Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

74 Richard Münch
sufficiently powerful that they prefer to work for changing employers for a limited
time only. And there is also the increasing number of young, mobile people who take
up the entrepreneurial role in very small new businesses within the rapidly growing
IT and media industries. We are witnessing a new gold rush, with a tremendous
dynamic and in depth transformation of the whole economy. For the young, mobile
labour force entrepreneurs, the employee capitalists and the new, small business
entrepreneurs, the regulations of the welfare state are out-dated remainders of a class
society far back in the past. They see such regulations much more as restrictions
on their activism than as means for social integration. What is emerging is a society
of individual activists which needs new forms of integration. Consultancy agencies,
employment agencies, job exhibits, job fairs, Internet mailing lists and networks
of the most different kinds are much more important in this new world than
employment administrations of the state, labour law and old-fashioned trade unions.
An analysis of European integration and globalisation in terms of the assumed class
interest of capital and labour is too much oriented to the past and prevents us from
looking at the constructive side of what is going on in this exciting epoch of massive
‘creative destruction’ by entrepreneurial activity.
Not a Europe of nations, but a Europe of individuals:
a transformation process full of conflicts
Whilst common features are increasing at the European level, those within the
member countries and their cultures are declining; vice-versa, the differences
between the nations are declining whilst they are increasing within the nations. The
common features within Europe are, however, of an abstract type and mould
a formal framework for a varied, widely branched and finely differentiated network
of more or less permanent loyalty relationships. In the framework of this network
structure, there is increasingly less room for strong collective solidarities,
collective identities and cultures. They are replaced by a pluralism of varied and
widely branched associations and cultural patterns. Therefore, the nation-states
and their national solidarities and cultures will not be an obstacle to further
integration in the long run, since they will lose in power and importance anyway.
The Europe of the future will not be a Europe of native countries and national
cultures, but rather a Europe of self-responsibly acting individuals and of a plurality
of life concepts that can no longer be homogenised nationally (Durkheim 1964:
133–8).
The single market alone brings about a comprehensive European and, at the
same time, globally oriented, consumer culture. National, regional and local
consumer traditions are inevitably flooded more and more by products arriving
from all across Europe and the world and lose their identity-forming strength.
To be able to survive at all, local producers have to maintain their position with
new products and practices by increasing their marketing, and conquering
consumers from outside their own region. The open market no longer allows for the
maintenance of traditions merely for tradition’s sake, but only their formation in line
with market requirements. In this case, it is not only material consumption that