the academic field, the literary field, the political field etc. Bourdieu chose the metaphor of fields to

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6 emphasize that - just like in the gravitational field - the essential feature which keeps everything moving is the invisible, namely, the relations.1_{There is a central objective} around which the field structures itself, not unlike the stake in a game (Bourdieu, Schmid 2001: 35). All fields are therefore stratified and individuals within each field try to improve their position vis-á-vis others. Each field has its own internal logic, its own “rules of the game” called doxa, which are known by the agents in the field (Mérand 2011: 179). The approach assumes that individuals try to defend or improve their positions vis-à-vis others by using resources available to them (Bourdieu 1986). Bourdieu called these resources capitals: in addition to economic capital which we are already familiar with (wealth, budget), he defined cultural capital (manners, credentials, education etc), social capital (network, connections), and symbolic capital (prestige, renown) (Mérand 2011: 178). All capitals can be inherited, accumulated, and converted. Social structure, in this view, “is a system of relations and differences instead of a set of attributes or essences. Subjects, whether they are persons or institutes, derive their social meaning from their position with respect to one another in a social field, and not from their intrinsic characteristics” (de Nooy 2003: 305; my emphasis). The positions of various agents in the field are determined by the amount and relative weight of the capitals they possess. The capitals which are central in a field can change (and do so almost continuously), but the underlying, i.e. objective, power dimensions of the field almost never change (de Nooy 2003).

Since all fields are stratified, they are all organized around two poles: the orthodox and the heterodox (Kauppi 2003: 778). The orthodox pole is where the dominant positions are; individuals occupy a position close to the orthodox pole when they play by the rules of the game and accumulate and/or inherit the right kind and as much as possible of the specific capital everyone in the field struggles for. The heterodox pole is the exact opposite: where actors are dominated and try to change the rules of the game and the central stakes of that particular field.

Throughout their lives, individuals move through many fields and they get socialized to some extent into the rules of those various fields. Since each individual has a specific trajectory, everyone develops a unique practical sense that no one completely shares with him/her (Bigo 2011: 241). This unique practical sense is what Bourdieu called

habitus. A person’s habitus consists of his/her “schemes of perception, thought, and

action,” and is continuously shaped throughout all of his/her life (Bourdieu in Lenger, Schneickert, Schumann 2013: 14, my translation). The relative position of an individual in social space, and the identities that correspond to such positions at any given moment in time are fundamental in the formation of an individual’s habitus (ibid.). A habitus takes the form of embodied knowledge, incorporated social position, and dispositions to

1_{Film “Die feinen Unterschiede und wie sie entstehen. Pierre Bourdieu untersucht unseren}

Alltag“ by Hans Dieter Zimmermann and Peter de Leuw produced by hessischer Rundfunk (hr) 1983 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQSYewA03BU

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7 act. The habitus then is both a frame through which individuals perceive and classify the social world, as well as a frame for action, shaped by all previous experiences (Bourdieu 2010[1979]: 165-169).

The idea that there is strong correspondence between the space of (objective) positions in the social structure and the space of positions, tastes, world views, lifestyles and so on was termed homology by Bourdieu. It means that the social position of an individual shapes his/her identity and position-takings (e.g. religious, political etc) to a large extent. Vice versa, people reveal something about their own social position when they express their tastes, positions and so on: “Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make […]” (Bourdieu 2010: xxix). It is important to note that the relationship between objective position and position-taking is not deterministic or mechanical, that is to say, individuals do have some agency, but it is limited and structured by their habitus.

These key concepts of a Bourdieusian sociology have the advantage of overcoming the “classical dichotomies, such as structure/agency, individual/collective, rational/ unconscious, in order to understand what social agents involved in EU processes think

and do considering their position in wider structures of interaction and domination”

(Georgakakis and Weisbein 2010: 94, my emphasis; Bourdieu, Wacquant 1992: 10). Field theory and the concepts of capitals and habitus allow us to integrate relevant information about actors’ backgrounds, resources, and world views into the analysis of their political decisions. That is, they make “embodied” institutions tangible for research. They enable us to look at the political elite as a powerful but heterogeneous group which is constantly struggling internally over defining the official narratives and the common good. Since discourses are essential for making distinctions, the role of language and the symbolic violence it exerts also play a central role in Bourdieusian analysis.

2.2 Discourses and symbolic violence

Things that seem self-evident to us are the product of long historical processes and it is the continuous task of sociology to reconstruct the history behind these seemingly natural distinctions (ibid.: 42-43). This is why attention to language, discourses, and concepts plays such an important role in Bourdieusian analysis. In this view, the state can be defined by possession of legitimate physical and symbolic violence (Bourdieu 2014: 3-4). Symbolic violence is the power exerted by discourses or classifications without going recognized. The state is a producer of “the fundamental consensus on the meaning of the social world that [in turn] is the very precondition of conflict over the social world” (ibid.: 4) In other words, if the state did not produce and canonize most of the social classifications we know, it could not exist and we could not engage in politics. And since each state is embodied by people, politics can be defined as agents struggling with each other to impose their classifications as the only legitimate, to conquer the

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8 monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence (Bourdieu, Schmid 2001: 12, 21). “The political field, thus, is a place where competition takes place around the right to speak and act in the name of a part or all of the lay people (citizens)” (ibid.: 15). This is why the role of language should not be neglected in studies of politics.

In all of his research on different fields, Bourdieu problematized the “‘essentialization’ or ‘naturalization’ of the world produced by the indigenous categories of each social universe, the struggles for categorization that they create and reproduce, and what they render invisible and unspeakable (the doxa) through the symbolic violence they exert as categories” (Bigo 2011: 231). When analyzing politics, this means that the dominant concepts and classifications used within the political field must be critically examined and contextualized. Scholars must perceive of all classifications as results of struggles between different position takings of actors who try to impose their world view on others (ibid.: 230). “All too often, categories used in official accounts are taken over by academics, therewith “’sanctifying’ administrative labels as analytical concepts […] with an interest in following a doxic line of thought favored by the state […]” (Bigo 2011: 230). According to Bourdieu, critical sociology means creating and disseminating tools that enable people to resist such symbolic violence.

To sum up, the second fundamental element of a Bourdieusian approach to EU politics is attentiveness about indigenous, dominant discourses in the political field, the world views they impose, and the symbolic violence that their categories exert. I am particularly interested in the manner in which different respondents will distinguish themselves and how they construct the relationship between different policy priorities. I will show in the analysis that the language of my respondents reveals quite a bit about the power dynamics in the political field. But language (and symbolic violence) is not only to be found “out there,” in documents, discourses, and interviews, but also as integral part of our own consciousness. That is why reflexivity is the third and last fundamental aspect of a Bourdieusian sociology.

2.3 Reflexivity

Reflexivity is propagated by many sociologists and anthropologists, but it often remains unclear what exactly it entails. Bourdieu’s vision of reflexive sociology is broader than most others because it goes beyond reflections of the scholar about herself in terms of social origin, and instead also encompasses critical reflections about the “unthought categories of thought which delimit the thinkable and predetermine the thought”, in other words, the researcher’s habitus, as well as the structure of the academic discipline and the scholar’s position in it. “What has to be constantly scrutinized and neutralized, in

the very act of construction of the object, is the collective scientific unconscious

embedded in theories, problems, and (especially national) categories of scholarly judgment (Bourdieu, Wacquant 1992: 40, original emphasis). Bourdieu therefore propagated that researchers question their own results in terms of their conditions of production and limitations in terms of time and space. Reflexive studies also have to

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9 take into account their possible effects. Especially in studying political phenomena, scholars are often caught in an “illusion of immediate knowledge” because politics permeates the fabric of all our lives (Mérand 2011: 186). Bourdieu asked his readers to “break with this blinding familiarity” and “to radically question everything that masks itself as self-evident, and to question the categories of perception and expression that underlie political discourse” (Bourdieu, Schmid 2001: 8, 59; my translation). This involves deliberate estrangement, problematization, and contextualization of empirical findings, of both official and academic concepts, and of preconceived knowledge (Ybema et al. 2009: 26; Georgakakis 2008: 2). As some authors point out, both official and academic accounts of EU politics are permeated by inadequate terms:

The discourse of Europeanization is dominated by superficial metaphors suggesting a teleological project legitimated by grand EU narratives, such as 'widening' and 'deepening' or 'ever closer union'; vague, if not inaccurate, sociological terms, such as 'integration' and 'inclusion', and morphological metaphors such as 'multi-levelled' governance (Delanty, Rumford 2005: 3).

Some scholars have argued such accounts are not just imprecise in their choice of terms, but also permeated with an ideology that tends to sees European integration in a positive light. They all too often conflate the normative with the descriptive: how the EU

ought to work according to its formal rules and the researcher’s world view is how such

academics describe it does work, thereby mystifying reality and producing an orthodoxy (Kauppi 2010; Kauppi, Rask Madsen 2007; Ryner 2012). It could be argued that the reason for overly optimistic accounts of European integration by EU scholars is that they are not reflexive about their own social position in the European middle and upper classes as well as in the academic field, belonging to the minority that actually benefited from integration in many ways, such as financially (Fligstein 2008), as academics through funding (Cini 2006: 42-43), as employees with high mobility through travels and their transnational networks, having friends and colleagues in other countries (Fligstein 2008), and through new forms of governance deployed by the EU that transform some academics into experts with political influence. In the field of EU studies, political scientists and legal scholars with no or little concern for reflexivity have been dominating the field for the past decades. It is indicative that most of their theories do not entail a power dimension: domination cannot be grasped through them. What is needed to counter unreflexive studies is thick empirical research complemented with reflexive analysis.

To sum up, a Bourdieusian approach to EU politics is characterized by an attentiveness to language, a conflict-based relational ontology with valuable concepts, and reflexivity about the researcher, her language, and the produced knowledge. A subset of political sociologists has started following such an approach in recent years (see for example Vauchez 2008 or Bühlmann, David, Mach 2012). They seek to understand “the formation

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10 of distinct European fields of political action and […] the particular types of capital they valorize and the habitus they incarnate” (Favell, Guiraudon 2009: 565, my emphases; Kauppi 2003). These types of studies regularly illuminate the embeddedness of actors in different social relations and how resources and roles are related to specific sub-sets of actors (Favell, Guiraudon 2009: 565). In contrast to my research, these scholars often use multiple correspondence analysis of biographical data for prosopographic studies. The systematic collection of this kind of data was unfortunately not possible in my case due to limited access. Except for this lack of a statistically calculated social space, I place my study into this Strasbourg School tradition.

3) The Genesis of Social and Economic Policy

The nature of the relationship between the social and the economic and the regulation thereof has been the topic of uncountable heated debates throughout the past two centuries. In this section, I will outline a brief history of different forms of that regulation and the world views behind them. I will distinguish four different phases in the genesis of social and economic policy: (1) the emergence of the social question in the 19th century; (2) the rise of welfare states until around the middle of the 20th_{century; (3)} interwoven processes of welfare state dismantling, European integration, and the rising dominance of economists in the second half of the 20th_{century; and (4) the crisis in} Europe since 2008 and policy-makers’ reaction to it. I include this history to challenge “the illusion of immediate knowledge”, i.e. to denaturalize contemporary, entrenched ideas about crisis, welfare, and the economy. Ideas, institutions, and concepts that seem self-evident to us nowadays are the product of long historical processes (Bourdieu 2001: 42-43). In order to problematize dominant discourses and classifications in the political field and to understand how certain concepts and institutions have become self-evident, we must look at their genesis.

3.1 The emergence of the social question in the 19

th

_century

How to regulate the opposition between capital and labor in society became a problem due to the rise of industrialism in Europe in the mid-19th_{century. Before that, families} were the site of social protection: various informal social, cultural, religious, and moral rules determined how families and communities regulated economic activity and took care of their vulnerable members (Tönnies 2005 [1887]). When the Industrial Revolution led to mass migration by individuals away from their families and into cities in the mid-19th_{century, poverty became a social condition for many, and the working} class was born (Wolf 1997:354-383). Furthermore, the new factories produced hitherto unknown levels of hazardous labor conditions. The only regulations that existed for employment at the time were those set into contract by employers, i.e. factory owners.

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11 The contradiction between labor and capital, between workers and employers, was as clear at this point in time as never again: at the same time that workers became politically sovereign in democratizing states, they remained economically dependent on factory owners to sell their labor to. In cases of sickness, accidents, unemployment or other such conditions, workers had no protection whatsoever. The new working class formed first trade unions and labor parties throughout Europe which exist until today. Another condition for the emergence of early forms of welfare was a shift in thinking about problems of governing (into what are now called public or social problems).

“Problems come into discourse and therefore existence as reinforcements of ideologies, not

simply because they are there or because they are important for wellbeing. They signify who are virtuous and useful and who are dangerous or inadequate, which actions will be rewarded and which penalized. […] They are critical in determining who exercise authority and who accept it” (Edelman 1988: 12, my emphasis). Governments came to see themselves as guarantors of society’s progress and wanted to act in that capacity, i.e. solving social problems, and thus raising national standards (health, education, etc) as well as their own position in the political field. It was a new, distinct way of governing in which the well-being of the nation became the legitimate object of state action. This was also connected to the increasing institutionalization of nation-states in which society - or the nation - is believed to be congruent with the territory of political rule of the state (Anderson 1991). Around the end of the 19th_{century, therefore, the principle of} solidarity within each nation was more and more often translated into social regulation – or social rights - by the state. These regulations were initially mainly about working conditions, but were gradually widened to other spheres. “In the name of social right the public power increasingly intervene[d] in the sphere of civil and private relations” (Donzelot 1988: 396). As the progress of the nation became the official prime political aim, the state had to restructure itself around these new objectives. The attitude of policy-makers became more managerialist: monitoring and actually intervening into the activities of the people. This entailed yet another shift:

The responsibility of the political authorities for the security of a nation, a state and a people, came to be understood in terms of their capacity to nurture natural economic processes to ensure national economic well-being. Further, over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the solidity of these national economies was increased by the regular publication of various national indicators of economic performance, and by the gradual tracing out of a plane of 'economic policy', which concerned itself with the proper ways in which the strengths of such an economic system could be enhanced: action on the money supply, on the labour market, together with tariffs and restrictions on imports and so forth, especially as national wealth came to be understood in terms of competition between discrete economies and their struggle to gain access to sources of cheap raw materials, cheap labour or lucrative markets outside their own territorial bounds. In the strategies of government that

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12 developed over the course of the twentieth century, the domains of the

economic and the social were distinguished, but governed according to a principle of joint optimization. (Rose 1996: 337-338)

The emergence of the notion of national economies and all its underlying ideas such as competition and productivity were therefore a precondition for the development of the notion “the social” as referring to some form of national solidarity mechanism through regulation. Both “the economy” and “the social” were dependent on the development of nation-states. In politics, one could now speak in the name of the social (ibid.). As the quote above demonstrates, the foundations were also laid for people to be able to speak in the name of the economy through the development of various, supposedly objective economic indicators, models, and theories.

What is noteworthy at this point is that social policies as developed around the turn of the 20th_{century came to be constituted as secondary to the economy in the sense that} social rights only alleviated effects resulting from industrial capitalism. They did not

solve the antagonism between capital and labor, but served to compensate shortcomings

of such an organization of economic production. As David Garland (2014) points out, the thinking of many contemporary policy-makers is still permeated by this logic of the unequal relationship: they view the free market or the economy as the natural principle of distribution in society, and welfare or social policy more generally as secondary principle of distribution, as artificial intervention challenging the supposedly natural

order of things. First of all, it has to be kept in mind that social regulations are also

functional for employers and middle classes, as they ensure stability and security for all. Secondly, this means that the welfare principle of distribution is not secondary to the market principle. Instead, welfare and market are mutually necessary and antagonistic principles of distribution: they both nourish and undermine each other (ibid.). 19th century laissez-faire capitalism was the exception (rather than the norm) of human history (ibid.). Societies have always and everywhere socially regulated economic action. The idea that social regulations are artificial interventions into the natural free market is therefore a deeply problematic myth.

Throughout this historical phase, the central contradiction between capital and labor turned into a conflict between “the economic” and “the social”. The site of the conflict increasingly shifted from individual and arbitrary wage contracts between worker and employer to the state bureaucracy as manager of the nation’s well-being. Donzelot’s notions of social rationality and economic rationality are very useful: social rationality is the logic behind speaking in the name of the social and thus refers to the principle of the collective, of solidarity; it is the point of view from which the protection of the workforce and social welfare for all members of society are the guiding principles, the stakes that should be at the center of the political field. Economic rationality – or speaking in the name of the economy, on the contrary, puts productivity and competition at the center of the organization of society, i.e. the political field.

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3.2 The rise of welfare and Keynesian ideology into the European Social

Model (roughly 1900-1957)

Around the beginning of the 20th_{century, the insurance technique became prominent in} Europe. The advantage of social insurance was that it made collective solidarity within the nation possible and administrable. Before this, compensation rules were set into (private) wage contracts. Unlike compensation, insurance rests on the idea that all actors in a system share the burdens of its flaws. An insurance is thus essentially a socialization of risks and the elimination of personal responsibility (Donzelot 1988: 400-402). For social insurance to work, general rules about working conditions became a necessity, therewith reducing the arbitrary power of employers to determine the content of contracts, leading to more and more social rights. That means that the insurance technique was central in the rise and consolidation of welfare states.

The insurance technique and social rights were not the only factors playing into the rise of welfare states, however. After the First World War, actors organized around 'the social' and 'the economic', trying to make the state recognize one or the other rationality exclusively. Both workers and employers developed into stronger, more unified social groups (Donzelot 1988: 414-416). In Donzelot’s view, “[t]he future success of Keynesian doctrine, which will make it possible for the State to articulate the economic and the social centrally rather than allowing either to predominate over the other, can be understood on the basis of this dangerous oscillation of the State's role between these two rival tendencies” (ibid.: 416) Keynesianism allowed to link the social and the economic together in a circular mechanism, in which none would permanently be subordinated to the other. It rests on the idea that welfare expands when the economy is in recession, and it retrenches when the economy is booming again. In theory, therefore, Keynesianism allows for a sort of pendulum movement between the social and the economic rationality. The prime example of the rising prominence and success of Keynesianism was the New Deal initiated by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, right after the Great Depression had led to social misery among large sectors of the population. The success of the New Deal made Keynesian policies even more popular, and they spread around Europe. Through increasing institutionalization of European welfare states, questions of personal responsibility were minimized. Social policy was the means through which individuals who suffered from the organization of production could be compensated without challenging the organization of production itself, or more importantly, the elites in charge of it (ibid.: 424). The rise of welfare states in Europe in the after-war years meant an unprecedented level of well-being of the general population (health, wealth, education, etc) as well as high levels of economic growth – up to the point where the high level of social protection earned its own term: the European Social Model.

What is important to keep in mind about this phase is that (1) crises were generally seen as integral part of the organization of production, (2) the positions of the two previously

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14 antagonistic groups seemed to be much less distinct from one another,2_{and (3) high} social standards and social spending did not seem to have any detrimental effects on economic productivity or stability.

3.3 Welfare state dismantling, European integration, and the rise of

economists (roughly 1957-2008)

This next phase was characterized by multiple developments, all of which had impacts on the relationship between the social and the economic. One of these developments was the project of European integration, favoring economic over social integration from the outset: the European Community was all about the Common Market. Another development was the concomitant dismantling of welfare states into what some call workfare states (Handler 2009). The third, interlinked process I will briefly describe in this section is the rise of economists, and with them, of economic rationality and of financialization, i.e. the penetration of economic rationality into sectors previously organized around qualitative values and/or social rationality. These three developments of (1) European integration, (2) welfare state dismantling, and (3) the rise of economists went hand in hand. One could even argue that the rise of economists was the condition for both welfare state dismantling and asymmetrical European integration. Certainly, the increasing influence of economists in the political field - along with their changing dominant ideology - was a big factor in the other two developments.

The Treaty that established the European Economic Community in 1957 barely included any social provisions, and these were supposed to help market integration, the central purpose of the Treaty (Bernhard 2011). The Common Market became the central aim of the European political field and economic rationality was the logic that went along with it. "If mentioned at all, European societal integration and social integration based on solidarity was assumed to follow market integration in a trickle-down process. Additionally, it was assumed that economic integration would sooner or later automatically serve social goals, so that social policy would be superfluous" (ibid.: 430). This shows that economic theories were shifting away from Keynesianism to what most call neoliberalism. European integration was an elite project, and has benefited mainly the upper and middle classes, while harming the lower classes, of which many people therefore came to see Europe as their enemy and who want to go back to “the nation-state idyll” (Fligstein 2008: 11,18; Beck, Grande 2007: 21).

The European Community was just one among many emerging organizations regulating societies beyond the nation-state after the Second World War.3_{This was both exemplary} and formative for the shift in thinking from autonomous, national economies to a global

2_{Possibly, (1) was a precondition for (2).}

3_{Other examples include the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1944, the World Bank in 1944, the} United Nations (UN) in 1945, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1961.

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15 economy. And since economies stopped being perceived as naturally congruent with the nation-state, the notion of collective solidarity within the nation was also affected:

Government of the social in the name of the national economy gives way to government of particular zones – regions, towns, sectors, communities – in the interest of economic circuits which flow between regions and across national boundaries. The economic fates of citizens within a national territory are uncoupled from one another, and are now understood and governed as a function of their own particular levels of enterprise, skill, inventiveness and flexibility (Rose 1996: 338).

This quote shows how new principles of distinction created new solidarity among the economic elite: they realized that their interests were much closer across national instead of class boundaries. No longer would their well-being be connected to the nation and the national economy. They came to see themselves as transnational elite, competing on a global market. Just as Marx and Engels had called on working classes to acknowledge their common interests and to overcome national distinctions in favor for class struggle in their Communist Manifesto – “proletarians of all countries, unite” – this was what the upper class did in Europe now, therewith creating a powerful “new” distinction, the transnational economic elite (Bourdieu, Schmid 2001: 51).

Rose speaks of a re-figuring of the territory of government from “the social”, i.e. the nation or society, to “communities” (e.g. gay, black, religious, transnational, unemployed, feminist, academic,…) (ibid.: 333). Instead of the state governing the nation, policy-makers now think in zones of government, and corresponding to this idea, social groups or communities – each of them with supposed characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, pathologies etc. This of course undermines collective forms of solidarity within a country and engenders a world view according to which different social groups must be governed differently rather than equally.

In search for economic attractiveness, i.e. conditions favorable to growth, stability, and foreign investment, states reduced public spending and privatized public goods and services (Lapeyronnie 2009: 207). Supposedly faced with increased global competitiveness and ageing populations, European governments started to propagate the vision that welfare states had become or soon would be too expensive to be sustained, a theme which figures prominently in political discourse until today (Bernhard 2011: 430-37). This led a massive re-imagination of the welfare state throughout Europe into what some call workfare states. Workfare means that social services are no longer provided to all citizens in need, but coupled to obligations. As Peck summarizes it:

Where welfare stands for the principle of needs-based entitlement and universality, workfare stands for compulsion and selectivity. Where welfare stands for passive income support, workfare stands for active labour market inclusion. Whereas welfare constructs its subjects as

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16 claimants, workfare reconstitutes them as jobseekers: the status of being

on welfare is replaced by the transitory experience of being processed

(back) into work through workfare (Peck quoted in Samers 2011: 202).

Ontologically, then, welfare states were based on the idea of a flawed system in which inherent problems could be remedied through the collective, whereas workfare is based on the idea of flawed persons whose behavior can be improved through monitoring, discipline and coercion. This shift of policies reflects the changing territory of government from the nation to communities, as described above. The new focus on employability and activation implies a shift from a social citizenship model, in which citizenship is a status; to a thinner citizenship model where citizenship becomes a contract in which citizens only enjoy rights when they fulfill all their duties (Handler 2009).

[These different strategies of welfare state dismantling] have involved innovations in the form of the state, ranging from the 'New Public Management' to new hybridized forms of 'public' organization. All have had

some discursive strategy for displacing, incorporating and marginalizing

these residual attachments [to the welfare state]: discourses of fiscalization; of demographic crises; of modernization; of managerialization; and of 'preservation' (the promise that reform will preserve core values, principles and practices). (Clarke 2007: 982, my emphasis)

This quote demonstrates that the dismantling of welfare states was rendered possible by discourses which legitimized - even necessitated - such changes. Workfare and privatizations eroded collective solidarity, since they effectively separate the population into two classes. Some have called them the primary and the secondary workforce (Paz-Fuchs 2008), others the affiliated and the marginalized (Rose 1996), often simply the middle and upper classes versus the precariat; in any case, one group is relatively educated, skilled, and unionized, enjoys relatively high job security and social protection, and receives wages so high they are able to accumulate capital as risk insurance. The other group constantly switches back and forth between precarious, short-term, low-skill employment and unemployment (and with it, obligatory trainings and unpaid internships), receives small wages with no opportunity for private savings, elaborate insurance or consumption of the privatized services (in fact, more often this group is burdened with debts), and is constantly monitored, disciplined, and coerced through various bureaucratic mechanisms.

The dismantling of European welfare states of course varied in form and content among various countries. Clarke defined nine types of “subordinating the social”, of which we witness different hybrid forms around Europe. The dismantling of welfare states included at least seven of those types: privatizing the social (conversion of publicly owned resources into private goods or companies), subjugating the social (to the demands of national economic competitiveness in a globalized world of markets),

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17 narrowing the social (downsizing and conditioning programs of social protection), functionalizing the social (e.g. turning unemployment insurance into a tool to get people back into work), economizing the social (changing subjectivities so that people come to think of themselves in economic terms, calculating choices to become subjects of value), fiscalizing the social (reframing social policies in terms of fiscal calculations, e.g. welfare becoming too expensive), and finally, reinventing governance towards more managerialist, market-centric rationalities (economic rationality) (Clarke 2007:975-978).

The second half of the 21st_{century also saw the rising dominance of economists,} economics, and mathematical/statistical thinking within the discipline. Economists multiplied and gained more and more important political, administrative, and managerial positions (Markoff, Montecinos 1993). European integration was a central factor in raising the political capital of economists, as the newly founded EC institutions were created to integrate European markets and therefore relied heavily on economic calculations, models, and data (Beck, Grande 2007: 21-22) Moreover, free market economic theories became more central and dominant within the discipline, supplanting Keynesianism, and more and more groups of economists opposing socialism in newly born think tanks propagated Chicago school free market economics (Backhouse 2005; Aistleitner, Fölker, Kapeller 2015). This gave even more force to the idea of competitiveness as an engine of the Common Market, in turn further normalizing the idea of the citizen as entrepreneur of her own life. Also part of this shift was the rise of rational action theories, in which human behavior is pre-modelled and predicted according to (assumed) externally determined preferences based on self-interest. Each decision that a person makes is supposed to be based on calculations of costs and benefits so that utility maximization is achieved (Hooghe 2004: 13-14). Such theories even colonized other disciplines such as parts of sociology and political science (ibid.; Favell, Guiraudon 2009: 556; Maurer, Müller, Siegert 1994). In politics and the media, economists were cited as experts more and more often, leading to an increased emphasis on the economic implications of political decisions, while at the same time marginalizing other perspectives and rationalities that used to be central in informing politicians, such as those of sociologists and historians.4_{Political elites started making} use of quantitative data and statistics to give the distinctions and world views they prefer “an aura of scientific guarantee, a stamp of truth” (Bourdieu 2001: 56, my translation). The world of finance became an ever larger share of countries’ GDP, further consolidating the dominance of financial interests in the political field. On top of that, the European Union continued to integrate economic and financial policies through new Treaties (e.g. Maastricht Treaty establishing completion of EMU and convergence criteria), and new or enlarged institutions (e.g. ECB, Eurostat, Eurogroup), which lend even more political capital to the economists who embody those institutions.

4_{As reported for the Dutch case in this article in De Correspondent (accessed 01/05/15)}

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18 To sum up, the phase between the Second World War and the 2008 crisis saw many interlinked transformations. One was increasing transnationalization, in the creation of the European Community and continuously asymmetrical European integration, but also in the idea of national economies giving way to one global economy. Another shift was the one from welfare to workfare states, and therewith from national collective solidarity mechanisms (what was considered ‘the social’) to privatized insurance mechanisms which only the primary workforce can afford. Another transformation was the rise of economists and their free market ideology, as well as the colonization of economic thinking into other disciplines and into politics. The two fundamental insights from this phase are that (1) the notion of ‘the social’ underwent major transformations during the dismantling of welfare states, and that (2) ‘the social’ is now subordinated to certain economic processes believed to be inevitable even the people on the human rights pole.

3.4 Europe since the crisis – a new historical phase?

This section will briefly describe what EU actors have done in the aftermath of the crisis, present different narratives about that crisis, problematize theoretical differences between chronic social problems and crises and draw some inferences. This will offer the frame to understand why I chose to focus on the European Semester

It is discourse that defines a crisis versus chronic problems. According to Edelman (1977), crises are systematically inflated (rhetorically) because they legitimize and expand authority – they construct external threats and demand for governmental action. The opposite is the case with social problems: they indicate internal/governmental failure and are thus systemically deflated in governmental rhetoric (ibid.: 49). Some scholars have blamed EU policy-makers to do precisely that: inflating the crisis and its economic imperatives to legitimize austerity, i.e. the further dismantling of social policy.5_{What matters is how the crisis is constructed and how these narratives structure} political responses: “During the radical uncertainty associated with economic failure, an interpretive battle commences in which policy-makers draw on ideas to narrate crises; these causal stories are used as both weapons to delegitimi[z]e pre-crisis institutions and as blueprints for a post-crisis settlement” (Blyth quoted in Stanley 2014: 2). The interpretative battles are fought by framing the crisis in a particular way through the use of classifications and the symbolic violence they exert: both the emphasizing of certain problematic aspects as well as the masking of other such aspects are crucial in defining appropriate solution strategies and in defining the positions that different groups will occupy (Laffan 2014: 267).

Edelman also points out that crises are typically presented as resulting from reasons outside political control, to be unique and threatening, and to require sacrifices to be

5_{For instance Portugese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos in an interview on this website}

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19 overcome (1977: 44). This resembles much of current news reporting on and official framing of the crisis. If we question the self-evidence of these assumptions, however, it appears that crises typically result from persisting inequalities in economic and political power, that the burdens imposed by a crisis fall disproportionately on the lower classes while upper classes often benefit from them, and that crises are, in fact, closely related to our social problems (ibid.:44-46). If we accept that the latter might just as well be true for the crisis Europeans are currently experiencing, the whole idea of a “crisis” becomes debatable.

In academia, crises are often theorized to be “windows of opportunity” for “paradigm shifts”, “critical junctures”, moments for political decisions. Especially in historical accounts, one or another shock/crisis is typically presented as turning point, as is the case for instance with explanations of the New Deal after the Great Depression. In various disciplines, different terms describe the idea that once something is perceived as a crisis by the majority, the status quo will not be reproduced. Of course, politicians capitalizing on crisis management also provide the public with various arguments about how they have ushered in a new era of stability in which the crisis could not recur. It was therefore reasonable of commentators to expect that the crisis in Europe would finally break with the superiority of economic rationality in the EU, with the dismantling of welfare states, or with the high renown of economists and the like (see for instance Frank 2011).

There are fundamentally two types of narratives about the crisis: in one, the crisis results from the fiscal profligacy of some Member States, stigmatized by calling them PIIGS, accused of overspending due to their ballooning welfare states (Tsoukala 2013: 242). In this narrative, the obvious solution to fiscal profligacy is (enforced) fiscal consolidation through austerity. The new economic and financial mechanisms, institutions, and rules make sense within this narrative, as most of them are designed to limit public deficits and debts, and to make that limitation enforceable through monitoring and sanctioning options. In the other narrative, however, the crisis results from flaws within the design of our institutions, such as banks and the Economic and Monetary Union (ibid.). In this view, the measures which have been taken seem largely irrelevant since they do not address the institutional flaws at the root of the crisis (Katzer, Schlager 2011). The actual crisis, in this view, cannot be grasped through economic indicators like growth, but instead takes the form of human suffering.

The contrasting narratives become resources that actors can use to further their position and goals. To put it into different terms, through the creation of a common sense that appears as truth of the social world (crisis-reaction as either tools only for financial/economic or also for social objectives), both kinds of narrators position themselves as savior of Europe from the crisis. Each of the narratives implicitly defines the crisis as something different, prompting different priorities. In the political field, the narratives which actors use typically corresponds to their social position, each framing

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20 thus also puts the narrator into an important and powerful position of solving the problem they just defined. Table 1 summarizes the two different narratives.

Problem definition/ framing Solution/policy priorities Role of narrator Economic rationality

The crisis is a crisis of the economy; the problem is a lack of growth, resulting in lower income for

governments, creating budget shortages. More debts will increase the problem.

- Getting growth back through structural reforms.

- Austerity, to not let lower tax incomes lead to higher public debts and deficits.

Prescribing the rules for

(neoliberal) structural reforms as well as for fiscal consolidation (=austerity)

Social

rationality The crisis is a crisis of society; the problem is human suffering (unemployment, rising poverty, lower access to health care etc.).

- Reducing human suffering, prioritizing social objectives over all others (even if that means increasing debts or slowing down economic recovery) Prescribing the rules for (Keynesian) structural reforms, i.e. raising public investments

Table 1. Two crisis narratives and their consequences.

While both of these narratives are expressed by commentators in the European public sphere, the former narrative is dominant in the political field. The dominant actors in the field (the so-called Five Presidents, the Finance and Economy Ministers, DG ECFIN) subscribe to this view. Many new measures and rules have been established to coordinate economic, financial, and fiscal policies among EU members, with the official aim to prevent future crises: the European Semester, the Six-Pack, the Fiscal Compact, the Two-Pack, the European Stability Mechanism, the Banking Union, the European System of Financial Supervision and so on.

The main effort of the EU to react to the crisis was the introduction of the European Semester. The European Semester is, broadly speaking, a new yearly cycle in which the constant monitoring and evaluating of the situation in Europe is supposed to feed into political decisions taken. The underlying assumption is that with enough knowledge about what is going on, another crisis can be prevented by enabling politicians to take action before a situation spins out of control. The European Semester is an annual cycle of information exchanges between the Commission and member states, monitoring and trying to improve upon Europe’s development. In the first half of each year, the Commission sets out key trends and priorities in the Annual Growth Survey (AGS), next, the Member State governments present their National Reform Programs (NRPs) describing which reforms they are planning to implement to achieve the targets, and lastly, the Commission publishes a few Country-Specific Recommendations (CSRs) for

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21 each Member State.6_{In the second half of each year, the National Semester, Member} States are supposed to implement the reforms that the Commission has recommended to them. In the subsequent European Semester, the progress of each country during the National Semester is again evaluated; the cycle begins anew. This new governance architecture can thus be said to be the new structure in which EU’s economic policies are implemented, with a special emphasis on fiscal and economic priorities and policies. The biggest concern of the Commission (expressed in the Annual Growth Survey and the Country-Specific Recommendations) is to enforce the debt and deficit objectives first established with the Maastricht Treaty, i.e. public deficits should not be higher than 3% of GDP, and public debt should not be higher than 60% of GDP.7

Klatzer and Schlager (2011) analyzed both the process of designing various economic governance mechanisms, as well as the specific contents of these mechanisms and rules and present a devastating conclusion: the process of establishing new policies was characterized by the conscious exclusion of various actors by the economic part of the European Commission (DG ECFIN) and the Finance Ministers of the Eurozone, as well as by an obfuscation of their plans to prevent political and public debates about them. In terms of content, the authors conclude that bureaucratic mechanisms are replacing political decisions and that the framework (list of indictors, thresholds, etc) in which economic policies of Member States will be monitored, evaluated, and possibly sanctioned, is subjected to the arbitrary decisions by DG ECFIN, leaving European economic governance even less democratically legitimate (ibid.). They also mention that the economic rationality narrative is being used which “represent[s] the States as incorrigible debt makers who have not done their ‘homework’ and lived beyond their means, and who finally have to be disciplined (ibid.: 70, my translation). Since their article was published, the marginalized actors such as the Social Protection Committee have struggled to change various aspects to make the European Semester more ‘balanced’ between social and economic priorities.

Considering theoretical expectations of crises as critical junctures, it is remarkable that no reversal of pre-crisis politics is noticeable. The three trends of increasing European integration, welfare state dismantling, and the rise of economists and their rationality are still continuing; we are witnessing more of the same. Nothing seems to have changed in terms of a paradigm shift. Therefore, my research question grows out of this observation that the crisis has not been a turning point in Europe’s history. How and why are social objectives subordinated to economic objectives of fiscal discipline and budgetary austerity in the European Semester?

6_{This is grossly oversimplified. There are many more intermediate steps, but the AGS, the NRPs, and the CSRs} are clearly the key tools of the European Semester. For an exhaustive account, see for instance

http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/economic_governance/the_european_semester/index_en.htm

(accessed 17/02/2015). 7

Ever since the Maastricht Treaty set out those criteria, various new rules and specifications have been adopted, such as the Stability and Growth Pact, Six-Pack, Fiscal Compact, Two-Pack. It is now also acceptable for Member States to make progress towards these criteria at a fast enough pace.

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22

4) Research Design and motivation

As I outlined in the introduction, when I started diving into European politics and the crisis, there seemed to be a mismatch between overly optimistic academic theories of EU integration and new forms of governance on the one hand, and the practice of politics as it is portrayed in news and by insiders and the like. At the same time, I also perceived a mismatch between the successes in crisis-management that certain politicians claimed for themselves and for Europe on the one hand, and the reality of deteriorating social conditions for millions of Europeans on the other hand. I did not understand how it was possible that many politicians and academics were so positive about European politics and the manner in which the crisis was tackled, while an ever larger share of the population saw their well-being decreasing year after year.

I noticed the peculiar framing of the crisis as a crisis of the economy (not of society) and realized that this had to be part of the explanation. This was the backdrop against which I decided to try to understand why Europe’s crisis-management took on the particular form that it did (and no other form). I decided to study the causes for and the mechanisms at play in the subordination of social cohesion objectives to economic

objectives of fiscal discipline and budgetary austerity. The aim of this study is to

illuminate the mechanisms at work in intra- and inter-institutional struggle over dominant priorities and definitions in the European political field. Since the question was still much too broad, I needed a certain frame through which I could study my research question. Since I was particularly interested in the crisis-management policies, the European Semester proved to be the appropriate frame for my study.

While the European Semester is the frame through which I pose my question, the Social Protection Committee (SPC) is the metaphorical site at which I started my research. The reason for this is that the Social Protection Committee has been the actor within EU politics that voiced most criticism about the European Semester, blaming it to sidestep social policy. They have continued to publish their evaluations on the various documents published as part of the European Semester.8

While this research project searched for an answer within the specific governance architecture at hand (subordination of social priorities in the European Semester), it will also give broader insights into mechanisms and processes of political struggle that take place more generally. The European Semester is only the way in which I look at how the SPC relates to the broader political field in which it operates. It became clear in the interviews that the European Semester is but the newest frame in which similar processes and dynamics are happening that have existed in the field for a long time.

8

For an impression, visit

http://ec.europa.eu/social/keyDocuments.jsp?advSearchKey=&mode=advancedSubmit&langId=en&policyArea =&type=46&country=0&year=0

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23 I moved to Brussels from November 2014 until February 2015 (with a break around Christmas and New Year’s Eve) to conduct ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews. In total, I interviewed 28 people. Out of these, 18 were on SPC member lists: 12 as actual members, 3 as permanent representatives, 3 as Commission officials. I interviewed 7 people in total working at the Commission, 4 of them at DG EMPL and 3 at DG ECFIN. In addition, I spoke to 3 persons from NGOs and 3 from Social Partners.9_The semi-structured interviews typically lasted between 45 and 60 minutes, some shorter, some longer. In the beginning, I recorded and transcribed interviews, but my respondents revealed quite some unease with this, and therefore I stopped recording and instead took notes and reconstructed the conversation at home immediately after the interview. Besides the interviews, I conducted participant-observation at three different events: one SPC meeting in November 2014, one convention lasting two days (the 4th_{Annual Convention against Poverty and Social Exclusion), and at a Hearing on} the Horizontal Social Clause (article 9 TFEU) at the European Parliament in December. For analysis, I coded all fieldwork notes, observations and interviews.

I prepared for the interviews by doing some research about the person I was about to speak to on the internet. For most respondents, I was able to find out some things about their biography (mainly their studies and career) through online CVs or LinkedIn. These biographical bits of data enabled me to get at least a partial picture of the typical social trajectories of different groups of actors. As mentioned before, it is typical for Bourdieusian political sociologies to conduct statistical analysis with biographical data. This was unfortunately not possible due to the limited access I had to this data. Besides, I quickly noticed that respondents became quite irritated by my asking about their backgrounds, leading me to exclude the topic from my interviews. However, I do think that such an analysis could still add much more depth to our understanding of the habitus of different kinds of actors in the field.

5) Analysis: The Struggle about the

Social Dimension in post-crisis Europe

In this section, I will present the findings from my fieldwork in Brussels. I want to let my respondents speak for themselves as much as possible, and complement their opinions with context and analysis. First, I will discuss the Social Protection Committee itself, how it works, what members think of it and their role. This is important because only a thorough description of the SPC and its members allows us to move beyond misconceptions and institutional design to understand what kinds of actors SPC members are, and what kind of context-of-action the committee setting provides. This short political sociology of the committee reveals the social basis of its decisions.

9

The numbers as presented here do not add up to 28 because three of the DG EMPL respondents were also involved in the SPC at present or in the past and are thus listed in both categories.

The struggle about the social dimension in the post-crisis European political field : a political sociology of the relation between ‘the social’ and ‘the economic’