Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe PDF
Preview Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe
Formations of European Modernity Formations of European Modernity A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe Gerard Delanty University of Sussex, UK © Gerard Delanty 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-28790-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, HampshireRG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-137-28791-5 ISBN 978-1-137-28792-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137287922 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 For Aurea Contents Preface and Acknowledgements ix Introduction: A Theoretical Framework 1 Part I Sources of the European Heritage 31 1 The European Inter-Civilizational Constellation 33 2 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 50 3 Christianity in the Making of Europe 67 4 Between East and West: The Byzantine Legacy and Russia 83 5 The Islamic World and Islam in Europe 97 Part II The Emergence of Modernity 111 6 The Renaissance and the Rise of the West Revisited 113 7 Unity and Divisions in Early Modern European History: 130 The Emergence of a Westernized Europe 8 The Enlightenment and European Modernity: 147 The Rise of the Idea of Europe 9 The Rise of the Nation-State and the Allure of Empire: 169 Between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism 10 The Historical Regions of Europe: Civilizational 195 Backgrounds and Multiple Routes to Modernity 11 Europe in the Short Twentieth Century: 215 Conflicting Projects of Modernity Part III The Present and its Discontents 243 12 Europe since 1989: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and 245 Globalization 13 Age of Austerity: Contradictions of Capitalism and 273 Democracy 14 The European Heritage as a Conflict of Interpretations 287 vii viii Contents Conclusion: Europe – A Defence 302 Notes 307 Bibliography 311 Index 332 Map of Europe 338 Preface and Acknowledgements This book emerged out of an attempt to write a new edition of my earlier book, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality(1995). The relative success of the book, which was translated into seven languages and widely cited, and the need to take account of significant developments within Europe and the wider world that occurred since the early 1990s seem to make a compelling case for a new edition. However, this soon became an impossible task as the direction of my own work had changed and the considerable amount of scholarship over the past two decades or so presented a challenge to some of the conceptual founda- tions of the book, which were primarily driven by a critique of the instrumentalization of history. So it was not simply a case of updating and revising an older work in light of changing times and new research. The result is an entirely new and longer book that offers a more com- prehensive perspective on the course of European history and society than one confined to a critical history of the idea of Europe. In a more specific sense it seeks to answer the question: what is the fundamental structure of Europe? In more normative terms, I pose the questions, what are the limits and possibility of the idea of Europe in the present day?; or, how should we evaluate the European heritage today? The following, in brief, is where I have felt it is necessary to offer a new interpretation on the question of Europe and its history. First, it is now essential to look at Europe in both a historical and contemporary perspective from a global angle and to see it as one among many world historical regions. My earlier book, while certainly considering the global context in the historical analysis, was primarily focused on the internal dynamics of European integration as far as the present day was concerned. In this book the global perspective is more strongly emphasized both in historical and contemporary context and a greater place is given to the possibility of cosmopolitanism. In doing so, it builds on what is now a very considerable body of literature in global history that puts in new perspective the rise of the West and the relation of Europe to the so-called non-western world, a theme I explored in several publications and in particular concerning the rela- tion between Europe and Asia. However, recourse to the global context – which needs to be more than a northern hemisphere perspective – alone is inadequate. The theoretical challenge is to combine a ix x Preface and Acknowledgements consideration of the global context with internal processes of develop- ment, since without such a macro-sociological account it is not poss- ible to explain how long-term structures are formed: endogenous factors alone rarely account for societal or cultural formations, but neither do purely external accounts. Second, following from the previous point, I am less inclined to emphasize the over-riding importance of the transnationalization of the nation-state by the EU and the coming of a new post-national community within Europe. Although there is no doubt that the Europeanization of the nation-state has been one of the most impor- tant developments of the past five decades, it cannot be regarded as the central focus for research on Europe, which is now in the throes of a crisis that calls into question some of the most important assumptions of the post-Second World War project of European integration. From a critical and normative perspective, one of the most important contri- butions of the project of European integration has been in the sphere of rights. This has tended to neglect the question of social justice and the problem of solidarity. The present work places a stronger emphasis on the social question in the analysis of European transformation and the need to take full account of not only the transformation of the state, but also of major economic change in the nature of capitalism, all of which have implications for democracy, social justice and solidarity. Third, I am more sceptical today than I was in Inventing Europeof a constructionist approach that primarily seeks to show how notions of identity, Europe, nations etc are invented discourses; this includes the argument I made in that earlier work that Europe has always been pro- duced out of a relation of hostility to the East and that without an external other the self had no identity. Such a position is useful for the critical purpose of unmasking the ‘Grand Narratives’ of history, but once this is done, and it has been done extensively, there are other and more important objectives, which cannot be easily achieved by recourse to what are fairly simplistic arguments and often polemical positions. How to take account of a more complex set of considera- tions, which suggest that Europe is not a single entity, has been one of the challenges in the writing of this book. Moreover, it seems to me, that the target of a critical approach must now not only be the older Eurocentric conceptions of the European heritage, but questionable claims made in the name of the critique of Eurocentrism as well as the arrival of pernicious interpretations of history, such as the clash of civilization thesis. So a corrective measure is needed not only against the illusions that the older approaches pro- Preface and Acknowledgements xi duced, where these are still influential, but also the self-serving procla- mations of relativism or of western triumphalism. Fourth, my work over the past two decades has become more firmly embedded in two bodies of theoretical literature, namely the social theory of modernity and cosmopolitanism, which inevitably led to a shift in emphasis. This book, as is suggested by the title, postulates the centrality of modernity as the context in which to understand the making of Europe and for making sense of its unity and diversity. As is much discussed in recent and extensive literature, modernity is now conceived as historically variable and is not specific to Europe, which represents only one variant. This serves not only as a useful framework in which to address global questions, but also as a way to understand the internal processes and dynamics that led to the formation of Europe as a structural reality and not only as a discourse or idea. Moreover, it also suggests a way out of the impasse of constructionist approaches that confine the analysis to identity and cultural construc- tions and makes for a firmer macro-analysis of long-term change and continuity. An analysis that is confined to the level of an account of the idea of Europe will provide only a limited perspective. The cos- mopolitan perspective, as developed in my book The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (2009), is also strongly present in this book as a critical and normative position that comple- ments the perspective on modernity. Twenty years ago political scientists and legal scholars dominated the study of Europe, but today the social sciences have a good deal more to offer to the study of Europe as a world historical region. The present work is primarily a contribution to the historical and political sociology of Europe. The macro-sociological perspective it offers is guided by the critical theory framework to provide a reconstruction of historical structures of consciousness and societal formations. The aim of such a ‘critique’ is to render intelligible that which is opaque in order to reveal alternative readings of the social world and the possibil- ities inherent in the present. Such a work is obviously extensively based on the work of numerous historians. Historians are concerned largely with the particular and are sceptical of accounting for phenom- ena by reference to broader constructions. Where they offer wider interpretations they do so for the non-specialized reader and rely on the narrative structure for a unity that is otherwise not possible. The sociological approach I have adopted seeks to place historical phenom- ena in wider frameworks of analysis without necessarily relying on the form of a narrative. This is perhaps to do less justice to approaches in
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