Culture and Integration
Culture and Integration - Two contrasting visions of Europe:
One envisions a united Europe overcoming historical divisions for global strength.
The other warns against a politically unified Europe, emphasizing national sovereignty.
This vision prioritizes the preservation of distinct national identities and decision-making autonomy, reflecting concerns about potential threats to cultural uniqueness and democratic accountability.
The division between these visions is persistent and concentrated in cultural regions.
These regions often exhibit distinct historical, religious, and linguistic characteristics that shape their attitudes toward European integration.
Federalist vision = strongly Catholic areas.
Rooted in historical ties to the Roman Catholic Church, these areas tend to favor a more centralized European structure with shared governance and values.
Antifederalist vision = Protestant areas.
Shaped by the Reformation and its emphasis on individual conscience and decentralized authority, these areas often advocate for a looser European framework that respects national sovereignty and diversity.
Britain and Nordic countries often resist deeper integration due to national idiosyncrasies.
These countries often possess unique legal, political, and cultural traditions that make them wary of ceding too much power to supranational institutions.
Culture, especially religious culture, shapes ideas about European identity and the value of political fragmentation.
Religious beliefs and values influence how people perceive their place in Europe and whether they prioritize unity or diversity.
Catholics = unified Europe, Latin Christendom.
Catholics often see a unified Europe as a way to revive the legacy of Latin Christendom, a shared cultural and religious heritage that transcends national boundaries.
Protestants = separate nation-states.
Protestants tend to emphasize the importance of separate nation-states as guardians of individual liberty and religious freedom, resisting attempts to create a centralized European authority.
The Reformation's echoes persist, influencing attitudes toward nation-states and the EU.
The Reformation's legacy of religious pluralism and decentralized authority continues to shape attitudes toward nation-states and the EU, particularly in Protestant-majority countries.
Social scientists often overlook religion, prioritizing material interests.
Social scientists often focus on economic factors and political power dynamics, neglecting the role of religious beliefs and values in shaping attitudes toward European integration.
However, religious ideas and motivations are more than just superficial.
Religious beliefs and values are deeply ingrained in people's identities and can have a significant impact on their political attitudes and behavior.
Rational choice theory and intergovernmentalism emphasize material benefits and national interests.
These theories assume that states act rationally to maximize their material interests and that international cooperation is primarily driven by bargaining among national governments.
Alan Milward: integration saved the nation-state, not challenged it, driven by economic crisis, not idealism.
Milward argued that European integration was a pragmatic response to economic crises, allowing nation-states to pool resources and enhance their collective strength.
Andrew Moravcsik: Commercial interests, bargaining power, and interstate commitments are key factors.
Moravcsik emphasized the role of commercial interests, bargaining power, and interstate commitments in shaping European integration, downplaying the influence of cultural or ideological factors.
Ideas, social and political networks, and religiously motivated groups contribute to integration.
Ideas, social and political networks, and religiously motivated groups play a significant role in promoting or resisting European integration, shaping public opinion and influencing policy decisions.
Culture shapes political elites' calculations and public opinion.
Cultural values and norms influence how political elites perceive their interests and how they frame their arguments, shaping public opinion and influencing the political debate.
Culture is hard to define and measure, also considering culture requires dealing with religion.
Culture is a complex and multifaceted concept that is difficult to define and measure, particularly when it involves religious beliefs and values, which are often deeply personal and subjective.
Cultural identity is simultaneously encouraged and feared.
Cultural identity can be a source of pride and belonging, but it can also be a source of division and conflict, particularly when it leads to exclusionary or discriminatory practices.
Ignoring culture, especially religion, means missing the complete picture.
Ignoring culture, especially religion, means overlooking a crucial dimension of human experience and understanding, leading to incomplete or distorted analyses of social and political phenomena.
Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber highlighted religious culture's influence.
Tocqueville and Weber emphasized the profound influence of religious culture on social, political, and economic life, shaping values, norms, and institutions.
The fall of the Berlin Wall allowed renewed emphasis on cultural explanations.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War led to a renewed interest in cultural explanations of political and economic development, as the ideological divide between communism and capitalism faded.
Lawrence Harrison: Latin American countries remained poor because of lacking cultural values for economic and political success.
Harrison argued that Latin American countries remained poor because they lacked the cultural values, such as individualism, hard work, and thrift, that are conducive to economic and political success.
David Landes: Culture makes all the difference in economic development.
Landes asserted that culture is the key determinant of economic development, shaping attitudes toward work, innovation, and investment.
Ronald Inglehart and Robert Putnam: Link between culture, economic development, and effective democracy.
Inglehart and Putnam argued that there is a strong link between culture, economic development, and effective democracy, with certain cultural values, such as trust, tolerance, and civic engagement, fostering both economic prosperity and democratic stability.
Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations: Culture is central to international politics.
Huntington famously argued that culture is the central factor in international politics, with civilizations, defined by shared cultural and religious values, clashing with one another in a global struggle for power.
The Al Qaeda attacks focused attention on Huntington’s thesis.
The Al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, brought renewed attention to Huntington's thesis, as they seemed to confirm the existence of a clash between Western civilization and radical Islam.
Journalists identified a cultural divide between the "North" and "South" during the euro crisis.
During the euro crisis, journalists often pointed to a cultural divide between the fiscally responsible North and the spendthrift South, blaming cultural differences for the economic problems facing the Eurozone.
Recent studies on European identities and religion in politics have begun to fill this gap.
Recent studies on European identities and religion in politics have begun to address the neglect of cultural factors in mainstream social science, providing new insights into the role of culture in shaping European integration.
Defining Culture
Culture is a complex concept, variably defined:
E.G. Tylor: "most complex whole" including knowledge and customs.
Ruth Benedict: custom distinguishing communities.
Margaret Mead: learned behavior transmitted from parents to children.
Clifford Geertz: "webs of significance."
Richard Shweder: community-specific ideas about truth and goodness.
Culture = ideas AND actions.
Alan Patten: culture as a "social lineage" emphasizing shared formative conditions.
Huntington: culture = "overall way of life."
Culture is an interactive mix of ideas and behaviors passed down through generations.
Culture and Religion
Religion is a significant part of culture.
Huntington: civilizations = "culture writ large", religion as the most important objective element.
Lipset and Lenz: religion remains an important determinant of variation in secular cultures.
Human beings are religious by nature, therefore their cultures must be religiously oriented.
Geertz: religion shapes behavior and experience, tunes human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and projects images of cosmic order onto the plane of human experience.
Tocqueville: nearly all behavior originates in conceptions of God.
Huntington: Western civilization includes European languages, classical legacy, separation of church and state, rule of law, social pluralism, representative bodies, and individualism.
Not all cultural elements are directly tied to religious beliefs.
Europe is increasingly secular, but is still affected by traditional religion.
Norris and Inglehart: Religious traditions have shaped cultures of each nation in an enduring fashion.
Religious ideas have been transformed into mores, customs, symbols and institutions.
Decline of traditional religion does not negate religious influences on integration.
European culture displays Christian heritage in languages, symbols, buildings, holidays, laws and schools.
Christianity has been central to European culture for 1,500 years, marked by the Great Schism (1054) and the Reformation (1517).
Confessional Cultures
Confessional cultures are "overall ways of life" shaped by religious traditions that act as common formative conditions.
Confessional cultures affect communities in three ways:
Shared ideas: Specify truths from sacred texts, influencing politics and leadership.
Shared behaviors: Reinforce beliefs, liturgies, rituals, prayers, holiday celebrations mark passages of life, give communities distinctive rhythms.
Distinguishing institutions: Embody and transmit beliefs and practices (ecclesiastical offices, churches, monasteries, missions, charities, schools, universities).
Confessional cultures offer identities for social distinction.
Integration and National Identity
Early integration theorists understood the social-psychological dimensions of integration.
Populations must accept people across borders as compatriots.
A Sense of Community and the Achievement of Stable Peace
Some scholars focus on how nations move from enmity to friendship.
Stable peace school: Some states have become close allies, forming new states.
Karl Deutsch: International system not always dog-eat-dog; community among states possible.
Peaceful change: States resolve problems without large-scale force.
Integrated states form "security communities".
Peace requires a new community.
People across the border are seen as belonging to "us".
New "sense of community" where problems are solved without violence.
Sense of community = mutual sympathy, trust, consideration, identification and responsiveness.
Grounded in a distinct “way of life”.
Compatibility of main values held by the politically relevant strata.
Values are most effective when in political institutions and habits of political behavior.
Political institutions and behaviors structured by common values.
Necessary "common culture” or “national character”.
Similarity of culture and lifestyle is crucial to integration.
Philip Jacob: The more that communities are similar, the more successful are attempts to build integrative relationships among them (1964).
Values and cultures of regional communities are raw materials.
Elites emphasize shared or divisive aspects.
Populations can change their perceptions.
Spirit of community and distinct way of life acquired over time via learning theory (communication).
People see themselves as part of a new community through material and non-material benefits.
Deutsch: Rewards of transactions create community images, leading to feelings of belonging and identification (1964).
Transactionalism: Community formation through interactions over time will result in a new community bound together physically and emotionally.
Deutsch's work on security communities drifted to the theoretical background.
Constructivism
Constructivist: Attracted to his emphasis on identity and international community.
Constructivism: International politics are "socially constructed".
Political interests are not system-derived or material forces.
How actors formulate perceptions of themselves and others, and determine their interests.
Cultures, norms, and ideas shape identities and interests.
Explores how actors agree on "facts" about the world and how "facts" are shaped by their social context.
Deutsch within a constructivist framework.
Challenges interests-based theories of international relations.
Raises "possibility of international community".
Perceptions of reality are malleable, people can change their minds about enemies and friends.
Changed perceptions change behavior.
Behaviors, especially increased transactions, taught trust and promote cooperation.
Something more than material interests at work; interests are at least in part socially constructed.
Constructivists have deepened Deutsch's work.
Emanuel Alder and Michael Barnett and Charles A. Kupchan helped explaining why states move from being enemies to being friends.
Generally follow Deutsch’s model.
Alder and Barnett
Achieving a pluralistic security community involves 3 phases: nascent, ascendant, and mature.
Starts when an external threat or change propels governments to cooperate regionally.
New multilateral institutions foster trust.
Transactions propel the process.
Ascendant phase: interactions lead to a common way of life.
Collective identity begins to emerge.
Mature phase: Expectations of peaceful change are institutionalized, regional actors now share an identity, borders unfortified, security decisions collective.
More than Deutsch, see stable peace as a change in how people perceive one another.
Creating a new collective identity involves reciprocal learning.
Identities are almost entirely socially constructed.
Identities unattached to common values or culture.
Kupchan
Kupchan ties sense of community to specific background conditions.
Stable peace occurs in three types:
Rapprochement = states move away from armed conflict to peaceful coexistence.
Security community = requires shared identity and an institutionalized process of conflict management.
Union = separate units merge into a single polity.
“foresight and vision” from elites determined to establish a long-lasting zone of peace is required.
Four "phases of onset":
begins at a crisis point with at least one state facing so strategic situation so threatening that it must “befriend an existing adversary.”
Second= existence of a preponderant state ready and able to anchor a new zone of peace, and policy entrepreneurship that brings fresh ideas to the decision table, often after a major disruption such as a war or regime change.
Three = unilateral accommodation, reciprocal restraint, societal integration, and the generation of new political narratives.
Condiitons that favor outbreak of peace:
Institutionalized restraint
compatible social orders
cultural commonality.
Commercial interactions are particularly facilitated if the integrating societies possess similar economic systems. Thus, the more similar the societies, the more natural the interactions and the more likely a common sense of community will emerge.
Stable peace will occur only under conditions of cultural commonality.
it is “perceptions of cultural affinity” that “guide states toward each other”.
National Identity in Early Integration Theory
Social-psychological element: a new European identity.
Peaceful integration requires a fundamental transformation of perceptions and behavior.
Elites stress shared elements or heighten differences.
Elites in the stable peace school were not the only integration theorists to suggest that the process required a social-psychological element.
Early federalists wanted pan-European mass movement.
Italian journalist, politician, and European activist Altiero Spinelli= vague pan-European mass movement that would recognize the evils of nationalism and set aside national interests.
Functionalists wanted a global, technocratic approach.
David Mitrany = reorganization.
Jean Monnet argued that peace in Europe would come about through a step-by-step coordination of activity in functional areas, regulated by “common rules which each member . . . committed to respect, and common institutions to watch over the application of these rules. ”
Neo-functionalists = Psychological shift in loyalties is key.
Ernst B. Haas defines political integration as the process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new centre.
Increase cooperation via new supranational institutions is important to ID construction.
What we learn from the stable peace school , constructivist allies, theorists of federalist is this peaceful integration requires a fundamental transformation of perceptions and behavior among people who were once separated but who begin to move together psychologically, socially, and behaviorally.
Constructing National Identity
Identity formation involves negation.
Constructing group identity requires defining a set of reference others.
Nations develop distinct identities through social interactions with other nations.
Transnational identities need an "other".
A new way of life in a region needs differences from existing areas or neighbors.
Something other than an enemy must draw "us" together.
Primordialists
Nations as natural and fundamental.
Modernists
Nations are modern constructed by elites for political purposes.
Industrialization, urbanization, secularization, dissolve society, create need for new systems of social control
Glued together by preexisting cultural material manipulated in the service of elites’ interests
Postmodernists
all identities are essentially, “imagined”
Benedict Anderson : “the nation is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them,.
a discursive formation of linguistic and symbolic practices
Preexisting cultural materials no matter
What matters to the postmodernist is individual identity In fact, postmodernists see the contemporary world moving away from the grand national movements that, dominated domestic and international politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, toward more fragmented overlapping identities that are entirely constructed. by elites and nonelites alike.
Each position has its difficulties take cultural content seriously, understand the power of elites
Ethnosymbolism
Ethnosymbolism middle ground
Culture matters, limits the ability to construct identities de novo Nations are, first of all, real communities with real consequences for the people who live in or with them.
Smith A nation is a named and self-defined human community, whose members cultivate shared myths, memories, symbols values, and traditions, reside in and identify with a historic homeland, create and disseminate a distinctive public culture, and observe shared customs and common laws
Tangible reality to Smith tangible cultural content and that content is cultural taking cultural content seriously
Nonmaterial elements of culture and their enduring hold on humans in community Understand why these Cultural resources can sometimes be employed to reinforce solidarity and sometimes manipulated to satisfy power seeking elites requires us to consider subjective elements of culture and appreciate the perspective of those inside
Historical antecedents matter deep roots in earlier cultural and political forms of society
explore the social and symbolic effect of conflicts both within and between nations
Take us to the world of culture, with its symbols, myths, memories, values, and traditions
Serve to define the Nation, differentiate it from others, and tie it to the past
National identity is the Continuous reproduction and reinterpretation of the pattern of values, symbols, memories, myths, and traditions that compose the distinctive heritage of nations, and the identification of individuals with that pattern and heritage.
Sacred foundations the Cultural resources which maintain a sense of national identity in a population may also be regarded as sacred foundations of the nation It is this sacred quality that gives the cultural resources, their grip on human will and emotion.
national identity, the ideology, based on national identity, has taken the functional place once held by our religion. Symbols, ceremonies, myths, and traditions formerly exclusive to religion or power paralleled in the service of nationalism
What draws on many motifs, beliefs and rituals of traditional religions, not just for its forms, but also for some of its content, such as myths of ethnic election, the sanctity of the homeland and the messianic role of the leader
National identity rests on sacred foundations identity, thus, entails a connection with the subjective elements of human culture elites ability to shape national identity
From an ethosymbolist perspective, 4 point emerge:
national communities is real with measurable effects, and those both inside and outside.
National identity is based on cultural factors have deep historical roots, traceable in many cases to premodern times.
National identity is often built on sacred foundations religion even in a secularized form, will provide key elements of national identity.
Elites can manipulate national identity be the boundaries
A Cultural Approach to Integration in Europe
Integration shifts a collective state of mind towards a sense of community that encourages common governance.
Peaceful integration requiress the building of a new community. It is, identity before organization.
Political, economic, and social elites are most active in the construction of new identities, the common culture.
From our discussion above, however, we can describe in general terms the development of a new national identity: the rise of a transnational elite.
Publics must embrace new sense of community
New forms of collective governance.
Draw on common culture
If all is there to reach final stage.
Forging a transnational Community that May evolve into a new national identity. Pitfalls in the construction:
If the ways of life are too different, cultural divisions among the people is too high.
Ideological content of culture matters
Trouble can also emerge if transnational elit networks does not prove to be in closer enough and cause the decisions at