NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS

NATIONALISM
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FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN
Nations and Nationalism 23 (2), 2017, 227–247.
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12299

Identity and social solidarity: an

ignored connection. A historical
perspective on the state of Europe and
its nations
BO STRÅTH
University of Helsinki, Finland

ABSTRACT. The article comments on the ongoing de-Europeanisation and re-natio-

nalisation of Europe from a historical perspective. The article argues that the building
of national community from the 1870s onwards focused on the problem of social inte-
gration where the development of emotional feelings of belonging and solidarity was
linked to the building of institutions for social politics in mutually reinforcing dynamics.
The social question emerged in the wake of the spread of industrial capitalism. Its role is
underexplored in the study of the building of national and European communities. The
social question draws attention to the institutional capacity of nation states rather than
nations based on emotions. Nationalism did not only mean the building of friend- en-
emy distinctions through ethnicity but also national socialism as a conservative reform
strategy against class struggle socialism. This contention between two approaches to the
problem of social integration moulded together national communities through
emotions and institutions without deploying the concept of identity. The article outlines
this development, culminating in the (West) European welfare states as nation– states in
the strong sense of the merger of these two terms, and how it came to an end in the
1970s when a reverse development began towards social disintegration at the end
accompanied by accelerating nationalism and xenophobia. The identity concept was
mobilised in 1973 as a tool in the European integration project to compensate for the
erosion of social institutions by means of emotions. It was taken over and politicised
from having been a technical term in mathematics and psychoanalysis. The
politicisation of the identity concept was an indication of a deep identity crisis in Europe
and its nations. The identity therapy failed, and the identity crisis remains, accompanied
by an ever louder nationalistic and xenophobic vocabulary. Emotions replace
institutions. The methodological focus of the article is on the semantics around key
concepts such as social politics, solidarity and identity in their historical context as
forward-looking and action-oriented concepts in the construction of community. This
approach with a focus on past futures is an alternative to the application of the
retrospective analytical concepts of ethnic and civic nationalism outlining present pasts.

KEYWORDS: conceptual history, de-Europeanisation, identity, re-nationalisation,

social nationalism, social solidarity

© The author(s) 2017. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2017
228 Bo Stråth

The problem: identity and solidarity – de-Europeanisation and re-nationalisation

The nineteenth century was the century of nation building. It was the century
of the invention and construction of nations. An important point of reference
was the charismatic use of the term ‘nation’ in the French revolution as a
mobilising and action-oriented key concept (Hunt 1984). The impact was
strong all over Europe, in particular, in the German-speaking territories. The
term highlighted a political and cultural community, political in terms of
particular citizen rights argued to be universal, cultural in terms of shared
ethnicity.
The French revolution occurred in a preindustrial age but the framework of
the European nation building was the industrial revolution based on steam and
new forms of physical and intellectual communication, organisation of labour
and mobilisation of capital. New labour market relationships emerged in the
wake of the spread of industrial capitalism. They were based on contracts
between sellers and buyers of labour. New kinds of capital accumulation and
poverty invalidated the cohesive link claimed between freedom and equality
in the French revolution. Nineteenth-century European nation building
became a long and contentious confrontation with what from the 1830s was
defined as the social question in a top-down perspective, which merged both
fear of the masses and empathy with them. From the 1870s, the social question
developed into the class question in a bottom-up perspective with more or less
revolutionary claims for social justice.
Nobody talked about identity in these processes. The search was for
community. German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies outlined in the 1880s
how the old term of ‘community’, Gemeinschaft, lost meaning in the wake of
the spread of industrial capitalism, being replaced by ‘society’, Gesellschaft,
which described a new social organisation based on division of labour, special-
isation and atomisation (Tönnies 1991 [1887]). Gesellschaft connoted
alienation. Somewhat later Émile Durkheim (1997 [1893]) analysed the same
process describing how the mechanical solidarity of traditional societies
changed into organic solidarity. There was a certain nostalgia implicit in the
concepts of community and mechanical solidarity. They were concepts for
cultural bonds between humans whereas the references to Gesellschaft and
organic solidarity addressed the issue of social bonds in ambiguous terms of
future threats and opportunities.
No one talked about identity in these nineteenth-century debates. Identity
was largely a technical term used for centuries in mathematics and since the
1880s in the new science of psychoanalysis. A key argument in this article – fol-
lowing the work of Reinhart Koselleck on the history of concepts – is that one
must distinguish between the languages of the time and the analytical concepts
imposed retrospectively on an earlier epoch by analysts of a later generation.1
It may seem strange to insist on the unimportance of the identity concept in
a collection of articles concerned with identity, but one can argue that this is
precisely why one should do so because this enables one to contextualise and

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A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations 229

historicise the term and to show how the origins of the concept are to be found
in the 1970s when it did emerge as a contemporary concept used to outline a
potential future.
The focus in the article is on the semantics around key concepts such as
social politics, solidarity and identity in their historical context as forward-
looking and action-oriented concepts in the construction of community. This
approach with a focus on past futures is an alternative to the application of
the retrospective analytical concepts outlining present pasts. The argument is
that the focus on past futures outlines historical processes in their ambiguities,
contradictions, oppositions and open-endedness, whereas the focus on present
pasts tends to confirm the history that actually happened and ignores the
potential alternatives.
There was in the nineteenth-century debates, a term that tried to bridge the
tensions between the vocabularies of community and society, mechanical and
organic solidarity: nation translated as people, peuple, popolo, pueblo, люди,
Volk, folk, kansa, etc, which through the French revolution got a future-ori-
ented mobilising capacity at the same time as it appealed to past greatness
and virtues. Key questions dealt with who the representatives of the nation/
the people were, the monarch or the representative assemblies and whom the
representatives in the representative assemblies represented. Another key issue
was about the relationships between national unification and social unification
in the nations, unification through external demarcation and as internal
integration.
The search for community and for a new vocabulary for a new kind of
social organisation at a time when many experienced a lack of community
involved the search for domestic social ties in a society that many experienced
in terms of alienation, atomisation and threat, as well as the search for the
boundaries and bonds of community defined against an Other. Germany
after the martial national unification in 1871 is a case in point. In 1873, a
group of professors in sociology and political economy founded an associa-
tion for social policy and politics. Gustav Schönberg, a professor in
Nationalökonomie in Basle, Freiburg and Tübingen, and a founder member
of the association, formulated the social task of the German Reich in pro-
grammatic terms:

The so-called social question is for us, after the national question has found its solution,
perhaps the most important for the future . . . Now, the task is to make the cultural state
[Kulturstaat] the truth . . . We therefore must categorically require from the state that it
fulfils what the state administration so far has not done, that it finally tells the German
people what the situation of its wage workers is (quoted from Wagner (1990): 80).

The building of nation states around the social and class questions in the
wake of the industrial revolution involved the intertwined politics of warfare
and welfare (Stråth 2016). The struggle about coming to terms with the social
question is the historical ground on which we can understand our present.

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230 Bo Stråth

Nation building had – in the language of retrospective analysis since the late
1970s both a civic and an ethnic dimension. A crucial influence for this
conceptualisation was Roger Brubaker’s historical comparison of France
and Germany (Brubaker 1992). In his analysis, nation building in France in
the wake of the revolution was based on the imagery of a civic republic in a
legal framing called jus soli, the law of the soil where all males born in
France automatically acquired citizenship. The citizens were unified in one
cohesive community. This imagery glossed over the deep tension between the
concepts of freedom and equality, rich and poor.
German nation building emerged in response and opposition to the French
project and had a stronger We–They profile that built on the principle of ius
sanguinis, the law of the blood, i.e. parentage, as the criterion for automatic
citizenship.
In practice, the civic version came to emphasise formal inclusion, whereas
the ethnic version built more on exclusion as an instrument for national
community. Formal inclusion in practice was not necessarily equivalent to
social inclusion. The civic inclusion emphasised political community in terms
of civic rights that were argued to be universal but did not necessarily involve
all citizens or subjects of the state. Ethnic nationalism tried to compensate for
this deficit in its argument for more cohesive cultural community around the
imageries of race and ethnicity. It often emphasised social inclusion through
concepts like national socialism or state socialism (as opposed to class struggle
socialism). Nation building had a stronger friend–enemy dimension in the
ethnic version. Ethnic nationalism operated with rigid, often essentialising
understandings of culture, history and traditions. Civic nationalism connected
to imageries of freedom. It put equal opportunities – not necessarily social
equality – against birth privileges. Civic nationalism played down the differ-
ences from other nations that ethnic nationalism highlighted. For instance,
Giuseppe Mazzini, in his imagery of Young Europe in the 1830s, did not see
any problem with civic nations unified in a European confederation.
Brubaker’s matrix has become a kind of ideal type in the discussion of
nationalism with an implicit subtext of a distinction between good and bad
nationalism. The debate has drawn attention to several weaknesses in this
binary conceptualisation. In political practices, territory and blood are seldom
mutually exclusive criteria for citizenship but tend to merge. Other criteria like
religion, language, history and geography disappear. The civic as well as the
ethnic track both lack an explicit reference to the social issue which since the
1830s was thematised all over Europe. Poverty is an old phenomenon and
the response to it before the spread of industrial capitalism was often social
exclusion, formally or in practice. After 1830, as industrial capitalism spread,
with new forms of property and poverty, the debate on the social question
began to address poverty as a threat built into the ‘industrial system’ and to
look for solutions from the perspective of inclusion.
The problem with the two key concepts of Brubaker is that ethnic national-
ism in the exegetics around it often has come to circumvent the social

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A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations 231

dimension of nationalism by its emphasis on exclusion and civic nationalism to

ignore the social in its definition of inclusion. The retrospective analytical
approach excludes the central problem of the nineteenth-century nation build-
ing: the ‘social question’ (as it was called from the 1830s) that became the ‘class
question’ in the 1870s. An approach focusing on contemporary discourses pays
attention to the role of the social question. The search for solutions to the
social question was a search for community through emotions and institutions:
in the language of today, a search for identity.
This article will proceed along a path that pays attention to the key concepts
in the semantics around the social question in the nineteenth-century nation
building and to identity when it emerged as a key concept in the contemporary
debates from the 1970s, as terms actually used in past debates, coined in
academic-political discourses in order to translate experiences into mobilising
horizons of expectation (Koselleck 1985 [1979]. They mediate past futures
rather than the past of the present in the 1970s and the 1980s when the
academic discourse on ethnic and civic nationalism emerged. Ethnic and civic
nationalism are retrospective analytical concepts. The key issue will be the
social dimension in the concepts used by contemporaries to grasp issues of
identity and solidarity. The emphasis on nation states rather than nations
means a focus on the institutional capacity to respond to emotional and mate-
rial interest claims around what was experienced as a social problem.
The focus on the concept of identity and on the semantics around the social
question and the issue of solidarity, in both cases in the contemporary
language, writes history forwards, whereas the focus on ethnic and civic
nationalism writes it backwards. We will come back to the advantages of the
focus on the contemporary conceptualisation.

The debate on the social question and the emergence of emotions and institutions
for national community

1870–1871 represented a tectonic shift of the power relationships in Europe

that destroyed the fundaments of the Vienna peace order and fundamentally
changed the preconditions of nation building. Bismarck completed the
national unification of Germany with arms on the ruins of the French empire
and against the backdrop of the violent attempts to redefine la nation after its
collapse. One of the proposals for the redefinition of national community was
the Paris Commune, which after a few months came to a bloody end but
remained as an inspiring example for Europe’s Left and a threat for its estab-
lishments. The language of revolutionary class struggle agitated Europe after
the Paris commune. Karl Marx frightened the ruling elites with a pamphlet
in 1871 about the Commune that became a bestseller. It was a common belief
that the Paris Commune had been the work of the International Working
Men’s Association (known as the First International) which Marx led. Marx’s
defence of the Commune led the conservative press throughout Europe to

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232 Bo Stråth

denounce him as the leader of a secret communist international workers’

conspiracy. Overnight, he became the most calumniated man in London. All
the leading newspapers commented on the publication in editorials. The
International was depicted as one of Europe’s great powers. Marx polarised
opinion: readers were either for or against the Commune. Together with his
growing reputation as the author of Capital, Marx rapidly became known as
the great revolutionary architect of ‘scientific socialism’ (Jones 2002).
In 1873, a speculation bubble triggered a long period of economic
stagnation with pressures on profits and wages, bankruptcies and unemploy-
ment. The stagnation lasted until the 1890s and was called the Great
Depression until the 1930s when an even deeper economic crisis took over
the label. The class struggle language became ever louder, and the liberal world
image lost credibility in the framework of economic crisis. New future horizons
emerged under the label of progress.
The class struggle debate put the social question and the issue of social
community on the political emergency agendas all over Europe. Marx’
argument that a specific working-class consciousness drove the class struggle
and moulded a social community among the workers threatened the
established order and intensified its search for national community involving
all subjects of the nation, including the workers. This was the European
framework of the specific German problem that Schönberg and the Associa-
tion for Social Policy articulated.
Against this background of revolutionary threats and economic crisis, and a
search for community in societies that were drifting apart, the German Verein
für Sozialpolitik and Disraeli’s government programme of social reform in
1874–1875 signalled a new academic-political approach to national integration
in Europe. National integration came to mean social integration of the
working classes. The British prime minister had expressed his concern with
the social question already in his 1845 novel Sybil, or the Two Nations (the rich
and the poor), where he referred to ‘the only duty of power, the social welfare
of the people’. In 1874, his concern became political, with a programme for
social reform in housing, savings and labour relations, against slum buildings
and for public health. The Employers and Workmen Act 1875 established
equality before the law regarding labour contracts. Other laws allowed peace-
ful picketing and regulated labour standards in factory work (Hennock 2004;
Englander 1998).
On the continent Bismarck followed up. His social legislation in the 1880s is
well known. His old-age pensions, sickness and work accident insurances were
the first in the world and became the model for other countries and the basis of
the modern welfare state. His attempt to appropriate the vocabulary about the
social from the socialists meant that he in many respects came close to their
agenda, and he even had occasional contacts with the social democratic leader
Ferdinand Lassalle. But he was also keen to get rid of competition from them.
Consequently, the organizations of the socialists were forbidden from 1878
until Bismarck’s dismissal in 1890.

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A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations 233

Bismarck could build his social reforms on academic support from the
Verein für Sozialpolitik, the Association for Social Policy, founded in 1873
by a number of reform-oriented professors in political economy and sociology
like Gustav Schönberg, Gustav von Schmoller and Adolph Wagner. The
backdrop to the initiative was the proclamation of the German Reich in
1871, the reverse of the Paris Commune. The political intention of the
association was focused on the state. The task of the association was to become
a forum in which academic, economic and political-administrative elites could
communicate about necessary measures to be undertaken on the basis of social
scientific research results. An urgent requirement was the establishment of a
public debate about what the professors referred to as the ‘social’ or the ‘class
question’ and how to solve it. State and society necessarily had to be activated
in order to establish a balance between the social interests drifting apart, the
professors argued. This was a sine qua non for the welding of a German nation.
It was not by chance that the Verein für Sozialpolitik was founded two years
after the establishment of the Reich. Welfare for social integration was the
follow-up instrument to consolidate what warfare had created (Hennock
2004; Wagner 1990; Stråth 2016: Ch 2; Grimmer-Solem 2003).
Despite all socialist reproaches from classical laissez-faire-oriented econo-
mists, who referred to the members of the association as Kathedersozialisten
(armchair socialists, alluding to their academic chairs, a label that was
popularised in the public debate in Germany and abroad), the members of
the association saw themselves in a mediating position between socialists and
market apologetics.
The Association for social policy did not emerge in a void but the frame-
work conditions went beyond the establishment of the German empire. The
historical basis was the intense European debate taking place since the 1830s
on what was referred to as the social issue or the social question. The debate
was a ruling-class therapy in order to come to terms with what they
experienced as a potential threat. The spread of industrial capitalism and
contract-based wage work from Britain to the continent brought not only un-
precedentedly large capital concentrations but also growing proletarianisation
of a new kind and scale. Property went hand in hand with poverty. The ruling
classes translated their experiences of the European revolutions since 1789 into
expectations of new threatening revolutions. The debate on the social issue was
about how to confront that threat. The self-organisation of the working classes
under ideas of class struggle and socialism in the 1870s, against the backdrop
of the extended economic crisis and intensified industrialisation, gave the
threat more dramatic proportions. The social issue became for the ruling elites
the class question. The political efforts for social integration grew. This was the
general European background of the German Katheder socialists (Wagner
1990; Winkel 1977).
These academics were politically conservatively or social liberally oriented.
They not only presented an external face to the public but also had an internal
academic profile. They all belonged to the so-called historical school, which

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234 Bo Stråth

had emerged in Germany in the early nineteenth century in conflict with the
classical economists. The historical school rejected the assumptions of univer-
sal laws governing economic performance, the discovery of which the classical
economists saw as their task. The search for the universal economic and social
laws had made classical economy blind to the growing social problems in the
wake of industrial capitalism, the historicists argued. The classicists never
seriously addressed the social problems. The historicists argued that each
country based its development on historically given norms, customs, practices
and institutions. The same problem could be approached very differently from
country to country, depending on the specific historical heritage. The idea of a
historical heritage provided a link between social definitions of belonging and
ethnic views (Winkel 1977; Koslowski 2005; Koslowski 1995).
In France, somewhere between Germany and Britain, the development was
similar, in particular conceptualised by Émile Durkheim in his work on the
differences between the mechanical solidarity of traditional societies and
organic solidarity based on the division of labour in modern societies. With
his concepts of solidarity and division of labour, he demonstrated the
increasing interdependence – instead of independence – of individuals in
industrial societies. Also in French political science, there was a movement
away from the assumption of universal laws explaining economic and social
behaviour towards historically derived theories for state intervention (Wagner
1990:76–79; Hansen 1999).
On this ground, the idea of solidarisme emerged, a main interpreter of which
was Léon Bourgeois, who was strongly influenced by Durkheim. Increasingly
protagonists of this view found laissez-faire unacceptable and promoted
reinforced state activity to mitigate the class clash (Durkheim 1997 [1893];
Wagner 1990: 76–79).
In the 1890s, national (or state) socialism emerged in Germany and Sweden
in order to express the emotional and institutional dimensions of the nation in
opposition to ‘cosmopolitan’ class struggle socialism. In a parallel movement,
solidarité emerged in France with the same ambition to emphasise the interest-
based institutional and emotional dimensions of the construction of commu-
nity. In The Division of Labour in Society, Émile Durkheim distinguished
between mechanical and organic solidarity where mechanical solidarity pro-
duced social cohesion and integration in traditional societies with people being
connected through similar work, education and religion. Organic solidarity, in
contrast, expressed social cohesion transcending the atomisation between
individuals by emphasising their dependence on each other in more advanced
societies where they perform different tasks and often have different values and
interests (Durkheim 1997 [1893]). Already before Durkheim, German
sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies had suggested a parallel dichotomy to describe
the social problems and the risk of atomisation in the wake of industrial
capitalism. He outlined nostalgically the past as Gemeinschaft, community,
and the ambiguous and more atomised future as Gesellschaft, society. The
workers began in the wake of this conceptualisation of organic, functional,

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A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations 235

interest-based solidarity and society to understand themselves as a cohesive

although oppressed part of the nation, as a class with class-consciousness.
Organic solidarity or Gesellschaft worked through institutional ties essential
in large-scale modern societies, while mechanical solidarity or Gemeinschaft
worked through the affective ties associated with the small-scale relationships
of traditional society. A few decades after Durkheim, Max Weber would
conceptualise the two dimensions of solidarity, the emotional and the
institutional, in terms of ideal and material interests (Gerth and Wright Mills
(eds) 1991 [1946]:280). In Italy, the liberalisti among the political economists,
persistent adherents of the liberal theory and radical free trade, lost ground
to the advocates of the state as instrument for social politics, the statalisti,
who, inspired by Bismarck, incorporated into the statutes of their association
a list of political measures to be promoted. Through their emphasis on the
social question and the role of the state to solve it, the statalisti in the 1870s
took over the lead in the economic debate from the liberal economists through
their formulation of the social question to which the liberals had never paid
attention (Wagner 1990: 120–123).
In Sweden, the development was similar. The influence of the German
Katheder socialists was obvious in political economics and social sciences. In
the years around 1900, conservative political science professor Rudolf Kjellén
suggested national socialism as an alternative to class struggle socialism. The
nation had to be organised as a home of the people, a folkhem. Like Bismarck
in Germany, a couple of decades before, Kjellén aimed at appropriating the
language of the social and of people and nation from the socialists. The social
democrats were highly interested in the idea of the folkhemmet but wanted to
give the home of the people a different design. A thirty-year discursive struggle
about giving meaning to the concept of the people and the imagery of the
folkhemmet followed until the social democrats in the 1930s took over the
priority of interpretation and maintained it for half a century (Stråth 2012).
Nation building in nineteenth-century Europe, from at latest the 1870s,
involved a conflict between conservatives and socialists about how to achieve
national integration, a conflict that in the long-run moulded together the
nation. National integration in the mass societies of the nineteenth century
emerged through political conflict about the social and the search for political
compromises
The drawn out crisis of liberalism and the ever louder voices all over Europe
for state interventions in the economy resulted in the emergence of a liberalism
with a social profile. Laissez-faire lost ground. The New Liberalism in Britain
in 1906 and social liberalism in Scandinavia are two instances of this
development.
Europe on the eve of World War I was top-down and authoritarian.
Through conservative concessions, the regimes consolidated their power and
integrated social protests (Sellin 2014). The authoritarian and conservative
regimes built on the insight that nation building required state building and
institutions for social politics. On this point, both Benedict Anderson and

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236 Bo Stråth

Ernest Gellner underestimate the role of social protest and social protection
for nation building in their emphasis on symbol production and education
for national integration (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983). The conservative
language of state, state socialism (Bismarck), national socialism for a home
for the people (Kjellén), social reform, social insurance, social policy, social
politics, etc. underpinned the channelling of social protest into national
integration. Solidarity was a key concept in these processes only in France:
solidarité nationale in the wake of Durkheim but the trend was the same
everywhere.
Welfare made states, and states made welfare (Stråth 2016: Ch 2). It is also
true that states continued to make war, and that wars made states. Charles
Tilly’s dictum was highly valid in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth
century (Tilly 1992). There is no better political protagonist than Bismarck and
no better academic protagonist than Kjellén for this connection between
welfare and warfare. Kjellén combined his attention to national socialism with
his interest in geopolitics. Warfare and welfare went hand in hand in the
politics for national integration. The pattern was widespread in Europe after
1870. After having dismissed him, Wilhelm II radicalised Bismarck’s approach
to national unification and social integration, presenting himself as a social
monarch and reinforcing the martial politics of imperialism.
Social imperialism connected warfare and welfare, supporting social politics
for the material improvement of the conditions of the working class with an
emotional attachment to the nation. As noted earlier, Max Weber distin-
guished between ideal and material interests. Both components, emotions
and social institutions were crucial in nation and state building. Imperialism
was an instrument to preserve the domestic social peace and the emotional
feelings of national community. Jingoism is a case in point. In the conceptual-
isation of Hans-Ulrich Wehler social imperialism was a defensive ideology to
counter the disruptive impacts of industrial capitalism on social cohesion. It
distracted public attention from domestic problems and contributed to
preserving the existing political order. Social imperialism provided the
emotional glue to keep together fractured societies (Wehler 1969 and 1977
[1973]. See, for a critical comment, Eley 1998: 925–926). In the contemporary
debate, J A Hobson saw the risks with imperialism and argued for a
different approach to social cohesion. Imperialism was in his view caused
by overcapacity in the domestic markets. He rejected imperialism as a tool
for social integration and suggested higher incomes to the working class to
boost domestic demand and at the same time increase social integration
(Hobson 1902).
World War I greatly extended state interventions. Social integration was
important for supportive home fronts. The rhetoric of international working-
class solidarity disappeared when the socialists and social democrats in almost
all European countries rallied behind their governments in support of national
war efforts. Socialism was nationalised. The war meant massive expansion of
the tasks of the state, including in the social area. Experiences of how the state

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A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations 237

apparatus could be used for regulation of economies and the social services
were accumulated and a new basis for thinking the welfare state was laid
(Cabanes 2014; Eisner 2000; Bartocci 1999; Bock 2004: 495–508).
The war brought the breakthrough of democracy in the postwar world, but
also totalitarianism in countries that failed to respond to social problems
articulated by a working class more powerful than ever before. On the
democratic track, solidarity became a key concept. Democracy emerged as
social democracy based on and transforming the social–political platform that
authoritarianism and conservative regimes had established since the 1870s.
Solidarity in terms of shared responsibility, based on common interest and
feelings of belonging and togetherness with both an emotional and material
dimension, became a point of reference in the social democratic politics for
national integration. The term expanded from its French origin and from its
use in the building of working class cohesion to the politics of national
integration based on the reconciliation between rich and poor through progres-
sive taxation for welfare politics. On the totalitarian side authoritarian
corporatism promoted emotional solidarity and material interests of the
masses through a combination of warfare and welfare.
On the basis of the war experiences and on the additional experiences of
version II of the Great Depression and of the World War, the 1950s saw the
breakthrough of the nation states in their modern meaning as national
communities of destiny building on feelings of social solidarity, government
control of income distribution through income taxes and guarantee of social
standards. Bismarck’s imposition of the social state had been top-down.
Now it changed to bottom-up struggles for more equality. The two world wars
and the economic crisis between them had increased the consciousness for
social peace.
The world wars, not the French revolution, paved the way for the break-
through of democracy. Monarchical authoritarian rule had from the Vienna
peace in 1815 until the outbreak of World War I a century later more or less
successfully warded off what the monarchs saw as the democratic threat by
means of a combination of repressions and concessions. The ideas of the
French revolution had certainly had a mobilising force but little capacity for
political implementation before 1914. The breakthrough to democracy after
1918 built on the link between civic and social rights. After still another world
war, T H Marshall in 1949 outlined his three-stage model of citizenship: civic
in the eighteenth, political in the nineteenth and social in the twentieth century.
The latter emphasised the social responsibilities the state has to its citizens
(Marshall 1963 [1949].
Here, one must add that this was a West European development in the
framework of the Cold War. The potential for radical protests, in particular
in France and Italy, and the threat of the Soviet Union triggered welfare
politics to stabilise the Western democracies. This was the framework of
Beveridge’s plan, Scandinavian social democratic welfare and the German
social market economy.

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238 Bo Stråth

The narrative of progressive European modernisation through a three-stage

(civil, political, social) model repressed in a Freudian sense the conservative
strategy of social politics for national integration from the 1870s until 1914, re-
moving it from the sight of historians. The functionalist social science narra-
tive in the 1950s and the 1960s of US provenance built a bridge over the
time from the world wars to the enlightenment, describing how superstition
became reason, backwardness progress, absolutism democracy and poverty
wealth. This development was led by the USA, which became the norm and
the goal for economic and political development but (Western) Europe would
follow suit according to such a modernisation narrative. In Western Europe,
the third step – social welfare – was implemented in the 1950s and 1960s by
Christian democrats and social democrats. The narrative described a response
to the threats of communism in Eastern Europe and to the warning provided
by it and had little place for the conservative reform politics of social integra-
tion from the later nineteenth century. Moore (1966) was path-breaking for the
formulation of this academic perspective with a clear ideological subtext. One
might say that the social dimension of the nineteenth century nation building
disappeared in this retrospective functionalist formulation of the past before
the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. In a conceptual-his-
torical approach focusing on the past futures before the catastrophes, as
conceived in the contemporary debates, this social dimension reappears.

The (West) European community building for national welfare

Social welfare was a means and a goal when Europe after the Second World
War entered the stage as a political actor. It was a tool to prevent a repeat
of past mistakes, to secure a sense of belonging. Not only the experiences of
the collapse of world capitalism in the 1930s but also those of Fascism and
Communism provided the interpretative framework for the foundation of
the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. Out of the bitter experience
of World War II, Europe’s Christian Democrats knew how the rule of the
people could be abused. Democracy had brought Nazism to power. At the
time of the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949) and the Korean War (1950–1953),
the Moscow-controlled Communist Parties in France and Italy had the
support of some twenty-five to thirty-five per cent of the electorate.
Through the construction of the European Coal and Steel Community,
Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi thought that they
could create an order more robust than that of the League of Nations, where
executive power would be protected from populist attacks and unreliable
voters. They were keen to avoid a new Weimar scenario. The framework
was the Cold War and Communism was the big threat. The Cold War was
characterised by its ongoing preparation for warfare through welfare and the
political guarantee of a social democracy, i.e. the implementation of
Marshall’s imagery of social citizenship that was the path to political

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A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations 239

allegiance. The nineteenth century construction of national community now

became a matter of building a European community through politics for
welfare.
The primary aim had never been to create a democratic organisation of
political belonging, but rather to establish a system of protection that would
make their nation states safe for democracy. The choice of terms to describe
this new institutional configuration is telling, with the High Authority (which
later became the Commission) as the body of centralised power. There was a
long-term undercurrent of development into a federal Europe that could be
found in the pragmatic construction of the European Coal and Steel Commu-
nity. Such dreams were promoted by memories of the war. The resistance
movements had imagined a federal Europe as their postwar goal. The
European Coal and Steel Community drew on the imageries of the resistance
movement emphasising both the emotional and the institutional dimensions
of solidarity, both the ideal and material interests in the terminology of Weber.
There was at this time no more talk about a European identity than there was
about national identities. Community was the key concept that unified the
emotional and the material.
When established in 1957, the European Economic Community was not
regarded as a democratic polity. On the contrary, the task of European
integration was to make the member states safe for democracy in a time when
twenty-five per cent of the electorates in Italy and France voted Communist
and the experiences and memories of the Weimar Republic were still fresh.
Democracy was to be safeguarded at the level of the member states, not at
the European level, a historical process Alan Milward rightly called ‘the
European rescue of the nation-states’(Milward 1992. Cf Stråth 2011). This
was an economic salvation of nation states where free trade and competition
guaranteed by the High Authority would promote economic growth in the
member states, which, in turn, would help the governments buy political
allegiance, thus protecting them from political extremism.

The identity crisis: the activation of the language of identity

The crucial question then is when and how the idea of a democratic Europe
and a European identity emerged.
Nation states became welfare states in reaction to Eastern Europe. There
was no talk about national identity, since identification with the welfare-pro-
viding nation states was self-evident. The language of national identity
emerged when the stability of the national welfare states eroded in the 1970s
and 1980s. The title of Anthony Smith’s 1971 book was Theories of National-
ism. His books in 1987 and 1991 were entitled The Ethnic Origins of Nations
and National Identity, respectively (Smith 1971, 1987 and 1991). Whereas the
first book was very much indebted to Smith’s PhD supervisor Ernest Gellner,
connecting nation building to the building of institutions, in particular for

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240 Bo Stråth

education; the other two books explicitly turned against Gellner by

emphasising emotions and ethnicity.
This change of book titles reflected the emergence of a new problem, which
had its origins in the collapse of the postwar economic international order in
the early 1970s. The collapse of the Bretton Woods order triggered by the
dollar crash in 1971, the Vietnam War and the oil price shock in 1973 – all
three events were connected – provoked paralysis and feelings of crisis in
Europe. Before this chain of events, the global youth revolt under the label
of ‘1968’ had prepared the ground for the feelings of (identity) crisis, confusion
and chaos. The (Western) world image of security and stability through
progress, established in a remarkably short time after 1945, collapsed.
The erosion of the welfare provisions provoked an identity crisis all over
Western Europe, an identity crisis that brought the concept of identity on to
political and academic agendas. The identity crisis activated the concept and
triggered an interconnected academic and political search for its substance.
Nations became identities in the nineteenth century and were identities during
their culmination as welfare states in the 1950s and 1960s. ‘National identity’
had been a tautology in those days. There were other concepts around in the
semantic field that emerged during the construction of nations as we have seen,
with a concentration on social policies and politics.

The imagery of a European identity

Before the talk about national identity became widespread, the leadership of
the European Community launched the term in 1973 as a therapy against
the feelings of crisis and doubts about the role of Europe. The bipolarity of
the Cold War with its clear distinction between good and bad became more
complex after 1971. The resoluteness with which the EC wanted to overcome
the paralysis caused by de Gaulle through plans for an economic and mone-
tary and security political union and a step in a federal direction began to
erode and the European leadership looked for rhetorical instruments to mask
the signs of decline. A summit in Paris in October 1972 agreed that Europe
must be able to make its voice heard in world affairs. In February 1973, the
president of the Commission, Ortoli, argued that the agreement was a decision
to establish a European identity comprised of ‘a heartfelt desire, shared by all
our peoples, to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the world’. A few weeks
later, he gave a speech in London, ‘Towards a European Identity’, where he
defined the concept: ‘Europeans are a people [in singular] who have a common
cultural background, a history often divided, who react more or less the same
way before events, who have more or less the same mode of life, the same level
of development’ (Schulz-Forberg and Stråth 2010: 42). By Europe, he meant
Western Europe, of course.
The identity concept thus began its political career and from this followed
its academic formulation. Position papers were written on how to understand

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A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations 241

the new key concept and whether it meant steps in more federal directions or
more pragmatic intergovernmental cooperation, whether the identity meant
a demarcation from the USA or just being a part of a broader Western
identity. The concept offered various opportunities from the start.
Against the backdrop of the sense of world economic crisis and instability,
the EC summit in Copenhagen in December 1973 discussed brave plans for a
more federal Europe but failed totally to agree anything specific. In this
context, the idea of a European identity presented itself as a face-saving tool.
The declaration on European identity was an escape forward – nothing more
and nothing less. It was an appeal to the emotions when institution building
did not work. The proclamation of a general ideational interest compensated
for the failure to define common material interests (Stråth 2002).
This declaration of a European identity departed from the principle of the
unity of the Nine (this was just after the addition of Britain, Denmark and
Ireland as new members), their responsibility to the rest of the world and the
dynamic nature of the European construction. The meaning of ‘responsibility
for the rest of the World’ was expressed in a hierarchical way. First, it was
understood as responsibility towards the other nations of Europe with whom
friendly relations and co-operation already existed. Secondly, it meant respon-
sibility towards the countries of the Mediterranean, Africa and the Middle
East. Thirdly, it referred to relations with the USA, based on a spirit of
equality and friendship. Next in the hierarchy was the narrowly understood
co-operation and constructive dialogue with Japan and Canada. Then came
détente towards the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. At
the bottom of the list came China, Latin America, and, finally, a reference
was made to the importance of the struggle against underdevelopment in
general (Passerini 2010 [2000]).
The fact that the USA was mentioned after the Middle East must be
understood in the context of the prevailing oil price shock and the fact that
President Nixon since 1971 had refused to let the dollar guarantee the Bretton
Woods order. One of the key issues in the concept of a European identity was
the relationship with the USA.

The European market citizens

In the 1980s, a neoliberal language emerged that outlined new horizons of

expectations around the concept of the market in opposition to delegitimised
welfare states, which, especially with persistent mass unemployment, no longer
functioned as they once had done. European imaginations of further integra-
tion and economic growth were connected to this emerging neo-liberal market
language, especially through Jacques Delors’ internal market project. The idea
of a European democracy, implicit in the notions of ‘a European identity’ and
‘democratic deficit’, was now transferred into a new semantic field around the
market concept. The market would more or less automatically lead to a

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242 Bo Stråth

European democracy with ‘European citizens’ (another new term) as its

carriers. The straight line from market to democracy was the idea that, follow-
ing the implosion of the Soviet empire, was to be sold to the East European
populations. The lost credibility in the capacity of states was substituted by a
new confidence in the capacity of the market. The market economy would
provide democracy where totalitarianism had once ruled.
More precisely, it was Altiero Spinelli’s Crocodile Club, named after a
restaurant in Brussels, which lobbied for a tighter European integration and
thus infused new life into the identity concept by canalising it in new directions.
Spinelli’s draught treaty for a European Union from February 1984 asserted
that citizens of member states should ipso facto be citizens of the Union.
Citizenship of the Union would be dependent on citizenship of a member state.
National law was to be co-ordinated with a view to constituting a
homogeneous judicial area. To achieve this, objective measures were to be
taken to encourage individual citizens to identify as citizens of the Union
(Schulz-Forberg and Stråth 2010: 47). With the introduction of European
citizenship, European identity was back on the table again, but in a new setting
filled with expectations for the market.
Gaston Thorn, President of the Commission, commented on the Spinelli
proposal by emphasising the need to equate European integration with
ordinary Europeans: ‘We have put in place measures which will make the
citizens, and particularly the young, understand Europe, identify themselves
with it and support it … Some simple measures, with a strong symbolic
content, must be quickly taken’( Schulz-Forberg and Stråth 2010: 48).
François Mitterand enthusiastically welcomed the draught treaty proposed
by Spinelli and the Parliament. At the conclusion of the European Council
meeting in Fontainbleau in June 1984, he stated that it was ‘essential that
the Community responds to the expectations of the people of Europe [in
singular] by adopting measures to strengthen and promote its identity’
(Schulz-Forberg and Stråth 2010: 48).
An ad hoc committee, fittingly named the People’s Europe, was set up to
look into ways of engaging the public symbolically with Europe. It delivered
its report in June 1985, which dealt with ‘important aspects of special rights
of citizens, of education, culture and communication, exchanges, and the
image and identity of the Community’, thus making ‘a substantial contribution
to the realisation of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. The
suggestions included a Community driving licence, a Euro lottery, 9 May as
Europe Day, a Community joint study programme exchange, European sports
teams, and a European flag, anthem and emblem in order to give ‘the
individual citizen a clearer perception of the dimension and existence of the
Community’. This was at a time when the academic debate on the role of
symbols in the construction (‘invention’) of nations (pace Anderson and
Hobsbawm) began to influence politics. The European identity was not only
created by the market but also became a matter of branding (Schulz-Forberg
and Stråth 2010: 48).

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A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations 243

The aims of the committee on the People’s Europe fitted in very well with
the internal market agenda of the new President, Jaques Delors. With the
rekindling of the identity discourse in 1984–85, the connection to a social
Europe was cut. The new association was with the citizen concept, which
somehow, without closer analysis, was linked to ideas of a European democ-
racy and a European internal market. The importance of symbol production
for the establishment of a European identity was emphasised. The democratic
people(s) were envisaged as free individuals in a common market rather than
as individuals tied to each other through social bonds mainly organised at a
national level.
In the new argumentative chain, the market-based civil society promoted
citizens, who became the constituents of an emerging European democracy
and bearers of identities that transcended the nation through their transna-
tional attachments to Europe.
The feeling of being on the winning side of history shifted to West European
hubris when the Soviet empire collapsed around 1990, and the political elites
and opinion builders, driven by an emerging American hegemony, told East
European peoples that to become democratic, they had to introduce capitalism
rapidly and democracy would follow. We know today that corrupt oligarchs
rather than democracy usually followed on these campaigns for the
privatisation of state property.

The failure of the project for market citizens

The first blow to the democracy- and identity-through-market imagery came in

2005 when the electorates in France and the Netherlands turned down the
proposal for a European constitution. The link to the enlargement of the EU
in 2004 with nine new members from the former communist East European
bloc was obvious. Political elites had not been particularly concerned about
increasing social differences within the Union through enlargement because
they had invested their hopes in the automatically equalising force of the
market. The voters in France and the Netherlands did not have the same faith
in this automatic force. The election campaign in France was driven by posters
of a Polish plumber taking jobs away from French workers by selling his cheap
labour in a new integrated European labour market (Schulz-Forberg and
Stråth 2010: 48).
The collapse of the financial markets in 2008 and the subsequent Euro crisis
after the bailout of the speculating banks triggered a South–North division
driven by stereotypes about the lazy South with its low productivity in contrast
to the industrious North with its high productivity and efficiency. This
division, in turn, complicated the old division between Western and Eastern
Europe. The Western part of the old East (the Baltic states and Slovenia) were
identified with the North against the South, whereas the Eastern part (e. g.
Romania, Bulgaria and the Balkans, with the exception of Slovenia) were

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244 Bo Stråth

rejected in the West as backward and corrupt. The refugee crisis of 2015
superimposed itself upon this complex pattern of European we–they demarca-
tions and made it even more complex. The Brexit referendum on June 2016 inten-
sified the complexity. The imagery of a cohesive Europe is falling apart. Nation
states return as the category of cohesion but this time, driven by xenophobia
instead of a social vision of solidarity. The paradox is that the long debate since
the 1830s on the social issue in Europe was silenced at the same time as social
inequalities and unemployment within the individual nation states grew.
The result we know: a growing contempt for the EU and a renationalisation
of Europe but not building as before on social integration with an inclusive
focus but instead promoting an aggressive and exclusive nationalism. There
are two enemies in the new nationalist language: Brussels and cheap labour
from within and without Europe. This is a type of identity discourse that
reminds one of the 1930s. The idea of a federal Europe with a European
identity is a dream of yesterday, a dream of the Cold War. Where the new
aggressive nationalism will take Europe is unclear.
Essentialising ethnic nationalism is the response to the failure to build social
community by institutional means, which in turn creates a sense of belonging
and solidarity, without any need to resort to the explicit use of the originally
psychoanalytical term ‘identity’. This response in turn divides Europe and
threatens to tear it apart.

Final thoughts: not the end of history but the end of expectations?

One of the most viable instruments for construction of community and social
solidarity used to be the translation of experiences into horizons of expecta-
tions. For the German historical philosopher Reinhart Koselleck, the outlining
of horizons of expectations and a growing gap between experiences and
expectations through ever braver plans and references to the concepts of
progress and future was the motor of modernity. The capacity to discern a past
that had been different, that is, worse, and a future that could be made
different, that is, better through human agency, provokes the dynamics of
modernity (Koselleck 1988 and 2003 [2000]).
However, Koselleck argued that this was not necessarily a perpetual move-
ment. The realisation of political programmes like republicanism, democracy
or liberalism would transform old expectations into new experiences, but
these two categories were not identical. There is no guarantee that expecta-
tions come about as planned. Indeed, they seldom do. The hopes invested in
old expectations might become experiences of disappointment. This would
probably also be true at some point in the future for expectations invested
in socialism and communism, Koselleck prognosticated in the mid-1970s,
when the influence of the ‘1968’ radicalism was still strong (Koselleck 1995
[1979]).

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A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations 245

He did not imagine that a new kind of liberalism would emerge following the
experiences of the fall of communism, developing a new great horizon of expec-
tation, and that this horizon around 2010 would become experiences of deep
disappointment. No new mobilising horizons of expectations have emerged
after these experiences of disappointment unless one considers the
accelerating destructive nationalism as the new expectation. However, if so, this
is not about progress any more but regression. The bigger the experiences of
failing to realise political ideals, the warier and vaguer the expectations, so that
eventually, there are no more expectations at all. Koselleck indicated the possi-
bility for the end of modernity as the end of belief in optimising progress. This is
a very different understanding of the end of history than that which circulated
at the time of the collapse of the Soviet empire. The key question is how close we
are to Koselleck’s scenario of experiences of disappointment and a narrowing
gap between experiences and expectations, and what this means for the capacity
to construct communities and imageries of social cohesion (Stråth 2015).
The successful construction of community does not need to thematise the
issue of identity, since it is just there. The proclamation of or the search for
identity indicates that there is some problem in the social organisation and in
the political capacity to manage the economy. To this extent, the present
resembles the 1970s more than the 1990s. The positive expectations that
followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and that were a response to the crisis
of the 1970s were disappointed. They never provided an adequate substitute
for the collapse of the welfare states in the 1970s. The two decades of neoliber-
alism from the 1980s appears now as a parenthesis of failure. We remain stuck
in the identity crisis of the 1970s, only with one more horizon of expectations
transformed into experiences of disappointment.
Consequently, the ongoing search for national identities is not guided by
wide horizons of expectations but by the narrow identification of enemies.
Interest-based inclusive solidarity is not the key any more in the search for
identity but rather emotional exclusion. The accumulated experiences since
the 1830s of the need for interest-based social solidarity for the successful
construction of community were abandoned in the 1970s. However, Market
Europe has failed to develop an alternative framework of identification and
nothing has replaced the dissolution of the horizons of the 1990s. Narrow
and exclusive ethnic nationalism is replacing the civic and socially inclusive
national solidarity and feelings of community constructed during the Cold
War period before 1971, a year that in retrospect represents the same water-
shed in European history as 1871. The difference is that 1871 was the
beginning of a politics for social integration and 1971 the beginning of the
dissolution of that politics. The essentialising renationalisation of Europe is
filling the void left after the collapse of Europe as a welfare project, a project
that did not need the identity concept to provide feelings of social community
and belonging. It follows on the failure of neoliberalism to fill the void with the
dream of market citizens emancipated from social dependencies and
responsibilities.

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246 Bo Stråth

Endnotes

1 For an introduction in English to the work of Koselleck see Olsen 2012.

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