...Blowin' In the Wind

Manuel Castells: From End of Millennium
Volume III of The Informaiton Age: Economy, Society, and Culture
Oxford: Blackwell 1998 (excerpts)

Cultural Identity and European Unification (pp 346-349)

The whirlwind of globalization is triggering defensive reaction around the world, often organized around the principles of national and territorial identity. In Europe, this perceived threat is materialized in the expanding powers of the European Union, Widespread citizen hostility to the process of unification is reinforced by the discourse of most political leaders presenting the European Union as the necessary adaptation to globalization, with the corollary of economic adjustment, flexibility of labor markets, and shrinkage of the welfare state, as the sine qua non conditions for the integration of each country in the European Union.¹⁰ Thus, since the acceleration of the integration process has coincided with stagnation of living standards, rising unemployment, and greater social inequality in the 1990s, significant sections of the European population tend to affirm their nations against their states, seen as captives of European supranationality. It is revealing that, with the partial exception of Britain, the political establishment of all countries, both on the center-right and on the center-left, are unquestionably pro-European, while most public opinions are sharply divided, at best.¹⁰

Debate over European integration is not a matter of raison d'etat but rather a matter of raison de nation. Whether European integration is allowed to proceed will depend on the ability of nations to secure their own survival. A nation will only allow integration when it is secure that its national identity will not be threatened, that it may even be strengthened by its exposure to different identities. If a nation feels that it is only able to survive through a close correspondence with a state that is sovereign and independent, if it does not believe that the state can be integrated while its culture is reproduced, it will block further integration.¹²

This insecurity is enhanced by the growing multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism of European societies, which trigger racism and xenophobia as people affirm their identity both against a supranational state and against cultural diversification.¹³ The utilization of this insecurity by political demagogues, such as Le Pen in France, amplifies the expression of cultural nationalism throughout the political system and the mass media. The linkage, in the public mind, between crime, violence, terrorism, and ethnic minorities/ foreigners/ the other leads to a dramatic surge in European xenophobia, precisely at the high point of European universalism. This is, in fact, in historical continuity with the previous unification of medieval Europe around Christianity - that is, an intolerant, religious boundary, exclusive of infidels, pagans, and heretics.¹⁴

There is an additional fundamental source of people's distrust vis a vis European institutions: what has come to be labeled "the democratic deficit." While significant powers affecting the livelihood of citizens has been transferred to the European Union (mainly to the Council of Ministers, representing European nation-states), and some essential economic policy decisions have even been made "automatic," under the control, in the near future, of the European Central Bank, the capacity of citizens to influence these decision has been considerable reduced. Between the act of choosing, every four years, from two usually unsatisfactory options of government, and the daily management of a complex, pan-European system, there is so much distance, that citizens feel definitely left out. There are practically no effective channels of citizen participation in the European institutions. An moreover, as Borja pointedly writes, there are no "European conflicts."¹⁵ Indeed, the democratic process is not only based on representation and consensus building, but in democratically enacted conflicts between different social actors vying for their specific interests. Other than farmers littering the streets of Brussels with their produce (still unhappy in spite of being entirely subsidized by all other Europeans, an, indirectly, by most of the developing world), the expressions of transnational collective mobilization aimed at European decision-making are negligible. The apprenticeship of European citizenship is absent, to a large extent because European institutions are usually happy to live in their secluded world of technocratic agencies and deal-making councils of ministers. For instance, the possibilities of using networks of computer-mediated communication for dissemination of information and citizen participation have been all but ignored.¹⁶ Thus, confronted with a decline in democracy and citizen participation, at a time of globalization in the economy and Europeanization of politics, citizens retrench in their countries, and increasingly affirm their nations. Nationalism, not federalism, is the concomitant development of European integration. And only if the European Union is able to handle, and accommodate, nationalism will it survive as a political construction. As Waever, based on Anthony Smith's insights. Proposes, while European institutions may adopt the French version of national identity, built around political identity, European nations my be heading toward the adoption of the German version of national identity, based on a linguistically united Volk¹⁷. As paradoxical as it may sound, it is possible that only the institutional and social articulation of both identity principles can make possible the development of a European Union that is something else than a common market.

But if nations, independently from the state, become the sources of identity-based legitimacy for the European construction, the issue arises of which nations. It seems relatively clear in the case of France; after the successful extermination of plural national identities by the French Revolution on behalf of the universal principle of democratic citizenship, when French people react against Europe they do so in the name of "La France," in terms that would equally be understood by General de Gaulle and the French Communists. For different reasons, it is also clear in Germany, where the ethnic purity of the nation, even among Kazakhstan's Germans, remains untainted by the millions of immigrants, and sons of immigrants, that will never be German. The greatest fear of Eurocrats is that this Germany may find an eternal expression in the deutschmark, and that in the event of a political crisis, the German constitutional court will rule against the European institutions, in application of the principle of Superrevisionsintanz that it affirmed in its landmark verdict of October 12, 1993.

But the appeal to national identity is more complicated in other countries, based on pluri-national states, as in the case of Spain, in the United Kingdom, and Belgium. Would Catalunya or Scotland affirm their identity against the European institutions, or, on the contrary, in favor of the European Union, bypassing, rather than opposing, the Spanish or British governments?¹⁸ Furthermore, the affirmation of a "Padania" identity in northern Italy has been superficially ridiculed because of the extravagant character of Bossie, the leader of the Lega Nord. And yet, while it is true that the foundation of this identity is essentially economic, and even more narrowly fiscal, it also has historical roots in the artificial integration of Italy in the late nineteenth century, and its dynamics may go well beyond the political anecdote. Not that Padania exists, but in linguistic, cultural, social, ad political terms, it is highly doubtful whether Italy existed until well into the twentieth century, with the Mezzogiorno, even today, having very little in common with Lombardy, Peidmont, or Emilia-Romagna.¹⁹ The retrenchment around the principle of national identity is strengthening the nation-states against the European Union in some countries, while reinforcing the European Union against the current nation-states in others.

The search for identity as an antidote to economic globalization and political disenfranchisement also permeates below the level of the nation-state, adding new dynamism to regions and cities around Europe. As Orstrom Moller writes, the future European model may be made up of the articulation of economic internationalization and cultural decentralization.²⁰ Regional and local governments are playing a major role in revitalizing democracy in the 1990s, and opinion polls show a higher degree of citizen trust in these lower levels of government as compared with national and supranational levels. Cities have become critical actors in establishing strategies of economic development, in negotiated interaction with internationalized firms. And both cities and regions have established European networks that coordinate initiatives, and learn from each other, putting into action a novel principle of cooperation and competition, whose practice we have described elsewhere.²¹ On the light side, an illustration of this double dynamic of local identity and European networking, which I consider to be extremely important, is the structuring of professional sports, such as football or basketball, in the past decade. As everybody knows, the local team is an essential rallying point for people's identity. While national competitions continue to be played, maximum attention is given to European competitions, (of which there are three for football, for instance), so that the reward for teams in the national competition is to become "European," a goal that many teams can reach, in contrast with only a few three decades ago. At the same time, the opening of labor markets for European players, and the mass migration to Europe of players from other countries, means that a significant proportion of players in the local team are foreigners. The result is that people mobilize around the identity of their city, as represented by a group of largely foreign professional players competing in various European leagues. It is through this kind of basic life mechanisms that the real Europe is coming into existence - by sharing experience on the basis of meaningful, palpable identity. How, then, can unification proceed between the high winds of globalization and the warm hearth of locality.

From the Conclusion: Making Sense of our World
The New Avenues of Social Change (pp 371-373)

According to observation, social challenges against patterns of domination in the network society generally take the form of constructing autonomous identities. These identities are external to the organizing principles of the network society. Against the worshipping of technology, the power of flows, and the logic of markets, they oppose their being, their beliefs, and their bequest. What is characteristic of social movements and cultural projects built around identities in the Information Age is that they do not originate within the institutions of civil society. They introduce, from the outset, an alternative social logic, distinct from the principles of performance around which dominant institutions of society are built. In the industrial era, the labor movement fought fiercely against capital. Capital and labor had, however, shared the goals and values of industrialization - productivity and material progress - each seeking to control its development for a larger share of its harvest. In the end, they reached a social pact. In the Information Age, the prevailing logic of dominant global networks is so pervasive and so penetrating that the only way out of their domination appears to be out of these networks, and to reconstruct meaning on the basis of an entirely distinct system of values and beliefs. This is the case for communes of resistance identity I have identified. Religious fundamentalism does not reject technology, but puts it at the service of God's Law, to which all institutions and purposes must submit, without possible bargaining. Nationalism, localism, ethnic separatism, and cultural communes break up society at large, and rebuild its institutions not from the bottom up, but from the inside out, the "who we are" versus those who do not belong.

Even proactive movements, which aim at transforming the overall pattern of social relationships among people, such as feminism, or among people and nature, such as environmentalism, start from the rejection of basic principles on which our societies are constructed: patriarchalism, productivism. Naturally, there are all kind of nuances in the practice of social movements, as I tried to make clear in volume II, but, quite fundamentally, their principles of self-definition, at the source of their existence, represent a break with institutionalized social logic. Should institutions of society, economy, and culture truly accept feminism and environmentalism, they would be essentially transformed. Using an old word, it would be a revolution.

The strength of identity-based social movements is their autonomy vis a vis the institutions of the state, the logic of capital, and the seduction of technology. It is hard to co-opt them, although certainly some of their participants may be co-opted. Even in defeat, their resistance and projects impact and change society, as I have been able to show in a number of selected cases presented in volume II. Societies of the Information Age cannot be reduced to the structure and dynamics of the network society. Following my scanning of our world, it appears that our societies are constituted by the interaction between the "net" and the "self," between the network society and the power of identity.

Yet, the fundamental problem raised by processes of social change that are primarily external to the institutions and values of society, as it is, is that they may fragment rather than reconstitute society. Instead of transformed institutions, we would have communes of all sorts. Instead of social classes, we would witness the rise of tribes. And instead of conflictive interaction between the functions of the space and flows and the meaning of the space of places, we may observe the retrenchment of dominant global elites in immaterial palaces made out of communication networks and information flows. Meanwhile people's experience would remain confined to multiple, segregated locales, subdued in their existence and fragmented in their consciousness. With no Winter Palace to be seized, outbursts of revolt may implode, transformed into everyday senseless violence.

The reconstruction of society's institutions by cultural social movements, bringing technology under the control of people's needs and desires, seems to require a long march from the communes built around resistance identity to the heights of new project identities, sprouting from the values nurtured in these communes.

Examples of such processes, as observed in contemporary social movements and politics, are the construction of new, egalitarian families; the widespread acceptance of the concept of sustainable development, building intergenerational solidarity into the new model of economic growth: and the universal mobilization in defense of human rights wherever the defense has to be taken up. For this transition to be undertaken, from resistance identity to project identity, a new politics will have to emerge. This will be a cultural politics that starts from the premise that informational politics is predominantly enacted in the space of media, and fights with symbols, yet connects to values and issues that spring from people's life experience in the Information Age.

Footnotes