Social Class in Europe. Étienne Penissat
more and more company directors play up their professional experience in a multinational as a way of establishing their legitimacy.15 At the same time, the mobility of workers within the European Union has risen since the union was expanded to include countries from the former East.16 There are two particularly significant movements of labour: the first from Bulgaria and Romania to Spain and Italy, and the second from the countries of the former East to the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. The substantial increase (over 45 per cent) in the number of posted workers in Europe between 2010 and 2014 is one illustration of this: today there are over two million of them in the European Union. In other words, class relations are experienced over the territory of Europe as a whole, not just at national level. Following the ‘no’ vote in the French and Dutch referendums of 2005, many interpreted the result as the revenge of the working class on the elite, in the context of a conflict that was now being played out on the European stage. The same was true of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom,17 even though, in some cases, the contribution of working-class voters to these great electoral jamborees was a refusal to participate.18 Behind what are often presented as oppositions between national identities lie political conflicts rooted in class divisions.
The few studies that exist of social class at the European level make little use of empirical data, and in the absence of statistical inquiry, ultimately make excessively abstract cases. One example is American sociologist Neil Fligstein, who, in his provocatively titled book Euro-Clash, argues that Europe can be split into three classes. At the top, he places a transnational elite of people who travel widely, speak several languages and identify themselves with the European project, from which they benefit both materially and culturally. In the middle there is a group of mainly middle-class citizens which is more sporadically connected with Europe, through either vacations, leisure (football, for example) or a professional occupation linked to the European economy. At the bottom there is a third, poorer group with a lower level of education, who speak only the language of their own country and do not consume cultural goods imported from other countries.19
Although it is only minimally based on the actual social position of individuals, Fligstein’s book thus invites us to think about class divisions at the European level. In fact, it is now possible to identify social groups precisely, using the large-scale European statistical surveys. The aim of the present study is to consider skilled manual workers, farmers or executives at the same level of detail over the whole of Europe. To what extent can similarity of social conditions outweigh the individual specificities of countries of residence? And, if national identity remains important, is it nevertheless possible to identify stronger European convergences between, for example, the elites in different countries than between the working and middle classes of any one country?
TRANSCENDING THE CLICHÉS OF NATIONAL DIFFERENCE
Arguing for an empirical sociology of social class in Europe means taking the opposite view from that disseminated by the European Commission, which remains anchored to a division along national boundaries. The commission, via Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union), supervises the publication of data provided by national statistical bodies (rate of growth, percentage of national debt, etc.), and publishes data on the operation of job markets (levels of employment and unemployment) that tend to underscore national differences. For example, per capita income varies widely from one country to another: the highest, that of Luxembourg, is three times that of the lowest, Romania.20 But the lens through which the European Commission views these matters is often highly restrictive and distorting. It effectively serves to compare countries with one another, in order either to validate the idea that inequalities can only be described at national level, or to set states in competition with one another. Official sources sometimes use other criteria, such as levels of education, but this is usually for the purpose of contrasting the ‘good student’ countries with the ‘poor students’ of Europe. Reference to social class, on the other hand, or even to socio-economic groups, is never used as a marker. Who knows how many farmers, skilled manual workers, senior managers or CEOs there are in Europe? While state development in France and the United Kingdom is based on statistical accounting in terms of social groups,21 this frame of reference is totally absent at European level. The unemployment rate is a good example of this bias, with significant political import: by emphasising differences in unemployment rates between countries, the statistics published by European institutions highlight disparities in economic performance while masking inequality of exposure to unemployment between the working class and the dominant class.
During the crisis in the eurozone in the late 2000s, arguments that were centred on national differences, sometimes embellished with culturalist stereotypes, became increasingly powerful: on the one hand there were the countries stigmatised by the term PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) on the ground of their alleged inability to pay their national debt, suspected of being lazy, irresponsible and even corrupt; on the other were Germany and the countries of the North, depicted as disciplined, hard-working and honest. These generalisations, which echo Montesquieu’s old theory of climates, whereby the climate influenced the nature of human beings and their societies, have powerfully pervaded discourses and representations. In contrast to this thinking, our approach will seek to identify the European populations and social groups that have been most affected by the opening up of national economies to competition.
When European institutions do take an interest in inequalities between individuals, it is mainly from the point of view of ‘human capital’, defined as the set of qualifications, aptitudes, skills and experience accumulated by individuals over the course of their life. In a society where education has become universal, access to lifelong education is portrayed as the means of giving each person the ‘chance’ of social mobility or access to employment. This vision is manifested in the European Commission’s voluntarist policy of developing the ‘human capital’ of European citizens. The European Union has set itself the goal of improving levels of education by 2020, with the aim of increasing individuals’ employability. The two principal objectives that have been put into figures are increasing the proportion of people who have been awarded a higher education qualification, and reducing the proportion of young people who leave education and training early, an area where there are wide variations between countries. However, universal access to education does not automatically translate into a reduction in social inequality, since working-class children always have great difficulty in converting their qualifications into social positions as advantageous as those of children of the middle and dominant classes.22 Moreover, this institutional approach tends to reduce inequality to a matter of education alone, while inequalities constructed in the workplace, and in housing, leisure and sociality, remain hidden.
The depth of the 2008 financial and economic crisis put the issue of wealth differences between social groups back on the agenda. Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, profoundly reworked an economic analysis which had, until then, been focused on differences in income: his book revealed that possession of assets – that is, capital that over the long term grows more rapidly than the production of added value – lies at the heart of contemporary inequalities.23 In the context of financial globalisation and weakening systems of social protection, wealth inequality becomes central. But power relations cannot be reduced to the action of a few ‘super-rich’ people whose income has skyrocketed compared to the rest of the population. They play out at many other levels on the social scale – between the foreman and his subordinate, or between