The Road to Social Europe: A Contemporary Approach to Political Cultures and Diversity in Europe

The Road to Social Europe is an excellent, if ‘‘contrarian,’’ essay on the political sociology of today’s Europe. Jean-Claude Barbier is a veteran comparativist who has worked all over Europe acquiring knowledge of different languages and cultures and extraordinary erudition. His basic argument is that ‘‘social Europe,’’ in the sense of a pan-EU corpus of social policies, will be a very long time coming, because the social policies of different European societies are built upon political cultures that resist it. The evidence that something has been resisting ‘‘social Europe’’ is overwhelming, as Barbier’s historical review demonstrates. In the EU’s founding years, member states were unwilling to delegate social policy prerogatives to the EU, seen in the meager list of Euro-level programs—the almostaccidental, but providential, inclusion of male-female labor market equality, weak regional development commitments, and an expensive welfare state for farmers— leaving other key policy areas—pensions, healthcare, unemployment and poverty programs, labor market training and regulation, family policies and education—in national hands. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the EU promoted new market liberalization accompanied by a few new European social policy prerogatives, including health and safety regulation, expanded regional redistribution, and efforts to promote Europeanlevel collective bargaining that did not get far; but again, most social policy remained national. Finally, at the turn of the new century there were new EU efforts to coordinate certain social policies—labor market regulation, pensions, and poverty policy—through ‘‘soft law. ’’ The absence of compulsory mechanisms of compliance led most to fall short. It is not true that six decades of European integration failed to influence national social policies, but the processes have been indirect. The EU’s stock in trade of economic governance and market opening has set in motion economic and social changes that have often obliged reluctant governments to reform their social models, albeit in national ways. This mystery of national resistance to ‘‘Europeanizing’’ social policy is what Barbier proposes to solve. A political scientist might offer the simple answer that because social policies are the most salient issues in the domestic politics of EU members, there has been too much at stake politically for governments to share social policy sovereignty with the EU. Barbier knows this, but finds it insufficient. He argues instead that national social policies are the products of specific national political cultures, deeply enracinated in languages and complex historical chains of responses to social issues. ‘‘Social policies’’ are not abstract and interchangeable, but emanate from long national debates about what social solidarity ought to be and embody constitutive elements of citizenship and national identities. Behind their national boundaries people think and interact differently from others outside them regarding fundamental matters of responsibility for their fellow citizens. The results are social policies with national logics of development that create particular national-bounded rationalities for debate and discourse. The heart of Barbier’s argument, found in Part II and entitled ‘‘Toward a sociological understanding of cultural diversity in Europe,’’ is an attempt to ground this notion of political culture and its consequences in European cultural diversity. The argument is a mixture of precedents in classical social theory (Weber, Parsons, and a few others), anthropological claims about the primacy of language in social ordering, and critical refutations of other approaches. Barbier makes short work of 1960s American ‘‘logic of industrial society’’ arguments (Wilensky and others are cited), which posited that advancing industrialization led to convergence on a single social policy model. He reviews comparative social policy scholarship following Esping-Andersen’s classic The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, finding it helpful, but criticizing its taxonomy Reviews 629