society, consensus, and asymmetric relations (welsh)
TRANSCRIPT
Society, Consensus, and Asymmetric Relations: A Conceptual and Historical Critique of the Social Dialogue and the Social Policy Agenda of the European Union's Lisbon Strategy.
John William Welsh
University of Helsinki
Faculty of Social Sciences
Political History
Master’s Thesis
November 2008
Contents 1. – Introduction 1.1 – Research Question......................................................................................... Page 1 1.2 – Method, Structure, and Source Selection...................................................... Page 12 2. – Theories Toward a Historical and Conceptual Analysis of the Social Dialogue 2.1 – Speech Acts and Illocutionary Force in the Social Dialogue........................ Page 21 2.2 – Conceptual History: Begriffsgeschichte and Contextualism......................... Page 26 2.3 – Critical Theory and ‘Instrumental Tendencies’ in the Lisbon Strategy........ Page 34 3. – Conceptual and Critical Analysis of the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy 3.1 – The Social Dialogue as ‘Ideal Speech Situation’.......................................... Page 51 3.2 – The Social Dialogue and the Concept of ‘Society’....................................... Page 62 3.3 – The Lisbon Strategy: Consensus Claims and Power Relations.................... Page 75 3.4 –The Social Dialogue and Asymmetric Relations........................................... Page 94 4. – Conclusion .................................................................................................... Page 112 Bibliography ..........................................................................................................Page 115
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1. Introduction
1.1 Research Question
Research Question and Motivation “Men are born and exist free and equal by right. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good”.1 “A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all”.2 “Just think what Europe could be. Think of the innate strengths of our enlarged union. Think of its untapped potential to create prosperity and offer opportunity and justice for all its citizens. Europe can be a beacon of economic, social and environmental progress to the rest of the world”.3
“Another remarkable trait of the present period is the coexistence of ideas which are the products of the past and those which are connected to the current climate. The past which seems without expression is not so much forgotten, it persists in monumental and sentimental form, and it is in this way that it integrates itself into modern understanding”.4
In a 2006 French survey entitled “Les 18-25 ans et l’élection présidentielle”, left wing
youth were asked for words which, for them, evoqued negative images of the ‘right’. These
included “Medef”,5 “capitalisme”, “privitisation”, “mondialisation”, and “Bourse”.
However, when questioned in further detail, this did not prevent most of them from
generally approving of labour market liberalisation policies, the introduction of the ‘internal
market’ in the public sector, ‘means-tested’ social security, and parental choice in
schooling.6 This is a France in which an historic conceptual vocabulary of ‘Modernity’,
including such concepts as la patrie, humanism, republicanism, revolution, citizenship,
universalism, which are encompassed by a distinctively French political hyper-awareness,
can no longer adequately express or comprehend itself in the absence of such concepts.
1 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Article 1. [Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits. Les distinctions sociales ne peuvent être fondées que sur l’utilité commune]. 2 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Article 16. [Toute société dans laquelle la garantie des droits n’est pas assurée ni la séparation des pouvoirs déterminée, n’a point de Constitution]. 3 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Growth and Jobs – A New Start for the Lisbon Strategy. European Commission (Brussels 2005). p 3. [My Emphases]. 4 Le Goff, J-P. La France Morcelée (Gallimard 2008). pp 65-66. [Un autre trait étonnant de la période présente tient à la coexistence d’idées issues du passé et de celles qui collent au nouvel air du temps. Le passé qui paraît sans ressource n’est pas autant oublié, il se maintient sous une forme monumentale et sentimentale, et c’est de cette façon qu’il s’intègre à la sensibilité moderne]. 5 Mouvement des entreprises de France. This is a large and encompassing confederation of businesses in France. 6 [18-25 year olds and the presidential election]. Etude IPSOS/Graines de Citoyens, decembre 2006.
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The quotes at the top illustrate how confused, inconsistent, incoherent, and unstable
are the concepts and the language with which we understand and express our contemporary
political visions, especially when attempted in often incongruous and depressingly ironic
histrionic language as one often finds in the pronouncements of EU institutions, as well as
at the national level. Whether a ‘crisis of modernity’ or the ‘end of ideologies’, there
appears to be a more widespread increase in an historically disoriented, and perhaps
inappropriate, ransacking of our historical baggage in order to somehow express current
opinion, comprehend change, and to mobilise and legitimise action in an ever more
pluralised, fractured, and problematised historical reality. This current political climate of
unconscious conceptual confusion, and the political (lack of) reaction to it, has been
referred to as a ‘fuite en avant’:
“This ‘fuite en avant’ does not belong to any one political faction. It seems to us in fact symptomatic of the absence of a new cultural and historical medium capable of interpreting and expressing the new historical situation in which we now live during this time of EU construction and globalisation”.7
In the case of France, but also more generally throughout the European Union, this new “air
du temps” has become a marked phenomenon since the 1980s and, in more concrete
political terms, can be traced in France to the socialist French government of the time under
Mitterrand, which sought to reconcile France with business and enterprise under the
auspices of ‘modernisation’ and the mobilisation of productive activity. In fact:
“Since the 1980s, modern management has ceaselessly developed a chaotic vision of the world and of change which neutralises the will to understand both of these at a global level. This vision of the development of the world is that of perpetual motion with neither rhyme nor rhythm other than that it must be adapted to as fast as possible”.8 The fundamental research question, and the initial interest that I have in this research, is
whether or not it is this sentiment that drives the current European Union institutions’
demands for political reform. When one reads again and again that “better responsiveness
7 Le Goff. La France Morcelée. p 70. [Cette fuite en avant n’est pas propre à un camp politique. Elle nous paraît en fait symptomatique de l’absence d’un nouveau creuset culturel et historique qui permette d’interpréter et de donner sens à la nouvelle situation historique que nous vivons à l’heure de la construction difficile de l’Union européenne et de la mondialisation]. 8 Ibid. pp 69-70. [Depuis les années 1980, le management moderniste n’a cessé de développer une vision chaotique du monde et des évolutions qui rend vaine la volonté de les interpréter dans leur globalité. La vision des évolutions du monde est celle d’un mouvement perpétuel sans but ni sens autre que celui de s’y adapter au plus vite].
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of European economies to anticipate and absorb change and a higher degree of adaptability
in the labour market is in the interest of society as a whole”, one cannot help but see a
connection.9 We are increasingly exhorted to “use our resources in ways which help us to
adapt to changing economic and social conditions”10 under the assumption that “industrial
relations, which in the past have contributed to maintaining a balance and to the success of
the European model, will have to be modernised and adapted apace”.11 The key note seems
to be adaptation to changing circumstances rather than the conventionally ‘modern’ notion
of shaping circumstances via political action based upon a rational vision of the future. In
fact, the European Commission Communications on the Social Dialogue, the Union’s
‘peak’ industrial concertation forum, seem to assume both to be possible simultaneously
and it is my argument that in the confused “air du temps” to which I have referred it is the
latter that shall give way to the former.
There are two distinct impressions that I have from a reading of the current reform
discourse in and around the EU institutions, particularly from the European Commission
Communications on the Lisbon Strategy for social and economic reform throughout the
Union, which will provide the two main themes of the thesis’ investigation. The first is that
a certain conceptual idiom is being rhetorically employed which is historically linked to the
view of ‘Society’ as a mediating environment for the realisation of future-oriented political
action.12 This is a ‘modern’ conceptual idiom and can be inferred from a glance at the
opening quotations. The question that I have in relation to this impression is whether or not
the ontological, epistemological, and actual categories upon which this ‘modern’
conceptual field rests are actually still extant in our current historical context. If the answer
is doubtful, then how will such a growing incompatibility affect the outcome of the present
deployment of ‘modern’ concepts in discussions on political reform in the EU. It is by
focusing on the concept of ‘Society’ in chapter 3.2 that I will come to illustrate the more
general point by means of a particular analysis of this concept.
9 Facing the Challenge: Report from the High Level Group (November 2004). p 32. 10 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Jobs and Growth. p 6. 11 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue, a Force for Innovation and Change (2002). p 15. 12 The unusual phrasing of this idea will become apparent in the analysis of ‘Society’ as a modern concept in chapter 3.2.
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The second impression stems from the first: that within these conceptual confusions
at the putative ‘modern-postmodern’ boundary, our inability to establish a reasoned and
coherent political vision and vocabulary creates a vacuum within which unrecognised
social and economic forces might operate based upon the imperatives and tendencies of
highly developed capitalist society to reproduce itself on its own instrumental terms. With
an underlying assumption in the Lisbon reform movement of adaptation to changing
economic imperatives at all costs, the Social Dialogue threatens to become a mediating
mechanism for these instrumental forces. Without the conceptual vocabulary to recognise,
contrast, or resist such trends, reform in the Lisbon Strategy threatens to deny us the very
political control that is entailed in our view of society as a medium for implementing
rational reform. That is the circular irony and immanent contradiction that seems to impress
itself from the dominant European discourse that orbits the current reformist agenda.
There is a danger that social and political adaptation will take place whilst the
Lisbon Agenda attempts to legitimise its interests in an incoherent historic conceptual
idiom which unconsciously takes advantage of the conceptual vacuum of our “air du
temps”. For instance, are words and concepts that pervade the reform discourse such as
“dialogue”,13 “solidarity”, “flexibility”, 14 dynamic,15 “partnership”,16 “innovation”,17
“revamp”, “initiative”, or “outsourcing” possessive of any meaningful interrelation or are
they merely trendy ‘buzz words’, the mutual estrangement of which matches the
incoherence of the vision they purport to offer?
Put succinctly, this thesis is a conceptual and critical exploration of how the
European Social Dialogue and the related Social Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Strategy look
to mobilise and legitimise productive action in a non-conflictual vision of political
consensus. I wish to question whether, by doing this in a potentially incompatible,
obfuscatory, and oblique manner, there is not a potential for them to be unreflexively
13 LaCapra, D. “History, Language, and Reading: Waiting for Crillon” (1995) 100:3, June, The American Historical Review. p 824. 14 Hyman, R. “Where Does Solidarity End?” (2002) 24, Transit Online; Thelen, K “Review: Beyond Corporatism: Toward a New Framework for the Study of Labour in Advanced Capitalism” (1994) 27:1,October, Comparative Politics. p 108. 15 Communication from the European Commission: Social Policy Agenda (Brussels 2000). p 2. 16 Hyman, R. “The Future of Unions” (2002) 1, Just Labour. p 10. 17 Communication from the European Commission: Social Policy Agenda (Brussels 2000). p 2.
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‘adapted’ as mechanisms of domination for certain interests or, perhaps worse, for non-at-
all.
Research Focus: The Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy When trying to find answers to the research questions above, the focus of this thesis shall
be on the European Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy, or rather that dimension of
the Lisbon Strategy that is most pertinent to both the Social Dialogue and to the European
Union’s policies on industrial relations and employment, the ‘Social Policy Agenda’. I have
chosen these as the foci for the thesis because whilst the broad and encompassing Lisbon
Strategy provides the wider context and motivating objectives for current EU reform, the
European Social Dialogue is tasked to be one of the more specific mechanisms for Lisbon’s
realisation in the area of industrial relations and socio-economic policy concertation.18 As
the Lisbon Strategy is so vast and wide-reaching, I have elected to concentrate on the Social
Policy Agenda because it is that part of the Lisbon Strategy that relates to industrial
relations and employment and therefore to the Social Dialogue more directly. This means
that the thesis is centred upon the Social Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Strategy realised
through the European Social Dialogue. My choice of primary sources should reflect this.
The European Social Dialogue is not something that can be easily defined in a
single understanding. Indeed, its definition seems to vary from circumstance to
circumstance.19 However, in the European Commission Communications the Social
Dialogue is “acknowledged to be an essential component of the European model of society
and development”.20 Fundamentally, the Social Dialogue is a means of decision-making
over the basic socio-economic concerns of industrial relations at the European level, but
increasingly at all levels of socio-economic activity, whether regional, national, or
industrial. The participants in this procedure are called the ‘social partners’ which includes
labour representatives, business representatives and government representatives, though
this list is neither exclusive nor exhaustive. Today’s European Social Dialogue is said to
18 Others include the Structural Funds, legislation, Open Method of Coordination, policy analysis and research. 19 Ishikawa, J. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue: A Social Dialogue Resource Book” (2003) International Labour Organisation. p 3. 20 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 6.
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cover two essential industrial functions at the European level: consultation and
negotiation.21
The Lisbon Strategy, or alternatively the Lisbon Agenda or Process, is much more
explicit and easily definable than the Social Dialogue. It is an action and development plan
that was the result of the European Council in Lisbon (March 2000). Intended to apply to
the whole of the Union, the Strategy represents a broad set of policies and goals set by the
institutions of the EU to improve the productive capacity of the euro-economy within the
context and limits of the ‘social model’, which means it is to be compatible with European
communitarian and social democratic politics as broadly defined. Covering such diverse
areas as immigration, education, technology, pensions, environment, and employment, the
broad aims of the Lisbon Strategy are to deal with the low productivity and stagnation of
economic growth in the EU, through the formulation of various policy initiatives to be
taken by all EU member states. The idea is to make Europe the most competitive and the
most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world. These objectives set out by the
Lisbon Strategy are to be attained by 2010.
The Social Dialogue constitutes one of the intended procedural and institutional
channels for the implementation of the Lisbon objectives. This means that it is essential to
this thesis that the Lisbon Agenda and the Social Dialogue be treated in conjunction, not
separately. The reason is that both are interrelated, after all, the Social Dialogue provides
the mechanism in which the Social Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Strategy will be realised.
Relevant Points of Departure in Contemporary Scholarship This thesis has a number of points of departure that, on the one hand, are generally
theoretical, and on the other, are more particularly connected to the Social Dialogue and
Lisbon Agenda, and which have influenced my fundamental motivations and research
questions. The next few pages are an outline of what one might call the ‘state-of-the-art’ in
some of the themes and areas of academic writing that are related to the stated aims of the
thesis and that have informed the direction of the thesis from the outset, either in ‘accord
with’ or in ‘contrast to’, and that have contributed some key ideas. This sketch should also
give an indication of how I wish to develop my own distinctive contribution.
21 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 7.
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This thesis is not novel in its thematic criticisms of the either capitalist society or
the European Union. In fact, such criticisms have notoriously come to make up the bread
and butter of academic writing on those topics both past and present. In the case of the
latter, this is particularly true of academic writing in the British Isles, and in the Nordic
Countries, which have probably been considered the two most eurosceptical regions of the
EU before enlargement, though for differing reasons. The contribution that I hope to make
in this thesis is in my approach to the criticism I intend to present. I hope to provide a fairly
fresh means of criticism by blending the critique of capitalist society found in Critical
Theory with a linguistic and conceptual analysis of the Commission’s presentation of the
Social Dialogue. I shall aim to do this in a manner which is informed by a historically
contextualist approach. Naturally, I intend to demonstrate the workings of this approach in
the detailed theoretical explorations in the following chapters of this section and in section
2. For now, I will talk about the recent developments in some of the more particular and
concrete themes of my work that are related to my basic research interest. These include:
the role of politics, democratic decision-making, industrial relations, and the Lisbon
Process.
At the most general level, my interest has been stimulated by the political
developments in French academic thinking on our present political climate. Writers such as
Jean Pierre le Goff, Jacques Généreux, and Bastien François have drawn attention, both in
France and in Europe, to a particular current political climate at the modern-postmodern
boundary.22 These writers have alluded to a retreat from the ‘political’ in favour of the
‘economic’ and to a growing inability to maintain a ‘political’ public discourse which is so
dear to the Gallic identification with society. Perhaps such developments are most acute in
France due to that nations renowned investment in the great political categories and
concepts of Enlightenment and Modernity, which have come under general questioning in
recent decades. The line of criticism amongst these writers has been directed toward the
growing primacy of both the market-mechanism and the ‘language of economism’ and the
discrediting of political conflict, which has provided me with the refreshingly linguistic and
22 Le Goff. La France Morcelée; Généreux, J. La Dissociété (Points-Seuil 2008); Généreux, J. Les Vraies Lois de l’Èconomie (Points-Seuil 2008); François, B. Misère de la Ve République (Points-Seuil 2007); François, B. Pour Comprendre la Constitution Européenne (Odile Jacob 2005).
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discursive kind of critique of the EU, capitalism, and the post-industrial society that I have
chosen to employ.
This theme of criticism has been paralleled in recent post-Marxist thought. The
French political scientists mentioned above have been working within certain post-
structuralist and critical French veins of thought which stress the dominating tendencies of
a certain apolitical parole of moralism, sentimentalism, and economism. Complimentary to
this, post-Marxists such as Slavoj Žižek, Chantal Mouffe, or Ernesto Laclau have worked
within Gramscian notions of ideological hegemony and Hegelian-Schmittian ideas of
conflict as an essential component in defining the ‘political’. 23 These strands of thought
have impressed upon me the need for a reinsertion of the political, that the absence of the
‘political’ is the triumph of economism, and that perhaps conflict is a necessary constituent
of politics as a meaningfully distinct type of activity. These propositions explicitly contrast
with the view of the EU institutions, which emphasise the role of ‘consensus’ rather than
conflict in European socio-economic decision-making.
Moving on to the question of the EU, a significant question in political analyses of
the EU institutions, European integration, and European policy reform revolves around the
issue of democratic accountability and the much decried ‘democratic deficit’.24 In the
English-speaking world, it is this issue that has come to dominate political discussions over
the European Union. The current state of research and interest in this area often comes
across as fixated upon a certain paradigm of politics which derives its fundamental
assumptions, its concepts and its idiom from what I consider to be a narrow Atlantic liberal
tradition which measures political outcomes in terms of direct elections, parliamentary
representation, and the classic duet of ‘the separation of powers’ and constitutional ‘checks
and balances’. The assumption is that an acceptable democratic ‘politic’ is established only
in reference to the Whiggish creed of parliamentary democracy.25 In this discourse, political
23 Mouffe, C. “Pluralism and Modern Democracy: Around Schmitt” in Mouffe’s The Return of the Political (Verso 1993). pp 117-134; Hirst, P Q. Marxism and Historical Writing (Routledge 1985). 24 Moravcsik, A. “In Defence of the ‘Democratic Deficit’: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union” (2002) 40:4, Journal of Common Market Studies. pp 603-624; Follesdahl, A., and Hix, S. “Why There is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Moravcsik and Majone” (2006) 44:3, Journal of Common Market Studies. pp 533-562. 25 Siedentop, L. Democracy in Europe (Penguin, London 2000); Rifkin, J. The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (Penguin 2004); Luff, P. A Brilliant Conspiracy?: Britain and the Federal Debate in Europe (Greycoat Press 1996); Glencross, A. “Consensus to Contestation: Reconfiguring Democratic Representation in the European Union
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criticisms have been concentrated on how the EU fails to satisfy a given criteria of political
representation of interests, institutionally and procedurally.
In my view, such recent research and criticism of EU integration, policy initiatives
and institutions, in those countries, has revolved around these themes. However, I consider
this tradition, derived as it is from pre-industrial political battles and concept formation, not
to provide sufficient critique for a political ontology that is not based upon early-modern
empiricist philosophical assumptions and upon natural law philosophy. In contrast to this, I
am interested in how continental traditions of thought can account for the political
shortcomings of the EU in a way that does not rely upon liberal theories of democratic
representation which have come to set the tone, especially in Britain and the United States,
and which seem insufficient to grasp the unconscious and discursive domain of politics so
crucial to understanding both the post-industrial society and the potential political
consequences of the EU’s recent reform agenda.
Evidently, industrial relations are an important element in this thesis. The ‘narrow’
Social Dialogue is after all established to be a form of industrial concertation. There is a
vast literature on European industrial relations but some interesting work has been done in
establishing certain typologies of industrial relations regimes.26 These typologies are either
treated as being national or regional but, in pre-enlargement Western Europe, have
consistently fallen into three broad types, each associated with a particular region: the
Nordic social democratic regimes, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ liberal form of free-collective
bargaining, and the ‘Continental’ corporatist ‘catholic’ regimes. Naturally, the discussion
ranges across more subtle and sophisticated differences and varieties than these three
categories, but there are nevertheless recognisable regional trends. It is the recent attempts
in the EU reformist agenda to ‘harmonise’ such regime divergences across Europe into a
coherent industrial relations policy based upon a European ‘core of values’ that has
in the Light of 19th Century United States Democratization” (2008) 15:1, February, Democratization. pp 123-141. 26 Lehmbruch, G; Schmitter, P C. Patterns of Corporatist Policy-Making (Sage 1982); Arts, W; Gelissen, J. “Welfare States, Solidarity and Justice Principles: Does the Type Really Matter?” (2001) 44, Acta Sociologica. pp 283-299; Hyman, R. Understanding European Trade Unionism: Between Market, Class and Society (Sage 2001); Esping-Andersen, G. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Polity Press 1990); Flora, P. (ed). Growth to Limits: The Western European Welfare States Since World War II, Vol. 1: Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark (De Gruyter 1986); Ginsburg, N. Divisions of Welfare: A Critical Introduction to Comparative Social Policy (SAGE 1992).
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stimulated the highest degree of recent academic writing, particularly in those Member
States that perceive themselves to be at a disadvantage in the process (i.e. Nordic
countries).27
Research in this area hitherto has mainly focused upon structural-institutional,
procedural, and systemic aspects of European industrial relations divergences and the
consequences for Member States in the process of harmonisation.28 However,
comparatively less has been written upon historical factors, differing cultural norms and
political traditions in Member States in the harmonisation process. There has been a strong
presumption in much of the literature of the universal applicability of EU policy initiatives
in this areas, at least in principle, based on the assumed existence of a European ‘core of
values’.29 This is where I would like to build my own contribution upon the extant corpus
of literature about the divergence of industrial relations regimes in Europe. In particular, I
would like to add a discussion over the effects of language, set within regional historical
contexts, in the EU’s attempts to create a common set of policies on industrial relations.
Closely related to the issue of industrial relations regime harmonisation is the
harmonisation of social protection, up to now an essential dimension of national welfare
provision. Jon Kvist and Juho Saari in The Europeanisation of Social Protection have
looked at how the Member States have reacted to the Europeanisation of social protection.
As they see it, in the wake of a series of cases of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) there
has emerged a gradual slide toward the application of competition law and the internal
market in the field of social protection, previously a legitimate concern of the Member
Sates and not the EU.30 According to them, there has been a growth in the 1990s of the
27 Kvist, J; Saari, J. (eds). The Europeanisation of Social Protection (Polity Press 2007); Waever, O. “Nordic Nostalgia: Northern Europe After the Cold War” (1992) 68:1, International Affairs. pp 77-102; Patomäki, H. “Beyond Nordic Nostalgia: Enisaging a Social/Democratic System of Global Governance” (2000) 35:2, Cooperation and Conflict. pp 115-154; Kuilpers, S; Selck, TJ. “Shared Hesitance, Joint Success: Denmark, Finland and Sweden in the European Union Policy Process” (2005) 12:1, February, Journal of European Public Policy. pp 157-176. 28 Ebbinghaus, B. “Europe Through the Looking Glass: Comparative and Multi-Level Perspectives” (1998) 41, Acta Sociologica. pp 301-313; Hassel, A; Streeck, W. “The Crumbling Pillars of Social Partnership” (2003) 26:4, October, West European Politics. pp 101-124; Lin, K. “Sectors, Agents and Rationale: A Study of the Scandinavian Welfare States With Special Reference to the Welfare Society Model” (2004) 47:2, June, Acta Sociologica. pp 141-157; Patomäki. “Beyond Nordic Nostalgia. pp 115-154. 29 Exceptions to this might include Baglioni, G; Crouch, C. European Industrial Relations: The Challenge of Flexibility (SAGE 1990); Crouch, C. Industrial Relations and European State Traditions (Clarendon 2003); Katzenstein, P J. Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Cornell UP 1984). 30 Kvist; Saari. The Europeanisation of Social Protection. p 2.
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view that social protection constitutes a ‘productive factor’ in EU institutions. This then led
to the inclusion of employment objectives in Amsterdam (1997) and to the Nice Summit’s
(2000) characterisation of the European Social Model by the importance of the Social
Dialogue and by being based upon a ‘coherent core of values’.31 Most recently, the Lisbon
Treaty (2007) has involved major revisions in the field of social protection, including the
‘mainstreaming of social protection and social inclusion into all policies’ thus elevating the
issue up to the European sphere from the strictly national. The reasoning is because of the
differences in Member States’ welfare regimes and the resultant difficulty in reaching
unanimity on the issue.32
The use of this little insight on social protection corresponds with a view of EU
social policy reform being shaped by certain ‘imperatives of competition’ that necessitate
productive mobilisation at the expense of other priorities, such as social protection. The
spreading power of subordinating competitive imperatives is something that has been
identified but is not an especially widespread perspective of the Lisbon Process of EU
reform.33 I would like to explore this idea and to analyse how it is able to operate through
the Lisbon Strategy, and the Social Dialogue in particular, bearing in mind what has already
been said of the condition of current political discourse and conceptual transition.
Work on the Lisbon Agenda has constituted something of an explosion in the last
few years but once again there are a few areas of particular interest. The relaunch of the
Lisbon Strategy has created the opportunity to rethink the approach to policy coordination
in the Union, in which there has been major problems in defining and agreeing upon a
common means of policy implementation.34 The result of this has been a surge of interest in
‘New Modes of Governance’ to explore the potential of various means to circumvent the
knotty problem of finding an effective and agreeable method of implementing the tenets of
the Lisbon Strategy. It is within this discourse that Open Methods of Co-ordination
31 Ibid. pp 1-6. 32 Ibid. p 5. 33 Petrella, R. “Europe Between Competitive Innovation and a New Social Contract” (1995) 47:1, March, International Social Science Journal. pp 11-23; Watson, M. “Embedding the ‘New Economy’ in Europe: A Study in the Institutional Specificities of Knowledge-Based Growth” (2001) 30:4, November, Economy and Society. pp 504-523; Kettunen, P. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Partnership” in L-F Landgrén & P Hautamäki (eds.). People, Citizen, Nation (Renvall Institute, Helsinki 2005). pp 28-49. 34 Begg, I. “Is There a Convincing Rationale for the Lisbon Strategy?” (2008) JCMS Symposium: EU Governance After Lisbon. p 427.
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(OMCs) have been judged to offer a suitably amorphous, and therefore less contentious,
option for the Member States. I will just say that writing on the OMCs seems to be of the
more technical variety, concentrating on detailed analyses of their institutional and
procedural workings and on their plausibility in relation to EU law, European bureaucratic
structures, and to resistance in the Member States.35
These loosely related themes in current political thought, in analyses of the EU
reform agenda, and in European industrial relations have furnished me with the ideas and
questions that form points of departure for my own continuation and contribution. As I said
at the start, my own contribution is neither in the tone nor in the object of my analysis but
in the approach to the questions that I have elected to pursue. It is to this that we must now
turn.
1.2 Method, Structure, and Source Selection ‘Critical’ Method vs. ‘Scientific’ Method I should perhaps begin by making a few comments on what the thesis is not about. It is not
my intention to follow a more positivistic type of Social Science which is based upon an
explicitly scientific and empirical ‘methodology’. These terms might appear somewhat
misleading to people of different national academic, linguistic, and intellectual traditions
and so let us be clear. By ‘scientific’ I mean the drawing of nomothetic research
conclusions by means of explicit and empirically verifiable hypotheses; the treatment of
subject and object as clearly definable and independent components or actors in historical
analysis36; the tendency towards quantitative over qualitative research; the setting of aims
as conclusive ends rather than exploratory ends; and establishing the separation of
theoretical-hypothetical from observational statements.37 I confess, this description may
seem to be either a fictional and extreme positivist position that does not really exist in
current academia or a convenient straw man against which one might easily establish ‘the
other’ in the structure of the research (with the possible exception of Comte’s social
35 Bignami, F. “Rethinking Interest Representation in the European Union” (2006) 26:2, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. p 440. 36 See Below on Critical Theory. 37 Lloyd, C. “Realism, Structurism and History: Foundations for a Formative Science of Society” (1989) 18, Theory and Society. p 459. Here Lloyd alludes to this aspect of Viennese Positivism.
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physics).38 However, there are many diluted or unreflexive forms of this kind of approach
in the social sciences and humanities against which I would wish to differentiate my own
work.39
I intend my work to reside more in a tradition of qualitative, idiographic, and
exploratory research and will base what follows within this vein. I will not be following a
‘methodology’, which implies a holistic, scientific, pre-fabricated tool to be deployed upon
the subject like a surgical instrument. I favour rather an ‘approach’, as inadequate as this
term may sound, which might inform interpretations and facilitate the handling of research
questions. The approach must not act as a straight jacket, confining and restricting thought,
research and language within pre-set parameters. It should rather give structure to the work
so as to provide clarity and rigour to the analysis, perspicuity to the understanding, and to
prevent the descent into unreflexive narrative, description, and irrelevance. The
conventional assumption that there exists a theory-free approach of pragmatism and
‘common sense’, where we just ‘get on’ with the business at hand, seems woefully
misleading. On the contrary, the belief that one cannot refrain or escape from theoretical
assumptions is one that I share.40 There is a need for some kind of explicitly positive and
reflexive statement of how I will try to bring some rigour to this approach and of how I
make choices.
This thesis is not ‘scientific’ and will therefore not be written under the assumptions
of a value-free social science. My position is that all academic inquiries, analyses, and
conclusions are founded on implicit, and often unrecognised, value-judgements. This
precludes any meaning for value-neutral terms like ‘impartial’, ‘objective’, or ‘unbiased’
accounts. All statements are positive engagements with value-judgements of some sort. On
these assumptions, the purpose of a critical approach, such as this is, is to explicitly and
reflexively recognise the presence of value-judgements and to reflectively examine the
validity and limits of either a human capacity or of a set of philosophical claims. The
approach might appear ‘one-sided’ but this is essential to its sceptical purpose, as it serves
to illuminate, expose, or highlight a particular facet or aspect of an object. To serve this
purpose a critique must necessarily be ‘biased’. Put more formally, an object is dealt with
38 Comte, A. Introduction to Positive Philosophy (Hackett 1988). p 13. 39 Lloyd, C. The Structures of History (Blackwell 1993). Chap. 4. 40 Hyman, R. Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction (MacMillan 1975). p 2.
14
critically “if we consider it only in reference to our cognitive faculties and consequently to
the subjective conditions of thinking it, without undertaking to decide anything about its
object”.41 There is little place here for strictly ‘objective’ standards from which analysis
will be drawn.
What this means is that this thesis will be a critique aimed at the Social Dialogue
and the Social Policy Agenda within the Lisbon Strategy. The more particular type of
critique that I shall be following is what has been called an Immanent Critique. Immanent
Critique might be understood as a mode of enquiry in social theory that analyses cultural
and social forms by identifying and exploring contradictions in the rules and systems
necessary to the production of those forms. Immanent Critique is a means of detecting the
societal contradictions which offer the most determinate possibilities for emancipatory
social change and “the content of immanent critique is the dialectic in history”.42 The
critique thus aims to contextualise not only the object of its investigation, but also the
ideological basis of that object; both the object and the category to which it belongs are
shown to be products of an historical process.43 In practical historical and dialectical terms,
a specific historical practice is measured against its own historical alternatives.44
Immanent critique has its roots in the philosophy of Hegel and Marx, and latterly in
the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno and in the cultural works of Fred Jameson. In the
case of Hegel, social critique is an “immanent critique because its critical standards are
ones given in the historical process” rather than derived from objective universal
principles.45 For Marx as well, immanent principles were useful for understanding social
change as they provided a basis for critique within historical reality.46 Perhaps the most
generous understanding of Immanent Critique views it as a means of ascertaining and
examining the difference between how men and things are and how they ought to be.47 It
must be said that this understanding can be neither refuted nor proven ‘wrong’ but can only
41 Kant, I. The Critique of Judgement (1790). SS 74. 42 Antonio, R J. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory: It’s Origins and Developments in Hegel, Marx and Contemporary Thought” (1981) 32:3, September, British Journal of Sociology. p 332. [Original Emphasis]. 43 This is important in regard to the ‘historical’ aspect of the thesis. 44 Marcuse, H. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Routledge 1964). p x. 45 Antonio. p 332. 46 Ibid. p 333. 47 Adorno, T. Negative Dialectics (Routledge 1973). p 167.
15
be misapplied or incomplete and might be criticised for being too vague and general to be
of any particular use.48
However, Immanent Critique is useful in this thesis because it provides a more
satisfactory critical potential in light of the various epistemological problems. Moreover,
the recognition of interests, equal validity, and the legitimacy of presence in the Social
Dialogue is essential, and can be achieved by means of an implicit Immanent Critique. If
this critique can help illuminate the ideologically obscured disparities in industrial relations,
the asymmetric relations of power in the EU, and the colonising tendencies of the Lisbon
Agenda, then it will prove its usefulness. I do not pretend to objectivity, scientific control,
or strict systematic structure because, as alluring as these commitments may be, they are
embedded in an empirical scientific methodology based upon an epistemology to which I
cannot commit. This thesis is intended as a critique.
Historical Dimension The historical dimension of the thesis comes from the historical nature of the critique lying
at the heart of Critical Theory, and from the historical nature of the approach to the
concepts which I shall be analysing. As shall be explained at greater length in chapter 2.3,
Critical Theory is a philosophical tradition of social critique which operates in historical
time. Similarly, the key tenets of Conceptual History emphasise the importance of historical
context for the understanding of concepts and meaning, which shall be elaborated in
chapter 2.2. Moreover, though much of the thesis’ substantial content will be in the form of
a critical analysis, this analysis itself will be embedded in an historical treatment, most
specifically in Immanent Critique. Beyond this there will be several excursions in to the
concrete historical past, particularly in regard to certain historical trajectories that have
bearing upon current political outcomes (features of the history of Nordic political culture).
I ought to say something about my historiographic sympathies and assumptions,
which are broadly narrative-linguistic. This means that I incline towards three implications
for understanding History: first, that narrative emplotment does not pre-exist in the
‘evidence’; secondly, that the logic of inference is secondary to the figurative capture and
representation of the content of the past; thirdly, that a moral judgement is crucial to how
48 Browne, C. “The End of Immanent Critique?” (2008) 11:1, European Journal of Social Theory. p 5.
16
we provide a meaning for the above, and that the metaphoric form which results from the
exercise of the historian’s imagination has a powerful pre-shaping authority over our
historical knowledge and the final meaning we ‘find’. In its defence, I do not think that
those who endorse the narrative-linguistic understanding imagine history as only being
about texts, with the extra-textual reality of the past excluded. This confusion stems from
the assumption that there is an autonomous foundation of reality which of itself determines
the literary production called History and which, in turn, results in the conflation of “the
past” with “History”.49
Fundamentally, as we shall see elaborated in chapter 2.2, this thesis will be written
around a discursive exploration of concepts set in the context of historical time. By this I
mean that I will explore, discuss, and establish the broad, and then more specific, historical
and contemporary debates, dialogues, and disagreements which orbit a number of relevant
problems, tensions and issues which are related to the stated aims and topic of the thesis.
This I will do within the ontological and epistemological parameters of the theoretical
traditions which I shall explore in section 2.
Source Selection and Handling As this thesis is a conceptual and theoretical work, the ‘sources’ will not constitute the core
and sole focus in an intensive empirical analysis. There is, nevertheless, a need to give an
account of how the sources have been selected and then handled in the process of
interpreting and evaluating. The most important factor in source selection is the recognition
of an informing principle behind selection which is related to the general method or
approach in the thesis and which is consistently applied. I must now explain this principle.
Firstly, I should say that, in accordance with my general approach, the sources are
neither selected nor handled in a strictly ‘scientific’ manner. I shall not be employing a
particularly sophisticated method of selection involving quantitative or qualitative ‘tools’.
Consequently, there are no tables, graphs, survey lists etc., which one might usually
associate with social scientific works. The reasons for the absence of such scientific
methods should be fairly evident given the unempirical nature of the thesis as explained
already in the chapter above. If the central thrust of the thesis is ideological and conceptual
49 Munslow, A. The New History (Pearson Longman 2003). p 138.
17
then a comprehensive and strictly systematic handling of sources is not appropriate. In my
chosen type of analysis, sources serve to illustrate certain ideas, utterances, intentions, and
motives that I wish to expose and interpret, and not to simply provide the maximum
amount of raw data on a given phenomenon for subsequent experimentation under
controlled conditions.
Furthermore, the ‘critical’ approach of the thesis, whilst sympathetic and well-
rounded, is not intended to be balanced, objective, or neutral but rather partial by its very
nature as a critique. This means that the sources themselves cannot be selected or handled
objectively in the empirical scientific sense. The strength of critique comes from its ability
to expose, highlight, and analyse a particular aspect of a thing. The ‘idea’ precedes the
‘fact’ rather than the other way around, assuming that facticity has any place at all. I do
recognise the problem of the consequent potential circularity of ‘illustrative’ source
selection, something which is particularly discussed in the area of hermeneutics. In the case
of this thesis, however, I don’t think this poses a serious problem. This is because the
‘hermeneutic circle’ applies only to statements which claim referential veracity to an extra-
textual reality. As shall be theoretically clarified in chapter 2.1, my sources constitute
textual ‘utterances’ which are not constative but are instead illocutionary utterances that are
neither referentially true nor false, but constitute actions and forces in themselves. It is the
force of these utterances in the sources, and the intentions which they communicate, that I
wish to select and use in the thesis for the purposes of analysis. This means that the chosen
extracts from the sources serve their purpose whenever and wherever they demonstrate the
existence of said intentional utterances. This in turn means that their selection, which is
based upon their perceived potential to illustrate a given argument, is therefore theoretically
valid, adequately rigorous, and founded on an informing principle which is consistently
applied.
In concrete practical terms, the ‘primary sources’ are going to consist of official
documentation of the European Union and other large national and international institutions
related to industrial relations and the EU. In particular, recent European Commission
Communications and Presidential Communications have been chosen as my sources for the
European Social Dialogue and the Social Policy Agenda within the context of the Lisbon
Strategy. I have chosen these documents because, as ‘Communications’, they most closely
18
resemble explicit textual utterances by the institutions of the EU on these matters, being, as
they are, written as self-professed clarifications and expressions of intent, purpose, and self-
understanding rather than simple reportage or constative statement. That the
Communications are a form of explicit and direct communication is important given the
centrality of language, speech acts and intentional utterances in the thesis, which shall be
explained in chapter 2.1. This is especially important for the exploration of concepts and
their self-understanding within the EU. The chosen Commission Communications on the
Social Dialogue and on the Social Policy Agenda (Lisbon) have all been released within the
last 10 years and are therefore as closely relevant to the present situation as possible and are
also explicitly tasked to communicate on the European Social Dialogue and the Social
Policy Agenda, as well as on the Lisbon Strategy more generally.
I will also include some documents from non-EU organisations such as the
International Labour Organisation (ILO).50 The inclusion of these sources shall hopefully
provide some breadth to the selection and will demonstrate how the Social Dialogue and
the Lisbon Strategy are not the ‘property’ of the EU but are much more amorphous and
diffuse phenomena, a point that shall have implications for my argument. These documents
might consist of reports, instruction manuals, or policy clarifications but nevertheless still
provide the kind of textual utterances of intention and perception as do the Commission
Communications. ‘Secondary’ sources, or research literature, shall be dealt with in the
usual manner as providing ideas, arguments, or clarifications and to demonstrate something
of the discursive environment within which this thesis has been researched and written.
Thesis Structure
For reasons already stated there will be no concrete hypothesis to be subsequently ‘proven’
or ‘disproven’ in this thesis. Chapter 1.1 is intended, evidently, to introduce the topic of the
thesis and to familiarise the reader with my chosen subject of the Social Dialogue and the
Social Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Process and with the basic questions to be discussed. It
also contains a brief discussion of some of the ‘points of departure’ in current academic 50 I should probably say that, though the frequently cited Ishikawa ‘resource book’ is not a Commission Communication, it is nevertheless a similar type of textual utterance in that it is also intended as an elucidation and statement of intent of the Social Dialogue aimed at an audience inside the International Labour Organisation. Although the ILO is not part of EU institutional structures the two organisations do have many linkages and close associations.
19
writing on the topic of the thesis and mentions their influence on the origins of the thesis’
arguments and ideas. This current chapter quite conventionally consists of a ‘profession of
faith’ and a basic account of how I shall order, handle, and select the work. The more
theoretical section 2 is not a schematic of the ‘tools’ I will be using later on, but more a
discussion over the traditions and schools of thought which will be woven together and will
culminate in section 3. It is necessary to demonstrate in section 2 how the theory of speech
acts, Conceptual History, and Critical Theory can compliment each other and thus
contribute to constructing a historically informed critique which will form the basis of my
analytical arguments in section 3. The small conclusion in chapter 4 will conclude and
summarise in the more conventional manner.
I understand that there is a tension here between precision and vagueness, control
and chaos. Fundamentally, I wish to satisfy both of these tendencies by riding that tension.
After providing some rigour in setting out implicit parameters in the framework of a
discourse, it is my intention for the structure and dialogue to emerge as the thesis unfolds in
a Nietzschean genealogical sense. To this end, much of my ‘method’ commentary will
unfold when appropriate in section 2 and will not be simply piled up in a hypothesis-setting
introduction. Given the importance placed in this thesis on linguistic contexts for the
determination of meaning, I think this structure is more appropriate than any other that
might boast greater claims to ‘scientific’ convention. However, the piece must be taken
holistically with the full implications, meaning and coherence materialising as the thesis
progresses, not dissected beforehand.
20
2. Theories Toward a Historical and Conceptual Analysis of the Social Dialogue Introduction: The Role of Section 2 In this section I will explore and analyse the theoretical traditions, ideas and arguments
which shall build up my analysis. The works discussed here will inform and develop my
interpretation of the role of the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Agenda.
The theory of speech acts, Conceptual History, and Critical Theory mutually
support and inform one another in my analysis and, in the synthesis, provide benefits in
interpretation which are complementary but also sufficiently varied to furnish a textured
critique. These benefits will become more apparent as the reader progresses in light of the
fundamental research question. The result will hopefully be an investigation built on a
fruitful tension produced by sewing what follows below into a coherent set of arguments
focused on the topic of the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Agenda.
The three chapters in this section are inter-related in a number of ways. Firstly, they
all recognise language as having a potent force in itself, not just to communicate ideas or
referential facts, but also to shape meaning, intentions, and action. They also show how
language is important for both agenda setting and power relations amongst political actors.
The theory of speech acts establishes that utterances have a ‘force’, Conceptual History
shows how these forces in context provide meaning for concepts as a route to
comprehending phenomena, and Habermasian Critical Theory develops the theory of
speech acts into an intersubjective procedure for democratic decision-making in praxis.
Secondly, they all provide a theoretical means of providing critique that is not
compromised by empirical normative standards, as mentioned in the chapter on method.
These three theoretical approaches to social theory are based on a recognition of the
epistemological subject-object paradigm and are an attempt, maybe not to transcend, but to
synthesise the two traditions in an epistemologically credible means of social critique. I
think that this is essential to establish a ‘critical’ potential, not just an analysis.
Thirdly, when treated as a whole, these chapter stress the importance of the
historical process in the analysis, and when woven together they provide an historical mode
of criticising the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Agenda. We shall see that this is either in
21
terms of the centrality of changing historical-linguistic contexts, essential to a history of
concepts, or in terms of an historical mode of critique, as in the case of Critical Theory.
This section is essential in order to see how by departing from an historically
sensitive mode of analysis, we run the risk of dissipating any critical potential in the
analysis. The consequences of this, as we shall see in Habermas’ theory, can be ideological
delusion, asymmetric power relations, or conceptual confusion, or a dubious universalising
foundationalism, all of which are arguably present in the Commission Communications on
the Social Dialogue. As has been made apparent, this is not a strictly empirical work which
applies well recognised and conventional scientific ‘tools’ to a given set of data. A
theoretical and ideological critique, such as this thesis attempts to be, needs a thorough
explanation of its informing theories and modes of historical critique in order to build up
the analysis into a fairly clear and credible argument, and it is for this reason that section 2
is presented in this way.
2.1 Speech Acts and Illocutionary Force in the Social Dialogue During the 20th Century considerable work has been conducted in the realm of the
philosophy of language. In the English-speaking world (mainly Britain) there were
philosophers of language who bent their intellectual endeavours toward ‘ordinary language
philosophy’ which came into vogue in the middle decades of the 20th Century. In
contradistinction to ‘continental’ ideal language philosophy, ordinary language philosophy
eschewed ideal theories of language and concentrated on the details of the ordinary use of
‘everyday’ language. This all took place within the tradition of analytic philosophy, which
has come to suppose, as its guiding characteristic, the clarification of thought by
examination of the logical form of philosophical propositions, and which has been driven
by nominalistic and anti-foundational propensities. A consequence of this has been a close
interest and intensive analysis of ‘ordinary language’, its use and significance. The belief
has been that many traditional philosophical problems are only illusions induced by
misunderstandings about language and that words taken in abstraction often result in
semantic obfuscation and futile and endless metaphysical speculation. This typically
English anti-essentialist and anti-idealist theme was probably based originally around
22
Wittgenstein’s later more sceptical work and then developed by John Austin, inter alia, in
the 1950s.51
Here the term ‘ordinary’ is “not in contrast with ‘esoteric’, ‘archaic’, or ‘specialist’,
etc. It is in contrast with ‘non-stock’ or ‘non-standard’” which might mean words which are
“metaphorical, hyperbolical, poetical, stretched and deliberately restricted”.52 Words are
deemed to have uses and usages, the former indicates techniques or ways of operating and
the latter alludes to prevailing practices, customs or fashions. Whilst a word might be
misused, “there cannot be a misusage any more than there can be a miscustom or a
misvogue”.53 In this vein, one might also differentiate the meaning of ‘phrases’ and of
‘sentences’. To understand a word or phrase is to know how to use it in making it perform
its role in a range of sentences, the sentence is the point of reference. Understanding a
sentence on the other hand does not involve knowledge of its role for it has none. There
may be rules governing general sentences, but no rules govern all sentences in specific.54
For example, knowing the meaning of “tomorrow is Thursday” is not knowing a general
rule as no general rule governs the use of this particular sentence. It is rather dependent
upon conditions or customs. Informed by the anti-foundational thinking in analytic
philosophy, this notion of ordinary language perhaps gives rise to an extraordinarily
flexible and versatile understanding of speech and meaning in relation to any referential
epistemology.
The growing interest in this ‘ordinary language’ stimulated an analysis of those
utterances which were apparently non-literal or ‘non-natural’ and which seemed to defy
referentially true meaning in the conventional sense. In this direction, Paul Grice in
particular perceived the importance of intentions in the making of linguistic meaning. By
concentrating on intention, the account of linguistic meaning was expanded. In
propositional form Grice’s understanding goes thus: that in an utterance where “A meant
something by X” this is roughly equivalent to saying “A uttered X with the intention of
inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention”.55 This can be illustrated by
51 See also works by Gilbert Ryle, P F Strawson, Oswald Hanfling, Gary Watson, H P Grice, J L Cohen, amongst others. 52 Ryle, G. “Ordinary Language” (1953) 62:2, April, The Philosophical Review. p 168. 53 Ibid. p 178. 54 Ibid. pp 179-180. 55 Grice, H P. “Meaning” (1957) 66:3, July, The Philosophical Review. p 384.
23
looking at the intentional meaning of a frown. A spontaneous frown which is passively
observed by a third party might be treated as a sign of displeasure. However, if this third
party is deliberately frowned at, then the frown may still be understood to convey
displeasure but this is so only if the audience ‘takes’ or recognises the frown as intended to
convey displeasure. So “if we take away the recognition of intention, leaving the other
circumstances, the belief-producing tendencies of the frown [speech act] must be regarded
as being impaired or destroyed”.56 It must be remembered that a key assumption here is that
“the criteria for judging linguistic intentions are very like the criteria for judging non-
linguistic intentions”.57 Summarised, this would mean that in regard to intentions:
“We are concerned with the case in which there is not simply an intention to produce a certain response in an audience, but an intention to produce that response by means of recognition on the part of the audience of the intention to produce that response, this recognition to serve as part of the reason that the audience has for its response, and the intention that this recognition should occur being itself intended to be recognised”.58 The result of this ‘cooperative principle’ is that meaning is derived from the mutual
engagement in discourse. This indicates the importance of the contextual conditions of
speech. It also explains how the environment of intersubjective communication is crucial to
the understanding of utterers’ intentions and therefore to linguistic meaning. This principle
is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, this is the reason why I have chosen the
Commission Communications for the sources in this thesis, as they represent these kinds of
intentional utterances. Also, at this point we can see the foundational principle behind the
transformation of the Social Dialogue into a Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ that I
shall argue in chapter 3.1.
In Austin’s seminal work, How to Do Things With Words (1955), he challenged
what he considered to be the dominant account of the western philosophical story of
language, that the chief function of a sentence is to make a statement of fact which is then
true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts.59 While not denying the existence of
such ‘constative’ or ‘locutionary’ utterances, he did seek to demonstrate the existence of
additional utterances, the truthfulness or falsity of which are non-existent and non- 56 Ibid. p 383. 57 Ibid. pp 387-388. 58 Strawson, P F. “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts” (1964) 73:4, October, The Philosophical Review. p 450. 59 Austin, J. How to Do Things With Words (Oxford UP 1962). p 1.
24
applicable – where the ‘force’ of an utterance is not exhausted by its locutionary
‘meaning’.60 These were statements which had been too often considered by many, Kant
amongst the most systematic, to be non-sensical ‘pseudo-statements’ due to their very
inability to be ‘verified’, despite their grammatical propriety.61 Austin challenged this
attitude building on the notion of utterers’ intentions just mentioned, and in doing so he
contributed to a growing tendency in 20th Century philosophy to transcend the subject-
object dichotomy.
There thus followed a rather complicated taxonomy of statements and utterances in
Austin’s work, but perhaps most strikingly he devised the performative utterance. The
character of this type of utterance being that it can neither be true nor false, correct nor
incorrect and that the utterance does not state, report, or describe some fact but actually is
an act in itself, dependant upon an extensive circumstantial criteria including situation,
speaker, hearer, and the phatic act (vocabulary). This is the speech-act, where words do not
“say” but “do”. More precisely, this is where the performance of an act is in saying
something rather than by saying something, utterances can have a force as well as content.
This constitutes the illocutionary act.
The illocutionary act is neither true nor false but requires certain conditions and
circumstances which are necessary for the utterance to be performed successfully, or
‘felicitously’. Crucially important to the success of the illocutionary act is whether it is, or
is not, ‘taken up’, that is, “bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the force
of the locution” in the recipient of the utterance.62 This means that for the act to be
performed it must satisfy certain conventions including sincerity of the utterer and
recognition on the part of the recipient given the parameters and circumstantial
environment within which it is made.63 If the illocutionary act is ‘taken up’, ergo
successfully performed, it qualifies as a speech act proper or a perlocutionary act. As a
rather crude example, one might say that the utterance “I will” or “I do” in the circumstance
of the marriage ceremony is neither a statement of fact, report nor description of a real
event, feeling or intention, but is actually the act itself. For without those two words the
60 Strawson. p 442. 61 Austin. p 2. 62 Ibid. pp 115-116. 63 Ibid. pp 103, 105, 108, 115, 120, 121, 127.
25
ritual of marriage does not successfully occur (or is “miscarried” in Austin’s parlance).
Similarly, if the groom is insincere, or God doesn’t hear, or the priest has not been ordained
then the speech act ‘misfires’ as the conventional requisites are not present.
Other examples of utterances open to this kind of illocutionary force might include
introducing someone or surrendering, appealing, accusing, promising or threatening.
Though it must be said that such utterances are open to all sorts of simultaneous and non-
exclusive uses, meanings, and intentions. The important thing is that Austin’s work has led
to greater interest in words as having force and in the significance of authors’ intentions,
and of the conditions in which they might be translated into successful speech acts. We see
here that context is all important in providing meaning rather than referentially observable
‘fact’.
What is crucial about this chapter is that ordinary language philosophy and its
analytic heritage contrasts with the Hegelianism and ‘continental idealism’ which we shall
find in the development of Critical Theory. These two opposed traditions will come
together in an attempted synthesis, in Habermas most of all, and in the exploration of the
Social Dialogue as a decision-making environment based on intersubjectivity, the
‘cooperative principle’, and utterers’ intentions. More particularly, this detailed and
technical explanation of speech-acts is essential to understanding a number of points.
Firstly, it is essential in order to understand the unfolding theoretical suppositions of
Conceptual History in the next chapter, particularly the central role of linguistic context in
determining the meaning of concepts. Secondly, by understanding the theory of speech acts
at this point I will be able to demonstrate how it is that illocutionary forces set an agenda in
the Social Dialogue beyond any referentially understood ‘constative’ meaning that might be
found in the language of the Commission Communications. In other words, how words
have force. Thirdly, the theory of speech acts is important for understanding how an
attempt has been made in Habermas’ thought to develop a species of procedural democracy
based upon intersubjective communication in an attempt to transcend the subject-object
distinction which distinguishes him from his Frankfurt predecessors.
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2.2 Conceptual History: Begriffsgeschichte and Contextualism Background We must now consider the role of concepts in relation to certain key issues in the thesis.
First, how do they provide a suitable means of comprehending phenomena in historical
time? Second, why are concepts particularly advantageous in this respect for historical
analysis? Third, how does the historicity of concepts relate to the modern-postmodern
boundary (our ‘air du temps’)?
To begin with one must recognise that the very notion of concepts is a thorny issue.
The first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of ‘concepts’ is how they might differ
from words, ideas, terms, or thoughts in general. Can there be concepts without words? Can
concepts cross linguistic boundaries pure and unsullied? Or do words merely label concepts
which exist beyond language? Broadly speaking, there is a rich variety of basic definitions;
concepts are words, symbols, thoughts which act as ‘bearers of meaning’ that exist in
matrices of mutual meaning and interrelation; concepts are abstract ideas or mental symbols
typically associated with corresponding representations in a language or symbology;
concepts are units of knowledge built from characteristics. It might be that to attempt a
definition is counter-productive and to avoid getting bogged down a brief sketch of the
relevant genealogy might be more helpful.
The term conceptum has been traced back to the 16th Century, but perhaps a more
generous reading might reach right back to Aristotle’s ‘definition of terms’ – natural. What
seems interesting is the apparent ‘modernity’ of the concept of ‘concept’. Its materialisation
in a form more distinctively recognisable to modern discourse seems to coincide with the
épanouissement of scientific thought. Skipping past the childhood and adolescence in the
genealogy we come to the first relevant engagement with the term in Kant.
The transcendental bid on the part of Kant to synthesise the empirical and rational
traditions required categories of the mind through which sensible data might be given
meaning for the thinking subject as thought perception. As he says, “without the sensible
faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be
thought. Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts, blind”.64 It is
64 Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason (Everyman 1781;1993). p 69. [A50/B74].
27
therefore necessarily the case that "neither of these faculties can exchange its proper
function. Understanding cannot intuit, and the sensible faculty cannot think. In no other
way than in the united operation of both, can knowledge arise”.65 In this fusion Kant
seemed to covet a more encompassing understanding of concepts beyond Locke’s general
ideas, Platonic ideas, and scholastic universals. Kant’s Critiques supplied western, largely
German, thought with the most comprehensive armoury for the development of ‘concepts’
in the epistemological battle based upon this short, but pithy, phrase.
This was an epistemological mechanism which was greatly harnessed in 19th
Century thought, in sociology vor allem. Furthermore, Kantian concepts were implicitly
imbued with a historical quality. Given that Kant understood the mind as finite, and that in
fact a finite mind is receptive to objects only in so far as such objects are structured a priori
in space and time. As all ‘representations’ are temporal, then time assumes a crucial role in
the exploration of the possibility of knowledge of objects.66 This historicity is important for
our purposes because of the subsequent use made of it by conceptual historians.
Weber was equally renowned a Century later for trying to establish a means of
grounding the a priori in an empirical enquiry. He adopted the conceptual template of the
neo-Kantians, but tempered the universalism of Kant’s understanding by placing it in an
historical process dividing knowledge into the Geisteswissenschaften and
Naturwissenschaften with empirical-positivist standards reserved for the latter only. He
recognised that in the Geisteswissenschaften “as soon as we attempt to reflect about the
way in which life confronts us in immediate concrete situations, it presents an infinite
multiplicity of successively and coexistently emerging and disappearing events both
‘within’ and ‘outside’ ourselves”.67
For Weber any attempt to reproduce or represent reality in an authentic way was
doomed to failure and that all one could do was to “bring order into the world of reality,
which is in a state of ceaseless flux”, through reasoned thought.68 There is “no absolutely
objective scientific analysis” of culture or social phenomena which is “independent of
special and one-sided viewpoints according to which – expressly or tacitly, consciously or
65 Ibid. p 70. [A51/B76]. 66 Ibid. pp 122-123. [A98-99]. 67 Weber, M. Methodology of the Social Sciences (Free Press 1949). p 72. 68 Saloman, A. “Max Weber’s Methodology” (1934) 1:2, May, Social Research. p 157.
28
unconsciously – they are selected, analysed and organised for expository purposes”.69
There is a necessity for ‘pre-suppositions’ to beat the chaos of individual judgements into
analytical order and this is achieved through the construction of concepts. It is perhaps
apposite to note that Weber envisaged concepts not as static, universal, and valid for all
time but rather that “every science, every single descriptive history, operates with the
conceptual stock-in-trade of its time” and that in the cultural ‘sciences’ “concept-
construction depends on the setting of the problem, and the latter varies with the content of
the culture itself” (i.e. through time).70 Conceptual History as a quasi-sub discipline of
professional history emerged from this kind of early 20th Century social science, though not
exclusively. We can also see here that concepts can provide a mechanism for
comprehension which is neither derived strictly from empirical observation nor from
metaphysical speculation.
Begriffsgeschichte and the Historical Semantics of Terms In keeping with the interests of this thesis, Begriffsgeschichte (Conceptual History) places
language at the heart of its mode of enquiry and values above all the “autonomous power of
words, without whose use human actions and passions could hardly be experienced, and
certainly not made intelligible to others”.71 It also acknowledges the ambiguity of all words,
a property shared by both concepts and words.72 Research from Begriffsgeschichte will
facilitate the understanding of my approach which, in chapter 3.2 will analyse the concept
of ‘Society’ based upon the assumptions discussed here, namely, that concepts must be
understood to operate historically and that changing historical contexts alter the meanings
of concepts. When one considers the utilisation of concepts in the Commission
Communications on the Social Dialogue it can be seen that, whilst such the concepts still
have a meaning, it is a meaning that is incompatible with the assumed aims of the Dialogue
because of the changing historical context and epistemological assumptions within which
we live.
69 Weber. Methodology. p 72. 70 Ibid. pp 105-106. 71 Koselleck, R. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Columbia UP 2004). p 75. 72 Ibid. p 85.
29
Conceptual History is concerned with the historical semantics of terms and their
genealogy, the changing paradigms of ideas, semasiology and onomatology. The notion of
time is very important and acts as primum mobile to the assumption of the ontological and
temporal contingency of cultural values and contexts. The approach to concepts in
Begriffgeschichte does entertain a distinction between words, terms, phrases, and concepts
proper. Reinhart Koselleck devised a differentiation of concept as distinct from words. In
the triangle of word (signification) – meaning (concept) – object, each concept is associated
with a word, but not every word is a social or political concept. Social and political
concepts possess a substantial claim to generality and always have many meanings – in
historical science, occasionally in modalities other than words.73 He could therefore say
that:
“In use a word can become unambiguous. By contrast, a concept must remain ambiguous in order to be a concept. The concept is connected to a word, but is at the same time more than a word: a word becomes a concept only when the entirety of meaning and experience within a socio-political context within which and for which a word is used can be condensed into one word”.74 Following on from this contextual view of concepts, the notion of historical semantics is
pivotal to understanding the thrust of Begriffsgeschichte. If concepts are therefore the
“concentrates of several substantive meanings” and they draw together a plenitude of
meanings then semantic fields become important for mapping these meanings and their
relationships in the interpretive triangle.75 Semantic fields provide associated meanings for
concepts, though always ambiguous, which “bundle[s] up the variety of historical
experience together with a collection of theoretical and practical references into a relation
that is given and can be experienced only through the concept”.76 However, this is no
empirical process which provides unmediated access to empirical knowledge via the
semantic function of the concept. A concept is not simply indicative of the relations which
it covers, it is also a factor within them.77 In this case, the concept establishes a particular
horizon for potential experience and conceivable theory, and in this way sets a limit. This is
very important for how concepts are connected to wider fields linguistic means and force 73 Ibid. pp 84-85. 74 Ibid. p 85. 75 The semantic field might be described as a set of distinct meanings represented by words or signifiers which are related to one another based upon those distinct meanings. 76 Koselleck. Futures Past. p 85. 77 Ibid. p 86. This sounds much like the Kantian synthesis discussed above.
30
and so can carry and distribute a whole load of implicit connotations which often go
unrecognised.
At first glance, Social History and Conceptual History differ in that the latter
concentrates on texts, words and speech. For Social History, and its background in the
empirical social sciences, texts and their attributed conditions of emergence have only an
empirical referential nature, whereas Conceptual History works continually through the
exegesis of texts, while simultaneously being based on such exegesis. There is a
recognisably more hermeneutic element. The contention of Reinhart Koselleck, with which
I am in agreement, is that traditional Social History actually cannot be separated from
Conceptual History as “a ‘society’ and its ‘concepts’ exist in a relation of tension which is
also characteristic of its academic historical disciplines”.78 The argument seems to be that a
society’s concepts are historically contingent based on the idea that the activity of
“temporal semantic construal” simultaneously establishes the historical force contained
within a statement.79 So we can see that the ahistorical, directly empirically referential, and
scientific suppositions of traditional Social History are tempered by a ‘philosophical history
of terminology’ and an ‘historical philology’. It is for this reason that my approach has been
historically conceptual rather than a straight social history of the Social Dialogue. An
Immanent Critique must be based upon the reflexive terms of the object itself, rather than
from without, and so the object must be understood within its own historical context rather
than from the vantage point of another.
Basically, concepts, and their semantic fields, are dependent for meaning on the
historical period in which they are used and political conflicts must be “interpreted and
decoded in terms of their contemporary conceptual boundaries, and the self-understanding
on the part of past speakers and writers of their own language use”.80 Though sociological
‘tools’ of Social History may have an empirical utility, they must be historically sensitive.
From this exploration of Begriffsgeschichte we can see how concepts are drawn from an
epistemological synthesis of the idealist and empiricist traditions and how they must be
placed in the changing contexts of historical time. This is how I have arrived at both my
78 Ibid. p 76. 79 Ibid. p 79. 80 Ibid. p 80. There is also a hint at the role of utterer’s intentions here.
31
method approach and my handling of concepts in the Commission Communications on the
Social Dialogue, to which we shall return in section 3.
After considering the epistemological foundations of historical concepts we can
then say something about the functioning of concepts in an example of changing historical
context. The synchronic semantic field and the diachronic historicity of concepts can be
combined and illustrated in the notion of the Sattelzeit (pivotal-time), Koselleck’s defining
contribution. Koselleck understood this to be an historical period in Western Europe from
about 1750-1850 in which a significant, recognisable and widespread shift took place in the
understood meanings of the most basic and foundational political and social concepts. This
period coincides with the French and Industrial Revolutions and arguably with the advent
of the ‘modern’ age. This view of ‘Modernity’ is less concerned with definitions of
economic relationships or with institutions but instead sees Modernity as being constituted
by the very appearance of generally held normative conceptual meanings which previously
had been local, disparate, and fractured. The appearance of shared meanings is reliant on
shared concepts which provide the mediating mechanism between mind and sensible
reality. The implications here are that there is a precedent for identifiable transition periods
of greater or lesser degree and, although I am not claiming our present ‘air du temps’ to be
a comparable period of transition, the principle needs to be recognised. From this I can go
on to more confidently explore the notion of a historically problematised use of concepts in
the Social Dialogue.
The revolutionising of new words for old meanings and the creation of innumerable
neologisms arose with the changing linguistic arsenal of the entire political and social space
of experience and thus established new horizons of expectation.81 When we come to
analyse the concept of ‘Society’ in the Social Dialogue we will see that this ‘future-
oriented’ characteristic of Modernity, and its new concepts, became a central component in
the vision of ‘Society’ as a rational means of shaping human life toward a future goal, a
quality not found in pre-modern forms of human association. Whilst this modern
understanding of society is still implicit in the view of society held by the EU institutions,
one must ask that as the future-oriented momentum of ‘Modernity’ is dissipating in our
81 Koselleck. Futures Past. p 79.
32
time at the ‘postmodern boundary’, what are the effects of such a temporal conceptual
incompatibility for the legitimacy of political decision-making?
A grasp of the theoretical workings of Begriffsgeschichte has a number of particular
uses for this thesis. It provides an important criticism of Social History which is similar to
that which the Cambridge Contextualists aimed at in their criticism of ‘histories of ideas’.
It criticises the careless transfer to the past of modern, context-determined expressions of
constitutional argument, something that I have found throughout various non-historical
analyses of EU politics that are based upon universalist principles of analysis or upon
liberal theories of the state-society relation. It also criticises the “practice in the history of
ideas of treating ideas as constants, assuming different historical forms but of themselves
fundamentally unchanging”.82 Similarly, by switching between synchronic and diachronic
analysis, Begriffsgeschichte can help disclose the persistence of past experience and the
viability of past theories, which I shall implicitly pursue especially in regard to the
forgotten strengths of the earlier forms of Critical Theory.83 Perhaps, the most specific and
useful idea that I wish to take from Begriffsgeschichte is the apprehension of certain
concepts as “recurrently emerging neologisms reacting to specific social or political
circumstances”. I think that this might apply to the current concept of ‘society’ as
understood in the Commissions Communications on the Social Dialogue.
The Historical Contextualism of the ‘Cambridge School’ The connection of Begriffsgeschichte with Cambridge Contextualism is debatable, as the
provenance of the latter is not Social History but Intellectual History, political philosophy
and the philosophy of language. Nevertheless, there are numerous cross-over points. Most
importantly it once again illustrates the need, on the one hand, to view concepts as
contingent on time and on authorial intentions and, on the other, to beware of diachronic
anachronism. Most of all, and in clearest distinction to Begriffsgeschiche, it develops the
theory of speech acts into an historical mode of interpretation and criticism.
During the 1970s the ideas surrounding speech acts that we detailed in chapter 2.1
were exported from the philosophy of language into other academic disciplines. Quentin
82 Ibid. p 81. 83 Ibid. p 89.
33
Skinner, along with Raymond Geuss, John Dunn and JGA Pocock, was responsible for
unleashing this linguistic scholarship within historical circles in Britain. Skinner was
disaffected with widespread teleological narratives within the ‘history of ideas’ stemming
from what he saw as extensive anachronistic fallacies born out of basic misunderstandings
of the language used in major historical treatises of political philosophy. In the heady
atmosphere of 1970s post-structuralism, Skinner’s revisionist thrust assaulted the central
supremacy of the idea in intellectual history, which he saw as prejudicing scholars into
perceiving a teleological and temporal omnipresence of certain political philosophical ideas
which he deemed to be contingent upon certain authors at certain points in historical time.
In its place he focused on deriving meaning from an interpretation of past philosophers’
intentions in writing what they did. Consequently, he imported Austin’s work on speech-
acts, seeing in them a potential for inferring authors’ intentions through their use of words
as acts in themselves. These individuals and their works have since been corralled by those
that followed under the rubric of the ‘Cambridge School’ of Contextualism.
The philosophical discussions around speech acts had concentrated hitherto on the
philosophies of action and of mind, most resolutely around the problems of agential
intention, referential epistemology, and meaning in texts, all problems to which Skinner
devoted much energy. However, he did go on to widen the scope of speech acts into an
emphasis beyond simple intentions by adding the caveat:
“Here I need to begin by making a negative point with as much emphasis as possible. The theory does not tell us, nor do I believe, that the intentions of speakers and writers constitute the sole or even the best guide to understanding their texts or other utterances”.84 The implications of this are that a further ‘guide to understanding’ texts and utterances has
to come from contexts and not just authorial intentional utterances in texts taken in isolation
from their linguistic, cultural and historical settings. If we cast our minds back to the
discussion of speech acts in the previous chapter, for an illocutionary act to be ‘taken up’,
that is, to be executed felicitously or ‘successfully’ and therefore to become a
perlocutionary act, an utterance must satisfy certain conditions determined by various
linguistic contexts. This means that the illocutionary acts we perform may be identified,
like all voluntary acts, by our intentions, but the illocutionary forces carried by our
84 Skinner, Q. Visions of Politics: Vol. 1 – Regarding Method (Cambridge UP 2002). p 110.
34
utterances are mainly determined by their meaning and context. Skinner himself refers to
the example of the ‘unintended warning’ where, though there may be circumstances in
which the issuing of a certain utterance will inevitably be taken to be a case of adverting to
danger, in such circumstances “the agent will be understood to have spoken, and will in fact
have spoken, with the illocutionary force of a warning. This will remain the case even if the
agent spoke without any intention to warn, and in consequence failed to perform the
corresponding illocutionary act”.85
It is for these reasons that it can readily happen that, in performing an illocutionary
act, an utterance may at the same time carry, without my intending it, a much wider range
of illocutionary force.86 We shall see that utterances in the Commissions Communications
on the Social Policy Agenda and on the Social Dialogue will entail these kinds of
‘additional meanings’ beyond the conscious intentions of the Commission. It is from this
that I will show in chapter 3.3 how an otherwise oblique agenda can be read and interpreted
when one places the utterances in wider contemporary contexts of meaning, semantically
linked to a dominating agenda of economic competition.
2.3 Critical Theory and ‘Instrumental Tendencies’ in the Lisbon Strategy
There are two main reasons for the inclusion of this chapter and both are connected to the
analysis in section 3. The first reason is that it is necessary to work through the early
thought of the Frankfurt School in order to explore its strengths and weaknesses in regard
to critique of capitalist society and therefore, implicitly, the functioning of the Lisbon
Strategy through the Social Dialogue. A discussion of the earlier Critical Theory which
preceded Habermas is also crucial for my later attempts in the conclusion to demonstrate
how Habermas’ departure from his predecessors’ thought has drained it of much of its
critical potential in contemporary politics and opened the door to the adaptive pressures of
international economic competition.
The second reason for the chapter is to construct my argument that the implicit
assumption in the Commission Communications is that the Social Dialogue represents a
Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’. Once this has been done, we shall be in a position, in
85 Ibid. p 109. [My Emphasis]. 86 Ibid. p 109.
35
the next section, to assess the validity of the ‘consensual’ claims which are made of the
Dialogue. We will also be able to analyse and criticise these claims in relation to a general
criticism of Habermas’ theory upon which they are based.
The Foundations for a Critique of Rationality and Communication The eponymous ‘Frankfurt School’ of self-styled critical theorists gathered around a
number of German social scientists and philosophers at the Institut für Sozialforschung in
Frankfurt-am-Main in the 1920s. The degree to which critical theorists constitute a
meaningful, coherent and, recognised ‘school’ has been a point of contention.87 Its internal
pluralism has been due in no small part to its diverse intellectual influences.88 Whilst
keeping this in mind, something can still be said of “a definable core” of Critical Theory,
not so much as a “fixed theoretical or empirical content”, but rather as an “historically
applied logic of analysis”. This particularly holds true for the decades around World War
Two, beginning with Horkheimer, Pollock, Fromm, Benjamin and Adorno inter alia – the
putative first generation of critical theorists.89
In broad terms, Critical Theory is an approach within social philosophy oriented
towards political action and social reform via a dialectical critique of historical reality
aimed at human emancipation. This goal is the primum mobile of Critical Theory but is a
telos which has no terminus, thus it constitutes an ongoing historical process. This vital
process at the heart of Critical Theory is essentially dialectical.90 Central to the tradition,
especially more recently in the writings of Habermas, is the issue of the grounding of
epistemic norms.
Early Critical Theory revolved around three main lines of contrast which
characterised the social research of the Institute; Critical Theory vs. Traditional Theory,
Idealism vs. Materialism, Rationalism vs. Irrationalism. The first of these three contrasts is
most important for establishing both the ‘critical’ and the ‘historical’ elements of Critical
Theory, which are also the two most important informing principles behind my research
87 McLaughlin, N. “Origin Myths in the Social Sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the Emergence of Critical Theory” (1999) 24:1, Canadian Journal of Sociology. pp 109-139. 88 Rush, F. “Introduction” in Rush (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Political Theory (Cambridge UP 2004). p 1. 89 Antonio,. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 330. 90 Marcuse. One Dimensional Man. p x.
36
method. ‘Critical Theory’ should be understood in opposition to ‘Traditional Theory’.
Traditional Theory places the inquiring subject outside of the socio-historical formation and
has been the dominating approach of the social sciences from the first decades of the 20th
Century. In contrast, Critical Theory has comprehended subject and object as both socially
formed with perception and thought in turn formed socio-historically. A social science and
sociology must be tempered by a historically situated social philosophy in order to render
any analysis effectively critical.
Instrumental Rationality, Anti-Positivism and the Dialectic in History
Critical Theory has incorporated diverse elements from the materialist-idealist dichotomy
but with the key determining factors being the enduring emphasis on Reason and the desire
to avoid reductivist, essentialist or instrumental thinking. Horkheimer embraced the
‘rational’ idealism of Kant, Hegel, and, surprisingly, Descartes but excluded the ‘irrational’
idealism of the kind of Counter-Enlightenment romanticism associated with Nietzsche,
Dilthey, Bergson, Heidegger and friends. This latter group has been treated as exponents of
an impoverished bourgeois philosophy drained of revolutionary and emancipatory
potential. That the ‘post-modernists’ who have revived much of this thought have been
similarly accused in our own time is an interesting instance of continuity to which we shall
return later. Fundamentally, however, the idealist tradition has been fatally compromised by
both foundationalism and transfiguration.91
The irrational and essentialist propensities of idealism were rejected either as
bankrupt, impotent, or opposed to the ontological contingency and emancipatory
presuppositions held by the Frankfurt theorists. However, the rational forms were also
dissected and critically analysed. The notion of instrumental rationality in particular has
been a key concern for decades of critical theorists from Horkheimer onwards.
91 Transfiguration is where a thing is deemed valuable, but not present in the World as a general matter though it is still thought to be immutable. The abiding presence of this something in the World is thought to be impossible and so this something is only attainable supernaturally. Thus, Transfiguration undermines the potential for social reform and critique, since transfiguring theories entail that the ultimate relief from suffering can be achieved only outside contexts in which human action can be effective. As a consequence the emancipatory purpose of critical thought is abrogated and idealism rendered suspect. See Rush. “Conceptual Foundations of Early Critical Theory”. p 13.
37
The problem seems to be thus: in conceiving, one discerns a particular aspect of an
object which is thought significant for the grouping of that object with other objects on the
basis of the shared aspect. The selection of what characteristics of an object are to be
understood as salient and determining is a purposive act and entails/reveals interests that
one has in comprehending reality in a certain manner. To the early critical theorists, the
outcome of an epistemology of observational science (experimentally controlled
observation as the ideal means of determining valid knowledge) is that “all things in nature
become identical with the phenomena they represent when submitted to the practices of our
laboratories, whose problems no less than their apparatus express in turn the problems and
interests of society as it is”.92 This form of reason is thus bereft of questions of value and,
therefore, of critical potential. Incidentally, this is not so far from Leo Strauss’
contemporary defence of political philosophy over political science.93 It also shares some of
Thomas Kuhn’s views on scientific paradigms and, likewise, Stephen J Gould has cogently
alluded to ‘iconographies of evolution’ which reflect “our hopes for a universe of intrinsic
meaning defined in our own terms”.94
The central importance of this critique is that instrumental reason promotes a
bureaucratically administered life because its value-neutrality allows it to work for
whomever controls it. In the case of consumer capitalism it conforms to the interests of
commodity production and its agents. This is pivotal in order to grasp the longstanding
opposition of critical theorists to certain elements in 20th Century social science, namely
positivism. Whilst Horkheimer accepted the materialist dialectic, he rejected the
contemporary materialism of logical-empiricism associated with the Vienna Circle,
claiming it to be reductive. The objection is that, in its commitment to the scientific
principle of empirical verification, positivism conceals a commitment to technological
rationality behind a façade of value-freedom. This is because the verifiability principle
presumes that ethical and political statements are meaningless, and whilst working within a
scientific method and an ‘establishment’ under conditions of capitalism, one is therefore
drawn inexorably by the demands of the status quo. Critical Theory attacks Western
92 Antonio. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 339. 93 Strauss, L. “What is Political Philosophy?” (1957) 19, The Journal of Politics. pp 347, 349-351, 355. 94 Kuhn, T S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Pheonix 1962); Gould, S J. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (Penguin 1991). p 43. [My Emphasis].
38
empiricism for its reification of conventional values which actually serve to legitimate both
capitalist society and ‘orthodox’ Marxist-Leninism ordaining, in the process, dominant
values as scientific laws and state bureaucracy as the rational society.95 In this view
consistent positivism commits one to reactionary conservatism in the final analysis.
Furthermore, the opinion that only scientific knowledge counts as knowledge is a
metaphysical ‘romanticisation’ of facts and is therefore ironically vulnerable to charges of
irrationalism.96
The historical dialectic in Critical Theory has been derived from Hegelian thought
and ought to be explained in a little detail so as to clarify what will follow in the rest of the
chapter. It was Hegel’s view that agency and belief can only be adequately understood
holistically and historically.97 Kant had attempted to replace the rationalist and empiricist
accounts of the self with the transcendental subject and so, similarly, Hegel advanced that
the content of concepts were determined by historically situated forms of social
rationality.98 Hegel’s thought is fundamentally essentialist and historicist and so, under
these assumptions, all forms of consciousness are partially true and through a dialectical
historical process a teleological holistic truth would be gradually unfolded and manifested.
This telos is indeterminately and implicitly present in all stages of progression, a
progression realised in a succession of increasingly adequate expressions of this holistic
truth via the dialectical process. Crucial to this progression is what Hegel calls determinate
negation. This is the immanent realization, on the part of a particular form of
consciousness, that that particular form of the thought-object dichotomy which the
consciousness held central to its conception of the world, actually keeps it from a true
account of its relation to the world. It is ‘alienating or ‘negating’, sometimes referred to as
the negation of negation.
This implies that the ontological suppositions of Critical Theory have insisted on an
ongoing and perpetual historical process and so no longer share Marx’s ahistorical
terminus. We must remember that “the central issue is that Critical Theory is not a general
95 Antonio. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 331. 96 Horkheimer. Critical Theory (Continuum 1975). pp 188-244. Though this is perhaps a reckless statement, the dispute is largely over the Marxist legacy – Hegelian vs. scientific, both of which have had a profound effect on Critical Theory. 97 Rush. “Conceptual Foundations of Early Critical Theory”. p 16. 98 Ibid. pp 16-17.
39
theory, but is instead a method of analysis deriving from a non-positivist epistemology”.99
This ‘method’ is not a prescriptive theodicy but rather limits itself to revealing the relevant
possibilities. Here lies perhaps the deepest deviation from Marx’s philosophy – though one
might argue that later critical theorists like Habermas have returned to this spirit of general
explanatory theory as we shall see.
From the Marxian tradition, Critical Theory received many of its analytical
categories, its lasting critique of capitalism, its belief in the alienation inherent to the
capitalist mode of production, and its telos of emancipation.100 The 11th thesis of Feuerbach
thunders that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point
is to change it” and this lies at the heart of Critical Theory as a dynamic logic of analysis.
This proclivity toward the social reformist, humanist, and voluntarist spirit of the
Feuerbach theses and the ‘Younger Marx’ is underlined by early Critical Theory’s distaste
for the later more scientific determinism of Marx’s later writings and those of his
successors. In this respect Critical Theory takes its place in a wider constellation of more
‘critical’ and ‘humanist’ incarnations of Marxism epitomised by Gramsci, Lukács, Perez-
Dias, Korsch, Sartre, Goldmann, and EP Thompson.101
The Loss of Immanent Potential and Dialectic Negation? Throughout the middle and later 20th Century much of the more ‘orthodox’ Marxian
underpinnings of Critical Theory have been dropped or revised. This has been in large
measure due to the growth of Stalinist state-socialism, the incidence of fascism, and the
perceived creep of managerial capitalism and the bureaucratic state, which have discredited
much of the optimistic expectation in the Marxist vision.102 Critical theorists have drawn
attention to a number of features which merit more remarkable revision.
To post-war critical theorists, it has become increasingly evident that the
emancipatory, revolutionary, and utopian potential of the proletariat, of class struggle, and
99 Antonio. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 332. 100 Ibid. p 330. 101 Gouldner, A. The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (MacMillan 1980). p 38. I suppose this is in distinction to more ‘structural’ Marxists like Althusser, Godelier, Therbon, and Nic Poulantzas who eschew Critical Theory as ideology and concentrate more on Marxism as science. 102 Adamson, W L. “Gramsci and the Politics of Civil Society” (1987) 7:3/4, Winter, Praxis International. p 320; Antonio. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 331.
40
of technology, has proven unreliable. The belief is that such optimism has constituted a
serious miscalculation within conventional Marxist theory, though this position might not
be shared by other more structural Marxists who still live in frustrated expectancy.103 The
role of technology as a capacity to free individuals from the alienating tendencies of social
capitalisation, from the division of labour, and from the necessity of subsistence work, has
been increasingly problematised after the Second World War. This worry has been further
strengthened by increased concern over the power and dominance of instrumental reason.
Spreading and intensifying automation in the production process has challenged the
centrality of surplus labour value as a fundamental keystone in Marx’s edifice of
exploitation and wage slavery.104 At the same time, however, the “improving material fate
of workers is a prima facie legitimation that promotes more efficient capitalist
domination”.105
It seems that Marx mistook an emancipatory force in instrumental rationality
believing that domination lay in necessity and not also in the scientific means of
overcoming that necessity. Critical theorists have implied that Marx’s faith in the
proletariat, and in science and technology, introduced a quasi-metaphysical determinism
into his analysis”.106 In the programmed society, the working class is no longer a privileged
historic agent, not just because the labour movement has been weakened, outmanoeuvred,
or misled, but because the exercise of power within a capitalist firm no longer places a class
at the centre of the economic system and its social conflicts.107
The categories inherited from ‘vulgar’ Marxism have proven either to have been
neutralised or absorbed in the post-war era. The unfolding events of the cold war and of the
post-war boom seem to have further strengthened the unassailable and dominant position of
world capital. The integration of large sections of the working class into the social structure
of monopoly capitalism, buttressed by the overwhelming concentration of economic and
political power, have rendered the possibilities of class struggle apparently otiose.108 In like
fashion, even the socialist countries in the 20th Century might be said to have been 103 Hirst, P Q. “Anderson’s Balance Sheet” in Marxism and Historical Writing (Routledge 1985). p 8. 104 Marcuse. One Dimensional Man. p 36. 105 Antonio. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 336. 106 Ibid. pp 337, 340. 107 Touraine, A. The Post-Industrial Society: Tomorrow’s Social History – Classes, Conflicts and Culture in the Programmed Society (Wildwood House 1971). p 17. 108 Marcuse. “The Failure of the New Left?” (1979) 18, Autumn, New German Critique. p 5.
41
pressured into co-existence with the seemingly inescapable capitalist mode of production,
regardless of their political mechanisms of redistribution, and were drawn by its power and
logic into the constant development of the means of production and into the expansion of
the productive capacities of the economy.
If the example of Marcuse is taken as a link from the first to the second generation
of critical theorists, we come to see here the changing problematics central to Critical
Theory after World War Two and into the 1960s and the recognition that “within a
repressive society even the progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to
the degree to which they accept the rules of the game”.109
Theodor Adorno’s treatment of the notion of ‘free time’ might be illustrative of the
integrative and assimilative potential of the social totality. We assume here that escape
from the ‘alienating’ qualities of laborious drudgery is the accepted aim of ‘free time’. He
argues that far from being a kind of ‘leisure time’, with its pre-bourgeois aristocratic
implications, it has rather become a ‘pseudo-activity’, a shadowy continuation of labour.
Here, “free time is shackled to its opposite” and is to some degree a haunting “parody of
itself”.110 In fact, ‘free time’ is functionally determined, and even when convinced of acting
under one’s own free will this will itself is fashioned by the forces from which it seeks to
escape in its hours away from work. ‘Free time’ increasingly exhibits the fetish character of
the commodity and commodification neutralises the chance of negation in society and the
individual.111 Like all other aspects of life, in one’s ‘free time’ one increasingly cannot
avoid mediation and so it becomes a colonised continuation of the forms of profit-oriented
social life.112
This follows Schopenhauer's pessimistic idea that “mankind is the factory product
of nature”, or at least of instrumental rationality, and is therefore captured by the totality of
the commodity character.113 In the face of these challenges the counter-culture of the 1960s
New Left, with its anti-authoritarian dismissal of ‘elitist’ theory-informed praxis, lost its
109 Marcuse, H. “Repressive Tolerance” in Marcuse, H; Moore, B; Wolff, R P. A Critique of Pure Tolerance” (Beacon Press 1969). p 83. 110 Adorno, T. The Culture Industry (Routledge 1991). pp 187-188. 111 Ibid. p 191. 112 Ibid. p 189. 113 Ibid. p 193.
42
political impetus and withdrew into a ritualised and personalised private liberation.114
Depressed resignation is probably an unsurprising outcome.
In the final analysis, these problems represent the essence of the one-dimensional
society, and the point of departure for the second generation of critical theorists centred
around Habermas.115 I think that the importance of this outline is that the feared loss of
immanent potential in social critique and the ascendency of instrumental rationality are
essential elements in later Critical Theory and in this thesis. They are the inherited
problems which had to be overcome, and still do. We shall return to a more thorough and
contemporary discussion of these problems later on.
In addition, this part of the chapter is very important as it provides the theoretical
underpinnings for my claims in chapter 3.3 over the integrating potential of capitalist
competition and reproduction that goes beyond material productive relations, classes,
technology, or expropriation into the realm of language, ideology and culture. It is in this
way that active ‘consensus’ becomes passive ‘consent’ if a society lacks the conceptual and
ideological ability to recognise capitalist integration and mobilisation and to then resist it.
The Contribution of Habermas Beyond the limits of Critical Theory, Habermas has worked most fundamentally toward the
epistemic establishment of a normative and empirical basis for critique. An enduring
feature of this endeavour has been the attempt at a comprehensive model of social criticism,
perhaps reminiscent of the great 19th Century patriarchs of social philosophy in the
industrialising age. This latter feature of his work has probably drawn the greatest and most
sustained criticism of all and might set him apart from his Frankfurt predecessors. His is a
Critical Theory that aims to be explanatory, practical, and normative.116
It is in his earlier works that Habermas evinced both the foundational and familiar
problematics which provided the driving force for his thinking over the subsequent
decades. Of profound importance to him has been the search for a means to resurrect a
dying confidence in Enlightenment reason and to then turn this into a critical potential.
How can the relation between technical progress and the social life-world, a relation that is
114 Marcuse. “The Failure of the New Left?”. p 5. 115 Rush, F. “Introduction”. p 1. 116 Bohman, J; Rehg, W. “Jürgen Habermas” (2007) May, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. p 5.
43
today still clothed in a primitive, traditional and unchosen form, be reflected upon and
brought under the control of rational discussion?.117
Continuing from where we left above, we can see that for Habermas the problem of
technical rationality continued to be crucial and it thus came to dominate his earlier works.
For him, Marcuse seems to be the first to make the “political content of technical reason the
analytical point of departure for a theory of advanced capitalist society”.118 Marx, on the
contrary, did not reckon with the discrepancy, at every social level, between the scientific
control of the material conditions of life (technology) and a democratic decision-making
process. The authoritarian welfare state is therefore not anticipated in his thought. This is
because the techniques by which the development of a highly industrialised society could
be brought under control can no longer be interpreted according to an instrumental model,
as though appropriate means were being organised for the realisation of goals that are either
presupposed without discussion or clarified through communication.119
Habermas developed an indictment of technology for being a scientifically
rationalised control of objectified processes which refers to the system in which research
and technology are coupled with feedback from the economy and administration.120 As
social labour is industrialised, the criteria of instrumental action, purposive-rational action,
penetrates all aspects of life as the depoliticisation of the mass of the population and the
decline of the public realm as a political institution become components of a system of
domination that tends to exclude practical questions from public discussion.121 Moreover,
technological rationality employs techniques placed at our disposal by science for the
realisation of specific goals. Instrumental action is rationalised in this sense to the extent
that the organisation of means to defined ends is guided by technical rules based on
empirical knowledge.122 Habermas is here in further agreement with Marcuse that “it is not
enough for a social system to fulfil the conditions of technical rationality. Even if the
117 Habermas, J. “Technical Progress and the Life-World” in Toward a Rational Society (Beacon Press 1970). p 53. 118 Habermas, J. “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” in Habermas’ Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics (Beacon Press 1970). p 85. 119 Habermas. “Technical Progress and the Life-World”. p 58. 120 Ibid. p 57. 121 Habermas, J. “The Scientization of Politics and Public Opinion” in Habermas’ Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics (Beacon Press 1970). p 75; Habermas. “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’”. p 81. 122 McCarthy, T. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (MIT Press 1978). p 8.
44
cybernetic dream of a virtually instinctive self-stabilisation could be realised, the value
system would have contracted in the meantime to a set of rules for the maximisation of
power and comfort; it would be equivalent to the biological base value of survival at any
cost, that is, ultrastability” or, in Marcuse’s lexicon, the one-dimensional society.123 These
ideas of Habermas are reminiscent of the social totality of Marcuse, the assimilation of
‘free time’ in Adorno, the attack of instrumental rationality and the critique of positivism
discussed above.
In terms of concrete politics, Habermas has constructed a more tangible political
vision of ‘mediation’. He posits two historic models of political practice in the ‘modern’
age: decisionistic and technocratic. The former model exists where practical technical
means are rendered up to political imperatives as rationalised choices, calculated strategies,
and automatic decision procedures. The technician serves the politician. The transition from
the Baconian plebiscitary decisionistic model to a more developed technocratic model is
made where dependence of the professional scientific intelligentsia on the politician
becomes reversed.124 As might be expected, Habermas recognised how the technocratic
model assumes an “immanent necessity of technical progress” and immanently uses this as
circular justification for its continuity without any cogent statement on value systems,
unsurprising given the neutralisation of any politic.125 Decisionistic and technocratic
models of political practice both reflect the transformation of practical into technical
questions and their consequent withdrawal from public discussion. In neither model does
the public body of citizens conferring in an unrestricted fashion about matters of the
commonwealth play an essential role.126 It is this criticism that he has levelled at
bureaucratisation of highly industrial society throughout the 20th Century.
Habermas proposed a third, pragmatist, model. In the pragmatistic model “the strict
separation between the function of the expert and the politician is replaced by a critical
interaction” where reciprocal communication seems possible and necessary. Through this
model “scientific experts advise the decision-makers and politicians consult scientists in
123 Habermas. “Technical Progress and the Life-World”. p 60. 124 Habermas. “Scientization of Politics”. p 63. 125 Ibid. p 64. 126 McCarthy. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. pp 11-12.
45
accordance with practical needs” and with “horizons of value systems”.127 The pragmatistic
model is dependent on mediation by the public as a political institution. Communication
between experts and the agencies of political decision determines the direction of technical
progress on the basis of the tradition-bound self-understanding of practical needs which is
in turn criticised by technology. This communication must be rooted in social interests and
in the value-orientations of a given social life-world.128
Universal Pragmatics and Communicative Reason The theoretical roots of universal pragmatics and its discursive ethics are manifold but, as
the man himself has admitted, the “theory of speech acts initiated by Austin” is probably
the “most promising point of departure for a universal pragmatics”.129 The mind must be
cast back to the explanation of this influence in chapter 2.1, for this is where the heritage of
Critical Theory and the theory of speech acts will be synthesised in to a theory of
communicative action. Habermas’ criticism of Hegel, Marx, Kant and just about all those
thinkers who have attempted to construct a rational and universal epistemological
foundation for social reform has been that they remain attached to a “philosophy of the
subject”, this being the obverse of the objectivism found in positivism to which Habermas’
has equally objected. Building on the notion of utterer’s intentions discussed above any
rational process must arise intersubjectively through communication.
Habermas has striven to integrate the dichotomy of the social life-world (the
communicatively structured Being derived from the hermeneutic and phenomenological
traditions) and the worldless universe of facts (formalised systems of cognitive-
instrumental action).130 This two level understanding of the social fabric provides a
framework for comprehending social action which calls to mind something of the
Gesellschaft-Gemeinschaft distinction. Behind this lies his more innovative “categorical
framework of social theory” resting on a paradigm of intersubjectivity, a paradigm of
127 Habermas. “Scientization of Politics”. p 66-67. 128 Ibid. p 68. 129 Habermas, J. Communication and the Evolution of Society (Heinemann 1979). p 7. 130 Habermas. “Technical Progress and the Life-World”. p 52.
46
intersubjective communication, rather than on the subject-object paradigm or the
“philosophy of consciousness”.131
Habermas’ more positive works have shown greater signs of a break from Marcuse
as he has formulated a way to synthesize technology and the life-world. He has stated that a
“dialectic of potential and will takes place today without reflection in accordance with
interests for which public justification is neither demanded nor permitted”. This problem he
elaborated: “today, the self-understanding of social groups and their worldview as
articulated in ordinary language is mediated by the hermeneutic appropriation of traditions
as traditions. In this situation questions of life-conduct demand a rational discussion that is
not focussed exclusively either on technical means or on the application of traditional
behavioural norms”.132 So the issue revolves around the role of mediation, as without it the
information content of the science cannot be relevant to that part of practical knowledge
which gains expression in literature. Thus the question is “how is it possible to translate the
technologically exploitable knowledge into the practical consciousness of a social life-
world”.133
What is then necessary is an elaboration of this dialectic within political
consciousness in order to direct the mediation of the technical progress and the conduct of
social life.134 When he affirms that “the relation of technical progress and social lifeworld
and the translation of scientific information into practical consciousness is not an affair of
private cultivation”,135 this is a renunciation of Marcuse’s faith in dialectical protest
movements on the cultural margins. Here there is a hint at the solution to the fundamental
problematic: how might the technical power of control be brought within the consensual
bounds of acting and transacting citizens? The irrationality of domination can only be
mastered by the development of a political decision-making process tied to the principle of
general discussion free from domination. There is now a necessity for fora of discussion
and concertation. The only possibility for the rationalisation of the power structure resides
131 Postone, M. “History and Critical Social Theory” (1990) 19:2, March, Contemporary Sociology. pp 170, 172. 132 Habermas. “Technical Progress and the Life-World”. p 53. 133 Ibid. p 52. 134 Ibid. p 61. 135 Ibid. p 57.
47
in conditions that encourage political power for thought developing through dialogue.136
After all, “Language is the specific medium of understanding in the sociocultural stage of
evolution”.137
We now have a need for a ‘rationally guided practice’ and a detailed articulation of
the logic, methodology, or structure of his theory.138 Institutionally secured forms of
general and public communication must be formulated that handle the practical question of
how men and women can and desire to live under the objective conditions of their ever-
expanding power of control.139 Therefore, “the task of universal pragmatics is to identify
and reconstruct universal conditions of possible understanding {Verständigung}”, that is,
“general presuppositions of communication”.140
Habermas looks to create a normative, yet procedural, institutional environment for
rational communication. Linguistically, universal pragmatics rests on the contention that
not only phonetic, syntactic, and semantic features of sentences, but also certain pragmatic
features of utterances, not only language but speech, not only linguistic competence but
communicative competence, admit of rational reconstruction in universal terms.141 So we
see that grammatically correct sentences and words might satisfy a claim of
comprehensibility, but universal pragmatics is concerned with utterances and as we have
seen in chapter 2.1, meaning and “communicatively successful speech action” is dependent
on mutual validity established in the very act of intersubjective communication.142 The
‘general presuppositions’ that Habermas consequently proposes are ‘validity claims’ that
participants have over any ‘ideal speech situation’ to ensure rational communication in an
institutional setting free of domination. In communicative action participants presuppose
that they know what mutual recognition of reciprocally raised validity claims means.143 The
aim is to achieve rational consensus without force as “a contested norm cannot meet with
the consent of the participants in a practical discourse unless..... all affected can freely
136 Ibid. p 61. 137 Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society. p 1. 138 McCarthy, T. “Translator’s Introduction” to Habermas’ Communication and the Evolution of Society (Heinemann 1979). p x. 139 Habermas. “Technical Progress and the Life-World”. p 57. 140 Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society. p 1. 141 McCarthy. “Translator’s Introduction”. p xix. 142 Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society. pp 31-32. 143 Ibid. p 4.
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{ zwanglos} accept the consequences and the side effects that the general observance of a
controversial norm can be expected to have for the satisfaction of the interests of each
individual”.144
For a speech act to be successful it must satisfy ‘acceptability conditions’ of
grammatical comprehensibility and truthful intention. The acceptability conditions are
practically determined by the “recognisable engagement of the speaker to enter into certain
speech-act-typical obligations”.145 This is a demonstration of sincerity. Remember, the
illocutionary force of a speech act resides in its capacity to move a recipient to act under the
belief that the engagement signalled by the utterer is seriously intended. In an institutional
setting of speech acts this force can be borrowed from the binding force of existing norms,
otherwise ‘validity claims’ can be induced by the recipient. In unbound discourse utterer
and recipient can reciprocally motivate each other to recognise validity claims. This is
because the content of the utterer’s engagement is dependent on a specific reference to a
thematically stressed validity claim whereby the utterer, in a “cognitively testable way”,
assumes “obligations to provide grounds” (truth claim), “obligations to provide
justification” (rightness claim), and “obligations to prove trustworthy” (truthfulness
claim).146 A participant in rational communication therefore acts with the aim of reaching
understanding by raising these three ‘validity claims’, that simultaneously satisfy the
‘acceptability conditions’. Put another way, the utterer “claims truth for a stated
propositional content or for the existential presuppositions of a mentioned propositional
content”. He claims rightness or appropriateness for norms which justify an interpersonal
relation that is to be ‘performatively established’. Finally, he claims the truthfulness of his
expressed intentions.147 This is the validity basis of speech, whether bound or unbound,
built on the theory of speech acts and designed to facilitate mutual understanding in
discourse with the intention of creating rational consensus intersubjectively.
In order to maintain the mutually recognised validity in reaching understanding, or
in the event that validity claims are brought into question, then participants in the
communication can insist on each others accountability to certain ideal requisites of speech.
144 Habermas, J. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (MIT 1990). p 93. 145 Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society. p 65. 146 Ibid. p 65. 147 Ibid. p 65.
49
There is an implicit assumption that the form of communication, while not being strategic,
is nevertheless argumentative. In this ‘ideal speech situation’, which represents the abstract
institution of discursive meaning via rational communication which Habermas wishes to
construct, he delimits a number of procedural requirements, which are by no means
definitive. Firstly, no party should be excluded from the discourse (Generality). Secondly,
all participants should have the opportunity to challenge the validity claims themselves
(Autonomy). Thirdly, participants must be willing and able to empathise with the validity
claims of their interlocutors (Ideal Role Taking). Fourthly, existing power differences
between participants must be neutralised and so have no effect on the creation of consensus
(Power Neutrality). Fifthly, participants must openly and genuinely explain their aims and
intentions and so refrain from strategic action, that is, machinations (Transparency).
Habermas’ later works depend on a number of implicit aims. Following his
Enlightenment forbears his aims are universalist and he “roots communicative rationality in
the very nature of language-mediated communication, and thereby implicitly claims that it
has universal significance”.148 He aims for a rational process free of idealist,
phenomenological and romantic distractions. He aims to synthesise certain dichotomies of
body-mind, theory-practice, analytic thought-continental thought, and he aims for an
intersubjective theory rather than one based on the subject-object paradigm. He aims for an
institutional setting for his theory of rational communicative action, the role of which is
important for ‘systemic’ steering in a given normative environment. Finally, Habermas
aims to develop a means of realising political consensus as “a decentred understanding of
the world depends on the possibility of communication based on uncoerced agreement”.149
The last word on Habermas can be left to Charles Taylor:
“Against the neo-Nietzscheans, he would strongly defend the tradition of critical reason, but he has his own grounds for distrusting Heideggerian disclosure and wants instead to hold on to a formal understanding of reason and, in consequence, a procedural ethic, although purged of the monological errors of earlier variants”.150
This long exploration of Critical Theory is important for a number of reasons. We
now have the bridge from speech act theory to an intersubjective theory of communicative
148 Postone. “History and Critical Social Theory”. p 173. 149 Ibid. p 173. 150 Taylor, C. Philosophical Arguments (Harvard UP 1995). p 17.
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action providing an institutional environment for political consensus through negotiation
and consultation. This is the point at which the criticisms of capitalist society’s integrating
tendencies, of instrumental rationality, Habermas’ need to normatively ground social
thought and critique, and the theory of speech acts all come together in a procedural social
theory of communicative action which I will argue is an unconscious and unrecognised
characterisation of the European Commission's view of the future role of the Social
Dialogue.
We have now demonstrated how Habermas has departed from some of the core
elements of earlier Critical Theory, especially in his preference for intersubjectivity over
historical dialectic, which hints at how a closer look at these neglected elements might
subsequently furnish us with a potential for critique that Habermas has lost. I have tried to
show how early Critical Theory emphasised the conflictual and dialectical, whereas
Habermasian Critical Theory has proposed the consensual, procedural and institutional and
has tended more toward general explanatory theory of which earlier critical theory had been
somewhat more sceptical. The relation of this to the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon
Strategy will become apparent in the next section, to which we shall now move.
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3. Conceptual and Critical Analysis of the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy 3.1 The Social Dialogue as ‘Ideal Speech Situation’ To set the rest of section 3 into perspective, I will spend this chapter by giving a more
detailed discussion of the developments of the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy and of
how they are inter-connected with one another. This will allow me to then draw upon the
Habermasian theory of communicative action in chapter 2.3 in order to present the future
role of the Social Dialogue as a potential ‘Ideal Speech Situation’. This is important for the
subsequent critique of such a role throughout the rest of the thesis 3.
The European Social Dialogue The recent history of the Social Dialogue is a post-war story. The European Social
Dialogue grew out of the Tripartite Conferences in the 1970s aiming at broad economic and
social concertation amongst EU institutions and the peak representatives of capital and
labour from Member States. Though unsuccessful at that time, in the mid 1980s it was
revived by the Delors Commission, with the Commission itself placed as ‘facilitator’
between both sides of industry in a bipartite dialogue. It has been noted that this brainchild
of Jacques Delors was something of a European level equivalent to what I have already
indicated that François Mitterrand was doing in France contemporaneously.151 The Single
European Act [SEA](1986) provided a legal basis for this arrangement: “the Commission
shall endeavour to develop the dialogue between management and labour at European level
which could, if the two sides consider it desirable, lead to relations based on agreement”.152
In the early 1990s the breakthrough for the Social Dialogue came in the Social
Agreement (SA) appended to the Maastricht Treaty (1992) which added a two-step
obligatory consultation of the European ‘social partners’ by the Commission over matters
of industrial policy. The possibility for binding agreements signed by the ‘social partners’
through a ‘Council decision’ was also introduced.153 The Amsterdam Treaty (1997)
incorporated the Social Dialogue procedures into Articles 138-139 of the EC Treaty. The 151 Kettunen. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Partnership”. pp 34-35. 152 Art. 118b. 153 Smismans, S. “The European Social Dialogue” in Law, Legitimacy and European Governance: Functional Participation in Social Regulation (Oxford UP 2004). pp 316-317.
52
thrust of the Social Dialogue at this point was still aimed at the reconciliation of the
imperatives of capital, on the one hand, and broad social democratic politics of solidarity
and distributive justice, on the other. Consequently, the Social Dialogue provided an
industrial relations framework for reconciling business and European social democratic
centre-left politics of ‘social cohesion’, a role which it still claims. It seems that “discussion
in the 1990s in many European countries centred around the tension of how best to increase
the competitiveness of the economy without compromising social justice”.154 Most
recently, the role of the Social Dialogue has been reaffirmed in the newly inserted Article
136a of the Lisbon Treaty (2007), despite the uncertain ratification prospects in some
Member States.
In the early 2000s the Social Dialogue’s profile has been boosted once again. This
time it will serve as a vehicle for the implementation of the Lisbon Strategy which is
“making the social dialogue contribute to meeting the various challenges”.155 As circular as
this process may sound, it does capture something of the causal confusion and indistinct
character of the demarcation between the various processes of the Social Dialogue, Lisbon
Strategy and the OMCs (Open Method of Coordination).156 Indeed the “European social
dialogue is becoming more diversified and broader in scope, particularly as a result of the
implementation of the strategy for economic and social reform decided upon in Lisbon and
confirmed in Barcelona in March 2002”.157
This greater diversity and wider scope of the Social Dialogue leads to perhaps two
recognisable and distinct potential forms of the Dialogue. The first is a ‘broad’
understanding which might include all forms of involvement of the social partners in
European policy-making through consultation, negotiation, and concertation. This extends
beyond simple industrial concerns. The second form is a ‘narrow’ understanding which
entails a more particular bipartite dialogue in the procedure as laid down in Articles 138-
139 EC. The importance of making this distinction lies in how each understanding lends a
greater or lesser potential scope and form for the Social Dialogue.
154 Ishikawa, J. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue: A Social Dialogue Resource Book” (2003) International Labour Organisation. p 16. 155 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2005). p 2. 156 I shall return to the OMCs below. 157 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue, a Force for Innovation and Change (2002). p 10.
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The ‘narrower’ understanding of the Social Dialogue conforms to a more
conventional form of corporatist decision-making in some 20th Century European states. In
the case of the European level, bipartite dialogue takes place within industrial sectors
involving the signing of collective agreements between ‘peak’ employers’ associations and
trade unions organised at the European level. These agreements constitute a form of
governance clearly limited to the sectoral area of the employment relationship and occur
outside the main political legislative avenue of decision-making.158 Such bipartite dialogue
has been encouraged by EU institutions since well before the 1990s, with more than 350
bipartite documents being signed at the sectoral level including joint opinions, guidelines,
codes of conduct, frameworks of action, and manuals up to 1992.159
Before Maastricht (1992), these instruments were considered ‘soft’, but after
Maastricht more binding commitments were devised. For nearly all agreements signed after
1992, but before 2000, the ‘social partners’ requested implementation by the more binding
means of Council directives. In the 1990s, bipartite agreement in the Social Dialogue acted
more as a ‘regulatory technique’ through statutes and through the ‘harder’ COCOCAs and
SICOCAs.160 Since 2000, and coinciding with the launch of the Social Policy Agenda of
the Lisbon Strategy, bipartite negotiation has reverted to ‘softer’, more autonomous and
non-statutory agreements like COSICAs and SISICAs. It appears that the narrower bipartite
understanding of the Social Dialogue seems to be evolving into ‘softer’ practices as before
1992 with questionable implications for the effective implementation of agreements in the
absence of institutional ‘shadows of hierarchy’ to provide binding force to agreements
between ‘social partner’s whose interests and objectives cannot be simply understood as
being the same.161
The ‘broader’ understanding of the Social Dialogue promises something more
ambitious and potentially novel.162 The recent rebranding of the previously lame Economic
and Social Committee (ESC) is a case in point. This EU institution was founded in 1958
along with the other original institutions of the EU and has provided a forum for 158 Smismans, S. “The European Social Dialogue in the Shadow of Hierarchy” (2008) 28:1, Journal of Public Policy. p 161. 159 Ibid. p 171. 160 ‘Commission-initiated and Council-implemented Collective Agreements’ and ‘Self-initiated but Council-implemented Collective Agreements’. 161 Ibid. p 172. 162 Smismans. Law, Legitimacy and European Governance. pp 317-318.
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representatives of national interest organisations to advise on European policy making,
mainly in areas pertaining to socio-economic matters. It has been said that hitherto the ESC
has supplied a never-ending stream of opinions which have not really made any difference
to policymaking, which has actually been dominated by civil servants in the Commission,
Council, and Parliament. In short, the prestige of the ESC has suffered along with European
social policy.163 However, the remit and composition of the ESC has more recently been
extended beyond economic groups, defined by their structural position in the market, to
become a ‘catch-all’ assembly of ‘civil society organisations’ more generally. Groups
which are now included promote such diverse issues as the environment, religion, family
life, human rights, R&D, and charity.164
Though the ESC is not strictly part of the (narrower) Social Dialogue, one might
argue that institutional lines of demarcation are coming down as both the ESC and the
Social Dialogue expand from matters of industrial relations into general areas of civil
society in a bid to widen and deepen their apparently ineffectual ability to influence
fundamental social and economic outcomes. In addition to this, the International Labour
Organisation (ILO), not an EU institution but still a recognised participant in an ever-
broadening vision of the Dialogue, also conceives of a Social Dialogue capable to “address
a wide range of issues from labour relations to wider social and economic challenges” at
the “provincial, regional, or state level”.165
This broader understanding of the future Social Dialogue emerges from the
Commission’s more recent utterances on the role and functioning of the Social Dialogue in
light of the growing exigencies of the Lisbon Strategy:
“The concertation [Social Dialogue] has been extended in recent years to cover many more topics with the setting-up of the macroeconomic dialogue, the launching of the European employment strategy, work on social protection and monitoring the conclusions of the Lisbon European Council”.166 “There is no limit to issues that can be covered by tripartite consultation”.167 We see here that a central element in the ‘broader’ potential role of the Social Dialogue, as
a form of decision-making, that is currently coming into vogue in European discourse is the 163 Bignami. “Rethinking Interest Representation in the European Union” . pp 439-440. 164 Ibid. p 440. 165 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 1. 166 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 13. [My Emphasis]. 167 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 15.
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Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC). The OMC has been said to offer a “flexible means
to address common policy issues without encroaching on sensitive areas of national
sovereignty, representing a ‘third way’ between communitarisation and purely national
governance and a potential test case for Habermasian deliberation”.168 This mode of
resolving policy problems, not via recourse to statutes, contracts, constitutions, cases, or
command authority structures, but by negotiation and consultation, casts its net further than
even the conventionally understood remit of the Social Dialogue. It must be noted that
OMCs are not part of Social Dialogue exclusively but are rather a potential, and
increasingly favoured, means for implementation of the Social Policy Agenda. Methods
include guidelines, indicators, benchmarking, and even shaming, but all are considered to
be pretty much non-binding, non-coercive and ‘soft’.
Being without institutional bounds, and more a mode than a form, the Commission
has clearly recognised the potential of this “innovation” for achieving the Lisbon
objectives, as can be seen from the quote above, and recognises that the “open method of
co-ordination, hitherto confined to the employment area, can now be applied to other social
policies”.169 Indeed, one now speaks not of OMC, but OMCs, as the number and variety
has multiplied into areas such as immigration, social cohesion, pensions, education, and
asylum. It is clear that the increasing pressure to implement the Lisbon Strategy is forcing
the narrower and more conventionally binding form of the Social Dialogue into the
inclusion of ‘softer’ methods such as OMCs to the extent that within the Social Dialogue:
“the recommendations of the High-Level Group on Industrial Relations and Change see the use of machinery based on the open method of coordination as an extremely promising way forward”.170 These ‘soft’ law practices (i.e. OMCs) and an ever more broadly and ‘loosely’ understood
Social Dialogue can pervade and penetrate society more effectively as a means of
‘decision-making’, and policy implementation, than conventional legal or socio-economic
institutions of decision-making can.
In the following chapters, though I will confine my critical analysis to the Social
Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Strategy in the context of the Social Dialogue, much of the
168 Pollack, A; Wallace, H; Wallace, W. (eds). Policy Making in the European Union (Oxford UP 2005). p 44. 169 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 2. 170 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 22. [Original Emphasis].
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critique will implicitly apply to the OMCs and so some references might be made to them
from time to time. There is a feeling that the broader, more insidious, pervasive and
encompassing, notion of the Social Dialogue is outgrowing the narrower bipartite emphasis
of the 1980s and 1990s. A decision-making institution that was formerly based on conflict-
resolution, bargaining, and more binding agreements, is now becoming a ‘softer’,
politically ‘consensual’ procedural environment for making agreements that purport to
include more actors at more levels more often, whether national, regional or European
wide. The consequences of this ‘broadening’ and ‘softening’ of the Social Dialogue’s remit
and operation, in terms of power, interests, and major political choices, could be stark and
will provide the focus for the rest of the work, particularly chapter 3.3 on asymmetric
relations.
As this might be a point of contention I should perhaps repeat here how I think that
to see the future of the Social Dialogue within the ‘narrower’ understanding, as has been
conventional hitherto, is possibly a mistake. The future of the Dialogue resides in its
capacity to fulfil its role as one of the most important midwives to the encompassing
demands of the Lisbon Strategy and to the enlargement of the Union. In the words of the
European Commission itself:
“The European social dialogue has arrived at a crossroads. It has considerable scope for action, extended further by the prospective enlargement and the back-up it requires. It is a vehicle for core values of participation and responsibility based on firmly-rooted national traditions and provides a suitable framework for managed modernisation. To take on this role properly at European level, it needs, however, to broaden its practices, diversify its operational methods and use to best advantage the entire bargaining area. This Communication lays a groundwork for strengthening social dialogue in an enlarged Europe”.171 If the Social Dialogue is therefore a ‘vehicle’ for the Lisbon objectives, then we ought to be
clear over what these objectives are.
The Lisbon Strategy
The Lisbon Strategy, or alternatively the Lisbon Agenda or Process, is much more explicit
and easily definable than the Social Dialogue. It was the result of the European Council in
Lisbon (2000) and it has a number of related general aims:
171 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 7. [My Emphasis].
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“The Lisbon European Council has identified a fresh set of challenges which must be met so that Europe can become ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ ”.172 “The Agenda aims to modernise the European social model, especially by improving collective capacity to act, and to offer new chances to all”.173
The Strategy represents a broad set of policies and goals set by the institutions of the EU to
improve the productive capacity of the euro-economy within the context and limits of the
‘social model’, which is compatible with European communitarian and social democratic
politics as broadly defined. The goals of the Lisbon Strategy were set from 2000 to 2010.
However, the period that followed the Lisbon European Council in March 2000 was
marked by a sharp reversal of fortune for the global economy.174 It seemed that the
European economy was still falling behind its American and Asian competitors in terms of
growth, productivity and ‘knowledge-intensive human capital’, set against the background
of an ageing population and very low demographic growth.175 Circumstantially, the
bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2001, the downturn in world trade in 2001, various
financial scandals, and geo-political instability in the wake of the 2003 Iraq War have all
contributed to falling financial confidence and contracting consumer demand throughout
the world economy.176 As an example, the employment rate for the EU-25 in 2003 was
63.9%, rather than the target 70%.177
The euro-economy apparently suffers from relatively low labour input, relatively
low levels of productivity growth and sluggish domestic consumer demand. This latter will
be of particular importance when the world economy absorbs the dampening effect of the
high oil prices and begins to recover.178 A High Level Group was tasked in 2004 to
investigate these problems with a view to the Commission relaunching the Lisbon Agenda
for the second half of the decade in the Spring European Council (2005). The result has
been a marked change of tone:
172 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 2. 173 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2005). p 3. 174 Communication from the President: Integrated Guidelines for Growth and Jobs 2005-2008 (2005). p 3. 175 Facing the Challenge: Report from the High Level Group (November 2004). p 6. 176 Communication from the President: Integrated Guidelines for Growth and Jobs 2005-2008 (2005). p 3. 177 Ibid. p 3. 178 Ibid. p 3. Though the course of this expected recovery has been cast into greater doubt in light of the present ‘credit crunch’ and the subsequent collapse of financial markets throughout Europe and America at the time of writing (July-Sept. 2008).
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“As stated in the Lisbon mid-term review, the Commission will make proposals to remove obstacles to labour mobility , notably those arising from occupational pension schemes”.179 The relaunch of the Lisbon Strategy from 2005 onwards is much more explicitly pro-
business in its proposals, aims, priorities, language, and general tone whilst falling back on
prognostications of economic doom and social malaise as a consequence of non-
compliance.180 The emphasis is now on more jobs rather than better jobs, and on greater
output and productivity. Nevertheless, bearing this in mind, one might say that this has
been an implicit quality of the Lisbon Strategy since its inception eight years ago and that
circumstances have simply placed greater pressure on the need to ‘liberalise’ markets to
meet productive expectations.
It is essential to this thesis that the Lisbon Agenda and the Social Dialogue be
treated in conjunction, not separately. The reason is that both are interrelated, the Social
Dialogue provides the mechanism in which Lisbon can gain leverage. One ought to
remember that in the Commission’s self perception, the “European social dialogue could
constitute a tool for the modernisation announced at the Lisbon European Council for all
key issues on the European agenda”.181 One can see that, in the implementation of the
Lisbon Strategy, the Social Dialogue is considered to be “the most effective way of
modernising contractual relations” and the objective is “to make social dialogue at all levels
contribute in an effective way to the challenges identified [in the Lisbon Agenda]”.182
As the Lisbon Strategy is such a wide-ranging set of policy objectives I should
perhaps clarify once more what it is that I am focusing upon within it. Whilst being still
interested in the Lisbon Strategy generally, it is the ‘Social Policy Agenda’ that concerns
me most. Whilst the Lisbon Strategy presents a comprehensive policy package that covers
diverse areas from education and the environment to pensions and asylum, the Social
Policy Agenda is that dimension and set of policies in the Lisbon Strategy which most
closely pertain to the Social Dialogue and the domain of European industrial relations and
employment. In the words of the Commission:
179 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2005). p 8. [My Emphasis]. 180 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Jobs and Growth – A New Start for the Lisbon Strategy (2005). p 4. 181 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 16. [Original Emphasis]. 182 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). pp 14, 23.
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“This Social Policy Agenda forms part of the integrated European approach towards achieving the economic and social renewal outlined at Lisbon. Specifically, it seeks to ensure the positive and dynamic interaction of economic, employment and social policy, and to forge a political agreement which mobilises all key actors to work jointly towards the new strategic goal”.183 The Social Policy Agenda has consisted of two phases, the first from 2000 to 2005 and the
second from 2005 to 2010, with the Lisbon relaunch dividing the two phases. To aid the
mental picturing of the relationship, one might say that the Social Policy Agenda has been
‘colonised’ by the wider Lisbon Process, increasingly so after the Lisbon mid-term Review
and relaunch for the second phase (2005-2010). Its role is to support and channel Lisbon in
the area of social policy and industrial relations, primarily via the widening Social
Dialogue.184
When reflecting upon the Lisbon objectives, considering the adaptive imperatives of
global competitiveness, and the possible lack of both a coherent political historical vision
and the conceptual vocabulary necessary to express it, there does seem to be a risk that the
attempted ‘reconciliation’ of capital and labour might become rather an ‘integration’,
‘assimilation’, or ‘domination’, of the latter by the former, via the forces of production and
of vested interests. One must ask whether without a coherent historical and conceptual self-
understanding, and without adequate contestation of our political vision, when the Lisbon
Strategy aims to “mobilise all key actors”,185 how can we be sure of the ends for which we
are being mobilised.
It is my understanding that the Social Dialogue, within which the Social Policy
Agenda of the Lisbon Strategy will operate, provides a fundamental social, political, and
economic environment through which social forces and participating interests can exert
influence, pressure and power in the form of an apparent consensual ‘reconciliation’ of the
historic forces of capital, labour, and the state. It must be stressed that one might argue that
they are empowered to do so because of the absence of the conceptual, ideological, and
theoretical means to resist them or to even recognise and analyse their respective roles
sufficiently.
183 Ibid. p 2. [My Emphasis]. 184 Kvist, Saari. The Europeanisation of Social Protection. p 11. 185 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 2.
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An ‘Ideal Speech Situation’?
Having explored the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy in greater detail, and having
demonstrated the manner of their inter-relation, I shall now develop the idea that the
‘broader’ Social Dialogue, which envisages a greater role for OMCs, has pretentions to
become a Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ in which more effective and legitimate
democratic decision-making can take place. A crucial line of investigation in this thesis will
be set on the credibility of such a claim and on the potential consequences for the two main
thematic questions of the thesis outlined at the outset: Is there conceptual confusion in the
Social Dialogue and, if so, how does it play a part in the integrating and instrumental
tendencies of economic competition that dominate the objectives of the Lisbon Strategy.
We must now recognise the Commission’s ‘consensual’ characterisation of the
European Social Dialogue and from where it draws its Habermasian inspiration and
framework. Though an explicit connection might not be readily available, it is my view that
much of the structure and procedure of the Social Dialogue resembles, to a great extent,
Habermas’ theory of communicative action and universal pragmatics put into praxis. The
institutional and procedural character of Habermas’ idea of consensual democracy enthuses
the vision of the Social Dialogue throughout EU institutions and communications. For
instance, the Commission has stated, in regard to the ‘social partners’ in the Lisbon process,
that it will “step up technical assistance made available to them for collecting, reviewing
and discussing information on the implementation of these guidelines”.186 This will take
place in “procedures for dialogue at technical and political level”.187 This seems to
resemble the pragmatistic model of decision-making preferred by Habermas’ over the
technocratic and decisionistic models of the past, which do not synthesise a collaboration
and mutual discourse between politically determined aims and the technical means with
which to achieve them. This was clearly elaborated in chapter 2.3. This is not to say,
however, that the European Commission has explicitly and self-consciously attempted to
put Habermas’ theories into practice, but this is nevertheless the general outcome.
Beyond this, there is reason to believe that the Social Dialogue is structured, at least
rhetorically, to create a facsimile of the ‘ideal speech situation’ as laid out in the
186 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 15. 187 Ibid. p 14. [My Emphasis].
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immediately preceding chapter. Recalling the five pre-requisites of the ‘ideal speech
situation’ covered in chapter 2.3 – Generality, Autonomy, Ideal Role-taking, Power
Neutrality, and Transparency – we can see how the Social Dialogue is intended to recreate
most of these conditions:
“Social Dialogue can be defined as a process, in which actors inform each other of their intentions and capacities, elaborate information provided to them, and clarify and explain their assumptions”.188 [Transparency]. “The Commission wishes to promote and improve the contribution of the social dialogue to better European governance through a series of proposals covering areas of fundamental importance: improved consultation, social partners’ representatives, tighter links and greater involvement at different levels, and transparency in dialogue”.189 [Transparency].
“The legitimacy and effectiveness of the social-partner consultation is based on their representativeness”.190 [Generality]. “The social partners should be fully involved in the preparation of these rules” [rules for the procedures themselves, these might be understood as ‘validity claims’].191 [Autonomy]. “In order to ensure better participation of marginalised groups, provisions ensuring their participation should be included in the rules or regulations of social dialogue institutions and fora”.192 [Generality and Power Neutrality]. “Each party should enter the dialogue with a common framework of reference and a common understanding of the purposes of social dialogue”.193 [Autonomy and Transparency]. “Social Dialogue, that is all types of negotiation, consultation or information-sharing among actors from different segments of society”.194 [Generality].
So as we can see, the superficial thrust of the Social Dialogue is about “facilitating
constructive interaction in order to arrive at social consensus/compromise among the
stakeholders in a society”195. The European Commission at least claims that the Social
Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Process has been subjected to wide-scale consultation and
dialogue with the different interested parties including non-governmental organisations,
social partners, and advisory committees.196 The critique in the following chapters will, at
188 Report of the High Level Group on Industrial Relations and Change in the European Union (2002a). p 25. 189 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 8. 190 Ibid. p 9. 191 Ibid. p 14. 192 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 10. 193 Ibid. p 11. 194 Ibid. p 5. 195 Ibid. p 1. 196 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 5.
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least partly, be based upon the reasonable assumption that the Social Dialogue is a species
of Habermas’ universal pragmatics and theory of communicative action put into practice.
Whether this claim lives, or can live, up to expectations of consensual politics is another
matter.
3.2 The Social Dialogue and the Concept of ‘Society’ “The terms [concepts] gradually die when the functions and experiences in the actual life of society cease to be bound up with them. At times, too, they only sleep, or sleep in certain respects, and acquire a new existential value from a new social situation”.197 Introduction
In this chapter, I want to look at the historical and contemporary use of the concept of
‘Society’, so important in the Social Dialogue, and to see how this transition can have
implications for our ability to conceptualise political and social organisation and action in a
way that has critical potential in the manner indicated in chapter 2.3. That the concept of
‘Society’ is integral to the Social Dialogue is a fairly evident observation. The ‘social’ is
patently the area of human activity with which the Social Dialogue is concerned and the
assumption of the existence of ‘Society’ is therefore implicit. The types of activity,
relations, and actors which the Dialogue is intended to encompass must be based upon the
belief that ‘Society’ first of all exists, and in a form compatible with the Dialogue’s other
assumptions, aims, and modes of operation.
It has been quite fairly lamented that a “‘full’ treatment of the topic of society is
clearly an awesome and perhaps impossible task”.198 The concept of ‘Society’ can have a
multiplicity of meanings even by a single interlocutor, often varying with audience,
intention, and circumstance.199 One might say that the concept of society has often been
inappropriately generalised thus destroying the great variety of conceptions of the term by
different political cultures or language communities.200 This generalisation is not so
surprising given that the social scientific paradigm, to which the concept of society is so
197 Elias, N. The Civilising Process: Sociogenic and Psychogenic Investigations (1939; 2000 Blackwell). pp 8-9. 198 Bowers, J; Iwi, K. “The Discursive Construction of Society” (1993) 4:3, Discourse and Society. p 358. 199 Kettunen, P. “Yhteiskunta – Society in Finnish” (2000) Vol 4, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought. SoPhi, Jyväskylä. p 159. 200 Ibid. pp 159-161.
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central, places the ability to conceptually generalise by induction at the heart of its criterion
as a paradigm or sub-discipline.201 It must be said that most of the more recent uses,
analyses, and descriptions of the concept have come from sociology, as one might expect,
and so are embedded in the epistemological assumptions associated with that particular
discipline.
I will not conduct a reductionist analysis where all the ways of accounting for a
phenomenon or concept are eliminated until the ‘real’ explanation or description remains.
Instead, I am interested in a number of related discourses on the concept which hopefully
will mutually help to illuminate the concept both generally and in relation to the Social
Dialogue.202 Nevertheless, this chapter will pursue the implicit Immanent Critique that was
outlined in chapter 2.1 and in this case it means that ‘Society’ as a concept is criticised on
its own terms and with its own normative standards.203
There are two themes to this chapter. Firstly, I intend to demonstrate that the
concept is necessarily linked to suppositions of meaning that are predicated on a ‘modern’
view of the cosmos, and to then analyse how modern-postmodern boundary problematises
the concept’s understanding in the Commissions view of the Social Dialogue. Secondly, I
want to explore the idea of the ‘Market Society’ as a more particular sub-concept of
‘Society’ and to see how the problematisation of ‘Society’ can effect a divorce of politics
from economy and society with all the instrumental one-dimensional implications.
However, before that a look at the two more particular concepts of Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft might provide a useful foundation to the detailed treatment that will follow.
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft These two concepts represent an attempt to recognise and distinguish ‘modern’ human
association from ‘pre-modern’ (or non-modern) and so provide a very useful means of
understanding both the modernity of the concept of ‘Society’ and more recent
understandings of the concept.
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft represent two mutually comprehensive perspectives
of human association and are a legacy of the great 19th Century powerhouse that was
201 Munslow. The New History. pp 104, 119. 202 Bowers; Iwi. “The Discursive Construction of Society”. p 361. 203 Kettunen. “Yhteiskunta”. p 164.
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German sociology. These two conceptual categories were explored most thoroughly as
sociological categories in Ferdinand Tönnies’ eponymous work and though they might
have been of fluctuating popularity they are nevertheless of sustained importance for they
provide two key ‘normal-types’ in sociology.204 These ‘normal types’ are opposed to
‘action-types’, in that the former ones are derived and treated axiomatically and deductively
and the latter empirically and inductively. In the Kantian tradition, Tönnies reckoned that
the ‘real’ could not be understood without conceptual categories of the mind, ergo action-
types, and applied sociology could not be interpreted without such concepts.
Gemeinschaft, roughly translated into ‘Community’, represents the group as unity
and whole. Without slipping into an obscure metaphysical idiom, it is that matrix of ‘real’
and organic relations in which we are immersed from birth.205 It is the language, mores,
beliefs, assumptions, intuitions of the family and clan. It is inescapable, insidious, and
implicit as are the inexplicable recesses of culture. Its semantic field might consist of terms
such as tradition, belief, bond, organic, collective, emotion, or kin. In an Aristotelian way,
Tönnies works the concept out from first principles. He seems to begin with an assumption
of the unity of human wills as a natural or original condition.206 Familial ties constitute the
embryonic form, next follows a Gemeinschaft of locality based on common habit and
physical life. Finally, comes the Gemeinschaft of mind based on coordinated action toward
a common goal. This is the ‘Community’ of mental life, which realises the truly human and
supreme form of Gemeinschaft whose “spiritual friendship forms a kind of invisible scene
or meeting which has to be kept alive by... the creative will”. Kinship (house),
neighbourhood (village), and friendship are thus derivatives of the original categories.207 In
the concept of Gemeinschaft there is little significance or attachment to concepts of
exchange and purchase, of contract or regulations.208
Gesellschaft, approximately translated into ‘Society’, is a “strange country” of an
imaginary and mechanical structure. It is the “public life and the World itself”, a world of
business, travel and sciences.209 The semantic field here might rather include voluntarist,
204 These are not Weberian ‘ideal types’ which have are more diachronic and historical. 205 Tönnies, F. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Michigan State UP 1887; 1957). pp 33-34. 206 Ibid. p 37. 207 Ibid. p 43. 208 Ibid. p 59. 209 Ibid. pp 33-34.
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‘received culture’, mechanism, market, contract, individual. This concept deals with the
artificial construction of an aggregate of human beings which superficially resembles the
Gemeinchaft in so far as the individuals live and dwell together peacefully. In the
Gesellschaft everybody is alone, isolated in a condition of tension against all others. No
actions are derived from an a priori unity; no actions manifest the will and spirit of the
unity and whereas in the Gemeinschaft these actions remain essentially united in spite of all
separating factors, here in the Gesellschaft they are essentially separated in spite of all
uniting factors. In this way such a negative attitude toward one another becomes the normal
and always underlying relation of these power endowed individuals, and it characterises the
Gesellschaft in rest; nobody wants to grant and produce anything for another individual, nor
will he be inclined to give ungrudgingly to another individual, if it be not in exchange for a
gift or labour equivalent that he considers at least equal to what he has given.210 One can
therefore see how the will of the exchange becomes universal as each individual grants and
produces in expectation of receiving an equivalent gift which is then considered in
aggregate. Thus it is that “the exchange itself, considered as a united and single act,
represents the content of the assumed social will”.211 That is, it represents to some extent,
the Market.
‘Consensus’ is an issue in the distinction between the two concepts where one could
speak of Gemeinschaft comprising the whole of mankind whereas Gesellschaft is
conceived as mere coexistence of people independent of each other. The importance of
these two sub-concepts is that they provide a touchstone landmark for understanding other
views of ‘Society’ and some of my arguments that are to follow.
One can see Feudalism as a system or culture which expanded the patriarchal
authority and character of the kinship relation of the Gemeinschaft and found highest
expression in the cult, fraternity, the guild, or the religious community of the medieval and
early-modern world.212 On the other hand, the atomised, empirical view of human relations
in the modern Gesellschaft reflects much of the political thought of the early-modern
empirical and contract theorists whose works coincided with the emergence of such
relations and upon whose thought much of modern Western political institutions are based.
210Tönnies. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. p 65. 211 Ibid. pp 66-67. 212 Ibid. p 50.
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The concept of Gesellschaft entails the presence of boundaries, roles, demarcation and is
predicated on the epistemological assumption of the subject-object distinction.
Some Conventional Understandings of the Concept At this point it might be well to touch upon some conventional understandings of the
concept of ‘Society’ so as to make my subsequent connection of Society to modernity a
little clearer. The Weberian understanding of Society, and also the most common intuitive
understanding, would most probably correspond to society as an Absent Concept.213 This
sees ‘Society’ as a categorical means by which we make sense of the inter-relation and
activity of human life. This is perhaps the most abstract, broad, and encompassing concept
of Society. Here Society is constituted by those processes of interaction or association in
which individuals engage. Society thus emerges out of the meaningful and intentional
action of individuals and groups of individuals.214 This understanding of the concept is not
treated as something particular beyond being a loose synonym for general associations of
people and consequently is of little direct use in our analysis of concepts.
Another common way of looking at ‘Society’ is to see it as a Sui Generis Object.
Here the concept is deliberately distanced from the ‘common sense’ anthropocentric
perception of society as nothing but an aggregation of individuals where the individual
constitutes the focus of analytical attention. In contrast to that, a Durkheimian reading
posits that social facts exist sui generis, necessitating the existence of a social realm which
is distinct from the psyche and the physical. Social facts must therefore be studied
objectively from without, just like other phenomena of nature. Furthermore, society is a
whole, an object which “is distinct from and greater than the sum of its parts. It forms a
specific order of reality with its own distinctive characteristics”.215 Once again we see that
positivistic suppositions of the subject-object dichotomy lie beneath this social scientific
treatment of the concept and the classic Cartesian constitutional duality of human nature
where Man is understood to be composed of two radically heterogeneous entities: the body
and the soul. This moral community in transcendence of the individual does not account for
society’s rootedness in concrete material conditions and relations, nor does it take much
213 Frisby, D; Sayer, D. Society (Ellis Horwood 1986). pp 54-74. 214 Bowers; Iwi. “The Discursive Construction of Society”. p 358. 215 Frisby; Sayer. Society. pp 35-36.
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account of intention, motive, and purpose as distinctive features of individual human
action. Society as Object fails to recognise that the ‘social’ and the ‘individual’ cannot be
opposed because the predicates of the individual are in themselves social is character and
origin.216
In treating ‘Society’ as a Cognitive Ideal one approaches society as an idea in the
German philosophic sense – it is a reality itself.217 Society is still derived from the sui
generis collectivity and not from the individual. However, this understanding differs
somewhat in that, though meaning is derived from within a communicative community, it
remains firmly a social phenomenon. Meaning does not stem from individual utterances
and speech acts and so this society is not the product of intersubjectivity in the sense found
in the previous chapters. Society therefore furnishes both the content of our thought and the
framework within which we think. Despite its idealistic nature, this concept still posits
society and individual as separate and distinct entities/phenomena.
In the Marxist tradition Society must be treated not as an abstraction but as an
historical set of material relations, as one might have expected. In an inversion of
Aristotle’s maxim, this Marxist position takes Man as essentially a social animal and
society does not exist separately as a subject apart from individuals and their
interrelations.218 In the Marxist tradition, Society as Object, Absent Concept, and as
Cognitive Ideal are all thought to be products of Gesellschaft and of the characteristic
‘modern’ reciprocal action therein. To Marx, the isolated individual assumed in the thought
of classical economic thought, empirical natural law, and social contract theory is a
specifically modern individual who has been projected into the past as ‘Man’ in the state-
of-nature rather than understood as the ‘real historical man’. Interestingly, it seems that to
him “only in the 18th Century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social
connectedness confront the individual as a mere means toward his private purposes, as
external necessity”.219 Therefore, to Marx, Society and social relations are something
distinctively ‘modern’.
216 Ibid. p 50. 217 Ibid. p 75. 218 Ibid. p 91. 219 Marx, K. Grungrisse (Penguin 1858; 1973). p 84.
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What these conventional understandings of ‘Society’ have in common is that they
are derived from a methodological individualism that works within the assumption of the
epistemological subject-object dichotomy. They are therefore heavily implicated in modern
characteristics and relations. This understanding of Society as a thoroughly modern concept
has come under strong disintegrating pressure from post-structuralism, and a greater
emphasis on the role of language as the source of meaning, and on the concept of ‘Culture’
(i.e. communities, individuals, race, gender, discourse) as providing a more legitimate arena
for a lot of academic study of human organisation and interaction.220 We now must explore
in greater detail how the concept is inextricably connected to Modernity and what are the
consequences for the future of ‘Society’ as a distinct concept in the Social Dialogue.
Indeed, there are those who consider the concept to be increasingly defunct for this very
reason.221
‘Society’ as a Modern Concept in the Social Dialogue The particular dominating condition in which all Europeans, to a greater or lesser degree,
have understood themselves and the Universe around them for the last few centuries is
‘Modernity’. The concept of Modernity is too awesome to be explored, but is loosely
understood as:
“a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which unlike any preceding culture lives in the future rather than the past”.222
In addition to this, Modernity is also “the ties of society to the nation-state; the
notion of society as an integrated holistic entity; and the notion of progress and
rationalisation as inherent powers and qualities of society”.223 As was already explained in
chapter 2.2, the Sattelzeit of the late 18th Century was a key period of conceptual shift,
accompanied by radical change in material conditions, which was instrumental in the
appearance of this distinctly ‘modern’ view of the world. The question is whether there is 220 Kettunen. “Yhteiskunta”. pp 159, 188-191. 221 Baudrillard, J. Simulations (New York 1983). 222 Giddens, A. Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Stanford UP 1998). p 94. 223 Kettunen. “Yhteiskunta”. p 161.
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not a current conceptual-epistemological shift and a consequent time of crisis as this
distinct ‘modern’ ontology is eroded. A strong indication has been put forward numerously
so far that the idea that ‘Society’ is predicated on the connected and supporting matrices of
meaning found in Modernity and is therefore being replaced by other concepts as the
modern condition is superseded by a post-modern condition. In this process, to what extent
do usages of the concept of ‘Society’ in the Social Dialogue, demonstrate an increasingly
incompatible and untenable expectation to shape human futures based on universalised
reason, and what are the political consequences of this.
First of all, it is pivotal to remember that the mere presence of technological
applications of science does not allow us to speak of a modern society, for that one must
look at changing attitudes, ideas, concepts, epistemologies, and interrelations.224 Secondly,
the ‘modern’ is inextricably linked to secularism and science by its shared assumption of an
epistemology of the subject-object distinction and the rise of the solus ipse principle. The
characteristic of the Western ideology of Modernity is that it replaced the idea of the
subject and the related idea of God with the idea of observable principles derived from
‘nature’, just as meditations on the soul were replaced by the dissection of corpses or the
study of the synapses of the brain.225 Indeed, the idea of Modernity makes science, rather
than God, central to society and at best relegates religious beliefs to the inner realm of
private life. We can also say that the distinctive feature of the Western tradition, at the
moment when it identified most strongly with Modernity, was the attempt to move from a
recognition of the essential role of rationalisation to the broader notion of a rational identity
in which reason would take control of not only scientific and technical activity, but also of
the government of human beings as well as the government of things.226 This means that, in
the Modern Age, ‘Society’ becomes the medium through which Enlightenment principles
and practical reason are exercised and realised for secularised theodicean ends on the
horizon of teleological expectations of progress.
Here we can see more clearly how the concept of ‘Society’ as Gesellschaft is more
appropriately understood as characteristic of modern activity over the pre-modern ‘action-
type’ of ‘Community’ (Gesellschaft). Perhaps most insightfully, this is because the most
224 Touraine, A. Critique of Modernity (Blackwell 1995). p 9. 225 Ibid. p 11. 226 Ibid. p 10.
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powerful conception of modernity, and the one which has had the most profound effects,
asserted above all that rationalisation required the destruction of so-called traditional social
bonds, customs, feelings, and beliefs, and that the agent of modernisation was neither a
particular social class or category, but reason itself and the historical necessity that was
paving the way for its triumph.227 Reason takes nothing for granted, it sweeps away social
and political beliefs and forms of organisation which are not based upon scientific
proofs.228 Modern human relations based upon these assumptions were re-enforced by the
related need for regularity and predictability of action in the perceived impersonal and
atomised relations of the Gesellschaft where the sole goal of social policies for
modernisation must be to clear a path for reason by getting rid of corporatist rules, customs
barriers, or defences by creating the security and predictability required by business, and by
training competent and conscientious operatives and managers.229
What applies to society also applies to the individual. The education of the
individual must be a discipline which frees him from the narrow and irrational vision forced
upon him by his family and his own passions, and therefore prepares him be an isolated
unit, or object, in the Gesellschaft. In ‘Society’, as distinct from other forms of human
association, actions are not just coordinated in processes of reaching understanding
(Gemeinschaft) but through functional interconnections that are not intended and often not
perceived (Gesellschaft).
Epistemologically, one can see how the early-modern natural law theorists
transposed features of the existing civil society back into the state of nature in order to
demonstrate the natural and rational grounds for establishing a social contract thus
confusing the observable and the immanent, the object and the subject.230 Objectivist
naturalism and recourse to instrumental reason are therefore complementary, so much so
that the combination has endured throughout the entire modern era perhaps until Freud. It
seems that the main function of the combination of nature and reason in the modern
concept of ‘Society’ is “to unite man and the world”, one might say ‘in spite of all
227 Touraine. Critique of Modernity. p 10. 228 Ibid. p 11. 229 Ibid. p 11. 230 Frisby; Sayer. Society. p 19.
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separating factors’ characteristic of modern Gesellschaft relations and tendencies, in the
pursuit of a universe of intrinsic meaning.231
At the supposed ‘postmodern boundary’ Society is becoming increasingly estranged
from the demands, needs, identities, and values of social actors. This is of particular
importance when considering the present state of class, solidarity, trade unionism, industrial
relations and Society in the post-industrial and ‘post-modern’ circumstances.232
So what we have here in our modern-postmodern ‘air du temp’ is an growing
undermining of the epistemological assumptions of natural law, solus ipse, positivist
empiricism, and the subject-object distinction which increasingly brings into question both
the universalistic and secularised principles and the ‘modern’ relations and identities of the
Gesellschaft. ‘Society’ ceases to function in the ‘modern’ understanding as a medium
which substitutes for the divine and through which universal principles and practical reason
are exercised for expected progressive ends. Though new apprehensions of the concept are
likely to emerge, the point here is to discuss how this change problematises the usage of the
Concept in the Social Dialogue.
“Just think what Europe could be. Think of the innate strengths of our enlarged union. Think of its untapped potential to create prosperity and offer opportunity and justice for all its citizens. Europe can be a beacon of economic, social and environmental progress to the rest of the world”.233 One can see that ‘Society’ is evidently an important concept in the Social Dialogue. The
two are inextricably linked to the extent that “Social Dialogue is acknowledged to be an
essential component of the European model of society and development”.234 Also, the
Social Dialogue, and its understanding of the concept of ‘Society’, is “rooted in the history
of the European Continent”.235 It is my contention in this chapter that should one to look at
the European Commission Communication quoted above, which has announced the Lisbon
Strategy’s re-launch with great pomp, one can see that the implicitly ‘modern’
understanding of the concept of ‘Society’ that I have put forward pervades throughout the
Social Dialogue’s self-perception therein.
231 Touraine. Critique of Modernity. p 15. [Original Italics]. 232 Touraine, A. “La Recomposition du Monde par Alain Touraine” (1994) jeudi 1 septembre, La République des Lettres; Hyman. “Where Does Solidarity End?”. 233 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Growth and Jobs. p 3. [My Emphases]. 234 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 6. 235 Ibid. p 6.
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The first impression that strikes the reader is that of the histrionic and rhetorical
style that permeates these documents. One can see from the extracts above that such
language might be deemed worthy of the most dramatic flourishes of the Age of Revolution.
To refer to “beacons” of “progress”, “justice”, and “opportunity” in such categorical terms
sounds reminiscent of the crudest rhetorical reproduction of what might be called
Enlightenment principles.
“To ensure the development and respect of fundamental social rights as a key component of an equitable society and of respect for human dignity”.236 This quote from the Social Policy Agenda demonstrates how the discussion of ‘rights’,
‘equality’, and ‘human dignity’, though woefully rhetorical, are nevertheless evidence of
both an assumption of the ‘Enlightenment Project’ and the distinctly modern Society built
upon early-modern natural law philosophy and the subject-object dichotomy.
Furthermore, ‘Society’ as an enabling medium through which human life can be
purposively influenced by the application of reason is clearly present in the Social
Dialogue’s self-perception. If the idea is that “within civil society, the social partners have a
particular role and influence”, and if Lisbon is tasked to “confront the new challenges to
social policy resulting from the radical transformation of Europe’s economy and
society”,237 then the modern understanding of society as a mechanism for rational and
purposive change is obviously upheld. Likewise, the whole repeated thrust of the Social
Dialogue is oriented toward “Europe’s Future”, which is a significant aspect of the modern
Society as a historically aware teleological mechanism aimed at progressive horizons.
Perhaps most conclusively the Commission envisages the Social Dialogue as:
“a vehicle for core values of participation and responsibility based on firmly-rooted national traditions and provides a suitable framework for managed modernisation, also in the candidate countries”.238
This interpretation of the Dialogue’s understanding of ‘Society’ is further strengthened by
the interesting absence of the concept of ‘Community’ throughout the Commission
Communications, aside from its use in the legal phrase of ‘European Community’. Though
in our times there increasingly seems to be a new confidence in the possibility and curing
236 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 22. 237 Ibid. p 5. [My Emphasis]. 238 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 7. [My Emphasis].
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capacity of ‘communities’ [Gemeinschaft] in relation to identity politics, the potential of
this concept to effect change in the distinctly modern manner discussed earlier in the
chapter is not present in the Commission Communications on the Social Dialogue.239 The
self-perception is therefore that of Society understood in the modern sense of a medium for
rational purposive future-oriented action.
In the Commission Communications pertaining to the Social Dialogue, Society as
an objectified modern Sui Generis entity seems to be a particularly frequently implied use
of the concept, though this is neither exclusive nor entire as the discussion of Habermas
will show in the next chapter. It is stated that “Social partners have a unique position within
civil society because they are best-placed to address issues related to work and can
negotiate agreements which include commitments”.240 The Social Policy Agenda is to be
“carried out in close co-operation with the civil society”.241 This objectified view of (civil)
society is not, however, an overarching or transcending idea but rather a domain of
impersonal activity distinct from other domains (i.e. the State, ‘Community’, or family),
nor is it really an Absent Concept, but a separate objective entity that can be worked ‘with’,
‘through’, or ‘within’.
It is interesting that again and again the Commission Communications refer to
various sub-concepts of ‘Society’, and phrases that are hyphenated to it. These include
“information-society”, “knowledge-society”, and “economy and society”. Here we have
what are almost a species of clarifying quasi-utterances that one often finds in speech acts
to clarify the intended meaning of an utterance in a certain context. These prefixes and
companion words are undoubtedly connected to a distinctively modern set of semantic
meanings and forms of interactivity. For example, the concept of ‘knowledge’ powerfully
connotes objective-empiricism, purposive savoir-faire, and concrete outcomes, rather than
the phronetic connotations of ‘wisdom’ or ‘prudence’.
So we come to it. How can an intersubjective view of the Social Dialogue, which is
proposed in the Commission Communications, be compatible with ‘Society’ understood as
a purposive mechanism for rational transformative social change and ‘modernisation,’ as
explained above, if the ‘modern’ epistemological and ontological suppositions and
239 Kettunen. “Yhteiskunta”. p 190. 240 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 5. 241 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 22.
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categories of such a ‘Society’ are being undermined? As the rising ‘postmodern’ notion of
‘identity’ as an all-determining category is devolving participation in society onto the level
of the individual, our societies are turning into increasingly uncoordinated sets of
collectivities, subcultures, and individuals. Can one truly speak of government policies of
transformation or modernisation through such an amorphous and ethereal mediating
concept as ‘Culture’. One might say that the concept of ‘Community’ shows more promise
and, referring to the idea of the ‘Imagined Community’, it has been mooted that as former
issues on the political agenda of national ‘society’ are transformed into external imperative
conditions of global market, the idea of the national ‘imagined community’ may be
strengthened, and some kind of moral and national competitive community reshape or
replace the concept of ‘Society’.242 But nevertheless, one has to remain sceptical, firstly, of
the universal and decontextualised applicability of this idea, especially in regard to the EU,
and secondly, because it still assumes a fairly high degree of coherence in political units.
Regardless, there is no indication of any such notion in the Commission Communications
on the future role of the Social Dialogue or in the Commission’s presentation of the Lisbon
Strategy.
The more recent fashionable growth in “new governance” and “soft” practices
which are integral and implicit to the current operations of the Social Dialogue are not
obviously compatible with what is, broadly speaking, a ‘modern’ understanding of
‘Society’. Indeed, the aim and reality of EU policy seems more concerned with the erosion
of nations, classes, societies in favour of quasi-legal discursive practices, communities and
areas which are more distinctive of what might be called aspects of the ‘postmodern’.243 So
on the one hand, the Commission and its recommended practices are implicated in the
retreat from ‘Society’ and its related modes and categories. On the other hand, the
Commission assumes the existence of ‘Society’ for the purposive implementation of its
policies in the ‘good old-fashioned way’. This conceptual confusion arises from a
historically insensitive understanding of concepts. It therefore robs ‘Society’, as employed
in the Commission Communications on the Social Dialogue, of its role as a mechanism for
242 Kettunen. “Yhteiskunta”. p 191. 243 see Lyotard. The Post-Modern Condition (Minnesota UP 1984).
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rational action toward purposive socio-political change and replaces it with a hollow and
impotent rhetorical echo of the concept’s former meaning.
If Man is no longer in political control, if indeed he ever was, and ‘God is dead’,
then what forces or agents step up to the breach? If we no longer have faith in ‘progress’ or
that prosperity will lead to greater democratisation and happiness, then the liberating vision
of Reason will recede in favour of the haunting spectre of a rationalisation that
concentrates the power to take decisions at the top or nowhere at all.
“Given that both collective and individual identity is fragile in a world which is exposed to market forces, there is now a no-man’s-land between the market and private life. In it, we can still see the ruins of public life, but violence is on the increase as socialisation declines”.244 3.3 The Lisbon Strategy: Consensus Claims and Power
“[Economic Competitiveness] has become the prime objective not just of enterprises but also of the State and of society as a whole.... The ‘gospel of competition’, like all ideologies, boils down to a few simple ideas. We are engaged willy nilly – so the industrialists, economists, political leaders and academics tell us – in a ruthless technological, industrial and economic war encompassing the entire planet. The aim is to survive, and survival hinges on being competitive. Otherwise there is no short- and long-term salvation, no growth, no economic and social welfare”.245 “The complimentary relationship between state and economy results in a goal conflict, of which there is a broad effective awareness, especially in downward phases of the business cycle; the conflict is between a policy of stability which has to adjust its measures to an independent, cyclical dynamic of the economic process and, on the other hand, a policy of reform meant to compensate for the social costs of capitalist growth, which policy requires investments irrespective of the business situation and of profit considerations”.246 Like the concept of ‘society’, the concept of ‘consensus’ has no general definition that will
be of great analytical use. Terms of use and meaning vary from context to context and so a
protracted definitional or genealogical discussion of what we mean by ‘consensus’ is not
apposite here. However, there is one distinction that I think will be of some use. It has been
said that “in everyday life we start from a background consensus pertaining to those
interpretations taken for granted among participants”.247 In this basic understanding
consensus is a normative set of background assumptions amongst a given group of people
preceding some kind of action or communication, it is a condition of being. This bears
244 Touraine. Critique of Modernity. pp 373-374. 245 Petrella. “Europe Between Competitive Innovation and a New Social Contract”. pp 11-12. 246 Habermas. Communication and Evolution of Society. p 196. 247 Ibid. p 3.
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some similarity to Rawls’s ‘Overlapping Consensus’ where, since no political agreement
on disputed questions can reasonably be expected, “we turn instead to the fundamental
ideas we seem to share through the political culture”.248 In this chapter, and in the Social
Policy Agenda, we are concerned with ‘consensus’ as a process of decision-making within
or between groups rather than as a prior set of shared assumptions.
The reason for this differentiation of consensus, either as condition or as process, is
that the former is normative, subconscious and untouchable, whereas the latter is within
reach of more tangible and particular claims for political interaction. Consensus as a
relatively ‘organic’ set of shared normative assumptions might be better termed concord
rather than consensus, a distinction that Tönnies himself seems to make:
“A mixed or complex form of common determinative will, which has become as natural as language
itself and which consists of a multitude of feelings of understanding which are measured by its norms, we call concord (Eintracht) or family spirit (concordia as a cordial allegiance and unity)”. This is the “will of the Gemeinschaft in its most elementary forms, including understanding in their separate relations and actions and concord in their total force and nature”.249 In this terminology, Concord is embedded in the personal relations of the Gemeinschaft and
is not of the same species as the understanding of consensus entailed in the claims of the
Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy which are connected to the distinct relations and
actions more characteristic of activity in the Gesellschaft. To Tönnies there is a “reciprocal,
binding sentiment as a peculiar will of a Gemeinschaft [which] we shall call understanding
[concord]” and which “represents the special social force and sympathy which keeps
human beings together as members of a totality”.250 So whilst we ought to remember that
Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft must not be understood in isolation but as complementary
and integral, we should nevertheless remember that by understanding concord as
semantically linked to Gemeinschaft and consensus to Gesellschaft we can see that
consensus is an outcome rooted in decision-making action amongst interacting but
impersonal agents, in the ‘modern’ sense, with some kind of ends-orientation. The
conclusion drawn from this is that whilst the existence of concord might be more plausible
as a condition free from conflict, it has no place in our discussion of political decision-
making processes, structures or institutions.
248 Rawls, J. Political Liberalism (Columbia UP 1996). p 105. 249 Tönnies. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. p 48. [My Emphasis]. 250 Ibid. p 47.
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I think that this differentiation will make analysis and demarcation a little easier and
might also provide more solid grounds for devising critique. It is when the ‘concord’ of a
group’s normative assumptions fails that various options are left open: argument, strategic
action, or communicative action which might lead to a consensual outcome. Incidentally,
this ‘failure’ or ‘breach’ of concord necessarily means that any ‘consensual’ decision-
making is the result of an initial disagreement or conflict of some sort or there would be no
need for such a decision-making process. As we shall see, any attempt to airbrush out
conflict in this understanding of consensus, obscures both the initial sundering of concord
and the necessary centrality of ‘conflict’ in my understanding of ‘consensus’ as a decision-
making process. It seems that what is often meant by ‘consensus’ in the Social Dialogue is
actually ‘compromise’, though an explicit use of this term would allow an unacceptable
recognition of the role of conflict in the Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy. Anyhow,
communicative action in the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy is claimed to be a
consensual form of decision-making, this more precisely means the reaching of an
understanding through communication based on the mutual recognition of validity claims.
Failure to theoretically or practically adhere to these validity claims constitutes a failure to
achieve consensual decision-making on the terms established, implicitly and explicitly, in
the Social Dialogue itself.
This chapter, and the one that follows it, will begin with a criticism of Habermas’
theory of communicative action, as far as it relates to the Social Dialogue and Lisbon, and
will then sequentially explore how ‘consensus-seeking’, agenda setting, and then
asymmetric relations, are a result of the theoretical failures. I will follow two themes of
criticism of the understanding of consensus present in the Social Dialogue and Lisbon
Strategy. One theme will consist of a ‘critique of ideology’ where I will try to demonstrate
how the claims of consensual decision-making are actually based on a flawed interpretation
and implementation of Habermas’ ideas, the result of an ideologised agenda which must
remain opaque and obscured in order to function. In effect, I want to expose how the
practice does not live up to the theory by implicitly drawing upon ideas of Critical Theory
from chapter 2.3. This will be most important in the discussions on asymmetric relations
and on ideological mobilisation inherent in the Commission’s consensus-seeking.
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In contrast, the other theme of criticism is not intended to ‘reveal’ that which is
ideologically or discursively obscured. Instead, I will critically analyse problems with the
very theory of communicative action itself and with the very possibility of political
consensus as understood in the way I have outlined above. I am interested to see how
power, discourse, changing epistemic norms, and asymmetric relations affect the possibility
for mutual understanding and the realisation of validity claims, and therefore threaten the
credibility of the universal pragmatics upon which the legitimacy claims of the Social
Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy are founded. It might well be that the unsuccessful
application of the theory of communicative action is primarily a result of the flaws in the
theory itself thus precluding any possible implementation in any practical circumstance.
However, in anticipation, we should make a more fundamental investigation of how these
theoretical problems of political consensus are based on certain epistemological and
ontological criticisms of Habermas’ theory.
Habermas’ Theory and the Role of Power Relations In chapter 3.1 I tried to demonstrate how Habermas’ theory of communicative action
discussed in chapter 2.3 implicitly applies to the Commissions proposals for the European
Social Dialogue, most obviously in its inclusive, consensual rhetoric and in its attempts to
claim what seems to be an ‘ideal speech situation’ in the Social Dialogue. For Habermas,
the consensual basis for his theory of communicative action relies on the idea that “the goal
of coming to an understanding [Verständigung] is to bring about an agreement
[Einverständnis] that terminates in the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal
understanding, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another”.251 This
undoubtedly resonates with the Social Dialogue’s ‘special responsibilities’ to promote the
“consultation of management and labour at community level and any measure to facilitate
their dialogue” along with the “two essential functions: consultation and negotiation”.252
The most significant criticism made of Habermas’ theory of communicative action,
which therefore also applies to the consensual claims of the Social Dialogue, is that it
underestimates the role of power relations in political activity, or indeed all activity. Two
251 Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society. p 3. 252 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 7.
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major sources of this criticism are a more traditional empirical strand of thought and a more
radical de-constructionist ‘postmodernism’ mentioned. Here I am more interested in the
latter.
The works of Jürgen Habermas and Michael Foucault highlight two essential
tensions in modernity. Firstly, this is the tension between consensus and conflict.253
Secondly, it is also the tension between a supposed point of rupture in Western thought
between ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’, on the one hand, and the denial of this breach,
on the other. The Habermas-Foucault debate is symptomatic of the struggle of integration
vs. disintegration, norm-building vs. norm-destroying, which recalls something of the
criticisms made by Nietzsche et al of the 19th Century social philosophers and theoretical
system builders.
The thought of Foucault has eclectic roots in French structuralism, post-
structuralism, and deconstructivism which works through a particularist and contextualist
tradition drawing on power-theorists such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche and is
characterised by ‘strategic’ thinking. In contrast, Habermas’ thought resides in the tradition
of universalistic systematic theorising epitomised by Socrates, Plato, and Kant. Though the
two thinkers share a Kantian view of reason as the essential component of any kind of
social critique, they are both emblematic of a certain polarisation of late 20th Century
thought in epistemology and social philosophy. To Foucault, Habermas is considered to be
a foundationalist thinker whose attempts to systematically ground formal structures of
thought in universal terms is unsustainable given the disintegration of meaning and of
confidence in epistemic criteria which has taken place in the last few decades. His
philosophy is thought to constitute an unacceptable recapitulation of the categorical
imperative. Habermas is accused of living in the shadow of Plato’s reductivist dichotomy of
Relativism–Foundationalism which facilitates thought but ultimately deludes
understanding.254 Based upon these differences a sustained attack has been made by those
with Foucauldian sympathies upon Habermas’ theory of communicative action.
For Foucault power is a positive concept and is all-pervasive, and “where there is
power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a
253 Flyvbjerg, B. “Habermas and Foucault: Thinkers for Civil Society” (1998) 49:2, June, The British Journal of Sociology. p 211. 254 Ibid. p 221.
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position of exteriority to power”.255 The main charge levelled at Habermas’ theory is that
the idea that the only force present in the ‘ideal speech situation’ is the “force of the better
argument” is a delusion. Habermas’ systematic understanding of power as working through
constitutions, institutions, law, sovereignty, or defined procedures is attacked by
poststructuralists for being excessively optimistic, uncritical, and negligent of the decentred
nature of power. The writing of constitutions over the last 200 years has repeatedly
demonstrated how their framing has often been like ‘writing on water’ and that the opinion
that institutional reform alters behaviour is a hypothesis rather than an axiom.256 In a more
pessimistic view of communicative action one might say that communication is more
usually characterised by non-rational rhetoric and by the maintenance of interests rather
than by freedom from domination and consensus-seeking, and that setting up institutional
‘procedures’ is no sure way of securing a communicative environment free from
domination, even though they be set up for that very purpose.257 In the actual functioning of
discourse ethics and communicative rationality, how does consensus-seeking and rhetoric,
freedom from domination and exercise of power, come together in individual acts of
communication?258 Is the handling of power to be understood as a negative neutralisation or
as a positive re-direction? These questions are never adequately dealt with in detail by
Habermas’ theory. There is a ‘utopia’ of communicative rationality but little concrete
indication of how to get there.
In contrast to Habermas’ theory, the Foucauldian position is that of the ‘Nietzschean
democrat’ for whom any form of government – liberal or totalitarian – must be subjected to
analysis and critique based on a will not to be dominated, voicing concerns in public and
withholding consent about anything that appears to be unacceptable.259 Foucault
emphasises constant concrete criticism of all institutions and procedures, even if apparently
neutral and independent, instead of establishing institutional and procedural systems which
subsequently should be supported once in place.
The ubiquity of power necessitates compromise over consensus, when understood
as a decision-making process as I outlined at the start. It has been quite cogently argued that
255 Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (1979). p 95. 256 Putnam, R D. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton UP 1993). pp 17-18. 257 Flyvbjerg. “Habermas and Foucault”. p 216. 258 Ibid. p 216. 259 Ibid. p 221.
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historically, in democratic societies, political ‘consensus’ has stemmed from a kind of
political battle fatigue where groups finally come to realise their mutual inability to gain
dominance and come therefore to recognise the need for accommodation.260 The form of
‘Consensus’, as a result of a decision-making procedure, that we want might better be
understood as ‘compromise’, rather than as the ‘consensus’ of shared interests or basic
values. Here is an implicit recognition of the role of power, the role of conflict, and the
immanent divergence of interests among social and cultural groups, assumptions which are
absent in the Social Dialogue and are inadequately treated in Habermas’ theory. The
political logic of compromise demands cooperation (behaviourally), as opposed to
agreement (ideologically), and emphasises a shift from ideology to behaviour.261 In this
formulation, compromise does not exclude the presence of common interests or goals, but
rather excludes the assumed necessity of their being common interests and goals as one
finds in the Lisbon Strategy.
Perhaps most importantly, Habermas’ thought, and the Social Dialogue, leave little
room for conflict as a positive force that rejuvenates and energises. Despite all the
references to ‘dynamism’ and the repetition of democratic clichés in the Commission
Communications on Lisbon, short shrift is given to the axiom that “public life is best
cultivated, not in an ideal sphere that assumes away power, but in many democratic spaces
where obstinate differences in power, material status, and hence interest can find
expression”.262 Actually, one might ultimately say that, despite the non-coercive (zwanglos)
intentions of Habermas’ discourse ethics, coercion is actually a necessary precondition in
political praxis for the guaranteeing of validity claims, given the inevitable ubiquity of
power and the plurality of interests and goals.
Richard Rorty and Bent Flyvbjerg have criticised Habermas’ communicative reason
for its Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ and for having a kind of religious status.263 Rorty goes
on to accuse the theory of trying to be a “healing and unifying power which will do the
260 Hirschmann, A O. “Social Conflicts as Pillars of Democratic Market Society” (1994) 22:2, Political Theory. p 208. 261 Ankersmit, F R. “Representational Democracy: An Aesthetic Approach to Conflict and Compromise” (2002) 8:1, Common Knowledge. p 27. 262 Flyvbjerg. “Habermas and Foucault”. p 229. 263 Ibid. pp 215, 216.
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work once done by God”, something that “we no longer need”.264 However, as we’ve seen
how ‘Society’, which historically has provided precisely this function, is being
transformed/destroyed, perhaps we do need that very quality?
The criticism is not all one way however. For his part, Habermas dismisses Foucault
as a relativist, historicist, and nihilist whose disestablishment of epistemic normative
grounding represents a potential threat to any critique of capitalist society. Foucault’s ideas
of anti-modernity [post-modernity] are considered to be a return to the enervating and
debilitating ideas of the late-Romantics and Aestheticists, robbing thought of its critical
potential and opening the door for a return to tradition, faith, and superstition to fill the
meaningless void.265 ‘Postmodernism’ is considered to be a reactionary force through
which these ‘discontents’ have not been called into life by modernist intellectuals but by
culturalists who are “rooted in deep seated reactions against the process of societal
modernization”.266 The conclusions that Habermas thus draws are based on the
interpretation that “more or less in the entire Western World, a climate has developed that
furthers capitalist modernisation processes as well as trends critical of cultural
modernism”.267 It is within the context of these criticisms of Habermas’ theory that I will
have to approach the particular issue of power relations in the Social Dialogue.
It must be said that, despite his optimistic tone, Habermas is not ignorant of the
practical obstacles facing the implementation of his theory, nor can he be said to seriously
believe in the ‘ideal speech situation’ as an absolute and utopian possibility. He has
conceded that ideal conditions of general communication extending to the entire public free
from domination must not disguise the fact that the empirical conditions for the application
of the ‘pragmatistic’ model are lacking.268 He has even gone so far as to lament that whilst
the Lifeworld must “become able to develop institutions not of itself which sets limits to
the internal dynamics and to the imperatives of an almost autonomous economic system
and its administrative complements”, it is regrettable that “the chances for this today are not
very good”.269
264 Rorty, R. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge UP 1989). p 68. 265 Habermas, J. “Modernity versus Postmodernity” (1981) 22, Winter, New German Critique. p 7. 266 Ibid. p 14. [Original Emphasis]. 267 Ibid. p 13. 268 Habermas. “The Scientization of Politics and Public Opinion”. p 75. 269 Habermas. “Modernity versus Postmodernity”. p 13.
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Habermas does hypothesise some reasons for being practically optimistic over the
potential for the pragmatistic model to ‘mediate’ towards the communicatively established
‘ideal speech situation’.270 For example, he cites the growing potential of journalistic
mediation. In similar style to the Kantian view that conflicts actually discursively bring
participants closer together, he sees international pressure for the peaceful coexistence of
competing social systems has a possible tendency that counters the communication block
between participants. There is a suggestion that there might be a growing potential for
scientists to be co-opted into political-ethical practice and to go beyond the technical
recommendations that they produce and reflect on their practical consequences. However,
in light of the both 20th American Psychoanalysis and the Manhattan Project, one has to
remain sceptical.
Despite both these caveats and reasons for practical optimism, there are many
practical reasons to be pessimistic of Habermas’ theory, and therefore of the consensualist
claims of the Social Dialogue. If one is to go through the ‘validity claims’ in the theory of
communicative action, there are strong reasons to be sceptical of their fulfilment in the
Social Dialogue, and it is to this that we must now turn.
I have discussed the most pressing theoretical objection to Habermas’ consensualist
theory. For now, I shall content myself to say that, whilst Habermas has attempted to
provide a means of social critique that integrates, addresses, and tries to reconcile the
critical tradition with the contemporary epistemological developments that threaten it, there
is nevertheless a lack of adequate recognition of the nature and role of power. This, along
with the sheer scale of the demands placed upon such an undertaking as Habermas’,
damages the credibility and plausibility of his efforts to theoretically ground epistemic
norms.
To me, the works of Habermas represent some of the most insightful observations,
criticisms, and analyses of capitalist society and the human condition contemporary to our
times, and for this reason I endorse much of the thought and content of those works.
However, I do object to much of his more positive and affirmatively systematic
formulations, for reasons both stated and still to come. I have tried to utilise his works in
my thesis with this distinction in mind without confusion and contradiction. In opposition
270 Habermas. “Scientization of Politics”. pp 77-78.
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to this, I think that regardless of whether ‘postmodernist’ thought is in fact a novel
epistemological breach, or a continuity of certain unavoidable ‘modern’ suppositions, it still
has worth in this analysis for its critical stance and for its focus on conflict, power, and
partisanship.271 Now we must look into the resultant implications of what has been said so
far for the consensual claims of the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy.
Ideological Mobilisation and Integration in the Lisbon Strategy “Solidarity and social inclusion cannot be separated from the globalised economy, where the competitiveness and attractiveness of Europe are at stake. This opening-up on two fronts requires strong and active participation of all concerned”.272 “Renewed growth is vital to prosperity, can bring back full employment and is the foundation of social justice and opportunity for all. It is also vital to Europe’s position in the world and Europe’s ability to mobilise the resources that tackle many global different [sic] challenges”.273 The Lisbon Strategy self-consciously presents itself as democratic and repeatedly
emphasises ‘social cohesion’, ‘better governance’, inclusion of opinion, and ‘opportunities
for all’, with the Social Dialogue as a “driving force for modernisation of the European
economy and the European social model” which “holds a crucial, unique position in the
democratic governance of Europe”.274 Despite the profuse, yet vague, allusions to
solidarity and democratic representation, the question still lingers. To what extent are these
allusions and claims genuine or merely legitimising assurances chosen for their expected
efficacy in securing certain policy aims in the zeitgeist? Indeed, that ‘democratic
governance’ is emboldened tempts one to think that perhaps the lady doth protest too much,
methinks. But alongside the immanent and integrating tendencies of instrumental rationality
in capitalist society discussed in chapter 2.3, how else can we account for the characteristics
of the Lisbon reforms.
Lars-Bo Kaspersen’s Fission Theory of the formation of democratic structures is
something that has been conceived in order to explain nation-state formation and the
development of national institutions of democratic representation within those nation-states.
Nevertheless, the dynamic might, with a little generosity, also be applied to other coherent
271 Flyvbjerg. “Habermas and Foucault”. p 230. 272 Communication from the Commission: On the Social Agenda (2005). p 4. 273 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Jobs and Growth. p 4. 274 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 6. [Original Emphasis].
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and aggregated levels of political and socio-economic organisation. The Fission Theory
understands historic nation-state formation as a struggle for mutual recognition between
potential states and that “this struggle for recognition, which is a political struggle with war
as an ultima ratio, evolves into various distinctive types of states”.275 This is not a
Darwinian ‘struggle for life’ but a struggle for recognition and legitimacy. State and society
are seen as constituted in a mutual struggle of recognition between states. Such relations of
recognition often take the shape of either ‘imaginary’ or ‘real’ wars that have a strong
impact on the internal construction of state and society.276
The philosophical roots of this theory are Hegelian, Schmittian, and Clauswitzian.
Hegel provides us with the notion of the struggle for recognition, enabling us to understand
that it is indeed a struggle – a relation – between states that constitutes those states. He
posits that a state cannot simply develop from ‘within’ thus entering the international
political order as a fully developed state. In order to be a state, it must be recognized by
another state. This struggle of recognition is an infinite and continuous Clauswitzian
process of ‘politics by other means’ and revolves round the Schmittian friend–enemy
relation which forms the key political differentia specifica. The friend–enemy relationship
is a mutual struggle for recognition, and it therefore follows that, in the extreme, a political
struggle includes the possibility of war.277 The result of this is that politics becomes, in this
context, a struggle between states in which a political and social order is developed and
imposed within the state ‘borders’. After imposing a social order, the state can use the
society to pursue its own ends in its struggle for recognition.278 This has consequences for
constitutional reforms, the internal formation of rights and obligations, the development of
representative institutions, and for the cultivation of norms.
This theory has been evoked to explain the development of the nation-state system
and the internal institutional development of democratic states.279 The conceptual changes
in the later 20th Century might bring us to question the current applicability of this nation-
state oriented theory, being as it is a product of a specific historical period arguably of
275 Kaspersen, L-B. “How Denmark Became Democratic: The Impact of Warfare and Reforms” (2004) 47:1, March, Acta Sociologica. p 73. 276 Ibid. p 73. 277 Ibid. pp 73-74. 278 Ibid. p 75. 279 Habermas. Communication and Evolution of Society. p 196.
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decreasing relevance. However, though the particular analysis pertaining to the nation-state
might be questionable in today’s global political dynamic, the general analysis is
nevertheless valid in a globalised economy that is still divided into fairly coherent sub-
units, especially in the domain of political organisation. In other words, it is important to
note that the concept of state in this context is not a ‘state apparatus’, but a whole, and a
unity that includes ‘society’. It is not, however, a unity constituted by its internal
elements.280 Though it has not been intended as a monocausal explanation of a state’s
make-up, the crucial idea I wish to take from this Fission Theory of state and society is
thus:
“The state has to produce a strong political will, the economic means and the ideological support of the population. The state must therefore possess a society that can generate the means necessary to maintain a strong defence. Thus, the very struggle for recognition, and its specific character, has a strong impact on the state, the state–society relationship, and the structure of the society”.281 The internal political formation of society is therefore, to some extent, the function of
certain inter-statial imperatives of competition. In this competition the state and society
must extract resources and gain ideological support in order to mobilise a defence. A legal
structure of rights and obligations reflects this process of extraction. Some groups and
classes are able to obtain certain privileges because they are indispensable to the state. They
might well provide the vital elements of the defence.282
The Fission Theory differs somewhat from the classical liberal theory of the
democratic state as the culmination of the ‘internal’ virtues of civil society – whether the
‘invisible hand’, historic liberal norms, or teleological institutional development based on
natural law. In contrast to this, the Fission Theory recognises how imperatives of
competition and struggle are integral to political organisation and have the awesome
potential to completely dominate the ideological orientation of state and society if left
unrecognised and unintegrated into a reflexively critical political vision. Without critical
resistance and the ideological and conceptual vocabulary to resist – this being something
which has come to characterise our ‘air du temp’ – then the ideology of competition will
280 Kaspersen. “How Denmark Became Democratic”. p 74. 281 Ibid. pp 74-75. 282 Ibid. p 75.
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permeate and ‘colonise’ all aspects of life. This understanding perhaps gives some useful
insight into the question:
“How is it that the ideology or cult of competition has forsaken the narrow bounds of the industrial and financial world, of the blind theorists of the market economy and the invisible hand, and of the fanatical thurifers of vulgar economic Darwinism to permeate world opinion right into the places most affected by destitution and social exclusion”.283 The Lisbon Agenda represents the need to mobilise, adapt, and integrate the population
under the imperatives of competition and the Social Dialogue is the means by which this is
to be achieved, that is, by the assimilation and neutralisation of coherent opposition. The
Dialogue is not to foster ‘consensus over’, but rather ‘consent to’ the Lisbon objectives. A
brief perusal through the pages of the European Commission Communications will
highlight the point. For instance, “the EU has a high potential for developing further its
competitive advantages, and it is crucial that actions are pursued with determination to
exploit fully that potential and to enhance confidence among EU citizens”.284 That the
Social Dialogue furnishes the enabling mechanism for this ‘exploitation’ of resources is an
idea that cries out from such declarations as this one:
“the social dialogue can help to establish at European level a favourable climate for improving competitiveness, innovation and social cohesion. At the same time, it can help to guide the adaptation process in the candidate countries, offering avenues and strategic orientation for reforms”.285 Whether in education, employment, pensions, ecology, justice claims, or income
distribution the Lisbon Strategy relates them all to the priority imperative of
competitiveness and the integration and mobilisation necessary for this end.
For instance, unemployment is not considered an evil for its role in creating social
inequalities or for its debilitating effects on individual’s self-esteem and psychological
welfare but for its drain on the productive and competitive potential of the social whole.
Therefore “in order to attain the Lisbon growth and jobs objectives, Europe needs a greater
number of active workers, who are also more productive”.286 Likewise, concern for the
283 Petrella. “Europe Between Competitive Innovation and a New Social Contract”. p 12. 284 Communication from the President: Integrated Guidelines For Growth and Jobs 2005-2008 (2005). p 5. [Original Emphasis]. 285 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 16. [Original Emphasis]. 286 Communication from the Commission: On the Social Agenda (2005). p 6.
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health and working conditions of those with jobs is not a heartfelt sympathy for the dignity
of labour, but rather is advantageous for competitiveness. After all, “prevention pays off”
and “less work-related accidents and diseases push up productivity, contain costs,
strengthen quality of work and hence valorise Europe’s human capital”.287
Education and the ‘knowledge society’ is not considered a good for its phronetic,
bürgerlich, or political value but because “the Lisbon European Council rightly recognised
that Europe’s future economic development would depend on its ability to create and grow
high-value, innovative and research-based sectors capable of competing with the best in the
world”.288 Along this line of thought, the attitude prevalent in the Lisbon Agenda seems to
be that “the realisation of a knowledge society, based upon human capital, education,
research and innovation policies, is key to boost our growth potential and prepare the
future”.289 In relation to reforming the education system you will repeatedly be told that the
chief aim of schooling, vocational training and higher education is “to prepare high-
performance human capital in order to make the country’s economy more competitive in
relation to the foreign rival (enemy?)”.290
Once again, better industrial relations are not considered to be important for a more
equitable distribution of the social-economic product but for “minimising the risk of
industrial and social conflict”, conflict which is undesirable to the demands of competition
but perhaps not to broader political goals which are never really discussed.291 Social
cohesion, stability, and participation are not encouraged because they are essential to a
political vision predicated on the expression of the general will, are aimed at the ‘good life’,
or are necessary to achieve aims of distributive justice, but because “participation of social
partners in the process of public policy-making will add legitimacy to these policies in
democratic societies”.292 It is even one of the primary objectives of the Social Policy
Agenda in the Lisbon Process to “modernise and improve social protection to respond to
287 Communication from the Commission: On the Social Agenda (2005). p 7. 288 Facing the Challenge: Report from the High Level Group (November 2004). p 19. 289 Communication from the President: Integrated Guidelines For Growth and Jobs 2005-2008 (2005). p 5. 290 Petrella. “Europe Between Competitive Innovation and a New Social Contract”. p 11. 291 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 1. 292 Ibid. p 5.
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the transformation of the knowledge economy, change in social and family structures and
build on the role of social protection as a productive factor”.293
Legitimising and mobilising policy objectives such as ‘social cohesion’,
unemployment, education, environment are not treated as ends open to political debate, but
are valued only as far as they facilitate the realisation of economic competitiveness. It
seems cogent that:
“In their connection many good things can be included in the argumentation for economic competitiveness. You can argue for moral, ecological, or aesthetic values without being obliged to use moral, ecological, or aesthetic arguments; you just prove that they promote economic competitiveness”.294 Since the mid-term review and the Lisbon Relaunch (2005) the objectives of the Social
Policy Agenda have become much more explicit in this way, brazenly relegating other,
previously euphemised, social aims to the margins. These latter have become even more
clichéd, ill-defined, and little explored and seem to function as rhetorical sugar for the pill
of market determined reforms. A tremulous urgency and intensity increasingly characterise
the tone and language of the Lisbon Agenda just as “boosting” the social partners’
“involvement” in the Lisbon Agenda necessitates a “framework for action involving all
levels and all players on a voluntary basis”.295 It is increasingly stressed in the
recapitulations of the Lisbon Strategy that “time is running out and there can be no room
for complacency”.296 This urgent exhortation reflects the imperative and unreflective nature
of the need to mobilise without delay, and herein lies the problem.
Here we see that political aims and goals are subordinated to market forces. The
assumption is that a “competitive economy strengthens social cohesion” and ultimately
promotes other political goals.297 However, this again relies upon an assumption of the
inherent virtue of the self-regulating and autonomous market mechanism. The Lisbon
Agenda never explicitly handles political aims as ends in themselves, does not differentiate
action from production, but instead comprehends all means and ends in terms of the goal of
competition within the self-regulating market. At this point, the lengthy explanation of
293 Communication from the Commission: On the Social Agenda (2000). p 2. 294 Kettunen, P. “The Society of Virtuous Circles” in Eskola, H; Kettunen, P. (eds). Models, Modernity and the Myrdals (Renvall Institute 1997) p 170. 295 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 14. 296 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Jobs and Growth. p 4. 297 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 7.
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instrumental rationality in chapter 2.3 once again seems rather relevant. The ‘affirmed’
rationality of the system, and the reasoning as to the relevance and efficiency of ‘higher
performance’ tools, legitimises the process of earmarking available material and immaterial
resources.298 Without a credible means of critique, the imperatives of the ‘unembedded’
self-regulating market, so evident in the Lisbon Agenda, will feed on a form of rationality
functioning on its own terms, and will continue to mobilise, legitimise and ideologise for
these unrecognised and uncriticised ends. Opposition is deemed counter-productive,
irrational, or even dangerous in a manner reminiscent of the Whiggish accusations levelled
at the Jacobite Tories in Karl Polanyi’s account of the English land enclosures.299 Industrial
relations as a politic is thus morphed into a dirigiste apotheosis of ‘Management’ and:
“This movement becomes faster over the years with the political discourse aligning itself more and more with that of management. Within the framework of ‘France plc’ [and Europe plc] the people tend to be considered as a human resource that must be convinced, mobilised and conditioned”.300 Taking a glimpse at Habermas’ quote at the beginning of the chapter we can see that the
need to legitimise and mobilise especially in times of economic malaise is recognised by
Habermas himself. Though one might criticise his positive formulations, Habermas does
recognise the integrating and mobilising capacities of capitalist society, as did his Frankfurt
predecessors. Like, Polanyi, he also recognised the potential danger of the self-regulating
market eschewing political and moral ends which it must ultimately do as it becomes
purposive and illegitimate in the sense of Polanyi’s understanding of ‘progressive
transformation’ and ‘social habituation’. The Lisbon Strategy demonstrates how Habermas’
fears over legitimacy problems in contemporary political organisation are well founded.
Lisbon does indeed seem to be subordinating all goals to the imperatives of economic
competition and “representing the accomplishments of the capitalist economy as,
comparatively speaking, the best possible satisfaction of generalised interests – or at least
insinuating that this is so”.301 All’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
298 Petrella. “Europe Between Competitive Innovation and a New Social Contract”. p 13. 299 Polanyi, K The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press 1944; 2001). 300 Le Goff. La France Morcelée. p 82. [Ce mouvement s’accélère au fil des ans et la discours politique s’aligne de plus en plus sur celui du management. Dans le cadre de l’“entreprise France” [et de l’Europe] le peuple tend à être consideré comme une ‘resource humain’ qu’il faut ‘convaincre’, ‘mobiliser’, et ‘former’ pour le changement]. 301 Habermas. Communication and Evolution of Society. p 196.
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Unfortunately, and despite Habermas’ efforts to the contrary, the theory of communicative
action and the very forces of illegitimation appear to be going hand-in-hand in the Social
Dialogue. The idea that universal pragmatics and discourse ethics will provide sufficient
means to resist and prevent these legitimacy problems seems increasingly unlikely and
speculative.
In this part of the chapter I have attempted a kind of ‘critique of ideology’ , that is, a
critique which “captures and discloses the hidden and unsustainable (i.e., irrational,
metaphysical, ideological) premises behind the theory”.302 Though, the object of my
analysis is not a theory, but a set of policies and objectives claiming wide status politically,
economically, and socially. My contention is that, despite the rhetoric of social democratic
political goals and of open and inclusive discussion, an instrumental agenda of competition
nevertheless seeks to mobilise society for its own, uncontested and undebated aims and
priorities. This it does under the illusive claims of consultation and ‘consensus’ whilst
actually implicitly promoting passive ‘consent’. The broadening of the Social Dialogue and
the spread of OMCs will open out this agenda from being a specific “part of an integrated
European approach aimed at economic and social renewal” to a broader encompassing
social totality which “affects the working and personal life of all people living in
Europe”.303 Further problems of political accountability are closely connected to these
developments which act as ‘co-ordination techniques’ and which will serve to confuse,
diffuse and disperse political responsibilities.304
There is therefore a doubt that the Lisbon Agenda is “a political agreement which
mobilises all key actors”.305 To what extent do the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy live
up to the claims of political consensus, as understood at the start of the chapter?
Agenda Setting of Speech Acts “No construal is quite innocent, something is always suppressed; and what is more, some interlocutors are always advantaged relative to others, for any language”.306
302 Kettunen. “The Society of Virtuous Circles”. p 161. 303 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2005). p 5. 304 Pollack; Wallace; Wallace. (eds). Policy Making in the European. pp 86-87. 305 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 2. [My Emphasis]. 306 Taylor. Philosophical Arguments. p 17. [My Italics].
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This aphorism, usually attributed to Nietzsche, forces us to recognise the power of
utterances not just to provide meaning, as we have seen already in chapter 2.1, but to
contain force and power in themselves. Words can shape a discourse, create a linguistic and
conceptual environment which has the power to shape thought and action. In effect, they
can set agendas. So how does it affect the claims of political consensus? A style of
language and conceptual vocabulary enthuses the European Commission Communications
and anchors the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy in wider semantic fields of
meaning, in a manner explained in chapter 2.2. So despite the claims of discussion,
negotiation, and consultation, it might be argued that these claims are irrelevant in a
conditioned discursive environment that is implicitly oriented from the outset. A little
exploration of this should demonstrate how the claims of Lisbon are not credible given the
discursively understood, or rather absorbed, semantics of the speech acts contained therein.
There are words and phrases in the Communications which have an underlying
semantic relationship which needs to be brought forth. There is no need for citation as they
are legion and frequent throughout the documents to which I have so far referred. The
selection goes as follows: innovation, dynamic, social-partners, stakeholders, human
resource, challenges, obstacles, modernisation, efficient transactions on the labour markets,
fixed-term work, economically dependent work, labour mobility, flexibility,
mainstreaming, synergy, outsourcing, offshoring, revamp. A glance at these words should
be sufficient to notice that they are not part of conventionally recognised political discourse
but are rather closely connected to a managerial view of society as an extension of the
private limited company. Any industrial relations understood as a locus of conflict,
negotiation, consultation, inclusion or even consensus amongst the extraordinarily diverse
corporations, classes, and nations of European society would not be dominated by such an
exclusive and monochromatic semantic field as this one. One must remember that the
Social Dialogue and Lisbon Agenda do indeed claim this degree of scope in their claims of
inclusiveness.
‘Citizen’, so closely linked to ‘society’ in modernity, and ‘stakeholder’ are used
synonymously, though with an increasing dominance of the latter term. Here the political
citizen is increasingly replaced by an economic ‘shareholder’ in the Market Society. The
‘human being’, so central to the universalist humanism of the French Revolution, now
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becomes the instrumental-purposive ‘human resource’ to be integrated, mobilised and
managed. Whilst these neologisms serve to re-shape and utilise the semantic resonances of
dying concepts, other neologisms have arisen to express genuinely novel concepts born of
the fires of the 1980s managerial and monetarist parturition. The provenance of
words/concepts like ‘synergy’, ‘outsourcing’, ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘offshoring’ and
‘revamping’ are more clearly related to the globalised economic order of high-technology,
advanced finance, and the disassociation of location and production in the post-industrial
society. This is a mode which is most obviously beyond political ‘embeddedness’. When
we turn to borderline tautological phrases like “economically determined work” we can see
the lengths to which the redactors of the Communications will go in order to avoid conflict
and controversy ergo avoid politics. The illocutionary force of such an ill-sounding phrase
as “economically determined work” leaves one in little doubt that to say “work that is
neither secure, stable nor permanent” would provoke an unacceptable degree of objection
to “progress”. This is interesting given the lengths to which the Social Dialogue purports to
be ultra-inclusive of opinion, honest, straight-forward, and transparent (important
‘acceptability conditions’).
The power of such language lies in its perlocutionary force, that is, in how meaning
is communicated beyond the constative form of the utterances and then taken up by the
recipient. Without an adequately coherent conceptual, and critically analytical vocabulary
to oppose the ideological forces at work in the discourse, people will ‘take up’ the
illocutionary force of such utterances by reference to a contemporary synchronic semantic
field which is increasingly associated, through discourse, with certain encompassing socio-
economic ends which are beneficially and sympathetically connotated (the best means of
satisfying the generalised will). These ends will seem desirable, perhaps by virtue of
cultural saturation and repetition, but for reasons discussed in chapter 2.3 they are
potentially spurious, instrumental, partial, and unreflexive. We can see how, to this end,
defined institutions, regulations, laws, or directives are not necessary and are even counter-
productive to these assumed economic ends. The very lack of binding agreements,
normative or otherwise, facilitates the agenda-setting power of the discourse. It is no
coincidence that ‘Communications’ are the preferred medium for such apparently
uncoercive or non-binding discourse formation as found in the Social Dialogue or the
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OMCs. Of course, the agenda-setting power works through all contemporary media, such
as journalism, academia, news, and various documentation.
The importance of this kind of ‘critique of ideology’ is that it highlights a need for
viable critique and analytical opposition. Beyond this, two other points should be
underlined. First, that while the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy utilise certain
concepts and histrionics of both ‘modernity’ and a certain political vision, these turn out to
be confused, conflated or even replaced by contradictory concepts and utterances which
serve to mobilise support for action which actually negates those original concepts. Second,
the claims of political inclusion, consultation and negotiation, and therefore consensus, are
shown to be incompatible with a dominating agenda-setting discourse of economism which
“reflects a neoliberal logic” and promotes the neutralisation of political conflict and
opposition.307 Conflict means compromise and choices might entail winners and losers,
both are eventualities that the ‘consensus-seeking’ but ‘consent inducing’ Social Dialogue
and managerial capitalism wish to preclude from explicit discussion. One must ask whether
they do this for different reasons or for the same reasons. The Commission might prefer the
former answer, one suspects the latter.
3.4 The Social Dialogue and Asymmetric Relations
The ‘Ideology of Parity’308 This chapter runs directly on from the analysis in the previous chapter, but as the analysis
here is more focused on the Social Dialogue, rather than the Lisbon Strategy, it seems
sensible to place it within a fresh chapter concentrating on the problems of European
asymmetric relations.
The result of the discussion of power relations in the previous chapter should alert
us to the very real possibility of politically asymmetric power relations in the Social
Dialogue, both developing and extant from the outset. The implications of this for any
inclusive and consensual claims made of the Dialogue are quite significant. The particular
307 Hyman, R. “Trade Unions and the Politics of the European Social Model” [Online](2005) LSE Research Online. p 2. 308 Kettunen, P. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Partnership”. pp 32-34.
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asymmetric relations to which I am referring here are those of the ‘ideology of parity’,
national variance and of European centre-periphery relations.309
The ‘ideology of parity’ rests on the assumption of the formal and substantial parity
of labour and capital in terms of their relative powers, resources and interests, whether
historically or in principle. The Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy are replete with these
assumptions. The repeated reference to the ‘partnership’ of labour and capital is the most
salient example of this and can be seen as one of their central themes: “the partnership
between the authorities, the social partners and civil society is one of the keys to the
success of European policies. In order to promote support for the reforms, the European
Council of March 2004 called on the Member States to set up partnerships for change”.310
The belief is that the Social Dialogue promotes “a balance between the demands of
economic development and social cohesion”.311 This entails an interpretation of the history
of the Social Dialogue claiming that “at the time social dialogue experienced problems, the
approach was often more adversarial and ideologically charged. However, when it became
more pragmatic and oriented towards problem-solving, it contributed significantly to
employment success”.312
The consequence of these assumptions is a belief that there can be an absence of
ideology at all and that conflict is a socio-economic evil produced by ideological delusions
of disparity. There are two ways in which this ironically ideological view of industrial
relations can be opposed. The first is by an exploration of the theoretical principle of the
worker-employer relation which Marx understood as one of immanent disparity, and the
second is an exploration of the actual unfolding of the principle of disparity in historical
reality.
In principle, in an analysis by Karl Polanyi, the core of industrial relations in the
Market Economy is the worker-employer relation. A Market Economy is an economic
system regulated and directed by market prices. Social order in the production and
distribution of goods is entrusted to this self-regulating mechanism.313 Consequently,
factors of production and all forms of exchange and distribution must be commodified in
309 Though what is said here could be expanded into issues of gender, race, age, etc... 310 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 5. 311 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 1. 312 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 12. 313 Polanyi. The Great Transformation. p 71.
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order to function through the ordering framework of the market mechanism. However,
labour, land, and money are obviously not commodities, instead we understand labour to be
only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not
produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from
the rest of life, be stored or mobilised.314 The conclusion is therefore, that labour power is a
‘ fictitious commodity’, notionally necessary for entrance into exchange in the Market
Economy. One argument has posited that the worker contracts out more than just labour
power in this ‘fictitious commodification’, he contracts out his inseparable “life itself” in a
way that the employer, as a juridical construct, does not.315 Although one should be careful
not to then assume that employer organisations in industrial relations are easier to form than
workers’ unions.316 This assumption often seems not to recognise that the profit motive of
capitalist reproduction necessitates competition amongst the owners of capital often pitting
employer against employer.317
Though more will be said on employer-worker organisations below, we can see here
how the dubious assumption of a formally symmetrical and freely contracted relationship
formed the basis for the historical and legal development of the relationship in the historical
process of industrialisation. This assumption of parity seems immersed in empiricist social
contract theory, the problems of which have been mentioned elsewhere but are worth
noting once more.
The disparity of the industrial relation in historical reality is perhaps best
demonstrated by a discussion of a particular national case, to show how the principle of
disparity has played out in a given historical context. The development of industrial
relations in 19th Britain gives one illustration of how a disparity of interests and power in
industrial relations practically crystallised in the historical social fabric. The early
industrialisation and historic liberal institutional traditions in Britain have undoubtedly
affected the development of the labour movement in a general comparison with other
European countries. The immanent political prejudice against organised labour in British
society drew its strength from a 19th Century liberal discourse, from neo-classical laissez-
314 Polanyi. The Great Transformation. p 75. 315 Offe, C; Wiesenthal, H. “Two Logics of Collective Action” in Offe Disorganised Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics (Polity Press 1985). 316 Kettunen. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Partnership”. pp 32-33. 317 Thelen. “Review: Beyond Corporatism”. p 121.
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faire economic thought, and from ascendant bourgeois class interests. The perceived danger
to ‘freedom of contract’ and parliamentary sovereignty are just two examples of how
associated labour posed a potential threat to the whiggish principles of 19th Century British
political culture. Although labour movements generally came of age toward the end of the
century, in the putative ‘second industrial revolution’, the seeds of British industrial culture
had been gestating for decades prior to this.
Britain’s early industrialisation (1780-1830), in parenthesis to the oppressive post-
Napoleonic restoration of Europe’s monarchies, had provided a legacy already
unfavourable to organised labour. Common Law traditions gradually compiled a growing
body of legislation that pre-dated the rise of seriously organised labour power and so
naturally came to favour the interests of capital from its years of hegemonic consolidation.
By the end of the 19th Century this weighty canon of anti-union legal precedents left the
labour movement little legal room to manoeuvre. The consequences were a greater
temptation to turn to extra-legal remedies and a growing propensity toward a mentality of
conflict, free-collective bargaining and a polarisation of perceived interests. The ease with
which anti-union legislation has been passed in the closing decades of the 20th Century, and
the inability to develop post-war institutions of industrial concertation in Britain, testifies to
the latent potential of this historical legacy.
In another axiomatic vein of 19th Century political culture, also of a whiggish bent,
attention might be drawn to social and political traditions of British elites “coming to terms
with emerging antagonistic groups” and co-opting them into a system thus tacitly endorsed
and politically neutralised.318 This oft idealised tradition of political informalism and
emphasis upon constitutional custom, norms, and precedent was further strengthened by the
landmark Trade Union Act (1871) which typically gave little positive codification of trades
unions’ status but rather preferred to re-enforce specific exemptions from prosecution and
legal penalties. By the 20th Century a culture of conflict was well rooted in British
industrial relations and trade unions came to recognise that their rights and strengths
resulted from what pressure they could assert themselves via the action of their
318 Crouch, C. Class Conflict and the Industrial Relations Crisis: Compromise and Corporatism in the Policies of the British State (Humanities Press 1977). p 25.
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memberships, not from government action or by reference to a positively defined legal
status. British trade unions became ‘schools of war’.319
It is interesting that this historic lack of any positive affirmation of the status of
labour, secured and enshrined in legislation, and the agenda-setting power of a liberal
discourse that filled the resultant vacuum in Britain, bears a striking likeness to the current
situation in the Social Dialogue. In the 1990s, bipartite agreements in the Social Dialogue
were signed only after an initial consultation by the Commission and not on the initiative of
the ‘social partners’, something which is not the case in the 2000s. This was because of the
disparity of the power position between management and labour at the European level.
Partly for the reasons mentioned above, labour lacks the bargaining power to get
management to the negotiating table in binding agreements on issues it considers
important.320 As to the employer side of the relationship, at the European level,
management does not seem to consider ‘softer’ non-binding norms or agreements
problematic and “only if management faces the risk of binding and more demanding
provisions will it have an incentive to negotiate with labour”.321 This has been called
‘bargaining in the shadow of the law’.322 On reflection this might well be true given the
opposing interests and unbalanced resources between the two parties.323
The weakness of employer and worker organisations at the European level can be
further explained by a certain logic of collective action. Assuming a certain degree of
‘rational choice’ amongst individuals, various forces militate against the continued integrity
of encompassing industrial organisations over time and promote the devolution of these
organisations into ‘narrow special-interest groups’.324 Opportunistic political
entrepreneurship can play on circumstantial internal divisions to further sectional interest;
free-riding is a persistent possibility especially in the undergrowth of large organisations;
potential cross-industry wage differentials form an ever-present temptation for splinter
unions or free-collective bargaining; and high levels of internal diplomacy and coercion are
necessary to contain these constant disintegrating tendencies. Such arguments have been 319 Hyman. Understanding European Trade Unionism. pp 1-3. 320 Smismans, S. “The European Social Dialogue in the Shadow of Hierarchy” (2008) 28:1, Journal of Public Policy. p 165. 321 Ibid. p 165. 322 Ibid. p 165. 323 Ibid. p 167. 324 Olson, M. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Harvard UP 1977).
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deemed reductivist, excessively empirical, and are thought to focus on policy at the expense
of “all determining social and economic structures”.325 However, in an ideological climate
not particularly favourable to industrial organisation in the market, these splintering forces
have a greater verisimilitude. Employer organisations have similar problems dictated by the
competitive imperatives of the profit motive. The point is that, even if both employers and
workers were affected by the disintegrating tendencies of organised action, labour will be
placed at a greater disadvantage given the disparity of the atomic worker-employer
relationship that has been discussed above, which lies at the heart of the employment
‘contract’ and of the market mechanism.
Both the disparity and the potential disintegration of industrial organisations at the
European level bode ill for the Social Dialogue’s claims to inclusive and consensual
decision-making. The promotion of OMCs, the development of the ‘softer’ Social Dialogue
in the 2000s, and the lack of positive legal or institutional affirmation of labour status in the
theory of communicative action suggests that the power of discourse to historically shape
the worker-employer relationship to the agenda of management is a very real possibility.
The “problem-solving” and “pragmatic” orientation of the Social Dialogue, fêted as the
solution to the ‘problems’ of conflict, removes the labour-capital relation from its wider
theoretical and historical setting and prevents critique by focusing attention on the micro
and on the immediate. ‘Ideology’ is condemned as being partial, delusional and counter-
productive which, once again, is predicated on the ‘negative’ notion of the possibility of
there being an ideologically neutral position which also connotates the self-regulating
market and the empirical natural law heritage that lies beneath.
History and critical ‘ideology’ are crucial if one is to analytically recognise the
actual disparity which is immanent to the very nature of the industrial relationship and then
to integrate an effective critique. Once this disparity is realised, then political conflict no
longer represents a breakdown or simply an ‘ideologised’ delusion, but rather a politics
which recognises that the interests of those participating in an industrial relation are not
necessarily all the same. Both positions are ideological, the question is which ideological
position positively engages in a critical understanding and recognises the role of ideology
325 Katzenstein. Small States in World Markets. p 16.
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and political conflict over the unquestioned priority of “employment success”, whatever
that term actually means.326
European Centre-Periphery Relations A second type of the politically asymmetric power relations in the European Social
Dialogue stems from national and regional variance. There are three interrelated elements
to these centre-periphery relations to which I would like to draw attention. Firstly, different
regions and nation-states have divergent experiences, historical trajectories, and cultural
pre-conditions to their industrial relations regimes and practices.327 Secondly, certain
nation-states, cultural groups, regions, bureaucracies, and languages have a privileged
proximity to EU discourse formation in industrial relations in a manner similar to the
agenda-setting dynamics treated above. Thirdly, across the national or regional linguistic
boundaries within Europe there are wide differences in how concepts are understood based
on varying historical semantics from region to region, nation to nation, and between
linguistic communities. The manner in which the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy
attempt to establish broad, general, consensual, or inclusive processes of decision-making
actually serves to privilege some of these national and regional groups or traditions over
others, regardless of whether this is the intention, and in doing so they necessarily bring
those consensual claims into question. In relation to this issue of asymmetry I am going to
consider the case of Nordic specificity in particular.
When the European Commission communicates the belief that the Social Dialogue
“holds a crucial, unique position in the democratic governance of Europe” it makes certain
assumptions about the Dialogue’s general applicability outside of the context of its
origins.328 The foundation of the asymmetric relations treated in this chapter can be found
in the assumed universalistic principles that inform and motivate the vision of the Social
Dialogue as a means of democratic decision-making.
For instance, it is considered that “though the social dialogue can only flourish in a
democratic society, it can make an important contribution to transition to democracy”.329
326 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 12. 327 Hyman. “Trade Unions and the Politics of the European Social Model”. p 2. 328 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 6. 329 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 9.
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Globally, the Social Dialogue represents the latest version of a long line of Eurocentric
political-institutional models for ‘less developed’ societies to emulate on the road to
democratic beatitude. This line of thinking can be found, for example, in the European
Commission’s co-operative relations with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and
the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In these multilateral relations the Commission seeks
to promote universalist principles such as “fundamental social rights” at the most general
level.330 However, at the European level, the idea seems to be to promote the Social
Dialogue for its curative and politically educative capacity in the process of EU
enlargement. The Commission asserts the need for educative “measures of support” to
promote the Dialogue in the former Soviet states where such modes of decision-making as
the Social Dialogue are considered to be weak by Western European standards, but where
‘progress’ can nevertheless still be made.331 These universalistic assumptions show an
insensitivity toward the deeply varying historical, cultural, or geopolitical contexts in these
countries. The consequences of the generalisation of the Social Dialogue’s applicability are
uncertain, at best.
The most prosaic and obvious of these national variances are self-recognised in the
Social Dialogue and it is understood that “there is a wide range of industrial relations
models throughout Europe, each one reflecting the practices and traditions of an individual
Member State: the abundance thus accumulated must be taken into account at the European
level”.332 However, this recognition does not seem to extend any further into an account of
how such regional disparities are to be handled, other than by reference to some directives
which “contain provisions allowing the social partners to adapt rules so as to take account
of differences in national situations”.333 One does not find much beyond these vague
statements. Moreover, this quote reveals how the problem of regional variance has been
approached hitherto with relatively ‘hard’ ‘directives’, little is said of how the more recent
‘softer’ practices of the Social Dialogue and the OMCs will address the issue. Without
adequately accounting for these national and regional asymmetries, the credibility of the
consensual and inclusive claims of the Social Dialogue is further damaged.
330 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 22. 331 Ibid. p 5. 332 Ibid. p 12. 333 Ibid. p 11.
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Beginning with the first element of European centre-periphery asymmetries
enumerated above, ‘regional variances in historical experiences and cultural traditions’, we
can say that within Western Europe one can discern qualitatively different welfare and
industrial relations regimes. This is not a novel idea. For instance, the most famous
classification of welfare regimes, and the one most commonly referred to, is that of Gøsta
Esping-Andersen, who distinguished three broad types of welfare regime: the Liberal
regimes, the Corporatist-Statist regimes, and the Social Democratic regimes.334 Though
these types of classification are highly contested and generalised, I am interested here more
in the principle of relatively coherent regional differences in industrial relations. A further
and more recent classification has come from Richard Hyman’s categorisation of trade
union traditions and, by implication, of industrial relations traditions more generally.335 In
his permutation, the three classifications correspond respectively to Business Unionism,
Christian-Democratic Unionism, and Social Democratic Unionism. It is the latter two that
concern us here as a means of demonstrating one particular example of asymmetry, that of
core ‘continental’ vs. peripheral Nordic industrial traditions and regimes, the former being
linked to Christian-Democratic traditions and the latter to Social Democratic.
To give a brief explanation, the Christian-Democratic traditions and the associated
Corporatist-Statist regimes, variably associated with Austria, Germany, Italy, and France
(to a lesser extent), have often been historically influenced by the Church, in opposition to
socialism, and are more closely associated with traditional family structures or ‘family
values’ and are placed in a broadly confessional and de-secularised catholic and ‘organic’
view of society. Here the family is a central institution in welfare provision and the state
intervenes to the extent that the family cannot service its members. Trade unions act as
vehicles for workers’ status driven by a demand for social justice and drive for forms of
social integration grown out of the social catholicism and functionalist/’organicist’ visions
of society over class-antagonism. This tradition has powerful normative roots established in
19th Century industrialisation in those countries. The welfare funding in these regimes takes
place through employee contributions to a greater extent than in the other regime types.
334 Esping-Andersen. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. 335 Hyman. Understanding European Trade Unionism. pp 1-3.
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In contrast to this, the Social Democratic regimes have been characterised by the
‘de-commodification’ of social rights, the funding of welfare through general taxation, and
by a social democratic ideology based upon secularised universalist principles realised
through pragmatic industrial and class compromise.336 Trade unions have generally acted as
interest organisations with labour market functions and have been more closely defined as
socialist unions rather than confessional unions. One must also remember that the formative
industrial relations period in the Nordic countries has been the early-mid 20th Century,
particularly in the interwar period, rather than the 19th Century.
It is my opinion that it is the Corporatist-Statist regime type, ‘Rhineland-
capitalism’, and the Christian-Democratic tradition of industrial relations and welfare
provision that predominates in the assumptions of the Social Dialogue, as it is this regime
type that most closely matches the ‘narrower’ mode of Social Dialogue that has been
characteristic throughout the later decades of the 20th Century and under the Delors
Commission. As the Social Dialogue therefore promotes this core industrial tradition at the
expense of those in the peripheral regions, the question that must be asked is, how does this
effect the consensual and inclusive claims made by the Dialogue.
An increasing amount of research interest is currently being shown in the historical
developments that might explain the regional differences between various European
welfare regimes and industrial relations.337 The result of this work is that such industrial
and political outcomes are reckoned to be less determined simply by policy, party,
production or ‘rationalising intellectuals’, than by regional and national socio-political
norms, cultural variables, and divergent historical experiences often with pre-industrial
roots.338 Here individuals are not positivistically simplified into ahistorical rational choice
agents who maximise and ‘rent-seek’, but are social and political creatures heavily
embedded within such normative contexts and historical horizons.339
336 Castles, F G. “Swedish Social Democracy: The Conditions of Success” (1975) 46:2, Political Quarterly. p 175; Kettunen, P. “A Return to the Figure of the Free Nordic Peasant” (1999) 42, Acta Sociologica. p 267. 337 Katzenstein. Small States in World Markets; Sørensen, Ø; Stråth, B. (eds). The Cultural Construction of Norden (Scandinavian UP); Sörensen, A B. “On Kings, Pietism and Rent-Seeking in Scandinavian Welfare States” (1998) 41, Acta Sociologica. 338 Trägårdh, L. “Statist Individualism: On the Culturality of the Nordic Welfare State” in The Cultural Construction of Norden. p 255. 339 Sörensen, A B. “On Kings, Pietism and Rent-Seeking in Scandinavian Welfare States” (1998) 41, Acta Sociologica. p 364.
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This means that although the small countries of Western Europe, of which the
Nordic countries make up a large number, have certain dynamic properties determined by
their size, geopolitical location, or functional niche, there are perhaps more significant
historical factors at work in terms of explanation of industrial outcomes. It is becoming
axiomatic that small states are more vulnerable to fluctuations on the world markets and so
political elites in those countries must become highly effective at adjusting to changing
economic circumstances.340 Nordic societies are small open economies, highly dependent
on exports, and very much exemplify the ‘national society’ with strong internal political
linkages. National economic interest has been easy to teach and learn. For example, in
Finland much social policy has been often subordinated to national economic exigencies.341
Given what will be said later of the close Nordic state-society relation, and of the ‘virtuous
circle’, the voluntary and informal coordination of conflicting objectives through
continuous bargaining between interest groups, state bureaucracies, and political parties has
been a common feature of Nordic industrial concertation.342
The point is then, how are these specificities to be explained. One can say that, aside
from such system-obsessed factors, the effective internal political adaptation to changing
international economic circumstances has been hitherto predicated on background
institutional and normative specificities which are particular to Nordic societies set in their
historical contexts. To ignore or confuse this historical and cultural-normative dimension
might very well result in culturally and socially incompatible European wide policies which
undermine the ability of Nordic countries to continue to adapt to domestic political
imperatives, hitherto so apparently successful.
Looking in more detail at recent studies of this historical dimension, it does seem
that the importance of early-modern Absolutism, the historic absence of feudal relations,
the establishment of the Lutheran ‘confessional state’, and the incidence of Pietist
revivalism have been granted pride of place in more recent explanations of Nordic
specificity in welfare regimes, industrial outcomes, and of national political parameters. For
instance, the importance that Lutheranism ascribed to the placing of education and care of
the poor under state auspices is considered to be an important development in the roots of
340 Katzenstein. Small States in World Markets. p 24. 341 Kettunen. “The Society of Virtuous Circles” . p 157. 342 Katzenstein. Small States in World Markets. p 32.
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the Nordic welfare state. The strong confessional presence of the Lutheran church has also
been complimented by a more disestablished ‘worldly asceticism’ characteristic of 18th
protestant Pietism and subsequent protestant movements.343 The historic legacy of this
pietistic Lutheranism has therefore been that actions are very much determined by
secularised behavioural norms of obedience based upon religious authority.344 When one
considers the ‘principle of universality’ at the core of the Nordic value system and an
arguably ‘homogeneous’ ethnic, social, and cultural fabric, characterised by decreasing
cultural space for pluralist subcultures in ‘civil society’ as one goes through the region from
west to east, it is not hard to understand how the ‘Good Life’ might well be the life of
normative conformity.345
In parenthesis to these early-modern religious influences, one might find that the
absence of feudalistic social relations and the longevity of strong absolutist royal
bureaucracies have historically resulted in coordinated service nobilities, a middle class
closely bound to the crown, and a widespread agricultural class of freeholding peasants. In
this scenario, agents of such absolutist confessional states have had great potential to work
through ‘Society’ as a conceptual mechanism for the pursuit of pragmatistically realised
Christian-Enlightenment principles.346 The supporting relationships and norms of
obedience have therefore been historically maintained not by military conscription or
vulgar political coercion, but by the sermon, in a regionally specific early-modern union of
crown and mitre.347 These are the broad contours of some of the oft-cited historical-cultural
specificities of the Nordic region that are relevant for contemporary Nordic political
organisation, socio-economic action, and industrial relations.
There are numerous potent objections to any dangerously simplified version of this
historical analysis. One must beware of generalising ‘Nordic’ historical experiences and
identities at the expense of the individual Nordic countries. There is a temptation toward
the romanticisation of certain agents and institutions (i.e. the image of the free-Nordic
peasant), and there are many versions of this analysis that often fall victim to the too tidy 343 Sörensen. “On Kings”. pp 367-368. 344 Ibid. p 365. 345 Stenius, H. “The Good Life is the Life of Conformity: The Impact of the Lutheran Tradition on Nordic Political Culture” in The Cultural Construction of Norden. pp 169-171. 346 Witoszek, N. “Fugitives From Utopia: The Scandinavian Enlightenment Reconsidered” in The Cultural Construction of Norden. pp 74-75. 347 Sörensen. “On Kings”. p 369.
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and formulaic teleological tendencies implicit in this ‘path-dependent’ approach.348
Likewise, one should not underestimate the importance of 20th Century political struggles
in the Nordic countries in effecting long-term industrial change, as in the case of Finland,
nor of the role of political parties, as in the case of the Social Democratic Party in Sweden.
Nevertheless, the point I wish to draw from this excursion into the North is that such
historical region specificities do have explanatory value and must be taken seriously in any
attempt to understand current regimes, practices, and structures beyond our present
obsession with social scientific and system theoretic models.
In light of the discussion of the concept of ‘Society’, it does seem that without a
contextualised sensitivity to such historical differences, and there seems little firm evidence
of such sensitivity, the Social Dialogue threatens implicitly to assert an ill-defined
industrial relations procedure upon more peripheral participants, whether national or
regional in its bid for “solidarity”, or in other words, ‘conformity’.349 The implication of all
this is that as the European Social Dialogue applies a single set of procedures, norms, and
regimes that are unwittingly representative of the core region of Europe, it does so in a
manner incompatible to peripheral regions, whose historic experiences, traditions and latent
political norms will implicitly resist and confuse attempts at coordination. There is always
the danger that “because industrial relations systems are nationally [or regionally]
embedded, economic internationalisation alters the preconditions for their functioning and
perhaps survival”.350 Furthermore, regardless of the eventuality of resistance, the
consequences of this can only be to damage the possibility of satisfying the Dialogue’s
essential validity claims, particularly of ‘Power Neutrality’ and ‘Ideal Role Taking’.
The closely related two elements of European asymmetric relations that I mentioned
above operate discursively and conceptually. The different historical experiences of regions
and their respective linguistic communities have also contributed to a divide in historical
semantics surrounding the state-society relation, industrial relations, and the wider political
field. Looking yet again at the Nordic societies, the semantics of many concepts might well
be shared within the Nordic region, but clearly differ from those of other European regions
348 Østergård, U. “The Geopolitics of Nordic Identity: From Composite States to Nation-State” in The Cultural Construction of Norden; Kettunen. “A Return to the Figure of the Free Nordic Peasant”. pp 260-262. 349 Hyman. “Trade Unions and the Politics of the European Social Model”. p 16. 350 Ibid. p 3.
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and linguistic groups, often the result of different historical experiences and languages
through which to express them:
“Paradoxically, in post-nation-states, in ‘a globalised world’ where the borders between nations are supposed to be of less importance, our words increasingly acquire meaning and context through contrasting our own experiences with those of others”.351 However, within these regions, though words may differ across a region’s internal
boundaries, there are shared key concepts. We can see that amongst the Nordic countries,
languages may differ from country to country, yet “they nevertheless look upon the world
in the same way. They share the same value system, rooted in common historical
experiences as part of a uniform Lutheran culture, where culture, state and church were
inseparable parts of a cohesive social structure”.352 It is important to identify key concepts
and analyse their varying usages without attempting to create common definitions, as the
Social Dialogue implicitly does, either by aiming to create ‘consensus’ over key concepts
or by falsely assuming a ‘concord’ over them.353 The outcome of such attempts is more
likely to induce passive ‘consent’, and all the connotations of subordination and disparity
that this word implies. Taking the example of Nordic societies, the Social Dialogue allows
certain key concepts that are semantically linked to certain ‘core’ European regions and
linguistic communities to take a privileged place in the decision-making discourse.
Consequently, key concepts which are alien to the context of Nordic societies go on to form
the basis for decision-making in the Social Dialogue thus placing ‘peripheral’ Nordic
societies at an implicit disadvantage in communicative action.
The core concept of the ‘social partners’, which pervades the Social Dialogue,
makes a good illustration of my point. One can see the great bearing of the concept in the
consensual claims of the Dialogue where “the mutual reconciliation of interests refers to the
commitment of social partners to identify common objectives and priorities so that they can
address current issues together”.354 We see in this apparently reasonable statement the
assumption that these ‘social partners’ do have common objectives and that these form the
basis for consensus. Now, though the Nordic region includes a number of different 351 Stenius, H. “We Have Cows in Finland Too”. Open Democracy, November 2001. p 2. 352 Ibid. p 3. 353 Ibid. pp 2, 4. 354 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 11.
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countries and linguistic groups they do share a common history, to a rather high degree, and
therefore have a common understanding of how key concepts are apprehended and used,
situated in this common history, facilitated by a common set of geo-political experiences
and environmental conditions. In Nordic industrial relations, the participants have been
traditionally referred to as ‘labour market parties’. This semantic meaning persists even
across such a radically different language boundary as that of Swedish and Finnish, in
which ‘labour market parties’ are arbetsmarknadsparterna and työmarkkinaosapuolet
respectively. The common semantic understanding of the concept of ‘labour market parties’
comes from the somewhat shared Nordic experiences of industrial relations.
20th Century Nordic industrial relations have been heavily conditioned by inter-war
period class conflicts, and heavily class-oriented civil war in the case of Finland. The
Nordic ‘social democratic’ regimes seem to have been created from a pragmatic process of
conflict and compromise between antagonistic industrial classes often under the auspices of
facilitating Social Democratic parties (mainly in Sweden). These industrial and political
processes and outcomes have been characterised by a certain degree of rational, pragmatic
realisation of a universalising ideology in a common culture of Reformation-Enlightenment
principles of self-betterment, education, and social action – the so-called “Lutheran peasant
Enlightenment”.355 Two related principles are underpinning this historic vision: the
normalcy of wage-work and the universalist idea of social rights based on citizenship.356
In relation to the former of these principles, the Nordic concept of work has been
founded on the normative notions of work-as-a-duty and work-as-a-right, more in Sweden
and Finland than in the other Nordic societies, thus promoting work as a route to autonomy
and individual empowerment.357 The historic adjustment to the normalcy of wage-work and
to the socialisation of production has entailed the adoption of three ideological elements:
the ‘spirit of capitalism’, the utopia of socialism, and the idealised tradition of the peasant
as mentioned above. It should be clear from what has been said that it is the last of these
355 Sørensen, Ø; Stråth, B. “Introduction: The Cultural Construction of Norden” in The Cultural Construction of Norden. p 24. 356 Kettunen. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Partnership”. pp 36-37. 357 Kettunen. “A Return to the Figure of the Free Nordic Peasant”. p 265.
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three elements which is specific to the Nordic societies.358 The over-bearing use of the
concept of the ‘social-partners’ in all documents pertaining to the Social Dialogue not only
sets agendas but also illuminates how the ‘core’ regions of Europe are asymmetrically
placed to affect a marginalisation of regionally specific industrial relations stories, in this
case the Nordic story, and thus failing to live up to the validity claims of implicitly
consensual decision-making. Worse than this, the enforced spread of such culturally
incompatible concepts might serve to undermine existing concepts at the domestic level
with all the consequences that this entails.
In parallel to the asymmetric dynamic of the repetitive use of the ‘social partners’
concept, one can also see how the concept of ‘Society’ is understood, and has functioned, in
a way that is specific to the Nordic region.359 In historic Nordic discourses of ‘Society’,
there has persisted a characteristic proximity, almost synonymity of state and society in
perceived spheres of activity. In Nordic consciousness ‘Society’ has consisted of a two
sided moral relationship between individuals and the state. This proximity has allowed, not
the state to dominate civil society as in traditionally ‘liberal narratives’, but rather society to
dominate the state. In Norden, ‘Society’ has acted as a legitimising concept that provides
reflexive criteria for the state’s exercise of power, and a functional substitute for utopia or
God. This is something that the ‘Modern’ concept of ‘Society’ has done more generally, as
we have already covered in the chapter 3.2. In the specifically Nordic sense, ‘Society’ has
acted as a means of immanent critique for itself, providing normative standards for its own
criticism. The case of the Swedish notion of the folkhem (the People’s Home) illustrates the
most ideologically elaborated example of this reflexively normative set of standards which
are established by the extension of the concept of ‘Home’ out to the social level. This is a
concept with certain regional specificity in itself.
By combining this particularly Nordic understanding of ‘social partners’, industrial
relations traditions, and Nordic ‘Society’ we come to quite a coherent set of Nordic
cultural, social, and historical specificities. In conclusion I will just touch on the interesting
358 Kettunen, P. “Lönarbetet och den Nordiska Demokratin i Finland” in Kettunen, P; Rissanen, T. (eds.) Arbete och Nordisk Samhällsmodell (1995), Papers on Labour History IV: The Finnish Society for Labour History. pp 255-280. 359 Kettunen. “A Return to the Figure of the Free Nordic Peasant”. p 267.
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idea of what has been called the Nordic ‘Virtuous Circle’ of society.360 This Nordic idea
posits the existence of a virtuous circle, based on the close association of civil society and
state as mentioned above, institutionalised in the class compromises which began the Social
Democratic era in the 1930s. These class compromises are a manifestation of a virtuous
circle of economy, politics and ethics and secularised adaptations of the homogenising
power of the Lutheran tradition. Society and state are then a moral idea, a kind of ‘imagined
community’.361 Within the virtuous circle ‘Society’ is both subject and actor, has rights and
duties, goals and values. The inter-war industrial compromises were therefore not just
compromises but also declarations of efficiency, democracy, and solidarity as core values.
The idea of work as duty rather than right overrode all these values, especially in Finland,
as a concomitant of Lutheran ethics and the demanding natural conditions of Norden.
Gunnar Myrdal, the Swede who coined the ‘virtuous circle’ idea in the mid-20th Century,
criticised both the ‘metaphysical’ belief in the harmony of individual interests, and the idea
of a spontaneous equilibrium that is inherent to the self-regulating market mechanism in the
Market Society.362 Myrdal’s values of national society and the ‘us’, as subject of the
virtuous circle, cannot be defined by international competitiveness, the dominance of which
must be resisted in relation to the other aspects of the virtuous circle.
This implies that when social equality and solidarity fall out of the virtuous circle
leaving economic competitiveness alone, as I have claimed is increasingly the case with
adoption of the Social Dialogue, the virtuous circle so integral to the political ‘successes’ of
Nordic societies is endangered. In the Nordic countries “all good things have to form a
virtuous circle and only such things are good that can be placed in the virtuous circle of
society”.363 It does seem that the virtuous circle incorporates both the need for ‘habituation’
and the idea of political ‘embeddedness’ outlined by Polanyi and it resembles Hyman’s
‘Eternal Triangle’, which is constituted by the three directions in with trade unions and
industrial systems are always drawn (Market, Class, Society).364
I have tried to show, through these examples, how the attempts to standardise the
usage of certain key concepts in the Social Dialogue serves to “corral people into a chorus
360 Kettunen. “The Society of Virtuous Circles”. 361 Anderson, B. Imagined Communities (Verso 1991). 362 Kettunen. “The Society of Virtuous Circles”. p 160. 363 Kettunen. “The Society of Virtuous Circles”. pp 170-171. 364 Hyman. Understanding European Trade Unionism. pp 3-5.
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of approval for common values, which are taken for granted with little or no room for
questioning [them]” in socio-economic decision-making.365 The dominating connotation of
the ‘social partner’ is that of parity of interests and powers, tacit endorsement, shared
general aims, shared norms, and automatic consensus. The indiscriminate use of such a
concept as the ‘social partner’ not only errs in its false assumption of uniformity, but also
threatens to exert an asymmetric power relation across Europe’s internal boundaries giving
little thought to the idea that:
“a sensible, civic-minded European debate requires that we share key concepts and symbols, but at
the same time acknowledge separate local, regional, social and gender experiences. It must aspire to identifying key concepts and analysing their different usages without trying to arrive at common definitions”.366 The consequence, otherwise, might be ‘consent’, but not ‘consensus’.
365 Stenius. “We Have Cows in Finland Too”. p 4. 366 Ibid. p 5.
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4. Conclusion
As the thesis has been more of a continuous exploration of ideas, there is less need
for a lengthy conclusion at the end, but more of a summing up. Having come to the end of
the thesis I am now in a position to recapitulate some of the conclusions made during the
analysis in light of the research questions outlined in the first chapter.
We have seen how words carry, not just referential meaning, but force and power to
shape discourses and to set unrecognised agendas. The language used in the Commission’s
presentation of the Social Dialogue has demonstrated this potential facet of language quite
clearly and, in this case, the agenda which has been set is that of the competitive
imperatives of the Lisbon Strategy. Without any apparent recognition of this, and under the
false impression that the Social Dialogue provides an unquestionably open and neutral
environment for socio-economic decision-making, the demands of the Social Policy
Agenda threaten, through the Social Dialogue, merely to establish passive ‘consent’ to its
objectives rather than encourage the creation of active ‘consensus’ based upon the
recognition of possible divergences in interests and goals amongst industrial participants.
I have also tried to show how language, through a theory of speech acts, can
provide the normative basis for an intersubjective theory of ‘consensual’ decision-making
secured in an ‘ideal speech situation’ from Habermas’ theory of communicative action, and
that the Social Dialogue represents this situation in practice. However, though I would be
cautious about making such a categorical statement about such a man, it seems that
Habermas fails to provide a practical procedure that is adequately defended against forms
of political domination and so, in his failure to deal with power relations, he actually sets up
an ideal mechanism for broader political and social integration and assimilation into the
‘one-dimensional society’. In our particular case, the deficits of Habermas’ theory seem to
lead to a failure to effectively critique the Social Dialogue. Behind this failure seems to lie
the impression that Habermas is substantially more optimistic and uncritical about
Modernity than both Max Weber and his earlier predecessors in the Frankfurt School, such
as Horkheimer and Adorno. I think that, as might be seen from the lengthy treatment in
chapter 2.3, the earlier critical theorists can provide a potentially stronger dialectic critique
113
that is less of a normative grand theory and more relevant to a decentred understanding of
power, such as I have outlined in my criticisms of the Social Dialogue.367
The benefit of a conceptual approach to research comes from how concepts can
synthesise the epistemological traditions of rationalist-idealism and material-empiricism
and therefore supply a credible means of comprehending phenomena. In addition to this,
the historically sensitive treatment of concepts in this thesis has hopefully highlighted the
significance of changing contexts, not only for the linguistic determination of meaning, but
also in order to see how changing historical circumstances affect the operation of concepts
as epistemological media. For instance, if changing historical contexts alter the matrices of
semantic meaning associated with the concept of ‘Society’, how can that concept continue
to mediate between the thinking subject and the external world in the manner to which we
are accustomed. As we retreat from ‘Society’, and all its connotations of ‘modern’, rational,
and politically purposive action, we also retreat from those ways of acting that are
dependent upon it. The understanding of ‘Society’ presented in the Social Dialogue evinces
no recognition of this and one might suppose that as the introduction of ever broadening,
softening, and more amorphous modes of policy coordination and communication continue
to erode the assumptions and categories of ‘Society’, the Commission will still insist on
envisaging ‘Society’ as an effective medium to implement purposive change. The result of
this is that the attempt to implement policies through a concept which is increasingly
defunct in our historical context will probably be ineffective in achieving its goals of being
democratic, consensual, and political.
A more likely hypothesis is that, in the absence of a potent concept capable of
realising purposive political action, it is less likely that we will be able to shape our futures
and more likely that we ourselves shall be fashioned by the integrating and colonising
tendencies of a highly capitalised global economy driven by the imperatives of international
competition. By establishing the Lisbon Strategy as a set of priorities for action we seem to
think that we are engaging in a ‘politics’, but this is a view of politics that claims conflict to
be an evil, that we Europeans all have the same set of ultimate goals and interests, and that
a ‘successful’ realisation of the Lisbon objectives will mean that every one is a winner.
Such wishful thinking could hardly be described as a healthy and active politics.
367 Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (1980). p 89.
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On the contrary, the view of the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy held by
the EU institutions maintains the implicit attitude to political activity characteristic of our
current ‘air du temps’ explained at the outset of this work. Politics is an inconvenience, a
counter-productive break upon the almightly need to compete internationally. Until we
learn to express our political visions in a way that is both coherent and apposite to our
historical context, and until we develop the conceptual categories necessary to do this, the
impersonal forces of the market shall continue to determine our fate.
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