Social Class in Europe: New Inequalities in the Old World

By Etienne Penissat, Cedric Hugree and Alexis Spire

Over the last ten years - especially with the 'no' votes in the French and Dutch referendums in 2010, and the victory for Brexit in 2016 - the issue of Europe has been placed at the centre of major political conflicts. Each of these crises has revealed profound splits in society, which are represented in terms of an opposition between those countries on the losing and those on the winning sides of globalisation. Inequalities beyond those between nations are critically absent from the debate.

Based on major European statistical surveys, the new research in this work presents a map of social classes inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. It reveals the common features of the working class, the intermediate class and the privileged class in Europe. National features combine with social inequalities, through an account of the social distance between specific groups in nations in the North and in the countries of the South and East of Europe. The book ends with a reflection on the conditions that would be required for the emergence of a Europe-wide social movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Apr 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781788736299

Etienne Penissat

Etienne P�nissat, sociologist, works on social classes and trade unionism. He has edited several books published by Agone, including R�primer et domestiquer. Strat�gies patronales (2013) et Porte-parole, militants et organisations (2015).

Book preview

SOCIAL CLASS IN EUROPE

SOCIAL CLASS

IN EUROPE

NEW INEQUALITIES IN THE OLD WORLD

CÉDRIC HUGRÉE, ETIENNE PENISSAT

AND ALEXIS SPIRE

TRANSLATED BY RACHEL GOMME

WITH EUNICE SANYA PELINI

First published in English by Verso 2020

First published as Les Classes sociales en Europe. Tableau

des nouvelles inégalités sur le vieux continent

© Editions Agone 2017

Translation © Rachel Gomme with Eunice Sanya Pelini 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-628-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-627-5 (LIBRARY)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-630-5 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-629-9 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number:

2020932681

Typeset in Minion by Hewer Text (UK) Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Contents

List of maps

List of graphs

List of tables

List of abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Considering Europe through the lens of social class

Transcending the clichés of national difference

Beyond income inequality

Classifying social classes

1. The Weakened Working Class

Portrait of a social group in competition throughout Europe

The map of the working class in Europe

Shared vulnerability in the European labour market

Income and consumption: the working class split in two

Conclusion

2. Delusions of Grandeur and Social Realities: The Middle Class

The middle class at work

Material comfort and cultural aspirations

The paradoxes of the political role of the middle class

3. Beyond the 1 Per Cent: The Plural Domination of the European Dominant Class

Defining the dominant class

The economic ascendancy of the dominant class

The three forms of cultural distinction of the dominant class

From social to political dominance

4. Dominance and Exclusion: The Interplay between Social Class and Nation

At the bottom of the European social space

The hegemony of the dominant class of the North and West

Circulation between classes and nations

5. Are Classes Mobilised at the European Level?

Class in conflict in and with the European Union

Class antagonism contained within national borders

An embryonic European social movement and its limitations

Conclusion

Conclusion

Appendix 1. Secondary Use of Four European Surveys

Appendix 2. Construction of Social Classes at European Level Using the ESEG Classification

Appendix 3. ESEG Classification (Detailed Level) and Social Class

Appendix 4. Constructing a European Social Class Space

Notes

Index

Maps

1. The working class in European countries

2. The middle class in European countries

3. The dominant class in European countries

Graphs

1. The employed labour force in European countries by sector of activity

2. Ability to afford one week’s holiday in Europe

3. A representation of the European social space, based on a number of surveys

4. A typology of the different social classes in Europe

Tables

  1. Socio-economic groups within the working class in Europe

  2. Non-European foreigners among the European working class

  3. Unemployment among Europeans

  4. Hardness of working conditions in Europe

  5. Poverty among European households

  6. Socio-economic groups within the middle class in Europe

  7. Characteristics of the socio-economic groups comprising the European middle class

  8. Weekend work in Europe

  9. Reading practices in Europe

10. Socio-economic groups within the dominant class in Europe

11. Incomes in the EU

12. Intensity of leisure practices in Europe

13. Mastery of foreign languages in Europe

14. Rate of participation in elections to the European Parliament since 1979

15. European socio-economic groups

Abbreviations

AT: Austria

BE: Belgium

BG: Bulgaria

CY: Cyprus

CZ: Czech Republic

DE: Germany

DK: Denmark

EE: Estonia

ES: Spain

FI: Finland

FR: France

GR: Greece

HU: Hungary

IE: Ireland

IT: Italy

LT: Lithuania

LU: Luxembourg

LV: Latvia

NL: Netherlands

PL: Poland

PT: Portugal

RO: Romania

SE: Sweden

SK: Slovakia

SL: Slovenia

UK: United Kingdom

EC: European Community

ECB: European Central Bank

EU: European Union

GDP: Gross Domestic Product

IMF: International Monetary Fund

OECD: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

AES: Adult Education Survey

EWCS: European Working Conditions Survey

LFS: Labour Force Survey

EU-SILC: European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions

Acknowledgements

A first version of this book was published in French, entitled Les classes sociales en Europe (Paris: Agone, 2017). The initial idea came from Cécile Brousse, whose work inspired us a lot. Access to European surveys was first made possible by our participation in the ESEG research group at the Institut national de la SEE. Our three laboratories, CERAPS, IRIS and CRESPPA-CSU, provided us with logistical and financial support for the publication. Our bibliographical research benefited from the suggestions of several colleagues who helped us to better understand social class in different countries: Virgilio Borges Pereira, Bruno Monteiro, Angeliki Drongiti, Jani Erola, Mihaela Hainagiu, Michał Kozłowski, Clemence Ledoux, Thomas Maloutas, Enrique Martin Criado, Pablo Lopez Calle, Harri Melin, Mikael Palme, Andreas Melldahl, Marie Plessz, Spyros Sakellaropoulos and Yiorgos Vassalos. Thanks to these correspondents, we were able to feed our demonstration of qualitative research conducted in different European countries.

Thomas Amossé, Philippe Askenazy, Audrey Mariette, Tristan Poullaouec and Delphine Serre reviewed all or part of the manuscript and offered us valuable suggestions. The remaining imperfections are obviously our sole responsibility.

The entire text was translated by Rachel Gomme, with the exception of chapters 2 and 3, which were translated by Eunice Sanya Pelini.

Introduction

The European Union has become the subject of intense conflict, as evinced by the ‘no’ votes in the French and Dutch referendums on the constitutional treaty in 2005, the Greek debt crisis of 2010, and the vote for Brexit in June 2016. In every country in Europe, an enduring political split has opened up between supporters and opponents of the European project.¹ Supporters take the view that this project represents the best way of ensuring economic progress and business competitiveness through the increase in trade; for opponents, it encourages social dumping and brings down standards of living for the majority. The tensions caused by relocations and competition between workers lead certain groups to demand protection for their national space. In response to these anxieties, journalists and politicians usually adopt a simplistic frame of reference that pits insiders against outsiders, globalisation’s winners against its losers, with the stereotype of the Polish plumber competing with the French, German or British worker. Although the social question lies at the heart of this political conflict, very few recorded data are available on social inequalities between European workers. In political discussions on the subject, the EU bureaucracy is rigidly tied to austerity,² and no mention is ever made of class distinction as a key tool of comprehension. It is time to ask what the famous Polish plumber has in common with a Romanian senior manager or a Spanish manual worker, and what sets them apart from one another.

The aim of this book is to present a map of inequalities in Europe that goes beyond the usual comparisons between countries: drawing on statistical data that are very rarely analysed from the point of view of occupations, our aim is to give an account for the first time of the differences between social classes at the European level.³ The point is not to ignore national specificities: people born in wealthiest countries keep what Milanovic called ‘citizenship rent’.⁴ Thanks to the World Inequality Database, it is now possible and easy to compare the level of income in one country with other incomes in Europe.⁵ Here, we would rather like to show how the national differences are embedded in a convergence of social inequalities that prevail in all European countries. In our view, the issue of inequality cannot be reduced to a simple analysis of levels of income and assets: it also relates to conditions of employment and work, lifestyles, housing conditions, cultural practices and leisure. These various domains of social life can now be measured through statistical studies conducted consistently in all European countries. Our task, then, is to consider the disparities between socio-economic and national groups, as well as gender and generational differences, together as a whole. Our commitment to an analysis in terms of social class is also a political act: more than just describing inequalities, our aim is to investigate the conditions of possibility of a European social movement.

CONSIDERING EUROPE THROUGH THE LENS OF SOCIAL CLASS

Since the 1980s, while European integration has gathered pace, the representation of society in terms of social class has been consistently declining. In the West, the retreat of Marxism resulted in a decline in the use of this concept in public debate, while in the East the desire for a radical break with the vestiges of Stalinism made it a despised term.

On both sides of the continent, the outlines of social classes are less distinct than they were in the past. Changes in European economic structures have played a substantial role in this process. The decline of industry and the growth of the service and retail sectors, the continuing rise in jobs in management and intermediate occupations, as well as mass unemployment, have substantially blurred the boundaries between social classes, while marginalising the industrial proletariat which used to comprise the hard core of the working class. The extension of duration of studies, and the spread of media and digital technology, have also revivified forms of inequality between countries and within different European social groups.

On the political level, the disappearance of the communist states and the weakening of workers’ parties and trade unions in Western countries have to some extent delegitimised references to class struggle. More generally, people no longer use class as a way of locating themselves within the social space. Throughout Europe, the sense of belonging to the working class has diminished among manual workers and low-skilled white-collar workers,⁶ and been replaced by the feeling of belonging to a vast middle class. Even when social protest regains momentum, as with the anti-austerity movements that arose in response to the 2008 crisis, the activists thus mobilised do not make their arguments in terms of class antagonism, but base their demands on more vague and encompassing oppositions, such as the division between the richest 1 per cent and the remaining 99 per cent, or between ‘the oligarchy’ and ‘the people’. These various developments have revived the idea that social class is disappearing.⁷ When reference is made to ‘twenty-first-century class conflicts’, it is either in relation to non-European territories or in predictions of the development of a precariat whose common characteristic is the lack of a stable job and career possibilities.⁸

The notion of class, articulated as the political and symbolic construction of a vision of the social world,⁹ is thus far less central today than it was in the past. Nevertheless, class status remains a pertinent tool for reflecting on and describing inequalities and social boundaries on the international level.¹⁰ We are also seeing renewed interest in using it as a way of reflecting on inequality in European societies.¹¹ In France, the Yellow vests (gilets jaunes) revolt that broke out in November 2018 put the working classes back at the centre of the public debate: starting as a challenge to increased fuel duty, the protest widened to demands around purchasing power and for the greater use of referendums. Several calls for extension to other countries were made, with unsuccessful attempts in both Wallonia (Belgium) and Poland. The confinement of the Yellow vests within French borders illustrates the difficulty faced by social movements in raising the issue of inequalities on a European scale.

Is it possible to speak of a European working class or a transnational ruling class? Class relations are largely constructed in the context of nation states, and in each country the outlines and intensity of these relations are shaped by the specific social and political history of the nation. Conversely, the European Union is not a state: it currently has no sovereign authority, apart from very limited prerogatives in specific areas such as immigration. And, while it has its own bureaucracy, its own staff and its own systems,¹² its social policy is virtually non-existent. Its principal intervention, often with the support of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has been to demand reforms requiring ever greater flexibility on the part of European workers, particularly since the start of the crisis in 2008.

In fact, until now, there have been few studies of inequality that consider the issue in terms of class at the European level. Yet this is a frame of reference, and even of identification, that is increasingly important for the people of Europe. The existence of institutions that provide resources, of financial regulations, norms, regular electoral processes and recognised symbols (flags, anthem), mark it as a social and political space. Moreover, the European Union represents a huge market, within which the various member states maintain particularly strong economic relations: nearly two-thirds of the trade of EU countries is within the European Union.

On a more fundamental level, most of the contemporary socioeconomic changes are occurring at supranational level, from the managerial turn of states to political developments, from the transformation of cities to changes in the education system and the restructuring of industry.¹³ The circulation, localisation and specialisation of capital contribute to forming and shaping class relations in Europe as a whole: the French executive directors of Danone invest in land belonging to Polish farmers; German senior managers at vehicle manufacturer Audi employ and manage workers in factories in Belgium, Spain and Hungary; Romanian forestry workers come to work in French forests; Polish workers are seconded to subcontracting companies in the shipyards at Saint-Nazaire in France; and so on. Capitalism has become extensively Europeanised, and class relations along with it. National corporations remain important but there is a concentration process in the big economic and financial firms: according to foreign direct investment figures, European multinationals have greatly increased their foreign investment in the last two decades: from 10 per cent to 60 per cent of GDP in Europe.¹⁴ There are more and more firms operating across multiple European countries.

The economic strategies of large European companies thus play a major part in determining the morphology of social classes in different European countries. The acquisition of an MBA or a degree from a prestigious foreign university has now become an essential rite of passage for those aspiring to managerial posts within the economic elites; similarly, more and more company directors play up their professional experience in a multinational as a way of establishing their legitimacy.¹⁵ At the same time, the mobility of workers within the European Union has risen since the union was expanded to include countries from the former East.¹⁶ There are two particularly significant movements of labour: the first from Bulgaria and Romania to Spain and Italy, and the second from the countries of the former East to the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. The substantial increase (over 45 per cent) in the number of posted workers in Europe between 2010 and 2014 is one illustration of this: today there are over two million of them in the European Union. In other words, class relations are experienced over the territory of Europe as a whole, not just at national level. Following the ‘no’ vote in the French and Dutch referendums of 2005, many interpreted the result as the revenge of the working class on the elite, in the context of a conflict that was now being played out on the European stage. The same was true of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom,¹⁷ even though, in some cases, the contribution of working-class voters to these great electoral jamborees was a refusal to participate.¹⁸ Behind what are often presented as oppositions between national identities lie political conflicts rooted in class divisions.

The few studies that exist of social class at the European level make little use of empirical data, and in the absence of statistical inquiry, ultimately make excessively abstract cases. One example is American sociologist Neil Fligstein, who, in his provocatively titled book Euro-Clash, argues that Europe can be split into three classes. At the top, he places a transnational elite of people who travel widely, speak several languages and identify themselves with the European project, from which they benefit both materially and culturally. In the middle there is a group of mainly middle-class citizens which is more sporadically connected with Europe, through either vacations, leisure (football, for example) or a professional occupation linked to the European economy. At the bottom there is a third, poorer group with a lower level of education, who speak only the language of their own country and do not consume cultural goods imported from other countries.¹⁹

Although it is only minimally based on the actual social position of individuals, Fligstein’s book thus invites us to think about class divisions at the European level. In fact, it is now possible to identify social groups precisely, using the large-scale European statistical surveys. The aim of the present study is to consider skilled manual workers, farmers or executives at the same level of detail over the whole of Europe. To what extent can similarity of social conditions outweigh the individual specificities of countries of residence? And, if national identity remains important, is it nevertheless possible to identify stronger European convergences between, for example, the elites in different countries than between the working and middle classes of any one country?

TRANSCENDING THE CLICHÉS OF NATIONAL DIFFERENCE

Arguing for an empirical sociology of social class in Europe means taking the opposite view from that disseminated by the European Commission, which remains anchored to a division along national boundaries. The commission, via Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union), supervises the publication of data provided by national statistical bodies (rate of growth, percentage of national debt, etc.), and publishes data on the operation of job markets (levels of employment and unemployment) that tend to underscore national differences. For example, per capita income varies widely from one country to another: the highest, that of Luxembourg, is three times that of the lowest, Romania.²⁰ But the lens through which the European Commission views these matters is often highly restrictive and distorting. It effectively serves to compare countries with one another, in order either to validate the idea that inequalities can only be described at national level, or to set states in competition with one another. Official sources sometimes use other criteria, such as levels of education, but this is usually for the purpose of contrasting the ‘good student’ countries with the ‘poor students’ of Europe. Reference to social class, on the other hand, or even to socio-economic groups, is never used as a marker. Who knows how many farmers, skilled manual workers, senior managers or CEOs there are in Europe? While state development in France and the United Kingdom is based on statistical accounting in terms of social groups,²¹ this frame of reference is totally absent at European level. The unemployment rate is a good example of this bias, with significant political import: by emphasising differences in unemployment rates between countries, the statistics published by European institutions highlight disparities in economic performance while masking inequality of exposure to unemployment between the working class and the dominant class.

During the crisis in the eurozone in the late 2000s, arguments that were centred on national differences, sometimes embellished with culturalist stereotypes, became increasingly powerful: on the one hand there were the countries stigmatised by the term PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) on the ground of their alleged inability to pay their national debt, suspected of being lazy, irresponsible and even corrupt; on the other were Germany and the countries of the North,