Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

Democracy without demos 73
This is also true for the effects of European monitoring and benchmarking. The
other side of restricting the nation-state’s range of policies to those which prove to
be successful under international market and institutional competition is the
overcoming of ‘company blindness’, the breaking up of coalitions in vested interests,
the uncovering of undeserved privileges and the discovering of the negative effects
of prevailing patterns of behaviour. In this way, a whole range of possible measures
become visible and available, which were unknown and impossible before. This
is the side of extending the range of policies compared to the earlier state of encapsulated
national employment policies of the welfare state resulting from the
establishment of the European multi-level regime in the field of social policy. Here,
political regulation is not more difficult in the European multi-level system than
in national politics, as is generally thematised, but, in fact, is actually easier, namely
better informed and more open. The example clearly demonstrates that it is a
one-sided ideological restriction of our perspective of what goes on in the processes
of European (and global) market integration, if we see them only as a destruction
of positive integration by the national welfare state in favour of negative supranational
integration without a corresponding and equally ‘strong’ positive
integration on that level. This perspective blinds us to the disintegrative side of
the national welfare state, both with regard to exclusionary effects beyond and
within the nation-state. It also lacks sensitivity to the negative effects of too much
integration: paralysis, avoidance and even suppression of open conflict, constriction
of freedom, standardisation of life and lack of innovation. An open-minded analysis
of European integration and global sociation has to look at both sides of the coin:
the destruction of established yet limited and out-dated forms of particularistic
nation-state integration and the construction of new, more flexible, individualised
and encompassing forms of multi-level integration.
This process of social transformation can no longer be analysed in terms of class
interest; it is too much part of the ideological superstructure of a historical epoch,
which we have left behind us in the meantime (Streeck 1996). The interests
of ‘capital’ and of ‘labour’ are so strongly differentiated with new and growing forms
of fusion, such as the capital-owning employee and the labour force entrepreneur
that it is no longer possible to carry out an analysis of what is going on in terms of
‘capital interests’ and ‘labour interests’. The positions of branches and of companies
within branches is so different that it is impossible to derive from them a common
interest in national, European or global regulation in general or in specific forms
and substances. The same goes for the employees, who range from the simple,
unskilled workers and service people through different levels of qualification to
highly qualified specialists. The fact that we have an increasing number of types
of labour contract which do not conform to the traditionally established ‘normal’
and standardised type of labour in terms of life-long, full-time employment with
regular working time, with one employer, is by no means merely a sign of the
‘weakened’ position of labour in conflict with capital. In this area, we not only find
people in a depressing situation of precarious employment, but also women who
work part-time by choice so that they reach a better reconciliation between family
and work, as well as a growing number of specialists who are independent and