Social Class in Europe. Étienne Penissat
discussions on the subject, the EU bureaucracy is rigidly tied to austerity,2 and no mention is ever made of class distinction as a key tool of comprehension. It is time to ask what the famous Polish plumber has in common with a Romanian senior manager or a Spanish manual worker, and what sets them apart from one another.
The aim of this book is to present a map of inequalities in Europe that goes beyond the usual comparisons between countries: drawing on statistical data that are very rarely analysed from the point of view of occupations, our aim is to give an account for the first time of the differences between social classes at the European level.3 The point is not to ignore national specificities: people born in wealthiest countries keep what Milanovic called ‘citizenship rent’.4 Thanks to the World Inequality Database, it is now possible and easy to compare the level of income in one country with other incomes in Europe.5 Here, we would rather like to show how the national differences are embedded in a convergence of social inequalities that prevail in all European countries. In our view, the issue of inequality cannot be reduced to a simple analysis of levels of income and assets: it also relates to conditions of employment and work, lifestyles, housing conditions, cultural practices and leisure. These various domains of social life can now be measured through statistical studies conducted consistently in all European countries. Our task, then, is to consider the disparities between socio-economic and national groups, as well as gender and generational differences, together as a whole. Our commitment to an analysis in terms of social class is also a political act: more than just describing inequalities, our aim is to investigate the conditions of possibility of a European social movement.
CONSIDERING EUROPE THROUGH THE LENS OF SOCIAL CLASS
Since the 1980s, while European integration has gathered pace, the representation of society in terms of social class has been consistently declining. In the West, the retreat of Marxism resulted in a decline in the use of this concept in public debate, while in the East the desire for a radical break with the vestiges of Stalinism made it a despised term.
On both sides of the continent, the outlines of social classes are less distinct than they were in the past. Changes in European economic structures have played a substantial role in this process. The decline of industry and the growth of the service and retail sectors, the continuing rise in jobs in management and intermediate occupations, as well as mass unemployment, have substantially blurred the boundaries between social classes, while marginalising the industrial proletariat which used to comprise the hard core of the working class. The extension of duration of studies, and the spread of media and digital technology, have also revivified forms of inequality between countries and within different European social groups.
On the political level, the disappearance of the communist states and the weakening of workers’ parties and trade unions in Western countries have to some extent delegitimised references to class struggle. More generally, people no longer use class as a way of locating themselves within the social space. Throughout Europe, the sense of belonging to the working class has diminished among manual workers and low-skilled white-collar workers,6 and been replaced by the feeling of belonging to a vast middle class. Even when social protest regains momentum, as with the anti-austerity movements that arose in response to the 2008 crisis, the activists thus mobilised do not make their arguments in terms of class antagonism, but base their demands on more vague and encompassing oppositions, such as the division between the richest 1 per cent and the remaining 99 per cent, or between ‘the oligarchy’ and ‘the people’. These various developments have revived the idea that social class is disappearing.7 When reference is made to ‘twenty-first-century class conflicts’, it is either in relation to non-European territories or in predictions of the development of a precariat whose common characteristic is the lack of a stable job and career possibilities.8
The notion of class, articulated as the political and symbolic construction of a vision of the social world,9 is thus far less central today than it was in the past. Nevertheless, class status remains a pertinent tool for reflecting on and describing inequalities and social boundaries on the international level.10 We are also seeing renewed interest in using it as a way of reflecting on inequality in European societies.11 In France, the Yellow vests (“gilets jaunes”) revolt that broke out in November 2018 put the working classes back at the centre of the public debate: starting as a challenge to increased fuel duty, the protest widened to demands around purchasing power and for the greater use of referendums. Several calls for extension to other countries were made, with unsuccessful attempts in both Wallonia (Belgium) and Poland. The confinement of the Yellow vests within French borders illustrates the difficulty faced by social movements in raising the issue of inequalities on a European scale.
Is it possible to speak of a European working class or a transnational ruling class? Class relations are largely constructed in the context of nation states, and in each country the outlines and intensity of these relations are shaped by the specific social and political history of the nation. Conversely, the European Union is not a state: it currently has no sovereign authority, apart from very limited prerogatives in specific areas such as immigration. And, while it has its own bureaucracy, its own staff and its own systems,12 its social policy is virtually non-existent. Its principal intervention, often with the support of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has been to demand reforms requiring ever greater flexibility on the part of European workers, particularly since the start of the crisis in 2008.
In fact, until now, there have been few studies of inequality that consider the issue in terms of class at the European level. Yet this is a frame of reference, and even of identification, that is increasingly important for the people of Europe. The existence of institutions that provide resources, of financial regulations, norms, regular electoral processes and recognised symbols (flags, anthem), mark it as a social and political space. Moreover, the European Union represents a huge market, within which the various member states maintain particularly strong economic relations: nearly two-thirds of the trade of EU countries is within the European Union.
On a more fundamental level, most of the contemporary socioeconomic changes are occurring at supranational level, from the managerial turn of states to political developments, from the transformation of cities to changes in the education system and the restructuring of industry.13 The circulation, localisation and specialisation of capital contribute to forming and shaping class relations in Europe as a whole: the French executive directors of Danone invest in land belonging to Polish farmers; German senior managers at vehicle manufacturer Audi employ and manage workers in factories in Belgium, Spain and Hungary; Romanian forestry workers come to work in French forests; Polish workers are seconded to subcontracting companies in the shipyards at Saint-Nazaire in France; and so on. Capitalism has become extensively Europeanised, and class relations along with it. National corporations remain important but there is a concentration process in the big economic and financial firms: according to foreign direct investment figures, European multinationals have greatly increased their foreign investment in the last two decades: from 10 per cent to 60 per cent of GDP in Europe.14 There are more and more firms operating across multiple European countries.
The economic strategies of large European companies thus play a major part in determining the morphology of social classes in different European countries. The acquisition of an MBA or a degree from a prestigious foreign university has now become an essential rite of passage for those aspiring to managerial