Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

Democracy without demos 75
matters, but cultural practices, ranging from eating habits right through to music,
theatre, literature and fine arts. Of course, in this process, everything that is
European or global is interpreted according to local traditions (Robertson 1992).
It would, however, be too short-sighted to deduce the continued existence of local
traditions from this fact. Local traditions as such will not survive, but will necessarily
change their character by being filled with things from outside the local range,
unite with these things and try to recruit customers outside the local market. In this
way, a colourful mixture of local and extra-local traditions is created so that places
no longer differ through their own particular traditions, but, at best, by the more
or less motley shades of their colourful range of goods on offer. Consumers will
find more or less the same everywhere. We can therefore see that cultural traditions
lose their local foundation and identity-forming strength within a common market.
The differences between local, regional and national cultures shrink; instead, the
local, regional and national scope of cultural practices is growing, i.e. their internal
differences are increasing.
Along with the outside adjustment and the simultaneous internal differentiation
of cultural practices, social milieus, ways of life and styles of consumption differ less
and less between nations, whilst they differentiate into ever smaller fragments
internally. Lifestyles and types of consumption develop across national traditions.
They create milieu-specific common features between nations, whereas new
differences arise within nations. Here, too, it is shown that Europeans are becoming
more similar beyond national borders whilst at the same time differentiating more
strongly internally according to milieus. There are smaller differences between
culture-consuming city tourists from Germany, the UK or the Netherlands than
between German cultural tourists and German mass tourists lazing around on the
beaches of the Adriatic Sea. Likewise, there are many similarities between mass
tourists from different countries, whilst they are worlds apart from the cultureoriented
tourists from their own country.
The finding that common features are growing throughout Europe, whilst the
common features within the nations are declining, that Europe is integrating,
whilst the nation-states differentiate internally, shows that this structural change
involves substantial conflicts in the nation-states. European integration implies,
to some degree, the disintegration of nation-states. The turning toward Europe is
first and foremost a matter of modernising elites, of the strong as a whole, whilst the
weak cling to their old national solidarities or withdraw to smaller regional and local
solidarities. The modernising elites carry out the entrepreneurial role of ‘creative
destruction’ in Schumpeter’s sense. It is not surprising, therefore, that the processes
of European and global integration and the weakening of nation-states are
accompanied by nationalistic and regionalist counter-movements. The big parties
lose in integrative strength and are therefore losing ground in almost all European
countries, above all to the benefit of right-wing populist and right-wing extremist
parties (Betz 1994). It is not only the conservative parties alone that have to cede
votes to the new extreme Right, but also the social democrats and the socialists.
They are torn apart by the diverging movements of modernists and traditionalists.
They no longer succeed in uniting the wide range of workers. Some of them