The diversities of Europe: From European modernity to the making of the European Union

Introduction ¹

The emergence of a system of nation-states was one of the key features of European modernity. As the making of nation-states tended to be closely linked to practices of cultural homogenization, it does not seem too exaggerated to argue that homogeneity – a concept not to be conflated with equality – must be considered a principle with a paradigmatic status in the social and political architecture of modern Europe. Over the last decades, historical sociologists have offered vast evidence of how the spread of national forms of rule across the Continent entailed an increasingly centralized control over the cultural practices of the population within discrete territories. ² In the long run, the population affected by this increased control was bound to become the Staatsvolk, as the poignant German term has it, a people inextricably linked to one – and only one – territorial state.

The birth of the modern European state system largely coincided with a protracted period of religious wars and struggles between spiritual and worldly forces over the ultimate foundations of political authority. In the three centuries after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the successive consolidation of the system of nation-states went hand in hand with intense institutional efforts at population structuring (Foucault, 1996). As a result of such efforts, the nation-state became the standard template for the articulation and organization of modern politics. In the realm of the social sciences, the establishment of the standard was concomitant with the internalization of a perspective that we nowadays label – and criticize – as ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2003), a perspective that attributes a quasi-natural character to the territorial units – delineated by clear-cut boundaries and represented by distinctive colours – which configure the political maps of contemporary Europe.

Cultural homogeneity as a state project

In many respects, the structuring of population meant creating collective identities by means of cultural homogenization. It has been argued that the main driving forces of the push for homogeneity were functional imperatives, as modern industrial societies require their members to adopt uniform cultural and communicative standards. ³ However, the choice of a specific variant of homogeneity – the decision for a particular national project – vis-à-vis multiple alternative options will not be properly understood if it is taken only as a sheer reflection of functional necessities. If we look for general models for explaining why homogenization became such a pressing issue in the making of modern Europe, we rather have to look into the realm of the political, where finding a solid cultural base for linking statehood and peoplehood became a crucial component of the legitimation strategies of modern times. Thus, all over Europe, state formation and nation-building implied a striving for cultural homogeneity – one territory with one people attached to one state – that could adopt milder or more aggressive forms, depending on the historical and geo-political context, stretching from enforced assimilation policies to violent and systematic ethnic cleansing (Brubaker, 1996; Mann, 2004).

Religion, language and ethnicity thereby became the main battlefields of nation-state construction in Europe. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) was based on the necessity to overcome the most violent manifestations of the conflict between the forces of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and to find ways of institutionalizing the differentiation of Christianity that had led to successive religious wars. Accordingly, one might argue that the Westphalian system represented an attempt at coming to grips with religious pluralism, and thereby a political concession to the realities of diversity. It is in this sense that Crouch (2000) has considered the continuity of distinct sociocultural pillars across time and space as a feature that sets the European experience apart from the melting-pot model of the USA. However, even if the overall picture resulting from the religious settlements adopted in the 17th century was a map that sanctioned different types of coalescence of political and religious allegiances, we must keep in mind that the rationale of the Westphalian arrangements was to secure homogeneity within the units that constituted the European state system. Ultimately, there was an immediate and strong link between the formation of nation-states and a politics of homogenization (Kraus, 2008: 29–32).

Outside the realm of religion, creating culturally homogeneous states must have looked like an extraordinary task at the time of the Peace of Westphalia. In many cases, homogeneity was not easy to manufacture; it was only achieved in the course of a long-lasting process, on which major ‘advances’ would not have been brought about without massive institutional intervention. Let us just take the case of France, a country which, since the times of early absolutism, could be considered as one of the European ‘proto-nationalizers’ par excellence. Still, way into the 19th century, substantial portions of the French population spoke hardly any French, and it took systematic efforts by the state elites of the Third Republic, who deliberately used schooling and conscription as instruments for disseminating the French language at the expense of regional vernaculars, to change this situation. Regardless of the specific features that were inherent to the construction of a national identity based on the republican creed, the intention to turn ‘peasants into Frenchmen’, ⁴ that is into citizens and nationals, was not an exclusive element of nation-building à la française. Similar stories have been told in the different official languages of the Westphalian world, in which Scanian, Cornish or Sardinian peasants would become Swedes, Brits or Italians, in correspondence with the identity of the particular territorial unit they were expected to embrace. In this respect, the principle ‘Cuius regio, eius lingua’, even if it never attained the same level of prominence and explicitness assigned to its early modern historical precursor, bore as much political weight as the ‘Cuius regio, eius religio’ formula.

The immediate and strong link established between the formation of nation-states and a politics of homogenization was not concerned only with the nationalization of the ‘internal’ masses. It slowly contributed also to a different vision of incoming flows, of geographical mobility: the growth in population produced by mobility had been traditionally defined as a boon for the state, as it provided the rulers with a wider tax base, a richer reservoir of skills and more loyal subjects (Bade, 2000). When states legitimized themselves in the international arena as acting on behalf of distinctive ethno-national groups, however, immigration become a source of diversity that had to be carefully monitored. The previous boon could now turn out to be a threat (Lucassen, 2005). The subsequent development of the modern state has implied a hardening of the distinction between citizen and foreigner (and between native and immigrant). The democratization of the polity and the development of the welfare state has, moreover, implied that the significance of these distinctions has become significant for a growing number of social spheres (Cvajner and Sciortino, 2010). Since the second half of the 19th century, geographical mobility across the national borders has become a ‘problem’ and a ‘challenge’ framed in terms of cultural diversity, and a variety of distinct ‘national’ models has been claimed to be necessary to tackle it, assimilating or integrating the alien newcomers in the national body (Brubaker, 1992; Joppke, 2010).

In short, the concern for the degree of homogeneity of the internal masses is strictly intertwined with the concern for the heterogeneity of the (previously) external ones. As the state took responsibility for ‘its’ population, it acquired the right and duty to modify its quality and its composition. In its developmental mode, sociocultural differences were inevitably defined as ‘non-modern’ or ‘anti-modern’ (Bayly, 2003). Insisting on practicing minority languages or religion, or failing to assimilate quickly to the modernized ways of the receiving nation-state was taken to be both causes and consequences of socio-economic backwardness. Political legitimacy, cultural emancipation and economic development were consequently all challenged by diversity and by its allegedly inevitable consequences: parochialism, poverty, superstition, division and fragmentation.

Not always, however, could the management of diversity be dealt with through assimilation. The main exception in the political project of the modern nation-state was clearly the ‘woman's question’ that has haunted European elites for more than two centuries. Early European political theory took for granted that the existence and adequate functioning of a civilized public sphere required in fact the existence and adequate functioning of a secluded private sphere, whose inhabitants could by definition be deprived of the benefits of a homogenized, rational, culture and of a liberal polity. The freedom and rationality of the (male) republic required the protection and enforcement of patriarchal authority within the household; the cherished solidarity of the republican brotherhood made sense only if matched by the lack of an equivalent sisterhood (Pateman, 1988). Such clear-cut division, still taken as obvious in the mid-19th century, proved however increasingly difficult to uphold, not the least for the impacts of the very nationalizing processes unleashed by the political projects of the modern state. The building of European nation-states has consequently encountered gender diversity very early on, in a variety of crucial junctions. Changes in gender relationships have been seen as a challenge for the future of populations, causing inadequate birth rates, or failing to guarantee the envisaged eugenic ‘quality’ of the new members of the nation (Freeden, 1979). Influential European intellectuals in the 19th century were sharply divided among the many who defined the prospects for gender equality as a pathology and the few who hailed it as the wave of the future. But in the end, all slowly came to agree on the state's responsibility for identifying, stipulating and regulating the role of women in the political and social space (Kandal, 1988). Here, however, politically enforced homogenizing actions could be seen, and were actually denounced, as negative. From such a perspective, the state should rather act as a protector of difference than as a guardian of similarity. It must be stressed that, in the context of our assessment of diversity politics in the nation-building era, the European angle plays a key role. As recent debates on ‘multiple modernities’ have brought to the fore, once we begin drawing comparisons between East, West, North and South, the paths leading to modern conditions point in remarkably different directions (Eisenstadt, 2000). They cannot be adequately interpreted as being the results of one standard cultural program applied more or less evenly on a global scale. ⁵ Hence, it is especially by looking at the European past that we will become aware of the strong moment of discontinuity inherent to a project that aims at having Europeans united in diversity, as the official motto of the European Union (EU) reads.

Diversity as a core concept in the European project

When seen against the background of European history, the emphatic affirmation of diversity clearly is part of an institutional discourse that intends to transcend some of the most characteristic features of polity-building in modern Europe. While the nation-states were meant to realize unity through homogenization, European institutions claim to desire a novel approach to political integration, giving highest priority to the protection of cultural and linguistic diversity. By embracing the imperative of protecting, and even promoting, diversity, the architects of the Union wanted to underline that the point of departure for the uniting of Europe was a clear break with some of the legacies of European modernity, at any rate to the extent that these legacies are represented by the model of the homogenous nation-state. Through the making and consolidation of the Westphalian state system, this model has developed on the basis of a normative monism that amalgamated one territory, one collective identity and one source of sovereignty in a uniform socio-political space (Kraus, 2011).

The EU, in contrast, aims at setting up an institutional framework for transnational polity-building which, while being grounded in a catalogue of common interests and values, openly admits multiple identities, shared sovereignties and highly differentiated and overlapping forms of integration. The fact is that nation-states, once they are conceived as member states, can maintain their traditional claim to internal homogeneity only recasting it as protection and enhancement of a distinctive cultural identity among many, as a partial, horizontal, stance within a broader and more universalistic assembly of (mostly liberal) ‘European’ values. Framed along these lines, ‘diversity’ is, at the same time, a way to acknowledge the enduring significance of the constituent member states and to claim a radically different and special role for the Union itself. Unsurprisingly, the concept of diversity has attained a pivotal role in the official discourse of the EU. Pioneers of economic integration, such as the first President of the European Commission Walter Hallstein, adopted a pioneering position when it came to emphasizing the decisive role the protection of diversity should play in the building of Europe (Hallstein, 1973: 112). Since the early 1970s, all main treaties and declarations that document the successive construction of a European polity have paid tribute to diversity. The term's normative pre-eminence becomes especially salient in the context of attempts at defining Europe's political identity, and, in particular, the novel aspects that distinguish this identity from previous models of political organization. When the EU claims to stand for unity in diversity, it claims to introduce a critical element of difference with regard to the institutional legacy of historical nationalism. While unity in European nation-states was generally conceived of as a synonym of cultural homogeneity, through which the people were linked to ‘their’ state, and the state to ‘its’ people, the pathway of European integration is supposed to follow another direction, namely to pursue common political and economic objectives without menacing the diverse cultural and linguistic affiliations which are constitutive of the Union's citizenry.

However, the European project has not only the task of simultaneously respecting and taming the homogenising traditions of its member states, but it has also the goal of making functionally viable (and thus culturally respectable) the protection and enhancement of national, transnational and sub-national diversities. The growing reference to diversity as a master conceptual frame, particularly when matched by strengthening networks of enduring relationships between the European institutions and local authorities, has contributed to widen the scope of the meaning of diversity (Judt, 2005). Here the respect for diversity is not seen as protection against war and oppression, but rather as a precondition of political stabilization and economic growth (Pastore and Sciortino, 2003). Here the European discourse claims that, with the development of the post-nationalistic framework of a ‘community’ of Europeans, many traditional cleavages that had challenged nation-states will, if properly managed, transform themselves into assets. They will cease to be constraints to become resources; they will be a source of precious cross-cutting links rather than be divisive; they will not be any more markers of backwardness but they will actually turn out to be symbols of true modernity.

The task of functionally sanitizing the old cultural and linguistic cleavages among European states, turning them into resources, is the main way through which the European project has tackled the diversities of Europe. In this respect, however, it should not be forgotten that European integration is not only a project that looks back to the horrors of the 20th century, but also a project that is meant to sustain forward-looking, enlightened action. It is increasingly entrusted with the task of accompanying and protecting the reluctant states of the Old Continent in their acceptance of the brave new global world. Its main achievement – the Common Market – has its rationale in the desire to secure a privileged position in the global markets for capital, goods, services and workers. EU institutions have the dual task of protecting the member states from the most negative aspects of the global arena and of pushing them to adapt successfully to it. It is in the context of such activities that the EU has started to deal with diversities which it had previously ignored or studiously neglected, such as gender and (non-EU) nationality. In these fields, as in the case of cultural and linguistic diversity, the European approach is based on the claim that what could be a precious resource is actually wasted as dead weight. Where the unequal distribution of resources and rights among social categories may be framed as impeding or limiting European economic and geopolitical competitiveness on the global scene, interventions by EU institutions may be seen as legitimate. In consequence, the EU has successively developed a basic institutional infrastructure targeting issues of gender and immigration. This is typically based on a frame which considers some of the member states as ‘backward’ in comparison to more ‘progressive’ members, which may offer enlightened guidance when it comes to reaping the benefits of equality. Built on shaky legal foundations, such infrastructure has generally been developed through the use of ‘soft power’, thereby often leaving only little room for action vis-à-vis the entrenched interests of the more powerful member states. Nonetheless, it gives the Union a recognized capacity to talk on behalf of European ‘values’ and to draw the attention of member state governments to diversity-related issues.

After successive enlargements, and since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the discursive weight assigned to diversity in official EU documents has kept increasing, to the extent that, if one began looking for a concept that condenses the normative added value that the Union may claim to embody vis-à-vis its member states, diversity would appear to be a first-rate candidate.

Diversity as an alternative to the search for a European identity

The EU has increasingly identified with diversity precisely because diversity has provided it with an innovative legitimation ground, which is sharply differentiated from the traditional self-understanding of the member states. The only period in which European institutions embarked somewhat in a different strategy, mimicking the previous strategies of nation-making, has been during the attempt, in the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty, to equip European institutions with a substantive frame of popular identification with Europe able to go beyond the shared commitment to peace, economic growth and prosperity. Such a project originated in the often-quoted observation made by Jacques Delors, Head of the Commission at the times of Maastricht, that ‘you don’t fall in love with a common market: you need something else’. ⁶ The search for this ‘something else’ was identified as a necessary step towards fully legitimizing the European project. Such a search, however, quickly opened up the Pandora's box of EU politics. It revealed the difficulties of developing a substantive cultural identity – something a citizen was supposed to fall in love with – without raising political jealousies among those member states eager to keep their sovereign prerogatives intact. It never really addressed why a contemporary multi-level project such as the EU should be following the notion of an emotionally bounded communitarian solidarity defined by a unified ‘imagined community’. More fundamentally, shifting from a procedural notion of diversity awareness to a substantive definition of common values was easier said than done. Any substantive notion of European identity, in fact, is highly controversial, and any ecumenical formulation will hardly escape from the charge of being either trivial or imperialist. The search for a substantive ‘something else’ paved the way to the fateful decision to provide Europe with its own constitution and to the dismal failure of such an attempt.

Such failure has, however, further heightened the significance of cultural and linguistic diversity in the construction of an actually existing Europe. Actually, the significance of diversity has dominated the convoluted period between the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s and the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009. The more Euro-sceptical member states have revived it as a recurrent pledge to safeguard their identities in a transnational institutional setting, while those forces eager to move towards closer political integration have invoked it as a genuine European value.

There are few doubts that diversity has become an entrenched and long-lasting continuity in the European project. The Treaty of Lisbon, which was adopted in 2009 as a surrogate of sorts for the aborted Constitution for Europe, offers a compact piece of evidence of the normative status assigned to diversity in the process of European polity-building. Article I-3, which lays down the Union's primary goals, includes the following two paragraphs:

It [the Union] shall promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among Member States. (…)

The Union shall respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe's cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced.

Taking diversity seriously: The need for a new approach

There is no risk of being too sentimental in dealing with the EU vision of diversity. Even a cursory overview of the history of the European process will reveal that the success of the concept in EU politics and policies has much to do with the fact that it can be easily used as a catch-all formula that superficially meets a broad range of interests. And it would be equally easy to argue that an important dimension of ‘diversity talk’ in European political debates may be easily debunked as ways to defend privileged or hegemonic positions. Eventually, it may also be stressed that the notion of diversity employed in European discourse is very uneven, reasonably strong with the sources of diversity that have been framed as a dangerous legacy of the past, while little room is given to actions concerning the new forms of diversity emerging within contemporary European societies.

At the same time, it would be wrong to deny or ridicule the fact that the architects of an emerging Euro-polity have made a conscious effort at establishing diversity as a core value to be safeguarded by European integration. As a matter of fact, the celebration of diversity can be regarded as one of the most genuine contributions European integration has thus far made to the language of contemporary constitutionalism.

Times are consequently ripe for a different ways of analysing the relationships between the EU project and issues of cultural and social diversity. The starting point may be precisely the abandonment of any implicit understanding of European institutions as state-like structures and consequently of the attempts to read EU developments along the tracks of the previous experience of European nation-states. On the contrary, it should be acknowledged that European institutions have shown a remarkable continuity in their attempt to reassure its member states and their public opinions that regardless of all political common ground that may emerge among Europeans, the European project does not involve any measures making for uniform patterns of cultural identification (Kraus, 2011: 24–25). It is time to take seriously such a project and try to understand better whether the Union has thus far lived up to its self-chosen endeavour. How have EU policies dealt with specific forms of diversity active in the European space? How much the development of the European approach to diversity has opened up opportunities for challenging the diversity regimes of the specific member-states? Has the aspiration to provide novel and productive combinations of socio-political cohesion and sociocultural diversity been effectively pursued by European institutions? Is the European project more consistent with certain forms of diversity and more at odds with others? Is the actual expansion of practical policy competencies making difficult to persevere in the avoidance of certain forms of diversity? To what degree are European institutions really in charge of the design of diversity policies? To what degree they are rather contested spaces, followers rather than entrepreneurs? In short, what is the credibility of the European diversity discourse at the beginning of the 21st century?

The papers collected in this special issue analyse precisely in which ways European policies have dealt with four key dimensions of social diversity that have been of particular concern in European societies: language, religion, immigration and gender. They analyse how issues linked to these various sources of diversity have succeeded – or failed – to become stable features of European institutions’ declarations and practices. Although the cluster of EU-related organizations, norms and actions varies remarkably across policy fields, the articles are able to highlight some interesting commonalities in the four areas under scrutiny. First, they are areas in which the EU is a relatively ‘weak’ actor and the member states are institutionally granted significant margins of control. In consequence, EU institutions are constrained in their ability to review actions by member states and are forced to intervene through soft power and enhanced networking, through scoreboards, common agendas, handbooks and declarations of common principles. ⁷ Even in the field of language, where the established room for action seems to be larger, the approach adopted by the EU has been, as Kraus and Kazlauskait ė -Gürbüz argue, fairly conservative and self-restrained. A similar restraint is shown by EU institutions in the field of religious diversity. Here, EU actions have developed along the track of the cautious agenda of the European Court of Human Rights, which concedes the member states a wide margin of appreciation both with regard to their compromises with majority religions and with regard to the acknowledgment of the rights of religious minorities. As Zanon and Sciortino show, such choice has been quite useful in avoiding the engagement of EU institutions with some of the most delicate issues in the history of specific member states, but it has also seriously limited the capacity of EU institutions to apply adequate measures in the field of non-discrimination.

The fact that the EU acknowledges its narrow leeway for policy action in the field of diversity does not imply it has been shy of initiatives meant to create specific channels of communication with social categories beyond and outside those of the member states. Lise Rolandsen Agustin's and Birte Siim's analysis of the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion reveals the ambiguities of the efforts made through the instruments of soft power to include (selectively) the voice of migrant women. In particular, it documents how the efforts are filtered by national priorities and by the specific configuration of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society organizations in the member states. The attempts at setting up a European Integration Forum, discussed in the contribution of Arribas Lozano, García-González, Sebastiani, Álvarez Veinguer and Gil Araujo, provide another interesting example of the ambiguities embodied in the European efforts to experiment with recognition and advocacy without challenging the legal and institutional framework of the relations between Union and member states.

On the other side, the papers published here document in detail how the concern with diversity shown by EU institutions and networks is not a mere bonfire of the vanities. Across the four fields under scrutiny, the papers highlight the important roles played by the various notions of diversity which are embedded in the European project: as acknowledgement of the historical and cultural diversity of member states; as an acknowledgement of individual and group diversity within a putatively shared and egalitarian European public sphere; as an instrument for achieving political stabilization, market competitiveness, territorial cohesion and economic growth. They all stress how the European discourse on diversity is, like any other field of diversity politics (Sciortino, 2003), defined by a complex setting of actors that rarely dance to the same tune.

In their review of the specific policy fields, the contributions to this special issue point at the limitations revealed by the European experiences and at the difficulties encountered in the translation of the value of diversity from the level of official documents to the mundane realm of practical action. At the same time, however, the authors conclude that EU policies have acquired a certain level of significance for the various kinds of diversity politics considered, that the involvement of EU institutions in these issues cannot be qualified as a mere decoy, nor as a mechanic translation of power struggles between different member states and policy traditions.

Read together, the papers published here provide evidence for a reading of diversity at the European level as a multidimensional, fluid policy phenomenon, whose evolution has been shaped both by internal institutional drives and by external, environmental, contingencies. As a matter of fact, the involvement of European institutions in the four fields surveyed seems to be contingent upon at least two common constraints. On the one hand, EU involvement is stronger when diversity issues may be framed as clearly linked to issues of economic competitiveness and labour productivity. The coexistence of the two different normative components analysed earlier makes EU discourse more prone to activation when both components may be invoked jointly (Kraus, 2012). On the other hand, it is weaker, or more tentative, when the source of diversity involved evokes one of the main societal cleavages that have shaped the history of nation-making in the member states. Here the importance of diversity – as a prerogative of member states – is often bound to prevail over the importance of diversity as a prerogative of citizens or groups in the European public sphere.