Society, Consensus, and Asymmetric Relations: A Conceptual and Historical Critique of the Social Dialogue and the Social Policy Agenda of the European Union's Lisbon Strategy.

John William Welsh

University of Helsinki

Faculty of Social Sciences

Political History

Master’s Thesis

November 2008

Contents 1. – Introduction 1.1 – Research Question......................................................................................... Page 1 1.2 – Method, Structure, and Source Selection...................................................... Page 12 2. – Theories Toward a Historical and Conceptual Analysis of the Social Dialogue 2.1 – Speech Acts and Illocutionary Force in the Social Dialogue........................ Page 21 2.2 – Conceptual History: Begriffsgeschichte and Contextualism......................... Page 26 2.3 – Critical Theory and ‘Instrumental Tendencies’ in the Lisbon Strategy........ Page 34 3. – Conceptual and Critical Analysis of the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy 3.1 – The Social Dialogue as ‘Ideal Speech Situation’.......................................... Page 51 3.2 – The Social Dialogue and the Concept of ‘Society’....................................... Page 62 3.3 – The Lisbon Strategy: Consensus Claims and Power Relations.................... Page 75 3.4 –The Social Dialogue and Asymmetric Relations........................................... Page 94 4. – Conclusion .................................................................................................... Page 112 Bibliography ..........................................................................................................Page 115

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1. Introduction

1.1 Research Question

Research Question and Motivation “Men are born and exist free and equal by right. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good”.1 “A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all”.2 “Just think what Europe could be. Think of the innate strengths of our enlarged union. Think of its untapped potential to create prosperity and offer opportunity and justice for all its citizens. Europe can be a beacon of economic, social and environmental progress to the rest of the world”.3

“Another remarkable trait of the present period is the coexistence of ideas which are the products of the past and those which are connected to the current climate. The past which seems without expression is not so much forgotten, it persists in monumental and sentimental form, and it is in this way that it integrates itself into modern understanding”.4

In a 2006 French survey entitled “Les 18-25 ans et l’élection présidentielle”, left wing

youth were asked for words which, for them, evoqued negative images of the ‘right’. These

included “Medef”,5 “capitalisme”, “privitisation”, “mondialisation”, and “Bourse”.

However, when questioned in further detail, this did not prevent most of them from

generally approving of labour market liberalisation policies, the introduction of the ‘internal

market’ in the public sector, ‘means-tested’ social security, and parental choice in

schooling.6 This is a France in which an historic conceptual vocabulary of ‘Modernity’,

including such concepts as la patrie, humanism, republicanism, revolution, citizenship,

universalism, which are encompassed by a distinctively French political hyper-awareness,

can no longer adequately express or comprehend itself in the absence of such concepts.

1 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Article 1. [Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits. Les distinctions sociales ne peuvent être fondées que sur l’utilité commune]. 2 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Article 16. [Toute société dans laquelle la garantie des droits n’est pas assurée ni la séparation des pouvoirs déterminée, n’a point de Constitution]. 3 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Growth and Jobs – A New Start for the Lisbon Strategy. European Commission (Brussels 2005). p 3. [My Emphases]. 4 Le Goff, J-P. La France Morcelée (Gallimard 2008). pp 65-66. [Un autre trait étonnant de la période présente tient à la coexistence d’idées issues du passé et de celles qui collent au nouvel air du temps. Le passé qui paraît sans ressource n’est pas autant oublié, il se maintient sous une forme monumentale et sentimentale, et c’est de cette façon qu’il s’intègre à la sensibilité moderne]. 5 Mouvement des entreprises de France. This is a large and encompassing confederation of businesses in France. 6 [18-25 year olds and the presidential election]. Etude IPSOS/Graines de Citoyens, decembre 2006.

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The quotes at the top illustrate how confused, inconsistent, incoherent, and unstable

are the concepts and the language with which we understand and express our contemporary

political visions, especially when attempted in often incongruous and depressingly ironic

histrionic language as one often finds in the pronouncements of EU institutions, as well as

at the national level. Whether a ‘crisis of modernity’ or the ‘end of ideologies’, there

appears to be a more widespread increase in an historically disoriented, and perhaps

inappropriate, ransacking of our historical baggage in order to somehow express current

opinion, comprehend change, and to mobilise and legitimise action in an ever more

pluralised, fractured, and problematised historical reality. This current political climate of

unconscious conceptual confusion, and the political (lack of) reaction to it, has been

referred to as a ‘fuite en avant’:

“This ‘fuite en avant’ does not belong to any one political faction. It seems to us in fact symptomatic of the absence of a new cultural and historical medium capable of interpreting and expressing the new historical situation in which we now live during this time of EU construction and globalisation”.7

In the case of France, but also more generally throughout the European Union, this new “air

du temps” has become a marked phenomenon since the 1980s and, in more concrete

political terms, can be traced in France to the socialist French government of the time under

Mitterrand, which sought to reconcile France with business and enterprise under the

auspices of ‘modernisation’ and the mobilisation of productive activity. In fact:

“Since the 1980s, modern management has ceaselessly developed a chaotic vision of the world and of change which neutralises the will to understand both of these at a global level. This vision of the development of the world is that of perpetual motion with neither rhyme nor rhythm other than that it must be adapted to as fast as possible”.8 The fundamental research question, and the initial interest that I have in this research, is

whether or not it is this sentiment that drives the current European Union institutions’

demands for political reform. When one reads again and again that “better responsiveness

7 Le Goff. La France Morcelée. p 70. [Cette fuite en avant n’est pas propre à un camp politique. Elle nous paraît en fait symptomatique de l’absence d’un nouveau creuset culturel et historique qui permette d’interpréter et de donner sens à la nouvelle situation historique que nous vivons à l’heure de la construction difficile de l’Union européenne et de la mondialisation]. 8 Ibid. pp 69-70. [Depuis les années 1980, le management moderniste n’a cessé de développer une vision chaotique du monde et des évolutions qui rend vaine la volonté de les interpréter dans leur globalité. La vision des évolutions du monde est celle d’un mouvement perpétuel sans but ni sens autre que celui de s’y adapter au plus vite].

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of European economies to anticipate and absorb change and a higher degree of adaptability

in the labour market is in the interest of society as a whole”, one cannot help but see a

connection.9 We are increasingly exhorted to “use our resources in ways which help us to

adapt to changing economic and social conditions”10 under the assumption that “industrial

relations, which in the past have contributed to maintaining a balance and to the success of

the European model, will have to be modernised and adapted apace”.11 The key note seems

to be adaptation to changing circumstances rather than the conventionally ‘modern’ notion

of shaping circumstances via political action based upon a rational vision of the future. In

fact, the European Commission Communications on the Social Dialogue, the Union’s

‘peak’ industrial concertation forum, seem to assume both to be possible simultaneously

and it is my argument that in the confused “air du temps” to which I have referred it is the

latter that shall give way to the former.

There are two distinct impressions that I have from a reading of the current reform

discourse in and around the EU institutions, particularly from the European Commission

Communications on the Lisbon Strategy for social and economic reform throughout the

Union, which will provide the two main themes of the thesis’ investigation. The first is that

a certain conceptual idiom is being rhetorically employed which is historically linked to the

view of ‘Society’ as a mediating environment for the realisation of future-oriented political

action.12 This is a ‘modern’ conceptual idiom and can be inferred from a glance at the

opening quotations. The question that I have in relation to this impression is whether or not

the ontological, epistemological, and actual categories upon which this ‘modern’

conceptual field rests are actually still extant in our current historical context. If the answer

is doubtful, then how will such a growing incompatibility affect the outcome of the present

deployment of ‘modern’ concepts in discussions on political reform in the EU. It is by

focusing on the concept of ‘Society’ in chapter 3.2 that I will come to illustrate the more

general point by means of a particular analysis of this concept.

9 Facing the Challenge: Report from the High Level Group (November 2004). p 32. 10 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Jobs and Growth. p 6. 11 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue, a Force for Innovation and Change (2002). p 15. 12 The unusual phrasing of this idea will become apparent in the analysis of ‘Society’ as a modern concept in chapter 3.2.

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The second impression stems from the first: that within these conceptual confusions

at the putative ‘modern-postmodern’ boundary, our inability to establish a reasoned and

coherent political vision and vocabulary creates a vacuum within which unrecognised

social and economic forces might operate based upon the imperatives and tendencies of

highly developed capitalist society to reproduce itself on its own instrumental terms. With

an underlying assumption in the Lisbon reform movement of adaptation to changing

economic imperatives at all costs, the Social Dialogue threatens to become a mediating

mechanism for these instrumental forces. Without the conceptual vocabulary to recognise,

contrast, or resist such trends, reform in the Lisbon Strategy threatens to deny us the very

political control that is entailed in our view of society as a medium for implementing

rational reform. That is the circular irony and immanent contradiction that seems to impress

itself from the dominant European discourse that orbits the current reformist agenda.

There is a danger that social and political adaptation will take place whilst the

Lisbon Agenda attempts to legitimise its interests in an incoherent historic conceptual

idiom which unconsciously takes advantage of the conceptual vacuum of our “air du

temps”. For instance, are words and concepts that pervade the reform discourse such as

“dialogue”,13 “solidarity”, “flexibility”, 14 dynamic,15 “partnership”,16 “innovation”,17

“revamp”, “initiative”, or “outsourcing” possessive of any meaningful interrelation or are

they merely trendy ‘buzz words’, the mutual estrangement of which matches the

incoherence of the vision they purport to offer?

Put succinctly, this thesis is a conceptual and critical exploration of how the

European Social Dialogue and the related Social Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Strategy look

to mobilise and legitimise productive action in a non-conflictual vision of political

consensus. I wish to question whether, by doing this in a potentially incompatible,

obfuscatory, and oblique manner, there is not a potential for them to be unreflexively

13 LaCapra, D. “History, Language, and Reading: Waiting for Crillon” (1995) 100:3, June, The American Historical Review. p 824. 14 Hyman, R. “Where Does Solidarity End?” (2002) 24, Transit Online; Thelen, K “Review: Beyond Corporatism: Toward a New Framework for the Study of Labour in Advanced Capitalism” (1994) 27:1,October, Comparative Politics. p 108. 15 Communication from the European Commission: Social Policy Agenda (Brussels 2000). p 2. 16 Hyman, R. “The Future of Unions” (2002) 1, Just Labour. p 10. 17 Communication from the European Commission: Social Policy Agenda (Brussels 2000). p 2.

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‘adapted’ as mechanisms of domination for certain interests or, perhaps worse, for non-at-

all.

Research Focus: The Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy When trying to find answers to the research questions above, the focus of this thesis shall

be on the European Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy, or rather that dimension of

the Lisbon Strategy that is most pertinent to both the Social Dialogue and to the European

Union’s policies on industrial relations and employment, the ‘Social Policy Agenda’. I have

chosen these as the foci for the thesis because whilst the broad and encompassing Lisbon

Strategy provides the wider context and motivating objectives for current EU reform, the

European Social Dialogue is tasked to be one of the more specific mechanisms for Lisbon’s

realisation in the area of industrial relations and socio-economic policy concertation.18 As

the Lisbon Strategy is so vast and wide-reaching, I have elected to concentrate on the Social

Policy Agenda because it is that part of the Lisbon Strategy that relates to industrial

relations and employment and therefore to the Social Dialogue more directly. This means

that the thesis is centred upon the Social Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Strategy realised

through the European Social Dialogue. My choice of primary sources should reflect this.

The European Social Dialogue is not something that can be easily defined in a

single understanding. Indeed, its definition seems to vary from circumstance to

circumstance.19 However, in the European Commission Communications the Social

Dialogue is “acknowledged to be an essential component of the European model of society

and development”.20 Fundamentally, the Social Dialogue is a means of decision-making

over the basic socio-economic concerns of industrial relations at the European level, but

increasingly at all levels of socio-economic activity, whether regional, national, or

industrial. The participants in this procedure are called the ‘social partners’ which includes

labour representatives, business representatives and government representatives, though

this list is neither exclusive nor exhaustive. Today’s European Social Dialogue is said to

18 Others include the Structural Funds, legislation, Open Method of Coordination, policy analysis and research. 19 Ishikawa, J. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue: A Social Dialogue Resource Book” (2003) International Labour Organisation. p 3. 20 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 6.

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cover two essential industrial functions at the European level: consultation and

negotiation.21

The Lisbon Strategy, or alternatively the Lisbon Agenda or Process, is much more

explicit and easily definable than the Social Dialogue. It is an action and development plan

that was the result of the European Council in Lisbon (March 2000). Intended to apply to

the whole of the Union, the Strategy represents a broad set of policies and goals set by the

institutions of the EU to improve the productive capacity of the euro-economy within the

context and limits of the ‘social model’, which means it is to be compatible with European

communitarian and social democratic politics as broadly defined. Covering such diverse

areas as immigration, education, technology, pensions, environment, and employment, the

broad aims of the Lisbon Strategy are to deal with the low productivity and stagnation of

economic growth in the EU, through the formulation of various policy initiatives to be

taken by all EU member states. The idea is to make Europe the most competitive and the

most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world. These objectives set out by the

Lisbon Strategy are to be attained by 2010.

The Social Dialogue constitutes one of the intended procedural and institutional

channels for the implementation of the Lisbon objectives. This means that it is essential to

this thesis that the Lisbon Agenda and the Social Dialogue be treated in conjunction, not

separately. The reason is that both are interrelated, after all, the Social Dialogue provides

the mechanism in which the Social Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Strategy will be realised.

Relevant Points of Departure in Contemporary Scholarship This thesis has a number of points of departure that, on the one hand, are generally

theoretical, and on the other, are more particularly connected to the Social Dialogue and

Lisbon Agenda, and which have influenced my fundamental motivations and research

questions. The next few pages are an outline of what one might call the ‘state-of-the-art’ in

some of the themes and areas of academic writing that are related to the stated aims of the

thesis and that have informed the direction of the thesis from the outset, either in ‘accord

with’ or in ‘contrast to’, and that have contributed some key ideas. This sketch should also

give an indication of how I wish to develop my own distinctive contribution.

21 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 7.

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This thesis is not novel in its thematic criticisms of the either capitalist society or

the European Union. In fact, such criticisms have notoriously come to make up the bread

and butter of academic writing on those topics both past and present. In the case of the

latter, this is particularly true of academic writing in the British Isles, and in the Nordic

Countries, which have probably been considered the two most eurosceptical regions of the

EU before enlargement, though for differing reasons. The contribution that I hope to make

in this thesis is in my approach to the criticism I intend to present. I hope to provide a fairly

fresh means of criticism by blending the critique of capitalist society found in Critical

Theory with a linguistic and conceptual analysis of the Commission’s presentation of the

Social Dialogue. I shall aim to do this in a manner which is informed by a historically

contextualist approach. Naturally, I intend to demonstrate the workings of this approach in

the detailed theoretical explorations in the following chapters of this section and in section

2. For now, I will talk about the recent developments in some of the more particular and

concrete themes of my work that are related to my basic research interest. These include:

the role of politics, democratic decision-making, industrial relations, and the Lisbon

Process.

At the most general level, my interest has been stimulated by the political

developments in French academic thinking on our present political climate. Writers such as

Jean Pierre le Goff, Jacques Généreux, and Bastien François have drawn attention, both in

France and in Europe, to a particular current political climate at the modern-postmodern

boundary.22 These writers have alluded to a retreat from the ‘political’ in favour of the

‘economic’ and to a growing inability to maintain a ‘political’ public discourse which is so

dear to the Gallic identification with society. Perhaps such developments are most acute in

France due to that nations renowned investment in the great political categories and

concepts of Enlightenment and Modernity, which have come under general questioning in

recent decades. The line of criticism amongst these writers has been directed toward the

growing primacy of both the market-mechanism and the ‘language of economism’ and the

discrediting of political conflict, which has provided me with the refreshingly linguistic and

22 Le Goff. La France Morcelée; Généreux, J. La Dissociété (Points-Seuil 2008); Généreux, J. Les Vraies Lois de l’Èconomie (Points-Seuil 2008); François, B. Misère de la Ve République (Points-Seuil 2007); François, B. Pour Comprendre la Constitution Européenne (Odile Jacob 2005).

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discursive kind of critique of the EU, capitalism, and the post-industrial society that I have

chosen to employ.

This theme of criticism has been paralleled in recent post-Marxist thought. The

French political scientists mentioned above have been working within certain post-

structuralist and critical French veins of thought which stress the dominating tendencies of

a certain apolitical parole of moralism, sentimentalism, and economism. Complimentary to

this, post-Marxists such as Slavoj Žižek, Chantal Mouffe, or Ernesto Laclau have worked

within Gramscian notions of ideological hegemony and Hegelian-Schmittian ideas of

conflict as an essential component in defining the ‘political’. 23 These strands of thought

have impressed upon me the need for a reinsertion of the political, that the absence of the

‘political’ is the triumph of economism, and that perhaps conflict is a necessary constituent

of politics as a meaningfully distinct type of activity. These propositions explicitly contrast

with the view of the EU institutions, which emphasise the role of ‘consensus’ rather than

conflict in European socio-economic decision-making.

Moving on to the question of the EU, a significant question in political analyses of

the EU institutions, European integration, and European policy reform revolves around the

issue of democratic accountability and the much decried ‘democratic deficit’.24 In the

English-speaking world, it is this issue that has come to dominate political discussions over

the European Union. The current state of research and interest in this area often comes

across as fixated upon a certain paradigm of politics which derives its fundamental

assumptions, its concepts and its idiom from what I consider to be a narrow Atlantic liberal

tradition which measures political outcomes in terms of direct elections, parliamentary

representation, and the classic duet of ‘the separation of powers’ and constitutional ‘checks

and balances’. The assumption is that an acceptable democratic ‘politic’ is established only

in reference to the Whiggish creed of parliamentary democracy.25 In this discourse, political

23 Mouffe, C. “Pluralism and Modern Democracy: Around Schmitt” in Mouffe’s The Return of the Political (Verso 1993). pp 117-134; Hirst, P Q. Marxism and Historical Writing (Routledge 1985). 24 Moravcsik, A. “In Defence of the ‘Democratic Deficit’: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union” (2002) 40:4, Journal of Common Market Studies. pp 603-624; Follesdahl, A., and Hix, S. “Why There is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Moravcsik and Majone” (2006) 44:3, Journal of Common Market Studies. pp 533-562. 25 Siedentop, L. Democracy in Europe (Penguin, London 2000); Rifkin, J. The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (Penguin 2004); Luff, P. A Brilliant Conspiracy?: Britain and the Federal Debate in Europe (Greycoat Press 1996); Glencross, A. “Consensus to Contestation: Reconfiguring Democratic Representation in the European Union

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criticisms have been concentrated on how the EU fails to satisfy a given criteria of political

representation of interests, institutionally and procedurally.

In my view, such recent research and criticism of EU integration, policy initiatives

and institutions, in those countries, has revolved around these themes. However, I consider

this tradition, derived as it is from pre-industrial political battles and concept formation, not

to provide sufficient critique for a political ontology that is not based upon early-modern

empiricist philosophical assumptions and upon natural law philosophy. In contrast to this, I

am interested in how continental traditions of thought can account for the political

shortcomings of the EU in a way that does not rely upon liberal theories of democratic

representation which have come to set the tone, especially in Britain and the United States,

and which seem insufficient to grasp the unconscious and discursive domain of politics so

crucial to understanding both the post-industrial society and the potential political

consequences of the EU’s recent reform agenda.

Evidently, industrial relations are an important element in this thesis. The ‘narrow’

Social Dialogue is after all established to be a form of industrial concertation. There is a

vast literature on European industrial relations but some interesting work has been done in

establishing certain typologies of industrial relations regimes.26 These typologies are either

treated as being national or regional but, in pre-enlargement Western Europe, have

consistently fallen into three broad types, each associated with a particular region: the

Nordic social democratic regimes, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ liberal form of free-collective

bargaining, and the ‘Continental’ corporatist ‘catholic’ regimes. Naturally, the discussion

ranges across more subtle and sophisticated differences and varieties than these three

categories, but there are nevertheless recognisable regional trends. It is the recent attempts

in the EU reformist agenda to ‘harmonise’ such regime divergences across Europe into a

coherent industrial relations policy based upon a European ‘core of values’ that has

in the Light of 19th Century United States Democratization” (2008) 15:1, February, Democratization. pp 123-141. 26 Lehmbruch, G; Schmitter, P C. Patterns of Corporatist Policy-Making (Sage 1982); Arts, W; Gelissen, J. “Welfare States, Solidarity and Justice Principles: Does the Type Really Matter?” (2001) 44, Acta Sociologica. pp 283-299; Hyman, R. Understanding European Trade Unionism: Between Market, Class and Society (Sage 2001); Esping-Andersen, G. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Polity Press 1990); Flora, P. (ed). Growth to Limits: The Western European Welfare States Since World War II, Vol. 1: Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark (De Gruyter 1986); Ginsburg, N. Divisions of Welfare: A Critical Introduction to Comparative Social Policy (SAGE 1992).

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stimulated the highest degree of recent academic writing, particularly in those Member

States that perceive themselves to be at a disadvantage in the process (i.e. Nordic

countries).27

Research in this area hitherto has mainly focused upon structural-institutional,

procedural, and systemic aspects of European industrial relations divergences and the

consequences for Member States in the process of harmonisation.28 However,

comparatively less has been written upon historical factors, differing cultural norms and

political traditions in Member States in the harmonisation process. There has been a strong

presumption in much of the literature of the universal applicability of EU policy initiatives

in this areas, at least in principle, based on the assumed existence of a European ‘core of

values’.29 This is where I would like to build my own contribution upon the extant corpus

of literature about the divergence of industrial relations regimes in Europe. In particular, I

would like to add a discussion over the effects of language, set within regional historical

contexts, in the EU’s attempts to create a common set of policies on industrial relations.

Closely related to the issue of industrial relations regime harmonisation is the

harmonisation of social protection, up to now an essential dimension of national welfare

provision. Jon Kvist and Juho Saari in The Europeanisation of Social Protection have

looked at how the Member States have reacted to the Europeanisation of social protection.

As they see it, in the wake of a series of cases of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) there

has emerged a gradual slide toward the application of competition law and the internal

market in the field of social protection, previously a legitimate concern of the Member

Sates and not the EU.30 According to them, there has been a growth in the 1990s of the

27 Kvist, J; Saari, J. (eds). The Europeanisation of Social Protection (Polity Press 2007); Waever, O. “Nordic Nostalgia: Northern Europe After the Cold War” (1992) 68:1, International Affairs. pp 77-102; Patomäki, H. “Beyond Nordic Nostalgia: Enisaging a Social/Democratic System of Global Governance” (2000) 35:2, Cooperation and Conflict. pp 115-154; Kuilpers, S; Selck, TJ. “Shared Hesitance, Joint Success: Denmark, Finland and Sweden in the European Union Policy Process” (2005) 12:1, February, Journal of European Public Policy. pp 157-176. 28 Ebbinghaus, B. “Europe Through the Looking Glass: Comparative and Multi-Level Perspectives” (1998) 41, Acta Sociologica. pp 301-313; Hassel, A; Streeck, W. “The Crumbling Pillars of Social Partnership” (2003) 26:4, October, West European Politics. pp 101-124; Lin, K. “Sectors, Agents and Rationale: A Study of the Scandinavian Welfare States With Special Reference to the Welfare Society Model” (2004) 47:2, June, Acta Sociologica. pp 141-157; Patomäki. “Beyond Nordic Nostalgia. pp 115-154. 29 Exceptions to this might include Baglioni, G; Crouch, C. European Industrial Relations: The Challenge of Flexibility (SAGE 1990); Crouch, C. Industrial Relations and European State Traditions (Clarendon 2003); Katzenstein, P J. Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Cornell UP 1984). 30 Kvist; Saari. The Europeanisation of Social Protection. p 2.

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view that social protection constitutes a ‘productive factor’ in EU institutions. This then led

to the inclusion of employment objectives in Amsterdam (1997) and to the Nice Summit’s

(2000) characterisation of the European Social Model by the importance of the Social

Dialogue and by being based upon a ‘coherent core of values’.31 Most recently, the Lisbon

Treaty (2007) has involved major revisions in the field of social protection, including the

‘mainstreaming of social protection and social inclusion into all policies’ thus elevating the

issue up to the European sphere from the strictly national. The reasoning is because of the

differences in Member States’ welfare regimes and the resultant difficulty in reaching

unanimity on the issue.32

The use of this little insight on social protection corresponds with a view of EU

social policy reform being shaped by certain ‘imperatives of competition’ that necessitate

productive mobilisation at the expense of other priorities, such as social protection. The

spreading power of subordinating competitive imperatives is something that has been

identified but is not an especially widespread perspective of the Lisbon Process of EU

reform.33 I would like to explore this idea and to analyse how it is able to operate through

the Lisbon Strategy, and the Social Dialogue in particular, bearing in mind what has already

been said of the condition of current political discourse and conceptual transition.

Work on the Lisbon Agenda has constituted something of an explosion in the last

few years but once again there are a few areas of particular interest. The relaunch of the

Lisbon Strategy has created the opportunity to rethink the approach to policy coordination

in the Union, in which there has been major problems in defining and agreeing upon a

common means of policy implementation.34 The result of this has been a surge of interest in

‘New Modes of Governance’ to explore the potential of various means to circumvent the

knotty problem of finding an effective and agreeable method of implementing the tenets of

the Lisbon Strategy. It is within this discourse that Open Methods of Co-ordination

31 Ibid. pp 1-6. 32 Ibid. p 5. 33 Petrella, R. “Europe Between Competitive Innovation and a New Social Contract” (1995) 47:1, March, International Social Science Journal. pp 11-23; Watson, M. “Embedding the ‘New Economy’ in Europe: A Study in the Institutional Specificities of Knowledge-Based Growth” (2001) 30:4, November, Economy and Society. pp 504-523; Kettunen, P. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Partnership” in L-F Landgrén & P Hautamäki (eds.). People, Citizen, Nation (Renvall Institute, Helsinki 2005). pp 28-49. 34 Begg, I. “Is There a Convincing Rationale for the Lisbon Strategy?” (2008) JCMS Symposium: EU Governance After Lisbon. p 427.

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(OMCs) have been judged to offer a suitably amorphous, and therefore less contentious,

option for the Member States. I will just say that writing on the OMCs seems to be of the

more technical variety, concentrating on detailed analyses of their institutional and

procedural workings and on their plausibility in relation to EU law, European bureaucratic

structures, and to resistance in the Member States.35

These loosely related themes in current political thought, in analyses of the EU

reform agenda, and in European industrial relations have furnished me with the ideas and

questions that form points of departure for my own continuation and contribution. As I said

at the start, my own contribution is neither in the tone nor in the object of my analysis but

in the approach to the questions that I have elected to pursue. It is to this that we must now

turn.

1.2 Method, Structure, and Source Selection ‘Critical’ Method vs. ‘Scientific’ Method I should perhaps begin by making a few comments on what the thesis is not about. It is not

my intention to follow a more positivistic type of Social Science which is based upon an

explicitly scientific and empirical ‘methodology’. These terms might appear somewhat

misleading to people of different national academic, linguistic, and intellectual traditions

and so let us be clear. By ‘scientific’ I mean the drawing of nomothetic research

conclusions by means of explicit and empirically verifiable hypotheses; the treatment of

subject and object as clearly definable and independent components or actors in historical

analysis36; the tendency towards quantitative over qualitative research; the setting of aims

as conclusive ends rather than exploratory ends; and establishing the separation of

theoretical-hypothetical from observational statements.37 I confess, this description may

seem to be either a fictional and extreme positivist position that does not really exist in

current academia or a convenient straw man against which one might easily establish ‘the

other’ in the structure of the research (with the possible exception of Comte’s social

35 Bignami, F. “Rethinking Interest Representation in the European Union” (2006) 26:2, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. p 440. 36 See Below on Critical Theory. 37 Lloyd, C. “Realism, Structurism and History: Foundations for a Formative Science of Society” (1989) 18, Theory and Society. p 459. Here Lloyd alludes to this aspect of Viennese Positivism.

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physics).38 However, there are many diluted or unreflexive forms of this kind of approach

in the social sciences and humanities against which I would wish to differentiate my own

work.39

I intend my work to reside more in a tradition of qualitative, idiographic, and

exploratory research and will base what follows within this vein. I will not be following a

‘methodology’, which implies a holistic, scientific, pre-fabricated tool to be deployed upon

the subject like a surgical instrument. I favour rather an ‘approach’, as inadequate as this

term may sound, which might inform interpretations and facilitate the handling of research

questions. The approach must not act as a straight jacket, confining and restricting thought,

research and language within pre-set parameters. It should rather give structure to the work

so as to provide clarity and rigour to the analysis, perspicuity to the understanding, and to

prevent the descent into unreflexive narrative, description, and irrelevance. The

conventional assumption that there exists a theory-free approach of pragmatism and

‘common sense’, where we just ‘get on’ with the business at hand, seems woefully

misleading. On the contrary, the belief that one cannot refrain or escape from theoretical

assumptions is one that I share.40 There is a need for some kind of explicitly positive and

reflexive statement of how I will try to bring some rigour to this approach and of how I

make choices.

This thesis is not ‘scientific’ and will therefore not be written under the assumptions

of a value-free social science. My position is that all academic inquiries, analyses, and

conclusions are founded on implicit, and often unrecognised, value-judgements. This

precludes any meaning for value-neutral terms like ‘impartial’, ‘objective’, or ‘unbiased’

accounts. All statements are positive engagements with value-judgements of some sort. On

these assumptions, the purpose of a critical approach, such as this is, is to explicitly and

reflexively recognise the presence of value-judgements and to reflectively examine the

validity and limits of either a human capacity or of a set of philosophical claims. The

approach might appear ‘one-sided’ but this is essential to its sceptical purpose, as it serves

to illuminate, expose, or highlight a particular facet or aspect of an object. To serve this

purpose a critique must necessarily be ‘biased’. Put more formally, an object is dealt with

38 Comte, A. Introduction to Positive Philosophy (Hackett 1988). p 13. 39 Lloyd, C. The Structures of History (Blackwell 1993). Chap. 4. 40 Hyman, R. Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction (MacMillan 1975). p 2.

14

critically “if we consider it only in reference to our cognitive faculties and consequently to

the subjective conditions of thinking it, without undertaking to decide anything about its

object”.41 There is little place here for strictly ‘objective’ standards from which analysis

will be drawn.

What this means is that this thesis will be a critique aimed at the Social Dialogue

and the Social Policy Agenda within the Lisbon Strategy. The more particular type of

critique that I shall be following is what has been called an Immanent Critique. Immanent

Critique might be understood as a mode of enquiry in social theory that analyses cultural

and social forms by identifying and exploring contradictions in the rules and systems

necessary to the production of those forms. Immanent Critique is a means of detecting the

societal contradictions which offer the most determinate possibilities for emancipatory

social change and “the content of immanent critique is the dialectic in history”.42 The

critique thus aims to contextualise not only the object of its investigation, but also the

ideological basis of that object; both the object and the category to which it belongs are

shown to be products of an historical process.43 In practical historical and dialectical terms,

a specific historical practice is measured against its own historical alternatives.44

Immanent critique has its roots in the philosophy of Hegel and Marx, and latterly in

the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno and in the cultural works of Fred Jameson. In the

case of Hegel, social critique is an “immanent critique because its critical standards are

ones given in the historical process” rather than derived from objective universal

principles.45 For Marx as well, immanent principles were useful for understanding social

change as they provided a basis for critique within historical reality.46 Perhaps the most

generous understanding of Immanent Critique views it as a means of ascertaining and

examining the difference between how men and things are and how they ought to be.47 It

must be said that this understanding can be neither refuted nor proven ‘wrong’ but can only

41 Kant, I. The Critique of Judgement (1790). SS 74. 42 Antonio, R J. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory: It’s Origins and Developments in Hegel, Marx and Contemporary Thought” (1981) 32:3, September, British Journal of Sociology. p 332. [Original Emphasis]. 43 This is important in regard to the ‘historical’ aspect of the thesis. 44 Marcuse, H. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Routledge 1964). p x. 45 Antonio. p 332. 46 Ibid. p 333. 47 Adorno, T. Negative Dialectics (Routledge 1973). p 167.

15

be misapplied or incomplete and might be criticised for being too vague and general to be

of any particular use.48

However, Immanent Critique is useful in this thesis because it provides a more

satisfactory critical potential in light of the various epistemological problems. Moreover,

the recognition of interests, equal validity, and the legitimacy of presence in the Social

Dialogue is essential, and can be achieved by means of an implicit Immanent Critique. If

this critique can help illuminate the ideologically obscured disparities in industrial relations,

the asymmetric relations of power in the EU, and the colonising tendencies of the Lisbon

Agenda, then it will prove its usefulness. I do not pretend to objectivity, scientific control,

or strict systematic structure because, as alluring as these commitments may be, they are

embedded in an empirical scientific methodology based upon an epistemology to which I

cannot commit. This thesis is intended as a critique.

Historical Dimension The historical dimension of the thesis comes from the historical nature of the critique lying

at the heart of Critical Theory, and from the historical nature of the approach to the

concepts which I shall be analysing. As shall be explained at greater length in chapter 2.3,

Critical Theory is a philosophical tradition of social critique which operates in historical

time. Similarly, the key tenets of Conceptual History emphasise the importance of historical

context for the understanding of concepts and meaning, which shall be elaborated in

chapter 2.2. Moreover, though much of the thesis’ substantial content will be in the form of

a critical analysis, this analysis itself will be embedded in an historical treatment, most

specifically in Immanent Critique. Beyond this there will be several excursions in to the

concrete historical past, particularly in regard to certain historical trajectories that have

bearing upon current political outcomes (features of the history of Nordic political culture).

I ought to say something about my historiographic sympathies and assumptions,

which are broadly narrative-linguistic. This means that I incline towards three implications

for understanding History: first, that narrative emplotment does not pre-exist in the

‘evidence’; secondly, that the logic of inference is secondary to the figurative capture and

representation of the content of the past; thirdly, that a moral judgement is crucial to how

48 Browne, C. “The End of Immanent Critique?” (2008) 11:1, European Journal of Social Theory. p 5.

16

we provide a meaning for the above, and that the metaphoric form which results from the

exercise of the historian’s imagination has a powerful pre-shaping authority over our

historical knowledge and the final meaning we ‘find’. In its defence, I do not think that

those who endorse the narrative-linguistic understanding imagine history as only being

about texts, with the extra-textual reality of the past excluded. This confusion stems from

the assumption that there is an autonomous foundation of reality which of itself determines

the literary production called History and which, in turn, results in the conflation of “the

past” with “History”.49

Fundamentally, as we shall see elaborated in chapter 2.2, this thesis will be written

around a discursive exploration of concepts set in the context of historical time. By this I

mean that I will explore, discuss, and establish the broad, and then more specific, historical

and contemporary debates, dialogues, and disagreements which orbit a number of relevant

problems, tensions and issues which are related to the stated aims and topic of the thesis.

This I will do within the ontological and epistemological parameters of the theoretical

traditions which I shall explore in section 2.

Source Selection and Handling As this thesis is a conceptual and theoretical work, the ‘sources’ will not constitute the core

and sole focus in an intensive empirical analysis. There is, nevertheless, a need to give an

account of how the sources have been selected and then handled in the process of

interpreting and evaluating. The most important factor in source selection is the recognition

of an informing principle behind selection which is related to the general method or

approach in the thesis and which is consistently applied. I must now explain this principle.

Firstly, I should say that, in accordance with my general approach, the sources are

neither selected nor handled in a strictly ‘scientific’ manner. I shall not be employing a

particularly sophisticated method of selection involving quantitative or qualitative ‘tools’.

Consequently, there are no tables, graphs, survey lists etc., which one might usually

associate with social scientific works. The reasons for the absence of such scientific

methods should be fairly evident given the unempirical nature of the thesis as explained

already in the chapter above. If the central thrust of the thesis is ideological and conceptual

49 Munslow, A. The New History (Pearson Longman 2003). p 138.

17

then a comprehensive and strictly systematic handling of sources is not appropriate. In my

chosen type of analysis, sources serve to illustrate certain ideas, utterances, intentions, and

motives that I wish to expose and interpret, and not to simply provide the maximum

amount of raw data on a given phenomenon for subsequent experimentation under

controlled conditions.

Furthermore, the ‘critical’ approach of the thesis, whilst sympathetic and well-

rounded, is not intended to be balanced, objective, or neutral but rather partial by its very

nature as a critique. This means that the sources themselves cannot be selected or handled

objectively in the empirical scientific sense. The strength of critique comes from its ability

to expose, highlight, and analyse a particular aspect of a thing. The ‘idea’ precedes the

‘fact’ rather than the other way around, assuming that facticity has any place at all. I do

recognise the problem of the consequent potential circularity of ‘illustrative’ source

selection, something which is particularly discussed in the area of hermeneutics. In the case

of this thesis, however, I don’t think this poses a serious problem. This is because the

‘hermeneutic circle’ applies only to statements which claim referential veracity to an extra-

textual reality. As shall be theoretically clarified in chapter 2.1, my sources constitute

textual ‘utterances’ which are not constative but are instead illocutionary utterances that are

neither referentially true nor false, but constitute actions and forces in themselves. It is the

force of these utterances in the sources, and the intentions which they communicate, that I

wish to select and use in the thesis for the purposes of analysis. This means that the chosen

extracts from the sources serve their purpose whenever and wherever they demonstrate the

existence of said intentional utterances. This in turn means that their selection, which is

based upon their perceived potential to illustrate a given argument, is therefore theoretically

valid, adequately rigorous, and founded on an informing principle which is consistently

applied.

In concrete practical terms, the ‘primary sources’ are going to consist of official

documentation of the European Union and other large national and international institutions

related to industrial relations and the EU. In particular, recent European Commission

Communications and Presidential Communications have been chosen as my sources for the

European Social Dialogue and the Social Policy Agenda within the context of the Lisbon

Strategy. I have chosen these documents because, as ‘Communications’, they most closely

18

resemble explicit textual utterances by the institutions of the EU on these matters, being, as

they are, written as self-professed clarifications and expressions of intent, purpose, and self-

understanding rather than simple reportage or constative statement. That the

Communications are a form of explicit and direct communication is important given the

centrality of language, speech acts and intentional utterances in the thesis, which shall be

explained in chapter 2.1. This is especially important for the exploration of concepts and

their self-understanding within the EU. The chosen Commission Communications on the

Social Dialogue and on the Social Policy Agenda (Lisbon) have all been released within the

last 10 years and are therefore as closely relevant to the present situation as possible and are

also explicitly tasked to communicate on the European Social Dialogue and the Social

Policy Agenda, as well as on the Lisbon Strategy more generally.

I will also include some documents from non-EU organisations such as the

International Labour Organisation (ILO).50 The inclusion of these sources shall hopefully

provide some breadth to the selection and will demonstrate how the Social Dialogue and

the Lisbon Strategy are not the ‘property’ of the EU but are much more amorphous and

diffuse phenomena, a point that shall have implications for my argument. These documents

might consist of reports, instruction manuals, or policy clarifications but nevertheless still

provide the kind of textual utterances of intention and perception as do the Commission

Communications. ‘Secondary’ sources, or research literature, shall be dealt with in the

usual manner as providing ideas, arguments, or clarifications and to demonstrate something

of the discursive environment within which this thesis has been researched and written.

Thesis Structure

For reasons already stated there will be no concrete hypothesis to be subsequently ‘proven’

or ‘disproven’ in this thesis. Chapter 1.1 is intended, evidently, to introduce the topic of the

thesis and to familiarise the reader with my chosen subject of the Social Dialogue and the

Social Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Process and with the basic questions to be discussed. It

also contains a brief discussion of some of the ‘points of departure’ in current academic 50 I should probably say that, though the frequently cited Ishikawa ‘resource book’ is not a Commission Communication, it is nevertheless a similar type of textual utterance in that it is also intended as an elucidation and statement of intent of the Social Dialogue aimed at an audience inside the International Labour Organisation. Although the ILO is not part of EU institutional structures the two organisations do have many linkages and close associations.

19

writing on the topic of the thesis and mentions their influence on the origins of the thesis’

arguments and ideas. This current chapter quite conventionally consists of a ‘profession of

faith’ and a basic account of how I shall order, handle, and select the work. The more

theoretical section 2 is not a schematic of the ‘tools’ I will be using later on, but more a

discussion over the traditions and schools of thought which will be woven together and will

culminate in section 3. It is necessary to demonstrate in section 2 how the theory of speech

acts, Conceptual History, and Critical Theory can compliment each other and thus

contribute to constructing a historically informed critique which will form the basis of my

analytical arguments in section 3. The small conclusion in chapter 4 will conclude and

summarise in the more conventional manner.

I understand that there is a tension here between precision and vagueness, control

and chaos. Fundamentally, I wish to satisfy both of these tendencies by riding that tension.

After providing some rigour in setting out implicit parameters in the framework of a

discourse, it is my intention for the structure and dialogue to emerge as the thesis unfolds in

a Nietzschean genealogical sense. To this end, much of my ‘method’ commentary will

unfold when appropriate in section 2 and will not be simply piled up in a hypothesis-setting

introduction. Given the importance placed in this thesis on linguistic contexts for the

determination of meaning, I think this structure is more appropriate than any other that

might boast greater claims to ‘scientific’ convention. However, the piece must be taken

holistically with the full implications, meaning and coherence materialising as the thesis

progresses, not dissected beforehand.

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2. Theories Toward a Historical and Conceptual Analysis of the Social Dialogue Introduction: The Role of Section 2 In this section I will explore and analyse the theoretical traditions, ideas and arguments

which shall build up my analysis. The works discussed here will inform and develop my

interpretation of the role of the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Agenda.

The theory of speech acts, Conceptual History, and Critical Theory mutually

support and inform one another in my analysis and, in the synthesis, provide benefits in

interpretation which are complementary but also sufficiently varied to furnish a textured

critique. These benefits will become more apparent as the reader progresses in light of the

fundamental research question. The result will hopefully be an investigation built on a

fruitful tension produced by sewing what follows below into a coherent set of arguments

focused on the topic of the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Agenda.

The three chapters in this section are inter-related in a number of ways. Firstly, they

all recognise language as having a potent force in itself, not just to communicate ideas or

referential facts, but also to shape meaning, intentions, and action. They also show how

language is important for both agenda setting and power relations amongst political actors.

The theory of speech acts establishes that utterances have a ‘force’, Conceptual History

shows how these forces in context provide meaning for concepts as a route to

comprehending phenomena, and Habermasian Critical Theory develops the theory of

speech acts into an intersubjective procedure for democratic decision-making in praxis.

Secondly, they all provide a theoretical means of providing critique that is not

compromised by empirical normative standards, as mentioned in the chapter on method.

These three theoretical approaches to social theory are based on a recognition of the

epistemological subject-object paradigm and are an attempt, maybe not to transcend, but to

synthesise the two traditions in an epistemologically credible means of social critique. I

think that this is essential to establish a ‘critical’ potential, not just an analysis.

Thirdly, when treated as a whole, these chapter stress the importance of the

historical process in the analysis, and when woven together they provide an historical mode

of criticising the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Agenda. We shall see that this is either in

21

terms of the centrality of changing historical-linguistic contexts, essential to a history of

concepts, or in terms of an historical mode of critique, as in the case of Critical Theory.

This section is essential in order to see how by departing from an historically

sensitive mode of analysis, we run the risk of dissipating any critical potential in the

analysis. The consequences of this, as we shall see in Habermas’ theory, can be ideological

delusion, asymmetric power relations, or conceptual confusion, or a dubious universalising

foundationalism, all of which are arguably present in the Commission Communications on

the Social Dialogue. As has been made apparent, this is not a strictly empirical work which

applies well recognised and conventional scientific ‘tools’ to a given set of data. A

theoretical and ideological critique, such as this thesis attempts to be, needs a thorough

explanation of its informing theories and modes of historical critique in order to build up

the analysis into a fairly clear and credible argument, and it is for this reason that section 2

is presented in this way.

2.1 Speech Acts and Illocutionary Force in the Social Dialogue During the 20th Century considerable work has been conducted in the realm of the

philosophy of language. In the English-speaking world (mainly Britain) there were

philosophers of language who bent their intellectual endeavours toward ‘ordinary language

philosophy’ which came into vogue in the middle decades of the 20th Century. In

contradistinction to ‘continental’ ideal language philosophy, ordinary language philosophy

eschewed ideal theories of language and concentrated on the details of the ordinary use of

‘everyday’ language. This all took place within the tradition of analytic philosophy, which

has come to suppose, as its guiding characteristic, the clarification of thought by

examination of the logical form of philosophical propositions, and which has been driven

by nominalistic and anti-foundational propensities. A consequence of this has been a close

interest and intensive analysis of ‘ordinary language’, its use and significance. The belief

has been that many traditional philosophical problems are only illusions induced by

misunderstandings about language and that words taken in abstraction often result in

semantic obfuscation and futile and endless metaphysical speculation. This typically

English anti-essentialist and anti-idealist theme was probably based originally around

22

Wittgenstein’s later more sceptical work and then developed by John Austin, inter alia, in

the 1950s.51

Here the term ‘ordinary’ is “not in contrast with ‘esoteric’, ‘archaic’, or ‘specialist’,

etc. It is in contrast with ‘non-stock’ or ‘non-standard’” which might mean words which are

“metaphorical, hyperbolical, poetical, stretched and deliberately restricted”.52 Words are

deemed to have uses and usages, the former indicates techniques or ways of operating and

the latter alludes to prevailing practices, customs or fashions. Whilst a word might be

misused, “there cannot be a misusage any more than there can be a miscustom or a

misvogue”.53 In this vein, one might also differentiate the meaning of ‘phrases’ and of

‘sentences’. To understand a word or phrase is to know how to use it in making it perform

its role in a range of sentences, the sentence is the point of reference. Understanding a

sentence on the other hand does not involve knowledge of its role for it has none. There

may be rules governing general sentences, but no rules govern all sentences in specific.54

For example, knowing the meaning of “tomorrow is Thursday” is not knowing a general

rule as no general rule governs the use of this particular sentence. It is rather dependent

upon conditions or customs. Informed by the anti-foundational thinking in analytic

philosophy, this notion of ordinary language perhaps gives rise to an extraordinarily

flexible and versatile understanding of speech and meaning in relation to any referential

epistemology.

The growing interest in this ‘ordinary language’ stimulated an analysis of those

utterances which were apparently non-literal or ‘non-natural’ and which seemed to defy

referentially true meaning in the conventional sense. In this direction, Paul Grice in

particular perceived the importance of intentions in the making of linguistic meaning. By

concentrating on intention, the account of linguistic meaning was expanded. In

propositional form Grice’s understanding goes thus: that in an utterance where “A meant

something by X” this is roughly equivalent to saying “A uttered X with the intention of

inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention”.55 This can be illustrated by

51 See also works by Gilbert Ryle, P F Strawson, Oswald Hanfling, Gary Watson, H P Grice, J L Cohen, amongst others. 52 Ryle, G. “Ordinary Language” (1953) 62:2, April, The Philosophical Review. p 168. 53 Ibid. p 178. 54 Ibid. pp 179-180. 55 Grice, H P. “Meaning” (1957) 66:3, July, The Philosophical Review. p 384.

23

looking at the intentional meaning of a frown. A spontaneous frown which is passively

observed by a third party might be treated as a sign of displeasure. However, if this third

party is deliberately frowned at, then the frown may still be understood to convey

displeasure but this is so only if the audience ‘takes’ or recognises the frown as intended to

convey displeasure. So “if we take away the recognition of intention, leaving the other

circumstances, the belief-producing tendencies of the frown [speech act] must be regarded

as being impaired or destroyed”.56 It must be remembered that a key assumption here is that

“the criteria for judging linguistic intentions are very like the criteria for judging non-

linguistic intentions”.57 Summarised, this would mean that in regard to intentions:

“We are concerned with the case in which there is not simply an intention to produce a certain response in an audience, but an intention to produce that response by means of recognition on the part of the audience of the intention to produce that response, this recognition to serve as part of the reason that the audience has for its response, and the intention that this recognition should occur being itself intended to be recognised”.58 The result of this ‘cooperative principle’ is that meaning is derived from the mutual

engagement in discourse. This indicates the importance of the contextual conditions of

speech. It also explains how the environment of intersubjective communication is crucial to

the understanding of utterers’ intentions and therefore to linguistic meaning. This principle

is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, this is the reason why I have chosen the

Commission Communications for the sources in this thesis, as they represent these kinds of

intentional utterances. Also, at this point we can see the foundational principle behind the

transformation of the Social Dialogue into a Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ that I

shall argue in chapter 3.1.

In Austin’s seminal work, How to Do Things With Words (1955), he challenged

what he considered to be the dominant account of the western philosophical story of

language, that the chief function of a sentence is to make a statement of fact which is then

true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts.59 While not denying the existence of

such ‘constative’ or ‘locutionary’ utterances, he did seek to demonstrate the existence of

additional utterances, the truthfulness or falsity of which are non-existent and non- 56 Ibid. p 383. 57 Ibid. pp 387-388. 58 Strawson, P F. “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts” (1964) 73:4, October, The Philosophical Review. p 450. 59 Austin, J. How to Do Things With Words (Oxford UP 1962). p 1.

24

applicable – where the ‘force’ of an utterance is not exhausted by its locutionary

‘meaning’.60 These were statements which had been too often considered by many, Kant

amongst the most systematic, to be non-sensical ‘pseudo-statements’ due to their very

inability to be ‘verified’, despite their grammatical propriety.61 Austin challenged this

attitude building on the notion of utterers’ intentions just mentioned, and in doing so he

contributed to a growing tendency in 20th Century philosophy to transcend the subject-

object dichotomy.

There thus followed a rather complicated taxonomy of statements and utterances in

Austin’s work, but perhaps most strikingly he devised the performative utterance. The

character of this type of utterance being that it can neither be true nor false, correct nor

incorrect and that the utterance does not state, report, or describe some fact but actually is

an act in itself, dependant upon an extensive circumstantial criteria including situation,

speaker, hearer, and the phatic act (vocabulary). This is the speech-act, where words do not

“say” but “do”. More precisely, this is where the performance of an act is in saying

something rather than by saying something, utterances can have a force as well as content.

This constitutes the illocutionary act.

The illocutionary act is neither true nor false but requires certain conditions and

circumstances which are necessary for the utterance to be performed successfully, or

‘felicitously’. Crucially important to the success of the illocutionary act is whether it is, or

is not, ‘taken up’, that is, “bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the force

of the locution” in the recipient of the utterance.62 This means that for the act to be

performed it must satisfy certain conventions including sincerity of the utterer and

recognition on the part of the recipient given the parameters and circumstantial

environment within which it is made.63 If the illocutionary act is ‘taken up’, ergo

successfully performed, it qualifies as a speech act proper or a perlocutionary act. As a

rather crude example, one might say that the utterance “I will” or “I do” in the circumstance

of the marriage ceremony is neither a statement of fact, report nor description of a real

event, feeling or intention, but is actually the act itself. For without those two words the

60 Strawson. p 442. 61 Austin. p 2. 62 Ibid. pp 115-116. 63 Ibid. pp 103, 105, 108, 115, 120, 121, 127.

25

ritual of marriage does not successfully occur (or is “miscarried” in Austin’s parlance).

Similarly, if the groom is insincere, or God doesn’t hear, or the priest has not been ordained

then the speech act ‘misfires’ as the conventional requisites are not present.

Other examples of utterances open to this kind of illocutionary force might include

introducing someone or surrendering, appealing, accusing, promising or threatening.

Though it must be said that such utterances are open to all sorts of simultaneous and non-

exclusive uses, meanings, and intentions. The important thing is that Austin’s work has led

to greater interest in words as having force and in the significance of authors’ intentions,

and of the conditions in which they might be translated into successful speech acts. We see

here that context is all important in providing meaning rather than referentially observable

‘fact’.

What is crucial about this chapter is that ordinary language philosophy and its

analytic heritage contrasts with the Hegelianism and ‘continental idealism’ which we shall

find in the development of Critical Theory. These two opposed traditions will come

together in an attempted synthesis, in Habermas most of all, and in the exploration of the

Social Dialogue as a decision-making environment based on intersubjectivity, the

‘cooperative principle’, and utterers’ intentions. More particularly, this detailed and

technical explanation of speech-acts is essential to understanding a number of points.

Firstly, it is essential in order to understand the unfolding theoretical suppositions of

Conceptual History in the next chapter, particularly the central role of linguistic context in

determining the meaning of concepts. Secondly, by understanding the theory of speech acts

at this point I will be able to demonstrate how it is that illocutionary forces set an agenda in

the Social Dialogue beyond any referentially understood ‘constative’ meaning that might be

found in the language of the Commission Communications. In other words, how words

have force. Thirdly, the theory of speech acts is important for understanding how an

attempt has been made in Habermas’ thought to develop a species of procedural democracy

based upon intersubjective communication in an attempt to transcend the subject-object

distinction which distinguishes him from his Frankfurt predecessors.

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2.2 Conceptual History: Begriffsgeschichte and Contextualism Background We must now consider the role of concepts in relation to certain key issues in the thesis.

First, how do they provide a suitable means of comprehending phenomena in historical

time? Second, why are concepts particularly advantageous in this respect for historical

analysis? Third, how does the historicity of concepts relate to the modern-postmodern

boundary (our ‘air du temps’)?

To begin with one must recognise that the very notion of concepts is a thorny issue.

The first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of ‘concepts’ is how they might differ

from words, ideas, terms, or thoughts in general. Can there be concepts without words? Can

concepts cross linguistic boundaries pure and unsullied? Or do words merely label concepts

which exist beyond language? Broadly speaking, there is a rich variety of basic definitions;

concepts are words, symbols, thoughts which act as ‘bearers of meaning’ that exist in

matrices of mutual meaning and interrelation; concepts are abstract ideas or mental symbols

typically associated with corresponding representations in a language or symbology;

concepts are units of knowledge built from characteristics. It might be that to attempt a

definition is counter-productive and to avoid getting bogged down a brief sketch of the

relevant genealogy might be more helpful.

The term conceptum has been traced back to the 16th Century, but perhaps a more

generous reading might reach right back to Aristotle’s ‘definition of terms’ – natural. What

seems interesting is the apparent ‘modernity’ of the concept of ‘concept’. Its materialisation

in a form more distinctively recognisable to modern discourse seems to coincide with the

épanouissement of scientific thought. Skipping past the childhood and adolescence in the

genealogy we come to the first relevant engagement with the term in Kant.

The transcendental bid on the part of Kant to synthesise the empirical and rational

traditions required categories of the mind through which sensible data might be given

meaning for the thinking subject as thought perception. As he says, “without the sensible

faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be

thought. Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts, blind”.64 It is

64 Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason (Everyman 1781;1993). p 69. [A50/B74].

27

therefore necessarily the case that "neither of these faculties can exchange its proper

function. Understanding cannot intuit, and the sensible faculty cannot think. In no other

way than in the united operation of both, can knowledge arise”.65 In this fusion Kant

seemed to covet a more encompassing understanding of concepts beyond Locke’s general

ideas, Platonic ideas, and scholastic universals. Kant’s Critiques supplied western, largely

German, thought with the most comprehensive armoury for the development of ‘concepts’

in the epistemological battle based upon this short, but pithy, phrase.

This was an epistemological mechanism which was greatly harnessed in 19th

Century thought, in sociology vor allem. Furthermore, Kantian concepts were implicitly

imbued with a historical quality. Given that Kant understood the mind as finite, and that in

fact a finite mind is receptive to objects only in so far as such objects are structured a priori

in space and time. As all ‘representations’ are temporal, then time assumes a crucial role in

the exploration of the possibility of knowledge of objects.66 This historicity is important for

our purposes because of the subsequent use made of it by conceptual historians.

Weber was equally renowned a Century later for trying to establish a means of

grounding the a priori in an empirical enquiry. He adopted the conceptual template of the

neo-Kantians, but tempered the universalism of Kant’s understanding by placing it in an

historical process dividing knowledge into the Geisteswissenschaften and

Naturwissenschaften with empirical-positivist standards reserved for the latter only. He

recognised that in the Geisteswissenschaften “as soon as we attempt to reflect about the

way in which life confronts us in immediate concrete situations, it presents an infinite

multiplicity of successively and coexistently emerging and disappearing events both

‘within’ and ‘outside’ ourselves”.67

For Weber any attempt to reproduce or represent reality in an authentic way was

doomed to failure and that all one could do was to “bring order into the world of reality,

which is in a state of ceaseless flux”, through reasoned thought.68 There is “no absolutely

objective scientific analysis” of culture or social phenomena which is “independent of

special and one-sided viewpoints according to which – expressly or tacitly, consciously or

65 Ibid. p 70. [A51/B76]. 66 Ibid. pp 122-123. [A98-99]. 67 Weber, M. Methodology of the Social Sciences (Free Press 1949). p 72. 68 Saloman, A. “Max Weber’s Methodology” (1934) 1:2, May, Social Research. p 157.

28

unconsciously – they are selected, analysed and organised for expository purposes”.69

There is a necessity for ‘pre-suppositions’ to beat the chaos of individual judgements into

analytical order and this is achieved through the construction of concepts. It is perhaps

apposite to note that Weber envisaged concepts not as static, universal, and valid for all

time but rather that “every science, every single descriptive history, operates with the

conceptual stock-in-trade of its time” and that in the cultural ‘sciences’ “concept-

construction depends on the setting of the problem, and the latter varies with the content of

the culture itself” (i.e. through time).70 Conceptual History as a quasi-sub discipline of

professional history emerged from this kind of early 20th Century social science, though not

exclusively. We can also see here that concepts can provide a mechanism for

comprehension which is neither derived strictly from empirical observation nor from

metaphysical speculation.

Begriffsgeschichte and the Historical Semantics of Terms In keeping with the interests of this thesis, Begriffsgeschichte (Conceptual History) places

language at the heart of its mode of enquiry and values above all the “autonomous power of

words, without whose use human actions and passions could hardly be experienced, and

certainly not made intelligible to others”.71 It also acknowledges the ambiguity of all words,

a property shared by both concepts and words.72 Research from Begriffsgeschichte will

facilitate the understanding of my approach which, in chapter 3.2 will analyse the concept

of ‘Society’ based upon the assumptions discussed here, namely, that concepts must be

understood to operate historically and that changing historical contexts alter the meanings

of concepts. When one considers the utilisation of concepts in the Commission

Communications on the Social Dialogue it can be seen that, whilst such the concepts still

have a meaning, it is a meaning that is incompatible with the assumed aims of the Dialogue

because of the changing historical context and epistemological assumptions within which

we live.

69 Weber. Methodology. p 72. 70 Ibid. pp 105-106. 71 Koselleck, R. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Columbia UP 2004). p 75. 72 Ibid. p 85.

29

Conceptual History is concerned with the historical semantics of terms and their

genealogy, the changing paradigms of ideas, semasiology and onomatology. The notion of

time is very important and acts as primum mobile to the assumption of the ontological and

temporal contingency of cultural values and contexts. The approach to concepts in

Begriffgeschichte does entertain a distinction between words, terms, phrases, and concepts

proper. Reinhart Koselleck devised a differentiation of concept as distinct from words. In

the triangle of word (signification) – meaning (concept) – object, each concept is associated

with a word, but not every word is a social or political concept. Social and political

concepts possess a substantial claim to generality and always have many meanings – in

historical science, occasionally in modalities other than words.73 He could therefore say

that:

“In use a word can become unambiguous. By contrast, a concept must remain ambiguous in order to be a concept. The concept is connected to a word, but is at the same time more than a word: a word becomes a concept only when the entirety of meaning and experience within a socio-political context within which and for which a word is used can be condensed into one word”.74 Following on from this contextual view of concepts, the notion of historical semantics is

pivotal to understanding the thrust of Begriffsgeschichte. If concepts are therefore the

“concentrates of several substantive meanings” and they draw together a plenitude of

meanings then semantic fields become important for mapping these meanings and their

relationships in the interpretive triangle.75 Semantic fields provide associated meanings for

concepts, though always ambiguous, which “bundle[s] up the variety of historical

experience together with a collection of theoretical and practical references into a relation

that is given and can be experienced only through the concept”.76 However, this is no

empirical process which provides unmediated access to empirical knowledge via the

semantic function of the concept. A concept is not simply indicative of the relations which

it covers, it is also a factor within them.77 In this case, the concept establishes a particular

horizon for potential experience and conceivable theory, and in this way sets a limit. This is

very important for how concepts are connected to wider fields linguistic means and force 73 Ibid. pp 84-85. 74 Ibid. p 85. 75 The semantic field might be described as a set of distinct meanings represented by words or signifiers which are related to one another based upon those distinct meanings. 76 Koselleck. Futures Past. p 85. 77 Ibid. p 86. This sounds much like the Kantian synthesis discussed above.

30

and so can carry and distribute a whole load of implicit connotations which often go

unrecognised.

At first glance, Social History and Conceptual History differ in that the latter

concentrates on texts, words and speech. For Social History, and its background in the

empirical social sciences, texts and their attributed conditions of emergence have only an

empirical referential nature, whereas Conceptual History works continually through the

exegesis of texts, while simultaneously being based on such exegesis. There is a

recognisably more hermeneutic element. The contention of Reinhart Koselleck, with which

I am in agreement, is that traditional Social History actually cannot be separated from

Conceptual History as “a ‘society’ and its ‘concepts’ exist in a relation of tension which is

also characteristic of its academic historical disciplines”.78 The argument seems to be that a

society’s concepts are historically contingent based on the idea that the activity of

“temporal semantic construal” simultaneously establishes the historical force contained

within a statement.79 So we can see that the ahistorical, directly empirically referential, and

scientific suppositions of traditional Social History are tempered by a ‘philosophical history

of terminology’ and an ‘historical philology’. It is for this reason that my approach has been

historically conceptual rather than a straight social history of the Social Dialogue. An

Immanent Critique must be based upon the reflexive terms of the object itself, rather than

from without, and so the object must be understood within its own historical context rather

than from the vantage point of another.

Basically, concepts, and their semantic fields, are dependent for meaning on the

historical period in which they are used and political conflicts must be “interpreted and

decoded in terms of their contemporary conceptual boundaries, and the self-understanding

on the part of past speakers and writers of their own language use”.80 Though sociological

‘tools’ of Social History may have an empirical utility, they must be historically sensitive.

From this exploration of Begriffsgeschichte we can see how concepts are drawn from an

epistemological synthesis of the idealist and empiricist traditions and how they must be

placed in the changing contexts of historical time. This is how I have arrived at both my

78 Ibid. p 76. 79 Ibid. p 79. 80 Ibid. p 80. There is also a hint at the role of utterer’s intentions here.

31

method approach and my handling of concepts in the Commission Communications on the

Social Dialogue, to which we shall return in section 3.

After considering the epistemological foundations of historical concepts we can

then say something about the functioning of concepts in an example of changing historical

context. The synchronic semantic field and the diachronic historicity of concepts can be

combined and illustrated in the notion of the Sattelzeit (pivotal-time), Koselleck’s defining

contribution. Koselleck understood this to be an historical period in Western Europe from

about 1750-1850 in which a significant, recognisable and widespread shift took place in the

understood meanings of the most basic and foundational political and social concepts. This

period coincides with the French and Industrial Revolutions and arguably with the advent

of the ‘modern’ age. This view of ‘Modernity’ is less concerned with definitions of

economic relationships or with institutions but instead sees Modernity as being constituted

by the very appearance of generally held normative conceptual meanings which previously

had been local, disparate, and fractured. The appearance of shared meanings is reliant on

shared concepts which provide the mediating mechanism between mind and sensible

reality. The implications here are that there is a precedent for identifiable transition periods

of greater or lesser degree and, although I am not claiming our present ‘air du temps’ to be

a comparable period of transition, the principle needs to be recognised. From this I can go

on to more confidently explore the notion of a historically problematised use of concepts in

the Social Dialogue.

The revolutionising of new words for old meanings and the creation of innumerable

neologisms arose with the changing linguistic arsenal of the entire political and social space

of experience and thus established new horizons of expectation.81 When we come to

analyse the concept of ‘Society’ in the Social Dialogue we will see that this ‘future-

oriented’ characteristic of Modernity, and its new concepts, became a central component in

the vision of ‘Society’ as a rational means of shaping human life toward a future goal, a

quality not found in pre-modern forms of human association. Whilst this modern

understanding of society is still implicit in the view of society held by the EU institutions,

one must ask that as the future-oriented momentum of ‘Modernity’ is dissipating in our

81 Koselleck. Futures Past. p 79.

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time at the ‘postmodern boundary’, what are the effects of such a temporal conceptual

incompatibility for the legitimacy of political decision-making?

A grasp of the theoretical workings of Begriffsgeschichte has a number of particular

uses for this thesis. It provides an important criticism of Social History which is similar to

that which the Cambridge Contextualists aimed at in their criticism of ‘histories of ideas’.

It criticises the careless transfer to the past of modern, context-determined expressions of

constitutional argument, something that I have found throughout various non-historical

analyses of EU politics that are based upon universalist principles of analysis or upon

liberal theories of the state-society relation. It also criticises the “practice in the history of

ideas of treating ideas as constants, assuming different historical forms but of themselves

fundamentally unchanging”.82 Similarly, by switching between synchronic and diachronic

analysis, Begriffsgeschichte can help disclose the persistence of past experience and the

viability of past theories, which I shall implicitly pursue especially in regard to the

forgotten strengths of the earlier forms of Critical Theory.83 Perhaps, the most specific and

useful idea that I wish to take from Begriffsgeschichte is the apprehension of certain

concepts as “recurrently emerging neologisms reacting to specific social or political

circumstances”. I think that this might apply to the current concept of ‘society’ as

understood in the Commissions Communications on the Social Dialogue.

The Historical Contextualism of the ‘Cambridge School’ The connection of Begriffsgeschichte with Cambridge Contextualism is debatable, as the

provenance of the latter is not Social History but Intellectual History, political philosophy

and the philosophy of language. Nevertheless, there are numerous cross-over points. Most

importantly it once again illustrates the need, on the one hand, to view concepts as

contingent on time and on authorial intentions and, on the other, to beware of diachronic

anachronism. Most of all, and in clearest distinction to Begriffsgeschiche, it develops the

theory of speech acts into an historical mode of interpretation and criticism.

During the 1970s the ideas surrounding speech acts that we detailed in chapter 2.1

were exported from the philosophy of language into other academic disciplines. Quentin

82 Ibid. p 81. 83 Ibid. p 89.

33

Skinner, along with Raymond Geuss, John Dunn and JGA Pocock, was responsible for

unleashing this linguistic scholarship within historical circles in Britain. Skinner was

disaffected with widespread teleological narratives within the ‘history of ideas’ stemming

from what he saw as extensive anachronistic fallacies born out of basic misunderstandings

of the language used in major historical treatises of political philosophy. In the heady

atmosphere of 1970s post-structuralism, Skinner’s revisionist thrust assaulted the central

supremacy of the idea in intellectual history, which he saw as prejudicing scholars into

perceiving a teleological and temporal omnipresence of certain political philosophical ideas

which he deemed to be contingent upon certain authors at certain points in historical time.

In its place he focused on deriving meaning from an interpretation of past philosophers’

intentions in writing what they did. Consequently, he imported Austin’s work on speech-

acts, seeing in them a potential for inferring authors’ intentions through their use of words

as acts in themselves. These individuals and their works have since been corralled by those

that followed under the rubric of the ‘Cambridge School’ of Contextualism.

The philosophical discussions around speech acts had concentrated hitherto on the

philosophies of action and of mind, most resolutely around the problems of agential

intention, referential epistemology, and meaning in texts, all problems to which Skinner

devoted much energy. However, he did go on to widen the scope of speech acts into an

emphasis beyond simple intentions by adding the caveat:

“Here I need to begin by making a negative point with as much emphasis as possible. The theory does not tell us, nor do I believe, that the intentions of speakers and writers constitute the sole or even the best guide to understanding their texts or other utterances”.84 The implications of this are that a further ‘guide to understanding’ texts and utterances has

to come from contexts and not just authorial intentional utterances in texts taken in isolation

from their linguistic, cultural and historical settings. If we cast our minds back to the

discussion of speech acts in the previous chapter, for an illocutionary act to be ‘taken up’,

that is, to be executed felicitously or ‘successfully’ and therefore to become a

perlocutionary act, an utterance must satisfy certain conditions determined by various

linguistic contexts. This means that the illocutionary acts we perform may be identified,

like all voluntary acts, by our intentions, but the illocutionary forces carried by our

84 Skinner, Q. Visions of Politics: Vol. 1 – Regarding Method (Cambridge UP 2002). p 110.

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utterances are mainly determined by their meaning and context. Skinner himself refers to

the example of the ‘unintended warning’ where, though there may be circumstances in

which the issuing of a certain utterance will inevitably be taken to be a case of adverting to

danger, in such circumstances “the agent will be understood to have spoken, and will in fact

have spoken, with the illocutionary force of a warning. This will remain the case even if the

agent spoke without any intention to warn, and in consequence failed to perform the

corresponding illocutionary act”.85

It is for these reasons that it can readily happen that, in performing an illocutionary

act, an utterance may at the same time carry, without my intending it, a much wider range

of illocutionary force.86 We shall see that utterances in the Commissions Communications

on the Social Policy Agenda and on the Social Dialogue will entail these kinds of

‘additional meanings’ beyond the conscious intentions of the Commission. It is from this

that I will show in chapter 3.3 how an otherwise oblique agenda can be read and interpreted

when one places the utterances in wider contemporary contexts of meaning, semantically

linked to a dominating agenda of economic competition.

2.3 Critical Theory and ‘Instrumental Tendencies’ in the Lisbon Strategy

There are two main reasons for the inclusion of this chapter and both are connected to the

analysis in section 3. The first reason is that it is necessary to work through the early

thought of the Frankfurt School in order to explore its strengths and weaknesses in regard

to critique of capitalist society and therefore, implicitly, the functioning of the Lisbon

Strategy through the Social Dialogue. A discussion of the earlier Critical Theory which

preceded Habermas is also crucial for my later attempts in the conclusion to demonstrate

how Habermas’ departure from his predecessors’ thought has drained it of much of its

critical potential in contemporary politics and opened the door to the adaptive pressures of

international economic competition.

The second reason for the chapter is to construct my argument that the implicit

assumption in the Commission Communications is that the Social Dialogue represents a

Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’. Once this has been done, we shall be in a position, in

85 Ibid. p 109. [My Emphasis]. 86 Ibid. p 109.

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the next section, to assess the validity of the ‘consensual’ claims which are made of the

Dialogue. We will also be able to analyse and criticise these claims in relation to a general

criticism of Habermas’ theory upon which they are based.

The Foundations for a Critique of Rationality and Communication The eponymous ‘Frankfurt School’ of self-styled critical theorists gathered around a

number of German social scientists and philosophers at the Institut für Sozialforschung in

Frankfurt-am-Main in the 1920s. The degree to which critical theorists constitute a

meaningful, coherent and, recognised ‘school’ has been a point of contention.87 Its internal

pluralism has been due in no small part to its diverse intellectual influences.88 Whilst

keeping this in mind, something can still be said of “a definable core” of Critical Theory,

not so much as a “fixed theoretical or empirical content”, but rather as an “historically

applied logic of analysis”. This particularly holds true for the decades around World War

Two, beginning with Horkheimer, Pollock, Fromm, Benjamin and Adorno inter alia – the

putative first generation of critical theorists.89

In broad terms, Critical Theory is an approach within social philosophy oriented

towards political action and social reform via a dialectical critique of historical reality

aimed at human emancipation. This goal is the primum mobile of Critical Theory but is a

telos which has no terminus, thus it constitutes an ongoing historical process. This vital

process at the heart of Critical Theory is essentially dialectical.90 Central to the tradition,

especially more recently in the writings of Habermas, is the issue of the grounding of

epistemic norms.

Early Critical Theory revolved around three main lines of contrast which

characterised the social research of the Institute; Critical Theory vs. Traditional Theory,

Idealism vs. Materialism, Rationalism vs. Irrationalism. The first of these three contrasts is

most important for establishing both the ‘critical’ and the ‘historical’ elements of Critical

Theory, which are also the two most important informing principles behind my research

87 McLaughlin, N. “Origin Myths in the Social Sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the Emergence of Critical Theory” (1999) 24:1, Canadian Journal of Sociology. pp 109-139. 88 Rush, F. “Introduction” in Rush (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Political Theory (Cambridge UP 2004). p 1. 89 Antonio,. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 330. 90 Marcuse. One Dimensional Man. p x.

36

method. ‘Critical Theory’ should be understood in opposition to ‘Traditional Theory’.

Traditional Theory places the inquiring subject outside of the socio-historical formation and

has been the dominating approach of the social sciences from the first decades of the 20th

Century. In contrast, Critical Theory has comprehended subject and object as both socially

formed with perception and thought in turn formed socio-historically. A social science and

sociology must be tempered by a historically situated social philosophy in order to render

any analysis effectively critical.

Instrumental Rationality, Anti-Positivism and the Dialectic in History

Critical Theory has incorporated diverse elements from the materialist-idealist dichotomy

but with the key determining factors being the enduring emphasis on Reason and the desire

to avoid reductivist, essentialist or instrumental thinking. Horkheimer embraced the

‘rational’ idealism of Kant, Hegel, and, surprisingly, Descartes but excluded the ‘irrational’

idealism of the kind of Counter-Enlightenment romanticism associated with Nietzsche,

Dilthey, Bergson, Heidegger and friends. This latter group has been treated as exponents of

an impoverished bourgeois philosophy drained of revolutionary and emancipatory

potential. That the ‘post-modernists’ who have revived much of this thought have been

similarly accused in our own time is an interesting instance of continuity to which we shall

return later. Fundamentally, however, the idealist tradition has been fatally compromised by

both foundationalism and transfiguration.91

The irrational and essentialist propensities of idealism were rejected either as

bankrupt, impotent, or opposed to the ontological contingency and emancipatory

presuppositions held by the Frankfurt theorists. However, the rational forms were also

dissected and critically analysed. The notion of instrumental rationality in particular has

been a key concern for decades of critical theorists from Horkheimer onwards.

91 Transfiguration is where a thing is deemed valuable, but not present in the World as a general matter though it is still thought to be immutable. The abiding presence of this something in the World is thought to be impossible and so this something is only attainable supernaturally. Thus, Transfiguration undermines the potential for social reform and critique, since transfiguring theories entail that the ultimate relief from suffering can be achieved only outside contexts in which human action can be effective. As a consequence the emancipatory purpose of critical thought is abrogated and idealism rendered suspect. See Rush. “Conceptual Foundations of Early Critical Theory”. p 13.

37

The problem seems to be thus: in conceiving, one discerns a particular aspect of an

object which is thought significant for the grouping of that object with other objects on the

basis of the shared aspect. The selection of what characteristics of an object are to be

understood as salient and determining is a purposive act and entails/reveals interests that

one has in comprehending reality in a certain manner. To the early critical theorists, the

outcome of an epistemology of observational science (experimentally controlled

observation as the ideal means of determining valid knowledge) is that “all things in nature

become identical with the phenomena they represent when submitted to the practices of our

laboratories, whose problems no less than their apparatus express in turn the problems and

interests of society as it is”.92 This form of reason is thus bereft of questions of value and,

therefore, of critical potential. Incidentally, this is not so far from Leo Strauss’

contemporary defence of political philosophy over political science.93 It also shares some of

Thomas Kuhn’s views on scientific paradigms and, likewise, Stephen J Gould has cogently

alluded to ‘iconographies of evolution’ which reflect “our hopes for a universe of intrinsic

meaning defined in our own terms”.94

The central importance of this critique is that instrumental reason promotes a

bureaucratically administered life because its value-neutrality allows it to work for

whomever controls it. In the case of consumer capitalism it conforms to the interests of

commodity production and its agents. This is pivotal in order to grasp the longstanding

opposition of critical theorists to certain elements in 20th Century social science, namely

positivism. Whilst Horkheimer accepted the materialist dialectic, he rejected the

contemporary materialism of logical-empiricism associated with the Vienna Circle,

claiming it to be reductive. The objection is that, in its commitment to the scientific

principle of empirical verification, positivism conceals a commitment to technological

rationality behind a façade of value-freedom. This is because the verifiability principle

presumes that ethical and political statements are meaningless, and whilst working within a

scientific method and an ‘establishment’ under conditions of capitalism, one is therefore

drawn inexorably by the demands of the status quo. Critical Theory attacks Western

92 Antonio. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 339. 93 Strauss, L. “What is Political Philosophy?” (1957) 19, The Journal of Politics. pp 347, 349-351, 355. 94 Kuhn, T S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Pheonix 1962); Gould, S J. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (Penguin 1991). p 43. [My Emphasis].

38

empiricism for its reification of conventional values which actually serve to legitimate both

capitalist society and ‘orthodox’ Marxist-Leninism ordaining, in the process, dominant

values as scientific laws and state bureaucracy as the rational society.95 In this view

consistent positivism commits one to reactionary conservatism in the final analysis.

Furthermore, the opinion that only scientific knowledge counts as knowledge is a

metaphysical ‘romanticisation’ of facts and is therefore ironically vulnerable to charges of

irrationalism.96

The historical dialectic in Critical Theory has been derived from Hegelian thought

and ought to be explained in a little detail so as to clarify what will follow in the rest of the

chapter. It was Hegel’s view that agency and belief can only be adequately understood

holistically and historically.97 Kant had attempted to replace the rationalist and empiricist

accounts of the self with the transcendental subject and so, similarly, Hegel advanced that

the content of concepts were determined by historically situated forms of social

rationality.98 Hegel’s thought is fundamentally essentialist and historicist and so, under

these assumptions, all forms of consciousness are partially true and through a dialectical

historical process a teleological holistic truth would be gradually unfolded and manifested.

This telos is indeterminately and implicitly present in all stages of progression, a

progression realised in a succession of increasingly adequate expressions of this holistic

truth via the dialectical process. Crucial to this progression is what Hegel calls determinate

negation. This is the immanent realization, on the part of a particular form of

consciousness, that that particular form of the thought-object dichotomy which the

consciousness held central to its conception of the world, actually keeps it from a true

account of its relation to the world. It is ‘alienating or ‘negating’, sometimes referred to as

the negation of negation.

This implies that the ontological suppositions of Critical Theory have insisted on an

ongoing and perpetual historical process and so no longer share Marx’s ahistorical

terminus. We must remember that “the central issue is that Critical Theory is not a general

95 Antonio. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 331. 96 Horkheimer. Critical Theory (Continuum 1975). pp 188-244. Though this is perhaps a reckless statement, the dispute is largely over the Marxist legacy – Hegelian vs. scientific, both of which have had a profound effect on Critical Theory. 97 Rush. “Conceptual Foundations of Early Critical Theory”. p 16. 98 Ibid. pp 16-17.

39

theory, but is instead a method of analysis deriving from a non-positivist epistemology”.99

This ‘method’ is not a prescriptive theodicy but rather limits itself to revealing the relevant

possibilities. Here lies perhaps the deepest deviation from Marx’s philosophy – though one

might argue that later critical theorists like Habermas have returned to this spirit of general

explanatory theory as we shall see.

From the Marxian tradition, Critical Theory received many of its analytical

categories, its lasting critique of capitalism, its belief in the alienation inherent to the

capitalist mode of production, and its telos of emancipation.100 The 11th thesis of Feuerbach

thunders that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point

is to change it” and this lies at the heart of Critical Theory as a dynamic logic of analysis.

This proclivity toward the social reformist, humanist, and voluntarist spirit of the

Feuerbach theses and the ‘Younger Marx’ is underlined by early Critical Theory’s distaste

for the later more scientific determinism of Marx’s later writings and those of his

successors. In this respect Critical Theory takes its place in a wider constellation of more

‘critical’ and ‘humanist’ incarnations of Marxism epitomised by Gramsci, Lukács, Perez-

Dias, Korsch, Sartre, Goldmann, and EP Thompson.101

The Loss of Immanent Potential and Dialectic Negation? Throughout the middle and later 20th Century much of the more ‘orthodox’ Marxian

underpinnings of Critical Theory have been dropped or revised. This has been in large

measure due to the growth of Stalinist state-socialism, the incidence of fascism, and the

perceived creep of managerial capitalism and the bureaucratic state, which have discredited

much of the optimistic expectation in the Marxist vision.102 Critical theorists have drawn

attention to a number of features which merit more remarkable revision.

To post-war critical theorists, it has become increasingly evident that the

emancipatory, revolutionary, and utopian potential of the proletariat, of class struggle, and

99 Antonio. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 332. 100 Ibid. p 330. 101 Gouldner, A. The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (MacMillan 1980). p 38. I suppose this is in distinction to more ‘structural’ Marxists like Althusser, Godelier, Therbon, and Nic Poulantzas who eschew Critical Theory as ideology and concentrate more on Marxism as science. 102 Adamson, W L. “Gramsci and the Politics of Civil Society” (1987) 7:3/4, Winter, Praxis International. p 320; Antonio. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 331.

40

of technology, has proven unreliable. The belief is that such optimism has constituted a

serious miscalculation within conventional Marxist theory, though this position might not

be shared by other more structural Marxists who still live in frustrated expectancy.103 The

role of technology as a capacity to free individuals from the alienating tendencies of social

capitalisation, from the division of labour, and from the necessity of subsistence work, has

been increasingly problematised after the Second World War. This worry has been further

strengthened by increased concern over the power and dominance of instrumental reason.

Spreading and intensifying automation in the production process has challenged the

centrality of surplus labour value as a fundamental keystone in Marx’s edifice of

exploitation and wage slavery.104 At the same time, however, the “improving material fate

of workers is a prima facie legitimation that promotes more efficient capitalist

domination”.105

It seems that Marx mistook an emancipatory force in instrumental rationality

believing that domination lay in necessity and not also in the scientific means of

overcoming that necessity. Critical theorists have implied that Marx’s faith in the

proletariat, and in science and technology, introduced a quasi-metaphysical determinism

into his analysis”.106 In the programmed society, the working class is no longer a privileged

historic agent, not just because the labour movement has been weakened, outmanoeuvred,

or misled, but because the exercise of power within a capitalist firm no longer places a class

at the centre of the economic system and its social conflicts.107

The categories inherited from ‘vulgar’ Marxism have proven either to have been

neutralised or absorbed in the post-war era. The unfolding events of the cold war and of the

post-war boom seem to have further strengthened the unassailable and dominant position of

world capital. The integration of large sections of the working class into the social structure

of monopoly capitalism, buttressed by the overwhelming concentration of economic and

political power, have rendered the possibilities of class struggle apparently otiose.108 In like

fashion, even the socialist countries in the 20th Century might be said to have been 103 Hirst, P Q. “Anderson’s Balance Sheet” in Marxism and Historical Writing (Routledge 1985). p 8. 104 Marcuse. One Dimensional Man. p 36. 105 Antonio. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory”. p 336. 106 Ibid. pp 337, 340. 107 Touraine, A. The Post-Industrial Society: Tomorrow’s Social History – Classes, Conflicts and Culture in the Programmed Society (Wildwood House 1971). p 17. 108 Marcuse. “The Failure of the New Left?” (1979) 18, Autumn, New German Critique. p 5.

41

pressured into co-existence with the seemingly inescapable capitalist mode of production,

regardless of their political mechanisms of redistribution, and were drawn by its power and

logic into the constant development of the means of production and into the expansion of

the productive capacities of the economy.

If the example of Marcuse is taken as a link from the first to the second generation

of critical theorists, we come to see here the changing problematics central to Critical

Theory after World War Two and into the 1960s and the recognition that “within a

repressive society even the progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to

the degree to which they accept the rules of the game”.109

Theodor Adorno’s treatment of the notion of ‘free time’ might be illustrative of the

integrative and assimilative potential of the social totality. We assume here that escape

from the ‘alienating’ qualities of laborious drudgery is the accepted aim of ‘free time’. He

argues that far from being a kind of ‘leisure time’, with its pre-bourgeois aristocratic

implications, it has rather become a ‘pseudo-activity’, a shadowy continuation of labour.

Here, “free time is shackled to its opposite” and is to some degree a haunting “parody of

itself”.110 In fact, ‘free time’ is functionally determined, and even when convinced of acting

under one’s own free will this will itself is fashioned by the forces from which it seeks to

escape in its hours away from work. ‘Free time’ increasingly exhibits the fetish character of

the commodity and commodification neutralises the chance of negation in society and the

individual.111 Like all other aspects of life, in one’s ‘free time’ one increasingly cannot

avoid mediation and so it becomes a colonised continuation of the forms of profit-oriented

social life.112

This follows Schopenhauer's pessimistic idea that “mankind is the factory product

of nature”, or at least of instrumental rationality, and is therefore captured by the totality of

the commodity character.113 In the face of these challenges the counter-culture of the 1960s

New Left, with its anti-authoritarian dismissal of ‘elitist’ theory-informed praxis, lost its

109 Marcuse, H. “Repressive Tolerance” in Marcuse, H; Moore, B; Wolff, R P. A Critique of Pure Tolerance” (Beacon Press 1969). p 83. 110 Adorno, T. The Culture Industry (Routledge 1991). pp 187-188. 111 Ibid. p 191. 112 Ibid. p 189. 113 Ibid. p 193.

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political impetus and withdrew into a ritualised and personalised private liberation.114

Depressed resignation is probably an unsurprising outcome.

In the final analysis, these problems represent the essence of the one-dimensional

society, and the point of departure for the second generation of critical theorists centred

around Habermas.115 I think that the importance of this outline is that the feared loss of

immanent potential in social critique and the ascendency of instrumental rationality are

essential elements in later Critical Theory and in this thesis. They are the inherited

problems which had to be overcome, and still do. We shall return to a more thorough and

contemporary discussion of these problems later on.

In addition, this part of the chapter is very important as it provides the theoretical

underpinnings for my claims in chapter 3.3 over the integrating potential of capitalist

competition and reproduction that goes beyond material productive relations, classes,

technology, or expropriation into the realm of language, ideology and culture. It is in this

way that active ‘consensus’ becomes passive ‘consent’ if a society lacks the conceptual and

ideological ability to recognise capitalist integration and mobilisation and to then resist it.

The Contribution of Habermas Beyond the limits of Critical Theory, Habermas has worked most fundamentally toward the

epistemic establishment of a normative and empirical basis for critique. An enduring

feature of this endeavour has been the attempt at a comprehensive model of social criticism,

perhaps reminiscent of the great 19th Century patriarchs of social philosophy in the

industrialising age. This latter feature of his work has probably drawn the greatest and most

sustained criticism of all and might set him apart from his Frankfurt predecessors. His is a

Critical Theory that aims to be explanatory, practical, and normative.116

It is in his earlier works that Habermas evinced both the foundational and familiar

problematics which provided the driving force for his thinking over the subsequent

decades. Of profound importance to him has been the search for a means to resurrect a

dying confidence in Enlightenment reason and to then turn this into a critical potential.

How can the relation between technical progress and the social life-world, a relation that is

114 Marcuse. “The Failure of the New Left?”. p 5. 115 Rush, F. “Introduction”. p 1. 116 Bohman, J; Rehg, W. “Jürgen Habermas” (2007) May, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. p 5.

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today still clothed in a primitive, traditional and unchosen form, be reflected upon and

brought under the control of rational discussion?.117

Continuing from where we left above, we can see that for Habermas the problem of

technical rationality continued to be crucial and it thus came to dominate his earlier works.

For him, Marcuse seems to be the first to make the “political content of technical reason the

analytical point of departure for a theory of advanced capitalist society”.118 Marx, on the

contrary, did not reckon with the discrepancy, at every social level, between the scientific

control of the material conditions of life (technology) and a democratic decision-making

process. The authoritarian welfare state is therefore not anticipated in his thought. This is

because the techniques by which the development of a highly industrialised society could

be brought under control can no longer be interpreted according to an instrumental model,

as though appropriate means were being organised for the realisation of goals that are either

presupposed without discussion or clarified through communication.119

Habermas developed an indictment of technology for being a scientifically

rationalised control of objectified processes which refers to the system in which research

and technology are coupled with feedback from the economy and administration.120 As

social labour is industrialised, the criteria of instrumental action, purposive-rational action,

penetrates all aspects of life as the depoliticisation of the mass of the population and the

decline of the public realm as a political institution become components of a system of

domination that tends to exclude practical questions from public discussion.121 Moreover,

technological rationality employs techniques placed at our disposal by science for the

realisation of specific goals. Instrumental action is rationalised in this sense to the extent

that the organisation of means to defined ends is guided by technical rules based on

empirical knowledge.122 Habermas is here in further agreement with Marcuse that “it is not

enough for a social system to fulfil the conditions of technical rationality. Even if the

117 Habermas, J. “Technical Progress and the Life-World” in Toward a Rational Society (Beacon Press 1970). p 53. 118 Habermas, J. “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” in Habermas’ Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics (Beacon Press 1970). p 85. 119 Habermas. “Technical Progress and the Life-World”. p 58. 120 Ibid. p 57. 121 Habermas, J. “The Scientization of Politics and Public Opinion” in Habermas’ Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics (Beacon Press 1970). p 75; Habermas. “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’”. p 81. 122 McCarthy, T. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (MIT Press 1978). p 8.

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cybernetic dream of a virtually instinctive self-stabilisation could be realised, the value

system would have contracted in the meantime to a set of rules for the maximisation of

power and comfort; it would be equivalent to the biological base value of survival at any

cost, that is, ultrastability” or, in Marcuse’s lexicon, the one-dimensional society.123 These

ideas of Habermas are reminiscent of the social totality of Marcuse, the assimilation of

‘free time’ in Adorno, the attack of instrumental rationality and the critique of positivism

discussed above.

In terms of concrete politics, Habermas has constructed a more tangible political

vision of ‘mediation’. He posits two historic models of political practice in the ‘modern’

age: decisionistic and technocratic. The former model exists where practical technical

means are rendered up to political imperatives as rationalised choices, calculated strategies,

and automatic decision procedures. The technician serves the politician. The transition from

the Baconian plebiscitary decisionistic model to a more developed technocratic model is

made where dependence of the professional scientific intelligentsia on the politician

becomes reversed.124 As might be expected, Habermas recognised how the technocratic

model assumes an “immanent necessity of technical progress” and immanently uses this as

circular justification for its continuity without any cogent statement on value systems,

unsurprising given the neutralisation of any politic.125 Decisionistic and technocratic

models of political practice both reflect the transformation of practical into technical

questions and their consequent withdrawal from public discussion. In neither model does

the public body of citizens conferring in an unrestricted fashion about matters of the

commonwealth play an essential role.126 It is this criticism that he has levelled at

bureaucratisation of highly industrial society throughout the 20th Century.

Habermas proposed a third, pragmatist, model. In the pragmatistic model “the strict

separation between the function of the expert and the politician is replaced by a critical

interaction” where reciprocal communication seems possible and necessary. Through this

model “scientific experts advise the decision-makers and politicians consult scientists in

123 Habermas. “Technical Progress and the Life-World”. p 60. 124 Habermas. “Scientization of Politics”. p 63. 125 Ibid. p 64. 126 McCarthy. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. pp 11-12.

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accordance with practical needs” and with “horizons of value systems”.127 The pragmatistic

model is dependent on mediation by the public as a political institution. Communication

between experts and the agencies of political decision determines the direction of technical

progress on the basis of the tradition-bound self-understanding of practical needs which is

in turn criticised by technology. This communication must be rooted in social interests and

in the value-orientations of a given social life-world.128

Universal Pragmatics and Communicative Reason The theoretical roots of universal pragmatics and its discursive ethics are manifold but, as

the man himself has admitted, the “theory of speech acts initiated by Austin” is probably

the “most promising point of departure for a universal pragmatics”.129 The mind must be

cast back to the explanation of this influence in chapter 2.1, for this is where the heritage of

Critical Theory and the theory of speech acts will be synthesised in to a theory of

communicative action. Habermas’ criticism of Hegel, Marx, Kant and just about all those

thinkers who have attempted to construct a rational and universal epistemological

foundation for social reform has been that they remain attached to a “philosophy of the

subject”, this being the obverse of the objectivism found in positivism to which Habermas’

has equally objected. Building on the notion of utterer’s intentions discussed above any

rational process must arise intersubjectively through communication.

Habermas has striven to integrate the dichotomy of the social life-world (the

communicatively structured Being derived from the hermeneutic and phenomenological

traditions) and the worldless universe of facts (formalised systems of cognitive-

instrumental action).130 This two level understanding of the social fabric provides a

framework for comprehending social action which calls to mind something of the

Gesellschaft-Gemeinschaft distinction. Behind this lies his more innovative “categorical

framework of social theory” resting on a paradigm of intersubjectivity, a paradigm of

127 Habermas. “Scientization of Politics”. p 66-67. 128 Ibid. p 68. 129 Habermas, J. Communication and the Evolution of Society (Heinemann 1979). p 7. 130 Habermas. “Technical Progress and the Life-World”. p 52.

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intersubjective communication, rather than on the subject-object paradigm or the

“philosophy of consciousness”.131

Habermas’ more positive works have shown greater signs of a break from Marcuse

as he has formulated a way to synthesize technology and the life-world. He has stated that a

“dialectic of potential and will takes place today without reflection in accordance with

interests for which public justification is neither demanded nor permitted”. This problem he

elaborated: “today, the self-understanding of social groups and their worldview as

articulated in ordinary language is mediated by the hermeneutic appropriation of traditions

as traditions. In this situation questions of life-conduct demand a rational discussion that is

not focussed exclusively either on technical means or on the application of traditional

behavioural norms”.132 So the issue revolves around the role of mediation, as without it the

information content of the science cannot be relevant to that part of practical knowledge

which gains expression in literature. Thus the question is “how is it possible to translate the

technologically exploitable knowledge into the practical consciousness of a social life-

world”.133

What is then necessary is an elaboration of this dialectic within political

consciousness in order to direct the mediation of the technical progress and the conduct of

social life.134 When he affirms that “the relation of technical progress and social lifeworld

and the translation of scientific information into practical consciousness is not an affair of

private cultivation”,135 this is a renunciation of Marcuse’s faith in dialectical protest

movements on the cultural margins. Here there is a hint at the solution to the fundamental

problematic: how might the technical power of control be brought within the consensual

bounds of acting and transacting citizens? The irrationality of domination can only be

mastered by the development of a political decision-making process tied to the principle of

general discussion free from domination. There is now a necessity for fora of discussion

and concertation. The only possibility for the rationalisation of the power structure resides

131 Postone, M. “History and Critical Social Theory” (1990) 19:2, March, Contemporary Sociology. pp 170, 172. 132 Habermas. “Technical Progress and the Life-World”. p 53. 133 Ibid. p 52. 134 Ibid. p 61. 135 Ibid. p 57.

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in conditions that encourage political power for thought developing through dialogue.136

After all, “Language is the specific medium of understanding in the sociocultural stage of

evolution”.137

We now have a need for a ‘rationally guided practice’ and a detailed articulation of

the logic, methodology, or structure of his theory.138 Institutionally secured forms of

general and public communication must be formulated that handle the practical question of

how men and women can and desire to live under the objective conditions of their ever-

expanding power of control.139 Therefore, “the task of universal pragmatics is to identify

and reconstruct universal conditions of possible understanding {Verständigung}”, that is,

“general presuppositions of communication”.140

Habermas looks to create a normative, yet procedural, institutional environment for

rational communication. Linguistically, universal pragmatics rests on the contention that

not only phonetic, syntactic, and semantic features of sentences, but also certain pragmatic

features of utterances, not only language but speech, not only linguistic competence but

communicative competence, admit of rational reconstruction in universal terms.141 So we

see that grammatically correct sentences and words might satisfy a claim of

comprehensibility, but universal pragmatics is concerned with utterances and as we have

seen in chapter 2.1, meaning and “communicatively successful speech action” is dependent

on mutual validity established in the very act of intersubjective communication.142 The

‘general presuppositions’ that Habermas consequently proposes are ‘validity claims’ that

participants have over any ‘ideal speech situation’ to ensure rational communication in an

institutional setting free of domination. In communicative action participants presuppose

that they know what mutual recognition of reciprocally raised validity claims means.143 The

aim is to achieve rational consensus without force as “a contested norm cannot meet with

the consent of the participants in a practical discourse unless..... all affected can freely

136 Ibid. p 61. 137 Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society. p 1. 138 McCarthy, T. “Translator’s Introduction” to Habermas’ Communication and the Evolution of Society (Heinemann 1979). p x. 139 Habermas. “Technical Progress and the Life-World”. p 57. 140 Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society. p 1. 141 McCarthy. “Translator’s Introduction”. p xix. 142 Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society. pp 31-32. 143 Ibid. p 4.

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{ zwanglos} accept the consequences and the side effects that the general observance of a

controversial norm can be expected to have for the satisfaction of the interests of each

individual”.144

For a speech act to be successful it must satisfy ‘acceptability conditions’ of

grammatical comprehensibility and truthful intention. The acceptability conditions are

practically determined by the “recognisable engagement of the speaker to enter into certain

speech-act-typical obligations”.145 This is a demonstration of sincerity. Remember, the

illocutionary force of a speech act resides in its capacity to move a recipient to act under the

belief that the engagement signalled by the utterer is seriously intended. In an institutional

setting of speech acts this force can be borrowed from the binding force of existing norms,

otherwise ‘validity claims’ can be induced by the recipient. In unbound discourse utterer

and recipient can reciprocally motivate each other to recognise validity claims. This is

because the content of the utterer’s engagement is dependent on a specific reference to a

thematically stressed validity claim whereby the utterer, in a “cognitively testable way”,

assumes “obligations to provide grounds” (truth claim), “obligations to provide

justification” (rightness claim), and “obligations to prove trustworthy” (truthfulness

claim).146 A participant in rational communication therefore acts with the aim of reaching

understanding by raising these three ‘validity claims’, that simultaneously satisfy the

‘acceptability conditions’. Put another way, the utterer “claims truth for a stated

propositional content or for the existential presuppositions of a mentioned propositional

content”. He claims rightness or appropriateness for norms which justify an interpersonal

relation that is to be ‘performatively established’. Finally, he claims the truthfulness of his

expressed intentions.147 This is the validity basis of speech, whether bound or unbound,

built on the theory of speech acts and designed to facilitate mutual understanding in

discourse with the intention of creating rational consensus intersubjectively.

In order to maintain the mutually recognised validity in reaching understanding, or

in the event that validity claims are brought into question, then participants in the

communication can insist on each others accountability to certain ideal requisites of speech.

144 Habermas, J. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (MIT 1990). p 93. 145 Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society. p 65. 146 Ibid. p 65. 147 Ibid. p 65.

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There is an implicit assumption that the form of communication, while not being strategic,

is nevertheless argumentative. In this ‘ideal speech situation’, which represents the abstract

institution of discursive meaning via rational communication which Habermas wishes to

construct, he delimits a number of procedural requirements, which are by no means

definitive. Firstly, no party should be excluded from the discourse (Generality). Secondly,

all participants should have the opportunity to challenge the validity claims themselves

(Autonomy). Thirdly, participants must be willing and able to empathise with the validity

claims of their interlocutors (Ideal Role Taking). Fourthly, existing power differences

between participants must be neutralised and so have no effect on the creation of consensus

(Power Neutrality). Fifthly, participants must openly and genuinely explain their aims and

intentions and so refrain from strategic action, that is, machinations (Transparency).

Habermas’ later works depend on a number of implicit aims. Following his

Enlightenment forbears his aims are universalist and he “roots communicative rationality in

the very nature of language-mediated communication, and thereby implicitly claims that it

has universal significance”.148 He aims for a rational process free of idealist,

phenomenological and romantic distractions. He aims to synthesise certain dichotomies of

body-mind, theory-practice, analytic thought-continental thought, and he aims for an

intersubjective theory rather than one based on the subject-object paradigm. He aims for an

institutional setting for his theory of rational communicative action, the role of which is

important for ‘systemic’ steering in a given normative environment. Finally, Habermas

aims to develop a means of realising political consensus as “a decentred understanding of

the world depends on the possibility of communication based on uncoerced agreement”.149

The last word on Habermas can be left to Charles Taylor:

“Against the neo-Nietzscheans, he would strongly defend the tradition of critical reason, but he has his own grounds for distrusting Heideggerian disclosure and wants instead to hold on to a formal understanding of reason and, in consequence, a procedural ethic, although purged of the monological errors of earlier variants”.150

This long exploration of Critical Theory is important for a number of reasons. We

now have the bridge from speech act theory to an intersubjective theory of communicative

148 Postone. “History and Critical Social Theory”. p 173. 149 Ibid. p 173. 150 Taylor, C. Philosophical Arguments (Harvard UP 1995). p 17.

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action providing an institutional environment for political consensus through negotiation

and consultation. This is the point at which the criticisms of capitalist society’s integrating

tendencies, of instrumental rationality, Habermas’ need to normatively ground social

thought and critique, and the theory of speech acts all come together in a procedural social

theory of communicative action which I will argue is an unconscious and unrecognised

characterisation of the European Commission's view of the future role of the Social

Dialogue.

We have now demonstrated how Habermas has departed from some of the core

elements of earlier Critical Theory, especially in his preference for intersubjectivity over

historical dialectic, which hints at how a closer look at these neglected elements might

subsequently furnish us with a potential for critique that Habermas has lost. I have tried to

show how early Critical Theory emphasised the conflictual and dialectical, whereas

Habermasian Critical Theory has proposed the consensual, procedural and institutional and

has tended more toward general explanatory theory of which earlier critical theory had been

somewhat more sceptical. The relation of this to the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon

Strategy will become apparent in the next section, to which we shall now move.

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3. Conceptual and Critical Analysis of the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy 3.1 The Social Dialogue as ‘Ideal Speech Situation’ To set the rest of section 3 into perspective, I will spend this chapter by giving a more

detailed discussion of the developments of the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy and of

how they are inter-connected with one another. This will allow me to then draw upon the

Habermasian theory of communicative action in chapter 2.3 in order to present the future

role of the Social Dialogue as a potential ‘Ideal Speech Situation’. This is important for the

subsequent critique of such a role throughout the rest of the thesis 3.

The European Social Dialogue The recent history of the Social Dialogue is a post-war story. The European Social

Dialogue grew out of the Tripartite Conferences in the 1970s aiming at broad economic and

social concertation amongst EU institutions and the peak representatives of capital and

labour from Member States. Though unsuccessful at that time, in the mid 1980s it was

revived by the Delors Commission, with the Commission itself placed as ‘facilitator’

between both sides of industry in a bipartite dialogue. It has been noted that this brainchild

of Jacques Delors was something of a European level equivalent to what I have already

indicated that François Mitterrand was doing in France contemporaneously.151 The Single

European Act [SEA](1986) provided a legal basis for this arrangement: “the Commission

shall endeavour to develop the dialogue between management and labour at European level

which could, if the two sides consider it desirable, lead to relations based on agreement”.152

In the early 1990s the breakthrough for the Social Dialogue came in the Social

Agreement (SA) appended to the Maastricht Treaty (1992) which added a two-step

obligatory consultation of the European ‘social partners’ by the Commission over matters

of industrial policy. The possibility for binding agreements signed by the ‘social partners’

through a ‘Council decision’ was also introduced.153 The Amsterdam Treaty (1997)

incorporated the Social Dialogue procedures into Articles 138-139 of the EC Treaty. The 151 Kettunen. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Partnership”. pp 34-35. 152 Art. 118b. 153 Smismans, S. “The European Social Dialogue” in Law, Legitimacy and European Governance: Functional Participation in Social Regulation (Oxford UP 2004). pp 316-317.

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thrust of the Social Dialogue at this point was still aimed at the reconciliation of the

imperatives of capital, on the one hand, and broad social democratic politics of solidarity

and distributive justice, on the other. Consequently, the Social Dialogue provided an

industrial relations framework for reconciling business and European social democratic

centre-left politics of ‘social cohesion’, a role which it still claims. It seems that “discussion

in the 1990s in many European countries centred around the tension of how best to increase

the competitiveness of the economy without compromising social justice”.154 Most

recently, the role of the Social Dialogue has been reaffirmed in the newly inserted Article

136a of the Lisbon Treaty (2007), despite the uncertain ratification prospects in some

Member States.

In the early 2000s the Social Dialogue’s profile has been boosted once again. This

time it will serve as a vehicle for the implementation of the Lisbon Strategy which is

“making the social dialogue contribute to meeting the various challenges”.155 As circular as

this process may sound, it does capture something of the causal confusion and indistinct

character of the demarcation between the various processes of the Social Dialogue, Lisbon

Strategy and the OMCs (Open Method of Coordination).156 Indeed the “European social

dialogue is becoming more diversified and broader in scope, particularly as a result of the

implementation of the strategy for economic and social reform decided upon in Lisbon and

confirmed in Barcelona in March 2002”.157

This greater diversity and wider scope of the Social Dialogue leads to perhaps two

recognisable and distinct potential forms of the Dialogue. The first is a ‘broad’

understanding which might include all forms of involvement of the social partners in

European policy-making through consultation, negotiation, and concertation. This extends

beyond simple industrial concerns. The second form is a ‘narrow’ understanding which

entails a more particular bipartite dialogue in the procedure as laid down in Articles 138-

139 EC. The importance of making this distinction lies in how each understanding lends a

greater or lesser potential scope and form for the Social Dialogue.

154 Ishikawa, J. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue: A Social Dialogue Resource Book” (2003) International Labour Organisation. p 16. 155 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2005). p 2. 156 I shall return to the OMCs below. 157 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue, a Force for Innovation and Change (2002). p 10.

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The ‘narrower’ understanding of the Social Dialogue conforms to a more

conventional form of corporatist decision-making in some 20th Century European states. In

the case of the European level, bipartite dialogue takes place within industrial sectors

involving the signing of collective agreements between ‘peak’ employers’ associations and

trade unions organised at the European level. These agreements constitute a form of

governance clearly limited to the sectoral area of the employment relationship and occur

outside the main political legislative avenue of decision-making.158 Such bipartite dialogue

has been encouraged by EU institutions since well before the 1990s, with more than 350

bipartite documents being signed at the sectoral level including joint opinions, guidelines,

codes of conduct, frameworks of action, and manuals up to 1992.159

Before Maastricht (1992), these instruments were considered ‘soft’, but after

Maastricht more binding commitments were devised. For nearly all agreements signed after

1992, but before 2000, the ‘social partners’ requested implementation by the more binding

means of Council directives. In the 1990s, bipartite agreement in the Social Dialogue acted

more as a ‘regulatory technique’ through statutes and through the ‘harder’ COCOCAs and

SICOCAs.160 Since 2000, and coinciding with the launch of the Social Policy Agenda of

the Lisbon Strategy, bipartite negotiation has reverted to ‘softer’, more autonomous and

non-statutory agreements like COSICAs and SISICAs. It appears that the narrower bipartite

understanding of the Social Dialogue seems to be evolving into ‘softer’ practices as before

1992 with questionable implications for the effective implementation of agreements in the

absence of institutional ‘shadows of hierarchy’ to provide binding force to agreements

between ‘social partner’s whose interests and objectives cannot be simply understood as

being the same.161

The ‘broader’ understanding of the Social Dialogue promises something more

ambitious and potentially novel.162 The recent rebranding of the previously lame Economic

and Social Committee (ESC) is a case in point. This EU institution was founded in 1958

along with the other original institutions of the EU and has provided a forum for 158 Smismans, S. “The European Social Dialogue in the Shadow of Hierarchy” (2008) 28:1, Journal of Public Policy. p 161. 159 Ibid. p 171. 160 ‘Commission-initiated and Council-implemented Collective Agreements’ and ‘Self-initiated but Council-implemented Collective Agreements’. 161 Ibid. p 172. 162 Smismans. Law, Legitimacy and European Governance. pp 317-318.

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representatives of national interest organisations to advise on European policy making,

mainly in areas pertaining to socio-economic matters. It has been said that hitherto the ESC

has supplied a never-ending stream of opinions which have not really made any difference

to policymaking, which has actually been dominated by civil servants in the Commission,

Council, and Parliament. In short, the prestige of the ESC has suffered along with European

social policy.163 However, the remit and composition of the ESC has more recently been

extended beyond economic groups, defined by their structural position in the market, to

become a ‘catch-all’ assembly of ‘civil society organisations’ more generally. Groups

which are now included promote such diverse issues as the environment, religion, family

life, human rights, R&D, and charity.164

Though the ESC is not strictly part of the (narrower) Social Dialogue, one might

argue that institutional lines of demarcation are coming down as both the ESC and the

Social Dialogue expand from matters of industrial relations into general areas of civil

society in a bid to widen and deepen their apparently ineffectual ability to influence

fundamental social and economic outcomes. In addition to this, the International Labour

Organisation (ILO), not an EU institution but still a recognised participant in an ever-

broadening vision of the Dialogue, also conceives of a Social Dialogue capable to “address

a wide range of issues from labour relations to wider social and economic challenges” at

the “provincial, regional, or state level”.165

This broader understanding of the future Social Dialogue emerges from the

Commission’s more recent utterances on the role and functioning of the Social Dialogue in

light of the growing exigencies of the Lisbon Strategy:

“The concertation [Social Dialogue] has been extended in recent years to cover many more topics with the setting-up of the macroeconomic dialogue, the launching of the European employment strategy, work on social protection and monitoring the conclusions of the Lisbon European Council”.166 “There is no limit to issues that can be covered by tripartite consultation”.167 We see here that a central element in the ‘broader’ potential role of the Social Dialogue, as

a form of decision-making, that is currently coming into vogue in European discourse is the 163 Bignami. “Rethinking Interest Representation in the European Union” . pp 439-440. 164 Ibid. p 440. 165 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 1. 166 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 13. [My Emphasis]. 167 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 15.

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Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC). The OMC has been said to offer a “flexible means

to address common policy issues without encroaching on sensitive areas of national

sovereignty, representing a ‘third way’ between communitarisation and purely national

governance and a potential test case for Habermasian deliberation”.168 This mode of

resolving policy problems, not via recourse to statutes, contracts, constitutions, cases, or

command authority structures, but by negotiation and consultation, casts its net further than

even the conventionally understood remit of the Social Dialogue. It must be noted that

OMCs are not part of Social Dialogue exclusively but are rather a potential, and

increasingly favoured, means for implementation of the Social Policy Agenda. Methods

include guidelines, indicators, benchmarking, and even shaming, but all are considered to

be pretty much non-binding, non-coercive and ‘soft’.

Being without institutional bounds, and more a mode than a form, the Commission

has clearly recognised the potential of this “innovation” for achieving the Lisbon

objectives, as can be seen from the quote above, and recognises that the “open method of

co-ordination, hitherto confined to the employment area, can now be applied to other social

policies”.169 Indeed, one now speaks not of OMC, but OMCs, as the number and variety

has multiplied into areas such as immigration, social cohesion, pensions, education, and

asylum. It is clear that the increasing pressure to implement the Lisbon Strategy is forcing

the narrower and more conventionally binding form of the Social Dialogue into the

inclusion of ‘softer’ methods such as OMCs to the extent that within the Social Dialogue:

“the recommendations of the High-Level Group on Industrial Relations and Change see the use of machinery based on the open method of coordination as an extremely promising way forward”.170 These ‘soft’ law practices (i.e. OMCs) and an ever more broadly and ‘loosely’ understood

Social Dialogue can pervade and penetrate society more effectively as a means of

‘decision-making’, and policy implementation, than conventional legal or socio-economic

institutions of decision-making can.

In the following chapters, though I will confine my critical analysis to the Social

Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Strategy in the context of the Social Dialogue, much of the

168 Pollack, A; Wallace, H; Wallace, W. (eds). Policy Making in the European Union (Oxford UP 2005). p 44. 169 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 2. 170 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 22. [Original Emphasis].

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critique will implicitly apply to the OMCs and so some references might be made to them

from time to time. There is a feeling that the broader, more insidious, pervasive and

encompassing, notion of the Social Dialogue is outgrowing the narrower bipartite emphasis

of the 1980s and 1990s. A decision-making institution that was formerly based on conflict-

resolution, bargaining, and more binding agreements, is now becoming a ‘softer’,

politically ‘consensual’ procedural environment for making agreements that purport to

include more actors at more levels more often, whether national, regional or European

wide. The consequences of this ‘broadening’ and ‘softening’ of the Social Dialogue’s remit

and operation, in terms of power, interests, and major political choices, could be stark and

will provide the focus for the rest of the work, particularly chapter 3.3 on asymmetric

relations.

As this might be a point of contention I should perhaps repeat here how I think that

to see the future of the Social Dialogue within the ‘narrower’ understanding, as has been

conventional hitherto, is possibly a mistake. The future of the Dialogue resides in its

capacity to fulfil its role as one of the most important midwives to the encompassing

demands of the Lisbon Strategy and to the enlargement of the Union. In the words of the

European Commission itself:

“The European social dialogue has arrived at a crossroads. It has considerable scope for action, extended further by the prospective enlargement and the back-up it requires. It is a vehicle for core values of participation and responsibility based on firmly-rooted national traditions and provides a suitable framework for managed modernisation. To take on this role properly at European level, it needs, however, to broaden its practices, diversify its operational methods and use to best advantage the entire bargaining area. This Communication lays a groundwork for strengthening social dialogue in an enlarged Europe”.171 If the Social Dialogue is therefore a ‘vehicle’ for the Lisbon objectives, then we ought to be

clear over what these objectives are.

The Lisbon Strategy

The Lisbon Strategy, or alternatively the Lisbon Agenda or Process, is much more explicit

and easily definable than the Social Dialogue. It was the result of the European Council in

Lisbon (2000) and it has a number of related general aims:

171 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 7. [My Emphasis].

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“The Lisbon European Council has identified a fresh set of challenges which must be met so that Europe can become ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ ”.172 “The Agenda aims to modernise the European social model, especially by improving collective capacity to act, and to offer new chances to all”.173

The Strategy represents a broad set of policies and goals set by the institutions of the EU to

improve the productive capacity of the euro-economy within the context and limits of the

‘social model’, which is compatible with European communitarian and social democratic

politics as broadly defined. The goals of the Lisbon Strategy were set from 2000 to 2010.

However, the period that followed the Lisbon European Council in March 2000 was

marked by a sharp reversal of fortune for the global economy.174 It seemed that the

European economy was still falling behind its American and Asian competitors in terms of

growth, productivity and ‘knowledge-intensive human capital’, set against the background

of an ageing population and very low demographic growth.175 Circumstantially, the

bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2001, the downturn in world trade in 2001, various

financial scandals, and geo-political instability in the wake of the 2003 Iraq War have all

contributed to falling financial confidence and contracting consumer demand throughout

the world economy.176 As an example, the employment rate for the EU-25 in 2003 was

63.9%, rather than the target 70%.177

The euro-economy apparently suffers from relatively low labour input, relatively

low levels of productivity growth and sluggish domestic consumer demand. This latter will

be of particular importance when the world economy absorbs the dampening effect of the

high oil prices and begins to recover.178 A High Level Group was tasked in 2004 to

investigate these problems with a view to the Commission relaunching the Lisbon Agenda

for the second half of the decade in the Spring European Council (2005). The result has

been a marked change of tone:

172 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 2. 173 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2005). p 3. 174 Communication from the President: Integrated Guidelines for Growth and Jobs 2005-2008 (2005). p 3. 175 Facing the Challenge: Report from the High Level Group (November 2004). p 6. 176 Communication from the President: Integrated Guidelines for Growth and Jobs 2005-2008 (2005). p 3. 177 Ibid. p 3. 178 Ibid. p 3. Though the course of this expected recovery has been cast into greater doubt in light of the present ‘credit crunch’ and the subsequent collapse of financial markets throughout Europe and America at the time of writing (July-Sept. 2008).

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“As stated in the Lisbon mid-term review, the Commission will make proposals to remove obstacles to labour mobility , notably those arising from occupational pension schemes”.179 The relaunch of the Lisbon Strategy from 2005 onwards is much more explicitly pro-

business in its proposals, aims, priorities, language, and general tone whilst falling back on

prognostications of economic doom and social malaise as a consequence of non-

compliance.180 The emphasis is now on more jobs rather than better jobs, and on greater

output and productivity. Nevertheless, bearing this in mind, one might say that this has

been an implicit quality of the Lisbon Strategy since its inception eight years ago and that

circumstances have simply placed greater pressure on the need to ‘liberalise’ markets to

meet productive expectations.

It is essential to this thesis that the Lisbon Agenda and the Social Dialogue be

treated in conjunction, not separately. The reason is that both are interrelated, the Social

Dialogue provides the mechanism in which Lisbon can gain leverage. One ought to

remember that in the Commission’s self perception, the “European social dialogue could

constitute a tool for the modernisation announced at the Lisbon European Council for all

key issues on the European agenda”.181 One can see that, in the implementation of the

Lisbon Strategy, the Social Dialogue is considered to be “the most effective way of

modernising contractual relations” and the objective is “to make social dialogue at all levels

contribute in an effective way to the challenges identified [in the Lisbon Agenda]”.182

As the Lisbon Strategy is such a wide-ranging set of policy objectives I should

perhaps clarify once more what it is that I am focusing upon within it. Whilst being still

interested in the Lisbon Strategy generally, it is the ‘Social Policy Agenda’ that concerns

me most. Whilst the Lisbon Strategy presents a comprehensive policy package that covers

diverse areas from education and the environment to pensions and asylum, the Social

Policy Agenda is that dimension and set of policies in the Lisbon Strategy which most

closely pertain to the Social Dialogue and the domain of European industrial relations and

employment. In the words of the Commission:

179 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2005). p 8. [My Emphasis]. 180 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Jobs and Growth – A New Start for the Lisbon Strategy (2005). p 4. 181 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 16. [Original Emphasis]. 182 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). pp 14, 23.

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“This Social Policy Agenda forms part of the integrated European approach towards achieving the economic and social renewal outlined at Lisbon. Specifically, it seeks to ensure the positive and dynamic interaction of economic, employment and social policy, and to forge a political agreement which mobilises all key actors to work jointly towards the new strategic goal”.183 The Social Policy Agenda has consisted of two phases, the first from 2000 to 2005 and the

second from 2005 to 2010, with the Lisbon relaunch dividing the two phases. To aid the

mental picturing of the relationship, one might say that the Social Policy Agenda has been

‘colonised’ by the wider Lisbon Process, increasingly so after the Lisbon mid-term Review

and relaunch for the second phase (2005-2010). Its role is to support and channel Lisbon in

the area of social policy and industrial relations, primarily via the widening Social

Dialogue.184

When reflecting upon the Lisbon objectives, considering the adaptive imperatives of

global competitiveness, and the possible lack of both a coherent political historical vision

and the conceptual vocabulary necessary to express it, there does seem to be a risk that the

attempted ‘reconciliation’ of capital and labour might become rather an ‘integration’,

‘assimilation’, or ‘domination’, of the latter by the former, via the forces of production and

of vested interests. One must ask whether without a coherent historical and conceptual self-

understanding, and without adequate contestation of our political vision, when the Lisbon

Strategy aims to “mobilise all key actors”,185 how can we be sure of the ends for which we

are being mobilised.

It is my understanding that the Social Dialogue, within which the Social Policy

Agenda of the Lisbon Strategy will operate, provides a fundamental social, political, and

economic environment through which social forces and participating interests can exert

influence, pressure and power in the form of an apparent consensual ‘reconciliation’ of the

historic forces of capital, labour, and the state. It must be stressed that one might argue that

they are empowered to do so because of the absence of the conceptual, ideological, and

theoretical means to resist them or to even recognise and analyse their respective roles

sufficiently.

183 Ibid. p 2. [My Emphasis]. 184 Kvist, Saari. The Europeanisation of Social Protection. p 11. 185 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 2.

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An ‘Ideal Speech Situation’?

Having explored the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy in greater detail, and having

demonstrated the manner of their inter-relation, I shall now develop the idea that the

‘broader’ Social Dialogue, which envisages a greater role for OMCs, has pretentions to

become a Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ in which more effective and legitimate

democratic decision-making can take place. A crucial line of investigation in this thesis will

be set on the credibility of such a claim and on the potential consequences for the two main

thematic questions of the thesis outlined at the outset: Is there conceptual confusion in the

Social Dialogue and, if so, how does it play a part in the integrating and instrumental

tendencies of economic competition that dominate the objectives of the Lisbon Strategy.

We must now recognise the Commission’s ‘consensual’ characterisation of the

European Social Dialogue and from where it draws its Habermasian inspiration and

framework. Though an explicit connection might not be readily available, it is my view that

much of the structure and procedure of the Social Dialogue resembles, to a great extent,

Habermas’ theory of communicative action and universal pragmatics put into praxis. The

institutional and procedural character of Habermas’ idea of consensual democracy enthuses

the vision of the Social Dialogue throughout EU institutions and communications. For

instance, the Commission has stated, in regard to the ‘social partners’ in the Lisbon process,

that it will “step up technical assistance made available to them for collecting, reviewing

and discussing information on the implementation of these guidelines”.186 This will take

place in “procedures for dialogue at technical and political level”.187 This seems to

resemble the pragmatistic model of decision-making preferred by Habermas’ over the

technocratic and decisionistic models of the past, which do not synthesise a collaboration

and mutual discourse between politically determined aims and the technical means with

which to achieve them. This was clearly elaborated in chapter 2.3. This is not to say,

however, that the European Commission has explicitly and self-consciously attempted to

put Habermas’ theories into practice, but this is nevertheless the general outcome.

Beyond this, there is reason to believe that the Social Dialogue is structured, at least

rhetorically, to create a facsimile of the ‘ideal speech situation’ as laid out in the

186 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 15. 187 Ibid. p 14. [My Emphasis].

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immediately preceding chapter. Recalling the five pre-requisites of the ‘ideal speech

situation’ covered in chapter 2.3 – Generality, Autonomy, Ideal Role-taking, Power

Neutrality, and Transparency – we can see how the Social Dialogue is intended to recreate

most of these conditions:

“Social Dialogue can be defined as a process, in which actors inform each other of their intentions and capacities, elaborate information provided to them, and clarify and explain their assumptions”.188 [Transparency]. “The Commission wishes to promote and improve the contribution of the social dialogue to better European governance through a series of proposals covering areas of fundamental importance: improved consultation, social partners’ representatives, tighter links and greater involvement at different levels, and transparency in dialogue”.189 [Transparency].

“The legitimacy and effectiveness of the social-partner consultation is based on their representativeness”.190 [Generality]. “The social partners should be fully involved in the preparation of these rules” [rules for the procedures themselves, these might be understood as ‘validity claims’].191 [Autonomy]. “In order to ensure better participation of marginalised groups, provisions ensuring their participation should be included in the rules or regulations of social dialogue institutions and fora”.192 [Generality and Power Neutrality]. “Each party should enter the dialogue with a common framework of reference and a common understanding of the purposes of social dialogue”.193 [Autonomy and Transparency]. “Social Dialogue, that is all types of negotiation, consultation or information-sharing among actors from different segments of society”.194 [Generality].

So as we can see, the superficial thrust of the Social Dialogue is about “facilitating

constructive interaction in order to arrive at social consensus/compromise among the

stakeholders in a society”195. The European Commission at least claims that the Social

Policy Agenda of the Lisbon Process has been subjected to wide-scale consultation and

dialogue with the different interested parties including non-governmental organisations,

social partners, and advisory committees.196 The critique in the following chapters will, at

188 Report of the High Level Group on Industrial Relations and Change in the European Union (2002a). p 25. 189 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 8. 190 Ibid. p 9. 191 Ibid. p 14. 192 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 10. 193 Ibid. p 11. 194 Ibid. p 5. 195 Ibid. p 1. 196 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 5.

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least partly, be based upon the reasonable assumption that the Social Dialogue is a species

of Habermas’ universal pragmatics and theory of communicative action put into practice.

Whether this claim lives, or can live, up to expectations of consensual politics is another

matter.

3.2 The Social Dialogue and the Concept of ‘Society’ “The terms [concepts] gradually die when the functions and experiences in the actual life of society cease to be bound up with them. At times, too, they only sleep, or sleep in certain respects, and acquire a new existential value from a new social situation”.197 Introduction

In this chapter, I want to look at the historical and contemporary use of the concept of

‘Society’, so important in the Social Dialogue, and to see how this transition can have

implications for our ability to conceptualise political and social organisation and action in a

way that has critical potential in the manner indicated in chapter 2.3. That the concept of

‘Society’ is integral to the Social Dialogue is a fairly evident observation. The ‘social’ is

patently the area of human activity with which the Social Dialogue is concerned and the

assumption of the existence of ‘Society’ is therefore implicit. The types of activity,

relations, and actors which the Dialogue is intended to encompass must be based upon the

belief that ‘Society’ first of all exists, and in a form compatible with the Dialogue’s other

assumptions, aims, and modes of operation.

It has been quite fairly lamented that a “‘full’ treatment of the topic of society is

clearly an awesome and perhaps impossible task”.198 The concept of ‘Society’ can have a

multiplicity of meanings even by a single interlocutor, often varying with audience,

intention, and circumstance.199 One might say that the concept of society has often been

inappropriately generalised thus destroying the great variety of conceptions of the term by

different political cultures or language communities.200 This generalisation is not so

surprising given that the social scientific paradigm, to which the concept of society is so

197 Elias, N. The Civilising Process: Sociogenic and Psychogenic Investigations (1939; 2000 Blackwell). pp 8-9. 198 Bowers, J; Iwi, K. “The Discursive Construction of Society” (1993) 4:3, Discourse and Society. p 358. 199 Kettunen, P. “Yhteiskunta – Society in Finnish” (2000) Vol 4, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought. SoPhi, Jyväskylä. p 159. 200 Ibid. pp 159-161.

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central, places the ability to conceptually generalise by induction at the heart of its criterion

as a paradigm or sub-discipline.201 It must be said that most of the more recent uses,

analyses, and descriptions of the concept have come from sociology, as one might expect,

and so are embedded in the epistemological assumptions associated with that particular

discipline.

I will not conduct a reductionist analysis where all the ways of accounting for a

phenomenon or concept are eliminated until the ‘real’ explanation or description remains.

Instead, I am interested in a number of related discourses on the concept which hopefully

will mutually help to illuminate the concept both generally and in relation to the Social

Dialogue.202 Nevertheless, this chapter will pursue the implicit Immanent Critique that was

outlined in chapter 2.1 and in this case it means that ‘Society’ as a concept is criticised on

its own terms and with its own normative standards.203

There are two themes to this chapter. Firstly, I intend to demonstrate that the

concept is necessarily linked to suppositions of meaning that are predicated on a ‘modern’

view of the cosmos, and to then analyse how modern-postmodern boundary problematises

the concept’s understanding in the Commissions view of the Social Dialogue. Secondly, I

want to explore the idea of the ‘Market Society’ as a more particular sub-concept of

‘Society’ and to see how the problematisation of ‘Society’ can effect a divorce of politics

from economy and society with all the instrumental one-dimensional implications.

However, before that a look at the two more particular concepts of Gemeinschaft and

Gesellschaft might provide a useful foundation to the detailed treatment that will follow.

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft These two concepts represent an attempt to recognise and distinguish ‘modern’ human

association from ‘pre-modern’ (or non-modern) and so provide a very useful means of

understanding both the modernity of the concept of ‘Society’ and more recent

understandings of the concept.

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft represent two mutually comprehensive perspectives

of human association and are a legacy of the great 19th Century powerhouse that was

201 Munslow. The New History. pp 104, 119. 202 Bowers; Iwi. “The Discursive Construction of Society”. p 361. 203 Kettunen. “Yhteiskunta”. p 164.

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German sociology. These two conceptual categories were explored most thoroughly as

sociological categories in Ferdinand Tönnies’ eponymous work and though they might

have been of fluctuating popularity they are nevertheless of sustained importance for they

provide two key ‘normal-types’ in sociology.204 These ‘normal types’ are opposed to

‘action-types’, in that the former ones are derived and treated axiomatically and deductively

and the latter empirically and inductively. In the Kantian tradition, Tönnies reckoned that

the ‘real’ could not be understood without conceptual categories of the mind, ergo action-

types, and applied sociology could not be interpreted without such concepts.

Gemeinschaft, roughly translated into ‘Community’, represents the group as unity

and whole. Without slipping into an obscure metaphysical idiom, it is that matrix of ‘real’

and organic relations in which we are immersed from birth.205 It is the language, mores,

beliefs, assumptions, intuitions of the family and clan. It is inescapable, insidious, and

implicit as are the inexplicable recesses of culture. Its semantic field might consist of terms

such as tradition, belief, bond, organic, collective, emotion, or kin. In an Aristotelian way,

Tönnies works the concept out from first principles. He seems to begin with an assumption

of the unity of human wills as a natural or original condition.206 Familial ties constitute the

embryonic form, next follows a Gemeinschaft of locality based on common habit and

physical life. Finally, comes the Gemeinschaft of mind based on coordinated action toward

a common goal. This is the ‘Community’ of mental life, which realises the truly human and

supreme form of Gemeinschaft whose “spiritual friendship forms a kind of invisible scene

or meeting which has to be kept alive by... the creative will”. Kinship (house),

neighbourhood (village), and friendship are thus derivatives of the original categories.207 In

the concept of Gemeinschaft there is little significance or attachment to concepts of

exchange and purchase, of contract or regulations.208

Gesellschaft, approximately translated into ‘Society’, is a “strange country” of an

imaginary and mechanical structure. It is the “public life and the World itself”, a world of

business, travel and sciences.209 The semantic field here might rather include voluntarist,

204 These are not Weberian ‘ideal types’ which have are more diachronic and historical. 205 Tönnies, F. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Michigan State UP 1887; 1957). pp 33-34. 206 Ibid. p 37. 207 Ibid. p 43. 208 Ibid. p 59. 209 Ibid. pp 33-34.

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‘received culture’, mechanism, market, contract, individual. This concept deals with the

artificial construction of an aggregate of human beings which superficially resembles the

Gemeinchaft in so far as the individuals live and dwell together peacefully. In the

Gesellschaft everybody is alone, isolated in a condition of tension against all others. No

actions are derived from an a priori unity; no actions manifest the will and spirit of the

unity and whereas in the Gemeinschaft these actions remain essentially united in spite of all

separating factors, here in the Gesellschaft they are essentially separated in spite of all

uniting factors. In this way such a negative attitude toward one another becomes the normal

and always underlying relation of these power endowed individuals, and it characterises the

Gesellschaft in rest; nobody wants to grant and produce anything for another individual, nor

will he be inclined to give ungrudgingly to another individual, if it be not in exchange for a

gift or labour equivalent that he considers at least equal to what he has given.210 One can

therefore see how the will of the exchange becomes universal as each individual grants and

produces in expectation of receiving an equivalent gift which is then considered in

aggregate. Thus it is that “the exchange itself, considered as a united and single act,

represents the content of the assumed social will”.211 That is, it represents to some extent,

the Market.

‘Consensus’ is an issue in the distinction between the two concepts where one could

speak of Gemeinschaft comprising the whole of mankind whereas Gesellschaft is

conceived as mere coexistence of people independent of each other. The importance of

these two sub-concepts is that they provide a touchstone landmark for understanding other

views of ‘Society’ and some of my arguments that are to follow.

One can see Feudalism as a system or culture which expanded the patriarchal

authority and character of the kinship relation of the Gemeinschaft and found highest

expression in the cult, fraternity, the guild, or the religious community of the medieval and

early-modern world.212 On the other hand, the atomised, empirical view of human relations

in the modern Gesellschaft reflects much of the political thought of the early-modern

empirical and contract theorists whose works coincided with the emergence of such

relations and upon whose thought much of modern Western political institutions are based.

210Tönnies. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. p 65. 211 Ibid. pp 66-67. 212 Ibid. p 50.

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The concept of Gesellschaft entails the presence of boundaries, roles, demarcation and is

predicated on the epistemological assumption of the subject-object distinction.

Some Conventional Understandings of the Concept At this point it might be well to touch upon some conventional understandings of the

concept of ‘Society’ so as to make my subsequent connection of Society to modernity a

little clearer. The Weberian understanding of Society, and also the most common intuitive

understanding, would most probably correspond to society as an Absent Concept.213 This

sees ‘Society’ as a categorical means by which we make sense of the inter-relation and

activity of human life. This is perhaps the most abstract, broad, and encompassing concept

of Society. Here Society is constituted by those processes of interaction or association in

which individuals engage. Society thus emerges out of the meaningful and intentional

action of individuals and groups of individuals.214 This understanding of the concept is not

treated as something particular beyond being a loose synonym for general associations of

people and consequently is of little direct use in our analysis of concepts.

Another common way of looking at ‘Society’ is to see it as a Sui Generis Object.

Here the concept is deliberately distanced from the ‘common sense’ anthropocentric

perception of society as nothing but an aggregation of individuals where the individual

constitutes the focus of analytical attention. In contrast to that, a Durkheimian reading

posits that social facts exist sui generis, necessitating the existence of a social realm which

is distinct from the psyche and the physical. Social facts must therefore be studied

objectively from without, just like other phenomena of nature. Furthermore, society is a

whole, an object which “is distinct from and greater than the sum of its parts. It forms a

specific order of reality with its own distinctive characteristics”.215 Once again we see that

positivistic suppositions of the subject-object dichotomy lie beneath this social scientific

treatment of the concept and the classic Cartesian constitutional duality of human nature

where Man is understood to be composed of two radically heterogeneous entities: the body

and the soul. This moral community in transcendence of the individual does not account for

society’s rootedness in concrete material conditions and relations, nor does it take much

213 Frisby, D; Sayer, D. Society (Ellis Horwood 1986). pp 54-74. 214 Bowers; Iwi. “The Discursive Construction of Society”. p 358. 215 Frisby; Sayer. Society. pp 35-36.

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account of intention, motive, and purpose as distinctive features of individual human

action. Society as Object fails to recognise that the ‘social’ and the ‘individual’ cannot be

opposed because the predicates of the individual are in themselves social is character and

origin.216

In treating ‘Society’ as a Cognitive Ideal one approaches society as an idea in the

German philosophic sense – it is a reality itself.217 Society is still derived from the sui

generis collectivity and not from the individual. However, this understanding differs

somewhat in that, though meaning is derived from within a communicative community, it

remains firmly a social phenomenon. Meaning does not stem from individual utterances

and speech acts and so this society is not the product of intersubjectivity in the sense found

in the previous chapters. Society therefore furnishes both the content of our thought and the

framework within which we think. Despite its idealistic nature, this concept still posits

society and individual as separate and distinct entities/phenomena.

In the Marxist tradition Society must be treated not as an abstraction but as an

historical set of material relations, as one might have expected. In an inversion of

Aristotle’s maxim, this Marxist position takes Man as essentially a social animal and

society does not exist separately as a subject apart from individuals and their

interrelations.218 In the Marxist tradition, Society as Object, Absent Concept, and as

Cognitive Ideal are all thought to be products of Gesellschaft and of the characteristic

‘modern’ reciprocal action therein. To Marx, the isolated individual assumed in the thought

of classical economic thought, empirical natural law, and social contract theory is a

specifically modern individual who has been projected into the past as ‘Man’ in the state-

of-nature rather than understood as the ‘real historical man’. Interestingly, it seems that to

him “only in the 18th Century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social

connectedness confront the individual as a mere means toward his private purposes, as

external necessity”.219 Therefore, to Marx, Society and social relations are something

distinctively ‘modern’.

216 Ibid. p 50. 217 Ibid. p 75. 218 Ibid. p 91. 219 Marx, K. Grungrisse (Penguin 1858; 1973). p 84.

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What these conventional understandings of ‘Society’ have in common is that they

are derived from a methodological individualism that works within the assumption of the

epistemological subject-object dichotomy. They are therefore heavily implicated in modern

characteristics and relations. This understanding of Society as a thoroughly modern concept

has come under strong disintegrating pressure from post-structuralism, and a greater

emphasis on the role of language as the source of meaning, and on the concept of ‘Culture’

(i.e. communities, individuals, race, gender, discourse) as providing a more legitimate arena

for a lot of academic study of human organisation and interaction.220 We now must explore

in greater detail how the concept is inextricably connected to Modernity and what are the

consequences for the future of ‘Society’ as a distinct concept in the Social Dialogue.

Indeed, there are those who consider the concept to be increasingly defunct for this very

reason.221

‘Society’ as a Modern Concept in the Social Dialogue The particular dominating condition in which all Europeans, to a greater or lesser degree,

have understood themselves and the Universe around them for the last few centuries is

‘Modernity’. The concept of Modernity is too awesome to be explored, but is loosely

understood as:

“a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which unlike any preceding culture lives in the future rather than the past”.222

In addition to this, Modernity is also “the ties of society to the nation-state; the

notion of society as an integrated holistic entity; and the notion of progress and

rationalisation as inherent powers and qualities of society”.223 As was already explained in

chapter 2.2, the Sattelzeit of the late 18th Century was a key period of conceptual shift,

accompanied by radical change in material conditions, which was instrumental in the

appearance of this distinctly ‘modern’ view of the world. The question is whether there is 220 Kettunen. “Yhteiskunta”. pp 159, 188-191. 221 Baudrillard, J. Simulations (New York 1983). 222 Giddens, A. Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Stanford UP 1998). p 94. 223 Kettunen. “Yhteiskunta”. p 161.

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not a current conceptual-epistemological shift and a consequent time of crisis as this

distinct ‘modern’ ontology is eroded. A strong indication has been put forward numerously

so far that the idea that ‘Society’ is predicated on the connected and supporting matrices of

meaning found in Modernity and is therefore being replaced by other concepts as the

modern condition is superseded by a post-modern condition. In this process, to what extent

do usages of the concept of ‘Society’ in the Social Dialogue, demonstrate an increasingly

incompatible and untenable expectation to shape human futures based on universalised

reason, and what are the political consequences of this.

First of all, it is pivotal to remember that the mere presence of technological

applications of science does not allow us to speak of a modern society, for that one must

look at changing attitudes, ideas, concepts, epistemologies, and interrelations.224 Secondly,

the ‘modern’ is inextricably linked to secularism and science by its shared assumption of an

epistemology of the subject-object distinction and the rise of the solus ipse principle. The

characteristic of the Western ideology of Modernity is that it replaced the idea of the

subject and the related idea of God with the idea of observable principles derived from

‘nature’, just as meditations on the soul were replaced by the dissection of corpses or the

study of the synapses of the brain.225 Indeed, the idea of Modernity makes science, rather

than God, central to society and at best relegates religious beliefs to the inner realm of

private life. We can also say that the distinctive feature of the Western tradition, at the

moment when it identified most strongly with Modernity, was the attempt to move from a

recognition of the essential role of rationalisation to the broader notion of a rational identity

in which reason would take control of not only scientific and technical activity, but also of

the government of human beings as well as the government of things.226 This means that, in

the Modern Age, ‘Society’ becomes the medium through which Enlightenment principles

and practical reason are exercised and realised for secularised theodicean ends on the

horizon of teleological expectations of progress.

Here we can see more clearly how the concept of ‘Society’ as Gesellschaft is more

appropriately understood as characteristic of modern activity over the pre-modern ‘action-

type’ of ‘Community’ (Gesellschaft). Perhaps most insightfully, this is because the most

224 Touraine, A. Critique of Modernity (Blackwell 1995). p 9. 225 Ibid. p 11. 226 Ibid. p 10.

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powerful conception of modernity, and the one which has had the most profound effects,

asserted above all that rationalisation required the destruction of so-called traditional social

bonds, customs, feelings, and beliefs, and that the agent of modernisation was neither a

particular social class or category, but reason itself and the historical necessity that was

paving the way for its triumph.227 Reason takes nothing for granted, it sweeps away social

and political beliefs and forms of organisation which are not based upon scientific

proofs.228 Modern human relations based upon these assumptions were re-enforced by the

related need for regularity and predictability of action in the perceived impersonal and

atomised relations of the Gesellschaft where the sole goal of social policies for

modernisation must be to clear a path for reason by getting rid of corporatist rules, customs

barriers, or defences by creating the security and predictability required by business, and by

training competent and conscientious operatives and managers.229

What applies to society also applies to the individual. The education of the

individual must be a discipline which frees him from the narrow and irrational vision forced

upon him by his family and his own passions, and therefore prepares him be an isolated

unit, or object, in the Gesellschaft. In ‘Society’, as distinct from other forms of human

association, actions are not just coordinated in processes of reaching understanding

(Gemeinschaft) but through functional interconnections that are not intended and often not

perceived (Gesellschaft).

Epistemologically, one can see how the early-modern natural law theorists

transposed features of the existing civil society back into the state of nature in order to

demonstrate the natural and rational grounds for establishing a social contract thus

confusing the observable and the immanent, the object and the subject.230 Objectivist

naturalism and recourse to instrumental reason are therefore complementary, so much so

that the combination has endured throughout the entire modern era perhaps until Freud. It

seems that the main function of the combination of nature and reason in the modern

concept of ‘Society’ is “to unite man and the world”, one might say ‘in spite of all

227 Touraine. Critique of Modernity. p 10. 228 Ibid. p 11. 229 Ibid. p 11. 230 Frisby; Sayer. Society. p 19.

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separating factors’ characteristic of modern Gesellschaft relations and tendencies, in the

pursuit of a universe of intrinsic meaning.231

At the supposed ‘postmodern boundary’ Society is becoming increasingly estranged

from the demands, needs, identities, and values of social actors. This is of particular

importance when considering the present state of class, solidarity, trade unionism, industrial

relations and Society in the post-industrial and ‘post-modern’ circumstances.232

So what we have here in our modern-postmodern ‘air du temp’ is an growing

undermining of the epistemological assumptions of natural law, solus ipse, positivist

empiricism, and the subject-object distinction which increasingly brings into question both

the universalistic and secularised principles and the ‘modern’ relations and identities of the

Gesellschaft. ‘Society’ ceases to function in the ‘modern’ understanding as a medium

which substitutes for the divine and through which universal principles and practical reason

are exercised for expected progressive ends. Though new apprehensions of the concept are

likely to emerge, the point here is to discuss how this change problematises the usage of the

Concept in the Social Dialogue.

“Just think what Europe could be. Think of the innate strengths of our enlarged union. Think of its untapped potential to create prosperity and offer opportunity and justice for all its citizens. Europe can be a beacon of economic, social and environmental progress to the rest of the world”.233 One can see that ‘Society’ is evidently an important concept in the Social Dialogue. The

two are inextricably linked to the extent that “Social Dialogue is acknowledged to be an

essential component of the European model of society and development”.234 Also, the

Social Dialogue, and its understanding of the concept of ‘Society’, is “rooted in the history

of the European Continent”.235 It is my contention in this chapter that should one to look at

the European Commission Communication quoted above, which has announced the Lisbon

Strategy’s re-launch with great pomp, one can see that the implicitly ‘modern’

understanding of the concept of ‘Society’ that I have put forward pervades throughout the

Social Dialogue’s self-perception therein.

231 Touraine. Critique of Modernity. p 15. [Original Italics]. 232 Touraine, A. “La Recomposition du Monde par Alain Touraine” (1994) jeudi 1 septembre, La République des Lettres; Hyman. “Where Does Solidarity End?”. 233 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Growth and Jobs. p 3. [My Emphases]. 234 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 6. 235 Ibid. p 6.

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The first impression that strikes the reader is that of the histrionic and rhetorical

style that permeates these documents. One can see from the extracts above that such

language might be deemed worthy of the most dramatic flourishes of the Age of Revolution.

To refer to “beacons” of “progress”, “justice”, and “opportunity” in such categorical terms

sounds reminiscent of the crudest rhetorical reproduction of what might be called

Enlightenment principles.

“To ensure the development and respect of fundamental social rights as a key component of an equitable society and of respect for human dignity”.236 This quote from the Social Policy Agenda demonstrates how the discussion of ‘rights’,

‘equality’, and ‘human dignity’, though woefully rhetorical, are nevertheless evidence of

both an assumption of the ‘Enlightenment Project’ and the distinctly modern Society built

upon early-modern natural law philosophy and the subject-object dichotomy.

Furthermore, ‘Society’ as an enabling medium through which human life can be

purposively influenced by the application of reason is clearly present in the Social

Dialogue’s self-perception. If the idea is that “within civil society, the social partners have a

particular role and influence”, and if Lisbon is tasked to “confront the new challenges to

social policy resulting from the radical transformation of Europe’s economy and

society”,237 then the modern understanding of society as a mechanism for rational and

purposive change is obviously upheld. Likewise, the whole repeated thrust of the Social

Dialogue is oriented toward “Europe’s Future”, which is a significant aspect of the modern

Society as a historically aware teleological mechanism aimed at progressive horizons.

Perhaps most conclusively the Commission envisages the Social Dialogue as:

“a vehicle for core values of participation and responsibility based on firmly-rooted national traditions and provides a suitable framework for managed modernisation, also in the candidate countries”.238

This interpretation of the Dialogue’s understanding of ‘Society’ is further strengthened by

the interesting absence of the concept of ‘Community’ throughout the Commission

Communications, aside from its use in the legal phrase of ‘European Community’. Though

in our times there increasingly seems to be a new confidence in the possibility and curing

236 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 22. 237 Ibid. p 5. [My Emphasis]. 238 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 7. [My Emphasis].

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capacity of ‘communities’ [Gemeinschaft] in relation to identity politics, the potential of

this concept to effect change in the distinctly modern manner discussed earlier in the

chapter is not present in the Commission Communications on the Social Dialogue.239 The

self-perception is therefore that of Society understood in the modern sense of a medium for

rational purposive future-oriented action.

In the Commission Communications pertaining to the Social Dialogue, Society as

an objectified modern Sui Generis entity seems to be a particularly frequently implied use

of the concept, though this is neither exclusive nor entire as the discussion of Habermas

will show in the next chapter. It is stated that “Social partners have a unique position within

civil society because they are best-placed to address issues related to work and can

negotiate agreements which include commitments”.240 The Social Policy Agenda is to be

“carried out in close co-operation with the civil society”.241 This objectified view of (civil)

society is not, however, an overarching or transcending idea but rather a domain of

impersonal activity distinct from other domains (i.e. the State, ‘Community’, or family),

nor is it really an Absent Concept, but a separate objective entity that can be worked ‘with’,

‘through’, or ‘within’.

It is interesting that again and again the Commission Communications refer to

various sub-concepts of ‘Society’, and phrases that are hyphenated to it. These include

“information-society”, “knowledge-society”, and “economy and society”. Here we have

what are almost a species of clarifying quasi-utterances that one often finds in speech acts

to clarify the intended meaning of an utterance in a certain context. These prefixes and

companion words are undoubtedly connected to a distinctively modern set of semantic

meanings and forms of interactivity. For example, the concept of ‘knowledge’ powerfully

connotes objective-empiricism, purposive savoir-faire, and concrete outcomes, rather than

the phronetic connotations of ‘wisdom’ or ‘prudence’.

So we come to it. How can an intersubjective view of the Social Dialogue, which is

proposed in the Commission Communications, be compatible with ‘Society’ understood as

a purposive mechanism for rational transformative social change and ‘modernisation,’ as

explained above, if the ‘modern’ epistemological and ontological suppositions and

239 Kettunen. “Yhteiskunta”. p 190. 240 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 5. 241 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 22.

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categories of such a ‘Society’ are being undermined? As the rising ‘postmodern’ notion of

‘identity’ as an all-determining category is devolving participation in society onto the level

of the individual, our societies are turning into increasingly uncoordinated sets of

collectivities, subcultures, and individuals. Can one truly speak of government policies of

transformation or modernisation through such an amorphous and ethereal mediating

concept as ‘Culture’. One might say that the concept of ‘Community’ shows more promise

and, referring to the idea of the ‘Imagined Community’, it has been mooted that as former

issues on the political agenda of national ‘society’ are transformed into external imperative

conditions of global market, the idea of the national ‘imagined community’ may be

strengthened, and some kind of moral and national competitive community reshape or

replace the concept of ‘Society’.242 But nevertheless, one has to remain sceptical, firstly, of

the universal and decontextualised applicability of this idea, especially in regard to the EU,

and secondly, because it still assumes a fairly high degree of coherence in political units.

Regardless, there is no indication of any such notion in the Commission Communications

on the future role of the Social Dialogue or in the Commission’s presentation of the Lisbon

Strategy.

The more recent fashionable growth in “new governance” and “soft” practices

which are integral and implicit to the current operations of the Social Dialogue are not

obviously compatible with what is, broadly speaking, a ‘modern’ understanding of

‘Society’. Indeed, the aim and reality of EU policy seems more concerned with the erosion

of nations, classes, societies in favour of quasi-legal discursive practices, communities and

areas which are more distinctive of what might be called aspects of the ‘postmodern’.243 So

on the one hand, the Commission and its recommended practices are implicated in the

retreat from ‘Society’ and its related modes and categories. On the other hand, the

Commission assumes the existence of ‘Society’ for the purposive implementation of its

policies in the ‘good old-fashioned way’. This conceptual confusion arises from a

historically insensitive understanding of concepts. It therefore robs ‘Society’, as employed

in the Commission Communications on the Social Dialogue, of its role as a mechanism for

242 Kettunen. “Yhteiskunta”. p 191. 243 see Lyotard. The Post-Modern Condition (Minnesota UP 1984).

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rational action toward purposive socio-political change and replaces it with a hollow and

impotent rhetorical echo of the concept’s former meaning.

If Man is no longer in political control, if indeed he ever was, and ‘God is dead’,

then what forces or agents step up to the breach? If we no longer have faith in ‘progress’ or

that prosperity will lead to greater democratisation and happiness, then the liberating vision

of Reason will recede in favour of the haunting spectre of a rationalisation that

concentrates the power to take decisions at the top or nowhere at all.

“Given that both collective and individual identity is fragile in a world which is exposed to market forces, there is now a no-man’s-land between the market and private life. In it, we can still see the ruins of public life, but violence is on the increase as socialisation declines”.244 3.3 The Lisbon Strategy: Consensus Claims and Power

“[Economic Competitiveness] has become the prime objective not just of enterprises but also of the State and of society as a whole.... The ‘gospel of competition’, like all ideologies, boils down to a few simple ideas. We are engaged willy nilly – so the industrialists, economists, political leaders and academics tell us – in a ruthless technological, industrial and economic war encompassing the entire planet. The aim is to survive, and survival hinges on being competitive. Otherwise there is no short- and long-term salvation, no growth, no economic and social welfare”.245 “The complimentary relationship between state and economy results in a goal conflict, of which there is a broad effective awareness, especially in downward phases of the business cycle; the conflict is between a policy of stability which has to adjust its measures to an independent, cyclical dynamic of the economic process and, on the other hand, a policy of reform meant to compensate for the social costs of capitalist growth, which policy requires investments irrespective of the business situation and of profit considerations”.246 Like the concept of ‘society’, the concept of ‘consensus’ has no general definition that will

be of great analytical use. Terms of use and meaning vary from context to context and so a

protracted definitional or genealogical discussion of what we mean by ‘consensus’ is not

apposite here. However, there is one distinction that I think will be of some use. It has been

said that “in everyday life we start from a background consensus pertaining to those

interpretations taken for granted among participants”.247 In this basic understanding

consensus is a normative set of background assumptions amongst a given group of people

preceding some kind of action or communication, it is a condition of being. This bears

244 Touraine. Critique of Modernity. pp 373-374. 245 Petrella. “Europe Between Competitive Innovation and a New Social Contract”. pp 11-12. 246 Habermas. Communication and Evolution of Society. p 196. 247 Ibid. p 3.

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some similarity to Rawls’s ‘Overlapping Consensus’ where, since no political agreement

on disputed questions can reasonably be expected, “we turn instead to the fundamental

ideas we seem to share through the political culture”.248 In this chapter, and in the Social

Policy Agenda, we are concerned with ‘consensus’ as a process of decision-making within

or between groups rather than as a prior set of shared assumptions.

The reason for this differentiation of consensus, either as condition or as process, is

that the former is normative, subconscious and untouchable, whereas the latter is within

reach of more tangible and particular claims for political interaction. Consensus as a

relatively ‘organic’ set of shared normative assumptions might be better termed concord

rather than consensus, a distinction that Tönnies himself seems to make:

“A mixed or complex form of common determinative will, which has become as natural as language

itself and which consists of a multitude of feelings of understanding which are measured by its norms, we call concord (Eintracht) or family spirit (concordia as a cordial allegiance and unity)”. This is the “will of the Gemeinschaft in its most elementary forms, including understanding in their separate relations and actions and concord in their total force and nature”.249 In this terminology, Concord is embedded in the personal relations of the Gemeinschaft and

is not of the same species as the understanding of consensus entailed in the claims of the

Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy which are connected to the distinct relations and

actions more characteristic of activity in the Gesellschaft. To Tönnies there is a “reciprocal,

binding sentiment as a peculiar will of a Gemeinschaft [which] we shall call understanding

[concord]” and which “represents the special social force and sympathy which keeps

human beings together as members of a totality”.250 So whilst we ought to remember that

Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft must not be understood in isolation but as complementary

and integral, we should nevertheless remember that by understanding concord as

semantically linked to Gemeinschaft and consensus to Gesellschaft we can see that

consensus is an outcome rooted in decision-making action amongst interacting but

impersonal agents, in the ‘modern’ sense, with some kind of ends-orientation. The

conclusion drawn from this is that whilst the existence of concord might be more plausible

as a condition free from conflict, it has no place in our discussion of political decision-

making processes, structures or institutions.

248 Rawls, J. Political Liberalism (Columbia UP 1996). p 105. 249 Tönnies. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. p 48. [My Emphasis]. 250 Ibid. p 47.

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I think that this differentiation will make analysis and demarcation a little easier and

might also provide more solid grounds for devising critique. It is when the ‘concord’ of a

group’s normative assumptions fails that various options are left open: argument, strategic

action, or communicative action which might lead to a consensual outcome. Incidentally,

this ‘failure’ or ‘breach’ of concord necessarily means that any ‘consensual’ decision-

making is the result of an initial disagreement or conflict of some sort or there would be no

need for such a decision-making process. As we shall see, any attempt to airbrush out

conflict in this understanding of consensus, obscures both the initial sundering of concord

and the necessary centrality of ‘conflict’ in my understanding of ‘consensus’ as a decision-

making process. It seems that what is often meant by ‘consensus’ in the Social Dialogue is

actually ‘compromise’, though an explicit use of this term would allow an unacceptable

recognition of the role of conflict in the Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy. Anyhow,

communicative action in the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy is claimed to be a

consensual form of decision-making, this more precisely means the reaching of an

understanding through communication based on the mutual recognition of validity claims.

Failure to theoretically or practically adhere to these validity claims constitutes a failure to

achieve consensual decision-making on the terms established, implicitly and explicitly, in

the Social Dialogue itself.

This chapter, and the one that follows it, will begin with a criticism of Habermas’

theory of communicative action, as far as it relates to the Social Dialogue and Lisbon, and

will then sequentially explore how ‘consensus-seeking’, agenda setting, and then

asymmetric relations, are a result of the theoretical failures. I will follow two themes of

criticism of the understanding of consensus present in the Social Dialogue and Lisbon

Strategy. One theme will consist of a ‘critique of ideology’ where I will try to demonstrate

how the claims of consensual decision-making are actually based on a flawed interpretation

and implementation of Habermas’ ideas, the result of an ideologised agenda which must

remain opaque and obscured in order to function. In effect, I want to expose how the

practice does not live up to the theory by implicitly drawing upon ideas of Critical Theory

from chapter 2.3. This will be most important in the discussions on asymmetric relations

and on ideological mobilisation inherent in the Commission’s consensus-seeking.

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In contrast, the other theme of criticism is not intended to ‘reveal’ that which is

ideologically or discursively obscured. Instead, I will critically analyse problems with the

very theory of communicative action itself and with the very possibility of political

consensus as understood in the way I have outlined above. I am interested to see how

power, discourse, changing epistemic norms, and asymmetric relations affect the possibility

for mutual understanding and the realisation of validity claims, and therefore threaten the

credibility of the universal pragmatics upon which the legitimacy claims of the Social

Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy are founded. It might well be that the unsuccessful

application of the theory of communicative action is primarily a result of the flaws in the

theory itself thus precluding any possible implementation in any practical circumstance.

However, in anticipation, we should make a more fundamental investigation of how these

theoretical problems of political consensus are based on certain epistemological and

ontological criticisms of Habermas’ theory.

Habermas’ Theory and the Role of Power Relations In chapter 3.1 I tried to demonstrate how Habermas’ theory of communicative action

discussed in chapter 2.3 implicitly applies to the Commissions proposals for the European

Social Dialogue, most obviously in its inclusive, consensual rhetoric and in its attempts to

claim what seems to be an ‘ideal speech situation’ in the Social Dialogue. For Habermas,

the consensual basis for his theory of communicative action relies on the idea that “the goal

of coming to an understanding [Verständigung] is to bring about an agreement

[Einverständnis] that terminates in the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal

understanding, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another”.251 This

undoubtedly resonates with the Social Dialogue’s ‘special responsibilities’ to promote the

“consultation of management and labour at community level and any measure to facilitate

their dialogue” along with the “two essential functions: consultation and negotiation”.252

The most significant criticism made of Habermas’ theory of communicative action,

which therefore also applies to the consensual claims of the Social Dialogue, is that it

underestimates the role of power relations in political activity, or indeed all activity. Two

251 Habermas. Communication and the Evolution of Society. p 3. 252 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 7.

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major sources of this criticism are a more traditional empirical strand of thought and a more

radical de-constructionist ‘postmodernism’ mentioned. Here I am more interested in the

latter.

The works of Jürgen Habermas and Michael Foucault highlight two essential

tensions in modernity. Firstly, this is the tension between consensus and conflict.253

Secondly, it is also the tension between a supposed point of rupture in Western thought

between ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’, on the one hand, and the denial of this breach,

on the other. The Habermas-Foucault debate is symptomatic of the struggle of integration

vs. disintegration, norm-building vs. norm-destroying, which recalls something of the

criticisms made by Nietzsche et al of the 19th Century social philosophers and theoretical

system builders.

The thought of Foucault has eclectic roots in French structuralism, post-

structuralism, and deconstructivism which works through a particularist and contextualist

tradition drawing on power-theorists such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche and is

characterised by ‘strategic’ thinking. In contrast, Habermas’ thought resides in the tradition

of universalistic systematic theorising epitomised by Socrates, Plato, and Kant. Though the

two thinkers share a Kantian view of reason as the essential component of any kind of

social critique, they are both emblematic of a certain polarisation of late 20th Century

thought in epistemology and social philosophy. To Foucault, Habermas is considered to be

a foundationalist thinker whose attempts to systematically ground formal structures of

thought in universal terms is unsustainable given the disintegration of meaning and of

confidence in epistemic criteria which has taken place in the last few decades. His

philosophy is thought to constitute an unacceptable recapitulation of the categorical

imperative. Habermas is accused of living in the shadow of Plato’s reductivist dichotomy of

Relativism–Foundationalism which facilitates thought but ultimately deludes

understanding.254 Based upon these differences a sustained attack has been made by those

with Foucauldian sympathies upon Habermas’ theory of communicative action.

For Foucault power is a positive concept and is all-pervasive, and “where there is

power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a

253 Flyvbjerg, B. “Habermas and Foucault: Thinkers for Civil Society” (1998) 49:2, June, The British Journal of Sociology. p 211. 254 Ibid. p 221.

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position of exteriority to power”.255 The main charge levelled at Habermas’ theory is that

the idea that the only force present in the ‘ideal speech situation’ is the “force of the better

argument” is a delusion. Habermas’ systematic understanding of power as working through

constitutions, institutions, law, sovereignty, or defined procedures is attacked by

poststructuralists for being excessively optimistic, uncritical, and negligent of the decentred

nature of power. The writing of constitutions over the last 200 years has repeatedly

demonstrated how their framing has often been like ‘writing on water’ and that the opinion

that institutional reform alters behaviour is a hypothesis rather than an axiom.256 In a more

pessimistic view of communicative action one might say that communication is more

usually characterised by non-rational rhetoric and by the maintenance of interests rather

than by freedom from domination and consensus-seeking, and that setting up institutional

‘procedures’ is no sure way of securing a communicative environment free from

domination, even though they be set up for that very purpose.257 In the actual functioning of

discourse ethics and communicative rationality, how does consensus-seeking and rhetoric,

freedom from domination and exercise of power, come together in individual acts of

communication?258 Is the handling of power to be understood as a negative neutralisation or

as a positive re-direction? These questions are never adequately dealt with in detail by

Habermas’ theory. There is a ‘utopia’ of communicative rationality but little concrete

indication of how to get there.

In contrast to Habermas’ theory, the Foucauldian position is that of the ‘Nietzschean

democrat’ for whom any form of government – liberal or totalitarian – must be subjected to

analysis and critique based on a will not to be dominated, voicing concerns in public and

withholding consent about anything that appears to be unacceptable.259 Foucault

emphasises constant concrete criticism of all institutions and procedures, even if apparently

neutral and independent, instead of establishing institutional and procedural systems which

subsequently should be supported once in place.

The ubiquity of power necessitates compromise over consensus, when understood

as a decision-making process as I outlined at the start. It has been quite cogently argued that

255 Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (1979). p 95. 256 Putnam, R D. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton UP 1993). pp 17-18. 257 Flyvbjerg. “Habermas and Foucault”. p 216. 258 Ibid. p 216. 259 Ibid. p 221.

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historically, in democratic societies, political ‘consensus’ has stemmed from a kind of

political battle fatigue where groups finally come to realise their mutual inability to gain

dominance and come therefore to recognise the need for accommodation.260 The form of

‘Consensus’, as a result of a decision-making procedure, that we want might better be

understood as ‘compromise’, rather than as the ‘consensus’ of shared interests or basic

values. Here is an implicit recognition of the role of power, the role of conflict, and the

immanent divergence of interests among social and cultural groups, assumptions which are

absent in the Social Dialogue and are inadequately treated in Habermas’ theory. The

political logic of compromise demands cooperation (behaviourally), as opposed to

agreement (ideologically), and emphasises a shift from ideology to behaviour.261 In this

formulation, compromise does not exclude the presence of common interests or goals, but

rather excludes the assumed necessity of their being common interests and goals as one

finds in the Lisbon Strategy.

Perhaps most importantly, Habermas’ thought, and the Social Dialogue, leave little

room for conflict as a positive force that rejuvenates and energises. Despite all the

references to ‘dynamism’ and the repetition of democratic clichés in the Commission

Communications on Lisbon, short shrift is given to the axiom that “public life is best

cultivated, not in an ideal sphere that assumes away power, but in many democratic spaces

where obstinate differences in power, material status, and hence interest can find

expression”.262 Actually, one might ultimately say that, despite the non-coercive (zwanglos)

intentions of Habermas’ discourse ethics, coercion is actually a necessary precondition in

political praxis for the guaranteeing of validity claims, given the inevitable ubiquity of

power and the plurality of interests and goals.

Richard Rorty and Bent Flyvbjerg have criticised Habermas’ communicative reason

for its Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ and for having a kind of religious status.263 Rorty goes

on to accuse the theory of trying to be a “healing and unifying power which will do the

260 Hirschmann, A O. “Social Conflicts as Pillars of Democratic Market Society” (1994) 22:2, Political Theory. p 208. 261 Ankersmit, F R. “Representational Democracy: An Aesthetic Approach to Conflict and Compromise” (2002) 8:1, Common Knowledge. p 27. 262 Flyvbjerg. “Habermas and Foucault”. p 229. 263 Ibid. pp 215, 216.

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work once done by God”, something that “we no longer need”.264 However, as we’ve seen

how ‘Society’, which historically has provided precisely this function, is being

transformed/destroyed, perhaps we do need that very quality?

The criticism is not all one way however. For his part, Habermas dismisses Foucault

as a relativist, historicist, and nihilist whose disestablishment of epistemic normative

grounding represents a potential threat to any critique of capitalist society. Foucault’s ideas

of anti-modernity [post-modernity] are considered to be a return to the enervating and

debilitating ideas of the late-Romantics and Aestheticists, robbing thought of its critical

potential and opening the door for a return to tradition, faith, and superstition to fill the

meaningless void.265 ‘Postmodernism’ is considered to be a reactionary force through

which these ‘discontents’ have not been called into life by modernist intellectuals but by

culturalists who are “rooted in deep seated reactions against the process of societal

modernization”.266 The conclusions that Habermas thus draws are based on the

interpretation that “more or less in the entire Western World, a climate has developed that

furthers capitalist modernisation processes as well as trends critical of cultural

modernism”.267 It is within the context of these criticisms of Habermas’ theory that I will

have to approach the particular issue of power relations in the Social Dialogue.

It must be said that, despite his optimistic tone, Habermas is not ignorant of the

practical obstacles facing the implementation of his theory, nor can he be said to seriously

believe in the ‘ideal speech situation’ as an absolute and utopian possibility. He has

conceded that ideal conditions of general communication extending to the entire public free

from domination must not disguise the fact that the empirical conditions for the application

of the ‘pragmatistic’ model are lacking.268 He has even gone so far as to lament that whilst

the Lifeworld must “become able to develop institutions not of itself which sets limits to

the internal dynamics and to the imperatives of an almost autonomous economic system

and its administrative complements”, it is regrettable that “the chances for this today are not

very good”.269

264 Rorty, R. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge UP 1989). p 68. 265 Habermas, J. “Modernity versus Postmodernity” (1981) 22, Winter, New German Critique. p 7. 266 Ibid. p 14. [Original Emphasis]. 267 Ibid. p 13. 268 Habermas. “The Scientization of Politics and Public Opinion”. p 75. 269 Habermas. “Modernity versus Postmodernity”. p 13.

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Habermas does hypothesise some reasons for being practically optimistic over the

potential for the pragmatistic model to ‘mediate’ towards the communicatively established

‘ideal speech situation’.270 For example, he cites the growing potential of journalistic

mediation. In similar style to the Kantian view that conflicts actually discursively bring

participants closer together, he sees international pressure for the peaceful coexistence of

competing social systems has a possible tendency that counters the communication block

between participants. There is a suggestion that there might be a growing potential for

scientists to be co-opted into political-ethical practice and to go beyond the technical

recommendations that they produce and reflect on their practical consequences. However,

in light of the both 20th American Psychoanalysis and the Manhattan Project, one has to

remain sceptical.

Despite both these caveats and reasons for practical optimism, there are many

practical reasons to be pessimistic of Habermas’ theory, and therefore of the consensualist

claims of the Social Dialogue. If one is to go through the ‘validity claims’ in the theory of

communicative action, there are strong reasons to be sceptical of their fulfilment in the

Social Dialogue, and it is to this that we must now turn.

I have discussed the most pressing theoretical objection to Habermas’ consensualist

theory. For now, I shall content myself to say that, whilst Habermas has attempted to

provide a means of social critique that integrates, addresses, and tries to reconcile the

critical tradition with the contemporary epistemological developments that threaten it, there

is nevertheless a lack of adequate recognition of the nature and role of power. This, along

with the sheer scale of the demands placed upon such an undertaking as Habermas’,

damages the credibility and plausibility of his efforts to theoretically ground epistemic

norms.

To me, the works of Habermas represent some of the most insightful observations,

criticisms, and analyses of capitalist society and the human condition contemporary to our

times, and for this reason I endorse much of the thought and content of those works.

However, I do object to much of his more positive and affirmatively systematic

formulations, for reasons both stated and still to come. I have tried to utilise his works in

my thesis with this distinction in mind without confusion and contradiction. In opposition

270 Habermas. “Scientization of Politics”. pp 77-78.

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to this, I think that regardless of whether ‘postmodernist’ thought is in fact a novel

epistemological breach, or a continuity of certain unavoidable ‘modern’ suppositions, it still

has worth in this analysis for its critical stance and for its focus on conflict, power, and

partisanship.271 Now we must look into the resultant implications of what has been said so

far for the consensual claims of the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy.

Ideological Mobilisation and Integration in the Lisbon Strategy “Solidarity and social inclusion cannot be separated from the globalised economy, where the competitiveness and attractiveness of Europe are at stake. This opening-up on two fronts requires strong and active participation of all concerned”.272 “Renewed growth is vital to prosperity, can bring back full employment and is the foundation of social justice and opportunity for all. It is also vital to Europe’s position in the world and Europe’s ability to mobilise the resources that tackle many global different [sic] challenges”.273 The Lisbon Strategy self-consciously presents itself as democratic and repeatedly

emphasises ‘social cohesion’, ‘better governance’, inclusion of opinion, and ‘opportunities

for all’, with the Social Dialogue as a “driving force for modernisation of the European

economy and the European social model” which “holds a crucial, unique position in the

democratic governance of Europe”.274 Despite the profuse, yet vague, allusions to

solidarity and democratic representation, the question still lingers. To what extent are these

allusions and claims genuine or merely legitimising assurances chosen for their expected

efficacy in securing certain policy aims in the zeitgeist? Indeed, that ‘democratic

governance’ is emboldened tempts one to think that perhaps the lady doth protest too much,

methinks. But alongside the immanent and integrating tendencies of instrumental rationality

in capitalist society discussed in chapter 2.3, how else can we account for the characteristics

of the Lisbon reforms.

Lars-Bo Kaspersen’s Fission Theory of the formation of democratic structures is

something that has been conceived in order to explain nation-state formation and the

development of national institutions of democratic representation within those nation-states.

Nevertheless, the dynamic might, with a little generosity, also be applied to other coherent

271 Flyvbjerg. “Habermas and Foucault”. p 230. 272 Communication from the Commission: On the Social Agenda (2005). p 4. 273 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Jobs and Growth. p 4. 274 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 6. [Original Emphasis].

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and aggregated levels of political and socio-economic organisation. The Fission Theory

understands historic nation-state formation as a struggle for mutual recognition between

potential states and that “this struggle for recognition, which is a political struggle with war

as an ultima ratio, evolves into various distinctive types of states”.275 This is not a

Darwinian ‘struggle for life’ but a struggle for recognition and legitimacy. State and society

are seen as constituted in a mutual struggle of recognition between states. Such relations of

recognition often take the shape of either ‘imaginary’ or ‘real’ wars that have a strong

impact on the internal construction of state and society.276

The philosophical roots of this theory are Hegelian, Schmittian, and Clauswitzian.

Hegel provides us with the notion of the struggle for recognition, enabling us to understand

that it is indeed a struggle – a relation – between states that constitutes those states. He

posits that a state cannot simply develop from ‘within’ thus entering the international

political order as a fully developed state. In order to be a state, it must be recognized by

another state. This struggle of recognition is an infinite and continuous Clauswitzian

process of ‘politics by other means’ and revolves round the Schmittian friend–enemy

relation which forms the key political differentia specifica. The friend–enemy relationship

is a mutual struggle for recognition, and it therefore follows that, in the extreme, a political

struggle includes the possibility of war.277 The result of this is that politics becomes, in this

context, a struggle between states in which a political and social order is developed and

imposed within the state ‘borders’. After imposing a social order, the state can use the

society to pursue its own ends in its struggle for recognition.278 This has consequences for

constitutional reforms, the internal formation of rights and obligations, the development of

representative institutions, and for the cultivation of norms.

This theory has been evoked to explain the development of the nation-state system

and the internal institutional development of democratic states.279 The conceptual changes

in the later 20th Century might bring us to question the current applicability of this nation-

state oriented theory, being as it is a product of a specific historical period arguably of

275 Kaspersen, L-B. “How Denmark Became Democratic: The Impact of Warfare and Reforms” (2004) 47:1, March, Acta Sociologica. p 73. 276 Ibid. p 73. 277 Ibid. pp 73-74. 278 Ibid. p 75. 279 Habermas. Communication and Evolution of Society. p 196.

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decreasing relevance. However, though the particular analysis pertaining to the nation-state

might be questionable in today’s global political dynamic, the general analysis is

nevertheless valid in a globalised economy that is still divided into fairly coherent sub-

units, especially in the domain of political organisation. In other words, it is important to

note that the concept of state in this context is not a ‘state apparatus’, but a whole, and a

unity that includes ‘society’. It is not, however, a unity constituted by its internal

elements.280 Though it has not been intended as a monocausal explanation of a state’s

make-up, the crucial idea I wish to take from this Fission Theory of state and society is

thus:

“The state has to produce a strong political will, the economic means and the ideological support of the population. The state must therefore possess a society that can generate the means necessary to maintain a strong defence. Thus, the very struggle for recognition, and its specific character, has a strong impact on the state, the state–society relationship, and the structure of the society”.281 The internal political formation of society is therefore, to some extent, the function of

certain inter-statial imperatives of competition. In this competition the state and society

must extract resources and gain ideological support in order to mobilise a defence. A legal

structure of rights and obligations reflects this process of extraction. Some groups and

classes are able to obtain certain privileges because they are indispensable to the state. They

might well provide the vital elements of the defence.282

The Fission Theory differs somewhat from the classical liberal theory of the

democratic state as the culmination of the ‘internal’ virtues of civil society – whether the

‘invisible hand’, historic liberal norms, or teleological institutional development based on

natural law. In contrast to this, the Fission Theory recognises how imperatives of

competition and struggle are integral to political organisation and have the awesome

potential to completely dominate the ideological orientation of state and society if left

unrecognised and unintegrated into a reflexively critical political vision. Without critical

resistance and the ideological and conceptual vocabulary to resist – this being something

which has come to characterise our ‘air du temp’ – then the ideology of competition will

280 Kaspersen. “How Denmark Became Democratic”. p 74. 281 Ibid. pp 74-75. 282 Ibid. p 75.

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permeate and ‘colonise’ all aspects of life. This understanding perhaps gives some useful

insight into the question:

“How is it that the ideology or cult of competition has forsaken the narrow bounds of the industrial and financial world, of the blind theorists of the market economy and the invisible hand, and of the fanatical thurifers of vulgar economic Darwinism to permeate world opinion right into the places most affected by destitution and social exclusion”.283 The Lisbon Agenda represents the need to mobilise, adapt, and integrate the population

under the imperatives of competition and the Social Dialogue is the means by which this is

to be achieved, that is, by the assimilation and neutralisation of coherent opposition. The

Dialogue is not to foster ‘consensus over’, but rather ‘consent to’ the Lisbon objectives. A

brief perusal through the pages of the European Commission Communications will

highlight the point. For instance, “the EU has a high potential for developing further its

competitive advantages, and it is crucial that actions are pursued with determination to

exploit fully that potential and to enhance confidence among EU citizens”.284 That the

Social Dialogue furnishes the enabling mechanism for this ‘exploitation’ of resources is an

idea that cries out from such declarations as this one:

“the social dialogue can help to establish at European level a favourable climate for improving competitiveness, innovation and social cohesion. At the same time, it can help to guide the adaptation process in the candidate countries, offering avenues and strategic orientation for reforms”.285 Whether in education, employment, pensions, ecology, justice claims, or income

distribution the Lisbon Strategy relates them all to the priority imperative of

competitiveness and the integration and mobilisation necessary for this end.

For instance, unemployment is not considered an evil for its role in creating social

inequalities or for its debilitating effects on individual’s self-esteem and psychological

welfare but for its drain on the productive and competitive potential of the social whole.

Therefore “in order to attain the Lisbon growth and jobs objectives, Europe needs a greater

number of active workers, who are also more productive”.286 Likewise, concern for the

283 Petrella. “Europe Between Competitive Innovation and a New Social Contract”. p 12. 284 Communication from the President: Integrated Guidelines For Growth and Jobs 2005-2008 (2005). p 5. [Original Emphasis]. 285 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 16. [Original Emphasis]. 286 Communication from the Commission: On the Social Agenda (2005). p 6.

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health and working conditions of those with jobs is not a heartfelt sympathy for the dignity

of labour, but rather is advantageous for competitiveness. After all, “prevention pays off”

and “less work-related accidents and diseases push up productivity, contain costs,

strengthen quality of work and hence valorise Europe’s human capital”.287

Education and the ‘knowledge society’ is not considered a good for its phronetic,

bürgerlich, or political value but because “the Lisbon European Council rightly recognised

that Europe’s future economic development would depend on its ability to create and grow

high-value, innovative and research-based sectors capable of competing with the best in the

world”.288 Along this line of thought, the attitude prevalent in the Lisbon Agenda seems to

be that “the realisation of a knowledge society, based upon human capital, education,

research and innovation policies, is key to boost our growth potential and prepare the

future”.289 In relation to reforming the education system you will repeatedly be told that the

chief aim of schooling, vocational training and higher education is “to prepare high-

performance human capital in order to make the country’s economy more competitive in

relation to the foreign rival (enemy?)”.290

Once again, better industrial relations are not considered to be important for a more

equitable distribution of the social-economic product but for “minimising the risk of

industrial and social conflict”, conflict which is undesirable to the demands of competition

but perhaps not to broader political goals which are never really discussed.291 Social

cohesion, stability, and participation are not encouraged because they are essential to a

political vision predicated on the expression of the general will, are aimed at the ‘good life’,

or are necessary to achieve aims of distributive justice, but because “participation of social

partners in the process of public policy-making will add legitimacy to these policies in

democratic societies”.292 It is even one of the primary objectives of the Social Policy

Agenda in the Lisbon Process to “modernise and improve social protection to respond to

287 Communication from the Commission: On the Social Agenda (2005). p 7. 288 Facing the Challenge: Report from the High Level Group (November 2004). p 19. 289 Communication from the President: Integrated Guidelines For Growth and Jobs 2005-2008 (2005). p 5. 290 Petrella. “Europe Between Competitive Innovation and a New Social Contract”. p 11. 291 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 1. 292 Ibid. p 5.

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the transformation of the knowledge economy, change in social and family structures and

build on the role of social protection as a productive factor”.293

Legitimising and mobilising policy objectives such as ‘social cohesion’,

unemployment, education, environment are not treated as ends open to political debate, but

are valued only as far as they facilitate the realisation of economic competitiveness. It

seems cogent that:

“In their connection many good things can be included in the argumentation for economic competitiveness. You can argue for moral, ecological, or aesthetic values without being obliged to use moral, ecological, or aesthetic arguments; you just prove that they promote economic competitiveness”.294 Since the mid-term review and the Lisbon Relaunch (2005) the objectives of the Social

Policy Agenda have become much more explicit in this way, brazenly relegating other,

previously euphemised, social aims to the margins. These latter have become even more

clichéd, ill-defined, and little explored and seem to function as rhetorical sugar for the pill

of market determined reforms. A tremulous urgency and intensity increasingly characterise

the tone and language of the Lisbon Agenda just as “boosting” the social partners’

“involvement” in the Lisbon Agenda necessitates a “framework for action involving all

levels and all players on a voluntary basis”.295 It is increasingly stressed in the

recapitulations of the Lisbon Strategy that “time is running out and there can be no room

for complacency”.296 This urgent exhortation reflects the imperative and unreflective nature

of the need to mobilise without delay, and herein lies the problem.

Here we see that political aims and goals are subordinated to market forces. The

assumption is that a “competitive economy strengthens social cohesion” and ultimately

promotes other political goals.297 However, this again relies upon an assumption of the

inherent virtue of the self-regulating and autonomous market mechanism. The Lisbon

Agenda never explicitly handles political aims as ends in themselves, does not differentiate

action from production, but instead comprehends all means and ends in terms of the goal of

competition within the self-regulating market. At this point, the lengthy explanation of

293 Communication from the Commission: On the Social Agenda (2000). p 2. 294 Kettunen, P. “The Society of Virtuous Circles” in Eskola, H; Kettunen, P. (eds). Models, Modernity and the Myrdals (Renvall Institute 1997) p 170. 295 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 14. 296 Communication to the Spring European Council: Working Together for Jobs and Growth. p 4. 297 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 7.

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instrumental rationality in chapter 2.3 once again seems rather relevant. The ‘affirmed’

rationality of the system, and the reasoning as to the relevance and efficiency of ‘higher

performance’ tools, legitimises the process of earmarking available material and immaterial

resources.298 Without a credible means of critique, the imperatives of the ‘unembedded’

self-regulating market, so evident in the Lisbon Agenda, will feed on a form of rationality

functioning on its own terms, and will continue to mobilise, legitimise and ideologise for

these unrecognised and uncriticised ends. Opposition is deemed counter-productive,

irrational, or even dangerous in a manner reminiscent of the Whiggish accusations levelled

at the Jacobite Tories in Karl Polanyi’s account of the English land enclosures.299 Industrial

relations as a politic is thus morphed into a dirigiste apotheosis of ‘Management’ and:

“This movement becomes faster over the years with the political discourse aligning itself more and more with that of management. Within the framework of ‘France plc’ [and Europe plc] the people tend to be considered as a human resource that must be convinced, mobilised and conditioned”.300 Taking a glimpse at Habermas’ quote at the beginning of the chapter we can see that the

need to legitimise and mobilise especially in times of economic malaise is recognised by

Habermas himself. Though one might criticise his positive formulations, Habermas does

recognise the integrating and mobilising capacities of capitalist society, as did his Frankfurt

predecessors. Like, Polanyi, he also recognised the potential danger of the self-regulating

market eschewing political and moral ends which it must ultimately do as it becomes

purposive and illegitimate in the sense of Polanyi’s understanding of ‘progressive

transformation’ and ‘social habituation’. The Lisbon Strategy demonstrates how Habermas’

fears over legitimacy problems in contemporary political organisation are well founded.

Lisbon does indeed seem to be subordinating all goals to the imperatives of economic

competition and “representing the accomplishments of the capitalist economy as,

comparatively speaking, the best possible satisfaction of generalised interests – or at least

insinuating that this is so”.301 All’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

298 Petrella. “Europe Between Competitive Innovation and a New Social Contract”. p 13. 299 Polanyi, K The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press 1944; 2001). 300 Le Goff. La France Morcelée. p 82. [Ce mouvement s’accélère au fil des ans et la discours politique s’aligne de plus en plus sur celui du management. Dans le cadre de l’“entreprise France” [et de l’Europe] le peuple tend à être consideré comme une ‘resource humain’ qu’il faut ‘convaincre’, ‘mobiliser’, et ‘former’ pour le changement]. 301 Habermas. Communication and Evolution of Society. p 196.

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Unfortunately, and despite Habermas’ efforts to the contrary, the theory of communicative

action and the very forces of illegitimation appear to be going hand-in-hand in the Social

Dialogue. The idea that universal pragmatics and discourse ethics will provide sufficient

means to resist and prevent these legitimacy problems seems increasingly unlikely and

speculative.

In this part of the chapter I have attempted a kind of ‘critique of ideology’ , that is, a

critique which “captures and discloses the hidden and unsustainable (i.e., irrational,

metaphysical, ideological) premises behind the theory”.302 Though, the object of my

analysis is not a theory, but a set of policies and objectives claiming wide status politically,

economically, and socially. My contention is that, despite the rhetoric of social democratic

political goals and of open and inclusive discussion, an instrumental agenda of competition

nevertheless seeks to mobilise society for its own, uncontested and undebated aims and

priorities. This it does under the illusive claims of consultation and ‘consensus’ whilst

actually implicitly promoting passive ‘consent’. The broadening of the Social Dialogue and

the spread of OMCs will open out this agenda from being a specific “part of an integrated

European approach aimed at economic and social renewal” to a broader encompassing

social totality which “affects the working and personal life of all people living in

Europe”.303 Further problems of political accountability are closely connected to these

developments which act as ‘co-ordination techniques’ and which will serve to confuse,

diffuse and disperse political responsibilities.304

There is therefore a doubt that the Lisbon Agenda is “a political agreement which

mobilises all key actors”.305 To what extent do the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy live

up to the claims of political consensus, as understood at the start of the chapter?

Agenda Setting of Speech Acts “No construal is quite innocent, something is always suppressed; and what is more, some interlocutors are always advantaged relative to others, for any language”.306

302 Kettunen. “The Society of Virtuous Circles”. p 161. 303 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2005). p 5. 304 Pollack; Wallace; Wallace. (eds). Policy Making in the European. pp 86-87. 305 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 2. [My Emphasis]. 306 Taylor. Philosophical Arguments. p 17. [My Italics].

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This aphorism, usually attributed to Nietzsche, forces us to recognise the power of

utterances not just to provide meaning, as we have seen already in chapter 2.1, but to

contain force and power in themselves. Words can shape a discourse, create a linguistic and

conceptual environment which has the power to shape thought and action. In effect, they

can set agendas. So how does it affect the claims of political consensus? A style of

language and conceptual vocabulary enthuses the European Commission Communications

and anchors the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy in wider semantic fields of

meaning, in a manner explained in chapter 2.2. So despite the claims of discussion,

negotiation, and consultation, it might be argued that these claims are irrelevant in a

conditioned discursive environment that is implicitly oriented from the outset. A little

exploration of this should demonstrate how the claims of Lisbon are not credible given the

discursively understood, or rather absorbed, semantics of the speech acts contained therein.

There are words and phrases in the Communications which have an underlying

semantic relationship which needs to be brought forth. There is no need for citation as they

are legion and frequent throughout the documents to which I have so far referred. The

selection goes as follows: innovation, dynamic, social-partners, stakeholders, human

resource, challenges, obstacles, modernisation, efficient transactions on the labour markets,

fixed-term work, economically dependent work, labour mobility, flexibility,

mainstreaming, synergy, outsourcing, offshoring, revamp. A glance at these words should

be sufficient to notice that they are not part of conventionally recognised political discourse

but are rather closely connected to a managerial view of society as an extension of the

private limited company. Any industrial relations understood as a locus of conflict,

negotiation, consultation, inclusion or even consensus amongst the extraordinarily diverse

corporations, classes, and nations of European society would not be dominated by such an

exclusive and monochromatic semantic field as this one. One must remember that the

Social Dialogue and Lisbon Agenda do indeed claim this degree of scope in their claims of

inclusiveness.

‘Citizen’, so closely linked to ‘society’ in modernity, and ‘stakeholder’ are used

synonymously, though with an increasing dominance of the latter term. Here the political

citizen is increasingly replaced by an economic ‘shareholder’ in the Market Society. The

‘human being’, so central to the universalist humanism of the French Revolution, now

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becomes the instrumental-purposive ‘human resource’ to be integrated, mobilised and

managed. Whilst these neologisms serve to re-shape and utilise the semantic resonances of

dying concepts, other neologisms have arisen to express genuinely novel concepts born of

the fires of the 1980s managerial and monetarist parturition. The provenance of

words/concepts like ‘synergy’, ‘outsourcing’, ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘offshoring’ and

‘revamping’ are more clearly related to the globalised economic order of high-technology,

advanced finance, and the disassociation of location and production in the post-industrial

society. This is a mode which is most obviously beyond political ‘embeddedness’. When

we turn to borderline tautological phrases like “economically determined work” we can see

the lengths to which the redactors of the Communications will go in order to avoid conflict

and controversy ergo avoid politics. The illocutionary force of such an ill-sounding phrase

as “economically determined work” leaves one in little doubt that to say “work that is

neither secure, stable nor permanent” would provoke an unacceptable degree of objection

to “progress”. This is interesting given the lengths to which the Social Dialogue purports to

be ultra-inclusive of opinion, honest, straight-forward, and transparent (important

‘acceptability conditions’).

The power of such language lies in its perlocutionary force, that is, in how meaning

is communicated beyond the constative form of the utterances and then taken up by the

recipient. Without an adequately coherent conceptual, and critically analytical vocabulary

to oppose the ideological forces at work in the discourse, people will ‘take up’ the

illocutionary force of such utterances by reference to a contemporary synchronic semantic

field which is increasingly associated, through discourse, with certain encompassing socio-

economic ends which are beneficially and sympathetically connotated (the best means of

satisfying the generalised will). These ends will seem desirable, perhaps by virtue of

cultural saturation and repetition, but for reasons discussed in chapter 2.3 they are

potentially spurious, instrumental, partial, and unreflexive. We can see how, to this end,

defined institutions, regulations, laws, or directives are not necessary and are even counter-

productive to these assumed economic ends. The very lack of binding agreements,

normative or otherwise, facilitates the agenda-setting power of the discourse. It is no

coincidence that ‘Communications’ are the preferred medium for such apparently

uncoercive or non-binding discourse formation as found in the Social Dialogue or the

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OMCs. Of course, the agenda-setting power works through all contemporary media, such

as journalism, academia, news, and various documentation.

The importance of this kind of ‘critique of ideology’ is that it highlights a need for

viable critique and analytical opposition. Beyond this, two other points should be

underlined. First, that while the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy utilise certain

concepts and histrionics of both ‘modernity’ and a certain political vision, these turn out to

be confused, conflated or even replaced by contradictory concepts and utterances which

serve to mobilise support for action which actually negates those original concepts. Second,

the claims of political inclusion, consultation and negotiation, and therefore consensus, are

shown to be incompatible with a dominating agenda-setting discourse of economism which

“reflects a neoliberal logic” and promotes the neutralisation of political conflict and

opposition.307 Conflict means compromise and choices might entail winners and losers,

both are eventualities that the ‘consensus-seeking’ but ‘consent inducing’ Social Dialogue

and managerial capitalism wish to preclude from explicit discussion. One must ask whether

they do this for different reasons or for the same reasons. The Commission might prefer the

former answer, one suspects the latter.

3.4 The Social Dialogue and Asymmetric Relations

The ‘Ideology of Parity’308 This chapter runs directly on from the analysis in the previous chapter, but as the analysis

here is more focused on the Social Dialogue, rather than the Lisbon Strategy, it seems

sensible to place it within a fresh chapter concentrating on the problems of European

asymmetric relations.

The result of the discussion of power relations in the previous chapter should alert

us to the very real possibility of politically asymmetric power relations in the Social

Dialogue, both developing and extant from the outset. The implications of this for any

inclusive and consensual claims made of the Dialogue are quite significant. The particular

307 Hyman, R. “Trade Unions and the Politics of the European Social Model” [Online](2005) LSE Research Online. p 2. 308 Kettunen, P. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Partnership”. pp 32-34.

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asymmetric relations to which I am referring here are those of the ‘ideology of parity’,

national variance and of European centre-periphery relations.309

The ‘ideology of parity’ rests on the assumption of the formal and substantial parity

of labour and capital in terms of their relative powers, resources and interests, whether

historically or in principle. The Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy are replete with these

assumptions. The repeated reference to the ‘partnership’ of labour and capital is the most

salient example of this and can be seen as one of their central themes: “the partnership

between the authorities, the social partners and civil society is one of the keys to the

success of European policies. In order to promote support for the reforms, the European

Council of March 2004 called on the Member States to set up partnerships for change”.310

The belief is that the Social Dialogue promotes “a balance between the demands of

economic development and social cohesion”.311 This entails an interpretation of the history

of the Social Dialogue claiming that “at the time social dialogue experienced problems, the

approach was often more adversarial and ideologically charged. However, when it became

more pragmatic and oriented towards problem-solving, it contributed significantly to

employment success”.312

The consequence of these assumptions is a belief that there can be an absence of

ideology at all and that conflict is a socio-economic evil produced by ideological delusions

of disparity. There are two ways in which this ironically ideological view of industrial

relations can be opposed. The first is by an exploration of the theoretical principle of the

worker-employer relation which Marx understood as one of immanent disparity, and the

second is an exploration of the actual unfolding of the principle of disparity in historical

reality.

In principle, in an analysis by Karl Polanyi, the core of industrial relations in the

Market Economy is the worker-employer relation. A Market Economy is an economic

system regulated and directed by market prices. Social order in the production and

distribution of goods is entrusted to this self-regulating mechanism.313 Consequently,

factors of production and all forms of exchange and distribution must be commodified in

309 Though what is said here could be expanded into issues of gender, race, age, etc... 310 Communication from the Commission: Social Policy Agenda (2000). p 5. 311 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 1. 312 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 12. 313 Polanyi. The Great Transformation. p 71.

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order to function through the ordering framework of the market mechanism. However,

labour, land, and money are obviously not commodities, instead we understand labour to be

only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not

produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from

the rest of life, be stored or mobilised.314 The conclusion is therefore, that labour power is a

‘ fictitious commodity’, notionally necessary for entrance into exchange in the Market

Economy. One argument has posited that the worker contracts out more than just labour

power in this ‘fictitious commodification’, he contracts out his inseparable “life itself” in a

way that the employer, as a juridical construct, does not.315 Although one should be careful

not to then assume that employer organisations in industrial relations are easier to form than

workers’ unions.316 This assumption often seems not to recognise that the profit motive of

capitalist reproduction necessitates competition amongst the owners of capital often pitting

employer against employer.317

Though more will be said on employer-worker organisations below, we can see here

how the dubious assumption of a formally symmetrical and freely contracted relationship

formed the basis for the historical and legal development of the relationship in the historical

process of industrialisation. This assumption of parity seems immersed in empiricist social

contract theory, the problems of which have been mentioned elsewhere but are worth

noting once more.

The disparity of the industrial relation in historical reality is perhaps best

demonstrated by a discussion of a particular national case, to show how the principle of

disparity has played out in a given historical context. The development of industrial

relations in 19th Britain gives one illustration of how a disparity of interests and power in

industrial relations practically crystallised in the historical social fabric. The early

industrialisation and historic liberal institutional traditions in Britain have undoubtedly

affected the development of the labour movement in a general comparison with other

European countries. The immanent political prejudice against organised labour in British

society drew its strength from a 19th Century liberal discourse, from neo-classical laissez-

314 Polanyi. The Great Transformation. p 75. 315 Offe, C; Wiesenthal, H. “Two Logics of Collective Action” in Offe Disorganised Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics (Polity Press 1985). 316 Kettunen. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Partnership”. pp 32-33. 317 Thelen. “Review: Beyond Corporatism”. p 121.

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faire economic thought, and from ascendant bourgeois class interests. The perceived danger

to ‘freedom of contract’ and parliamentary sovereignty are just two examples of how

associated labour posed a potential threat to the whiggish principles of 19th Century British

political culture. Although labour movements generally came of age toward the end of the

century, in the putative ‘second industrial revolution’, the seeds of British industrial culture

had been gestating for decades prior to this.

Britain’s early industrialisation (1780-1830), in parenthesis to the oppressive post-

Napoleonic restoration of Europe’s monarchies, had provided a legacy already

unfavourable to organised labour. Common Law traditions gradually compiled a growing

body of legislation that pre-dated the rise of seriously organised labour power and so

naturally came to favour the interests of capital from its years of hegemonic consolidation.

By the end of the 19th Century this weighty canon of anti-union legal precedents left the

labour movement little legal room to manoeuvre. The consequences were a greater

temptation to turn to extra-legal remedies and a growing propensity toward a mentality of

conflict, free-collective bargaining and a polarisation of perceived interests. The ease with

which anti-union legislation has been passed in the closing decades of the 20th Century, and

the inability to develop post-war institutions of industrial concertation in Britain, testifies to

the latent potential of this historical legacy.

In another axiomatic vein of 19th Century political culture, also of a whiggish bent,

attention might be drawn to social and political traditions of British elites “coming to terms

with emerging antagonistic groups” and co-opting them into a system thus tacitly endorsed

and politically neutralised.318 This oft idealised tradition of political informalism and

emphasis upon constitutional custom, norms, and precedent was further strengthened by the

landmark Trade Union Act (1871) which typically gave little positive codification of trades

unions’ status but rather preferred to re-enforce specific exemptions from prosecution and

legal penalties. By the 20th Century a culture of conflict was well rooted in British

industrial relations and trade unions came to recognise that their rights and strengths

resulted from what pressure they could assert themselves via the action of their

318 Crouch, C. Class Conflict and the Industrial Relations Crisis: Compromise and Corporatism in the Policies of the British State (Humanities Press 1977). p 25.

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memberships, not from government action or by reference to a positively defined legal

status. British trade unions became ‘schools of war’.319

It is interesting that this historic lack of any positive affirmation of the status of

labour, secured and enshrined in legislation, and the agenda-setting power of a liberal

discourse that filled the resultant vacuum in Britain, bears a striking likeness to the current

situation in the Social Dialogue. In the 1990s, bipartite agreements in the Social Dialogue

were signed only after an initial consultation by the Commission and not on the initiative of

the ‘social partners’, something which is not the case in the 2000s. This was because of the

disparity of the power position between management and labour at the European level.

Partly for the reasons mentioned above, labour lacks the bargaining power to get

management to the negotiating table in binding agreements on issues it considers

important.320 As to the employer side of the relationship, at the European level,

management does not seem to consider ‘softer’ non-binding norms or agreements

problematic and “only if management faces the risk of binding and more demanding

provisions will it have an incentive to negotiate with labour”.321 This has been called

‘bargaining in the shadow of the law’.322 On reflection this might well be true given the

opposing interests and unbalanced resources between the two parties.323

The weakness of employer and worker organisations at the European level can be

further explained by a certain logic of collective action. Assuming a certain degree of

‘rational choice’ amongst individuals, various forces militate against the continued integrity

of encompassing industrial organisations over time and promote the devolution of these

organisations into ‘narrow special-interest groups’.324 Opportunistic political

entrepreneurship can play on circumstantial internal divisions to further sectional interest;

free-riding is a persistent possibility especially in the undergrowth of large organisations;

potential cross-industry wage differentials form an ever-present temptation for splinter

unions or free-collective bargaining; and high levels of internal diplomacy and coercion are

necessary to contain these constant disintegrating tendencies. Such arguments have been 319 Hyman. Understanding European Trade Unionism. pp 1-3. 320 Smismans, S. “The European Social Dialogue in the Shadow of Hierarchy” (2008) 28:1, Journal of Public Policy. p 165. 321 Ibid. p 165. 322 Ibid. p 165. 323 Ibid. p 167. 324 Olson, M. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Harvard UP 1977).

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deemed reductivist, excessively empirical, and are thought to focus on policy at the expense

of “all determining social and economic structures”.325 However, in an ideological climate

not particularly favourable to industrial organisation in the market, these splintering forces

have a greater verisimilitude. Employer organisations have similar problems dictated by the

competitive imperatives of the profit motive. The point is that, even if both employers and

workers were affected by the disintegrating tendencies of organised action, labour will be

placed at a greater disadvantage given the disparity of the atomic worker-employer

relationship that has been discussed above, which lies at the heart of the employment

‘contract’ and of the market mechanism.

Both the disparity and the potential disintegration of industrial organisations at the

European level bode ill for the Social Dialogue’s claims to inclusive and consensual

decision-making. The promotion of OMCs, the development of the ‘softer’ Social Dialogue

in the 2000s, and the lack of positive legal or institutional affirmation of labour status in the

theory of communicative action suggests that the power of discourse to historically shape

the worker-employer relationship to the agenda of management is a very real possibility.

The “problem-solving” and “pragmatic” orientation of the Social Dialogue, fêted as the

solution to the ‘problems’ of conflict, removes the labour-capital relation from its wider

theoretical and historical setting and prevents critique by focusing attention on the micro

and on the immediate. ‘Ideology’ is condemned as being partial, delusional and counter-

productive which, once again, is predicated on the ‘negative’ notion of the possibility of

there being an ideologically neutral position which also connotates the self-regulating

market and the empirical natural law heritage that lies beneath.

History and critical ‘ideology’ are crucial if one is to analytically recognise the

actual disparity which is immanent to the very nature of the industrial relationship and then

to integrate an effective critique. Once this disparity is realised, then political conflict no

longer represents a breakdown or simply an ‘ideologised’ delusion, but rather a politics

which recognises that the interests of those participating in an industrial relation are not

necessarily all the same. Both positions are ideological, the question is which ideological

position positively engages in a critical understanding and recognises the role of ideology

325 Katzenstein. Small States in World Markets. p 16.

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and political conflict over the unquestioned priority of “employment success”, whatever

that term actually means.326

European Centre-Periphery Relations A second type of the politically asymmetric power relations in the European Social

Dialogue stems from national and regional variance. There are three interrelated elements

to these centre-periphery relations to which I would like to draw attention. Firstly, different

regions and nation-states have divergent experiences, historical trajectories, and cultural

pre-conditions to their industrial relations regimes and practices.327 Secondly, certain

nation-states, cultural groups, regions, bureaucracies, and languages have a privileged

proximity to EU discourse formation in industrial relations in a manner similar to the

agenda-setting dynamics treated above. Thirdly, across the national or regional linguistic

boundaries within Europe there are wide differences in how concepts are understood based

on varying historical semantics from region to region, nation to nation, and between

linguistic communities. The manner in which the Social Dialogue and Lisbon Strategy

attempt to establish broad, general, consensual, or inclusive processes of decision-making

actually serves to privilege some of these national and regional groups or traditions over

others, regardless of whether this is the intention, and in doing so they necessarily bring

those consensual claims into question. In relation to this issue of asymmetry I am going to

consider the case of Nordic specificity in particular.

When the European Commission communicates the belief that the Social Dialogue

“holds a crucial, unique position in the democratic governance of Europe” it makes certain

assumptions about the Dialogue’s general applicability outside of the context of its

origins.328 The foundation of the asymmetric relations treated in this chapter can be found

in the assumed universalistic principles that inform and motivate the vision of the Social

Dialogue as a means of democratic decision-making.

For instance, it is considered that “though the social dialogue can only flourish in a

democratic society, it can make an important contribution to transition to democracy”.329

326 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 12. 327 Hyman. “Trade Unions and the Politics of the European Social Model”. p 2. 328 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 6. 329 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 9.

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Globally, the Social Dialogue represents the latest version of a long line of Eurocentric

political-institutional models for ‘less developed’ societies to emulate on the road to

democratic beatitude. This line of thinking can be found, for example, in the European

Commission’s co-operative relations with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and

the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In these multilateral relations the Commission seeks

to promote universalist principles such as “fundamental social rights” at the most general

level.330 However, at the European level, the idea seems to be to promote the Social

Dialogue for its curative and politically educative capacity in the process of EU

enlargement. The Commission asserts the need for educative “measures of support” to

promote the Dialogue in the former Soviet states where such modes of decision-making as

the Social Dialogue are considered to be weak by Western European standards, but where

‘progress’ can nevertheless still be made.331 These universalistic assumptions show an

insensitivity toward the deeply varying historical, cultural, or geopolitical contexts in these

countries. The consequences of the generalisation of the Social Dialogue’s applicability are

uncertain, at best.

The most prosaic and obvious of these national variances are self-recognised in the

Social Dialogue and it is understood that “there is a wide range of industrial relations

models throughout Europe, each one reflecting the practices and traditions of an individual

Member State: the abundance thus accumulated must be taken into account at the European

level”.332 However, this recognition does not seem to extend any further into an account of

how such regional disparities are to be handled, other than by reference to some directives

which “contain provisions allowing the social partners to adapt rules so as to take account

of differences in national situations”.333 One does not find much beyond these vague

statements. Moreover, this quote reveals how the problem of regional variance has been

approached hitherto with relatively ‘hard’ ‘directives’, little is said of how the more recent

‘softer’ practices of the Social Dialogue and the OMCs will address the issue. Without

adequately accounting for these national and regional asymmetries, the credibility of the

consensual and inclusive claims of the Social Dialogue is further damaged.

330 Communication from the Commission: The European Social Dialogue. p 22. 331 Ibid. p 5. 332 Ibid. p 12. 333 Ibid. p 11.

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Beginning with the first element of European centre-periphery asymmetries

enumerated above, ‘regional variances in historical experiences and cultural traditions’, we

can say that within Western Europe one can discern qualitatively different welfare and

industrial relations regimes. This is not a novel idea. For instance, the most famous

classification of welfare regimes, and the one most commonly referred to, is that of Gøsta

Esping-Andersen, who distinguished three broad types of welfare regime: the Liberal

regimes, the Corporatist-Statist regimes, and the Social Democratic regimes.334 Though

these types of classification are highly contested and generalised, I am interested here more

in the principle of relatively coherent regional differences in industrial relations. A further

and more recent classification has come from Richard Hyman’s categorisation of trade

union traditions and, by implication, of industrial relations traditions more generally.335 In

his permutation, the three classifications correspond respectively to Business Unionism,

Christian-Democratic Unionism, and Social Democratic Unionism. It is the latter two that

concern us here as a means of demonstrating one particular example of asymmetry, that of

core ‘continental’ vs. peripheral Nordic industrial traditions and regimes, the former being

linked to Christian-Democratic traditions and the latter to Social Democratic.

To give a brief explanation, the Christian-Democratic traditions and the associated

Corporatist-Statist regimes, variably associated with Austria, Germany, Italy, and France

(to a lesser extent), have often been historically influenced by the Church, in opposition to

socialism, and are more closely associated with traditional family structures or ‘family

values’ and are placed in a broadly confessional and de-secularised catholic and ‘organic’

view of society. Here the family is a central institution in welfare provision and the state

intervenes to the extent that the family cannot service its members. Trade unions act as

vehicles for workers’ status driven by a demand for social justice and drive for forms of

social integration grown out of the social catholicism and functionalist/’organicist’ visions

of society over class-antagonism. This tradition has powerful normative roots established in

19th Century industrialisation in those countries. The welfare funding in these regimes takes

place through employee contributions to a greater extent than in the other regime types.

334 Esping-Andersen. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. 335 Hyman. Understanding European Trade Unionism. pp 1-3.

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In contrast to this, the Social Democratic regimes have been characterised by the

‘de-commodification’ of social rights, the funding of welfare through general taxation, and

by a social democratic ideology based upon secularised universalist principles realised

through pragmatic industrial and class compromise.336 Trade unions have generally acted as

interest organisations with labour market functions and have been more closely defined as

socialist unions rather than confessional unions. One must also remember that the formative

industrial relations period in the Nordic countries has been the early-mid 20th Century,

particularly in the interwar period, rather than the 19th Century.

It is my opinion that it is the Corporatist-Statist regime type, ‘Rhineland-

capitalism’, and the Christian-Democratic tradition of industrial relations and welfare

provision that predominates in the assumptions of the Social Dialogue, as it is this regime

type that most closely matches the ‘narrower’ mode of Social Dialogue that has been

characteristic throughout the later decades of the 20th Century and under the Delors

Commission. As the Social Dialogue therefore promotes this core industrial tradition at the

expense of those in the peripheral regions, the question that must be asked is, how does this

effect the consensual and inclusive claims made by the Dialogue.

An increasing amount of research interest is currently being shown in the historical

developments that might explain the regional differences between various European

welfare regimes and industrial relations.337 The result of this work is that such industrial

and political outcomes are reckoned to be less determined simply by policy, party,

production or ‘rationalising intellectuals’, than by regional and national socio-political

norms, cultural variables, and divergent historical experiences often with pre-industrial

roots.338 Here individuals are not positivistically simplified into ahistorical rational choice

agents who maximise and ‘rent-seek’, but are social and political creatures heavily

embedded within such normative contexts and historical horizons.339

336 Castles, F G. “Swedish Social Democracy: The Conditions of Success” (1975) 46:2, Political Quarterly. p 175; Kettunen, P. “A Return to the Figure of the Free Nordic Peasant” (1999) 42, Acta Sociologica. p 267. 337 Katzenstein. Small States in World Markets; Sørensen, Ø; Stråth, B. (eds). The Cultural Construction of Norden (Scandinavian UP); Sörensen, A B. “On Kings, Pietism and Rent-Seeking in Scandinavian Welfare States” (1998) 41, Acta Sociologica. 338 Trägårdh, L. “Statist Individualism: On the Culturality of the Nordic Welfare State” in The Cultural Construction of Norden. p 255. 339 Sörensen, A B. “On Kings, Pietism and Rent-Seeking in Scandinavian Welfare States” (1998) 41, Acta Sociologica. p 364.

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This means that although the small countries of Western Europe, of which the

Nordic countries make up a large number, have certain dynamic properties determined by

their size, geopolitical location, or functional niche, there are perhaps more significant

historical factors at work in terms of explanation of industrial outcomes. It is becoming

axiomatic that small states are more vulnerable to fluctuations on the world markets and so

political elites in those countries must become highly effective at adjusting to changing

economic circumstances.340 Nordic societies are small open economies, highly dependent

on exports, and very much exemplify the ‘national society’ with strong internal political

linkages. National economic interest has been easy to teach and learn. For example, in

Finland much social policy has been often subordinated to national economic exigencies.341

Given what will be said later of the close Nordic state-society relation, and of the ‘virtuous

circle’, the voluntary and informal coordination of conflicting objectives through

continuous bargaining between interest groups, state bureaucracies, and political parties has

been a common feature of Nordic industrial concertation.342

The point is then, how are these specificities to be explained. One can say that, aside

from such system-obsessed factors, the effective internal political adaptation to changing

international economic circumstances has been hitherto predicated on background

institutional and normative specificities which are particular to Nordic societies set in their

historical contexts. To ignore or confuse this historical and cultural-normative dimension

might very well result in culturally and socially incompatible European wide policies which

undermine the ability of Nordic countries to continue to adapt to domestic political

imperatives, hitherto so apparently successful.

Looking in more detail at recent studies of this historical dimension, it does seem

that the importance of early-modern Absolutism, the historic absence of feudal relations,

the establishment of the Lutheran ‘confessional state’, and the incidence of Pietist

revivalism have been granted pride of place in more recent explanations of Nordic

specificity in welfare regimes, industrial outcomes, and of national political parameters. For

instance, the importance that Lutheranism ascribed to the placing of education and care of

the poor under state auspices is considered to be an important development in the roots of

340 Katzenstein. Small States in World Markets. p 24. 341 Kettunen. “The Society of Virtuous Circles” . p 157. 342 Katzenstein. Small States in World Markets. p 32.

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the Nordic welfare state. The strong confessional presence of the Lutheran church has also

been complimented by a more disestablished ‘worldly asceticism’ characteristic of 18th

protestant Pietism and subsequent protestant movements.343 The historic legacy of this

pietistic Lutheranism has therefore been that actions are very much determined by

secularised behavioural norms of obedience based upon religious authority.344 When one

considers the ‘principle of universality’ at the core of the Nordic value system and an

arguably ‘homogeneous’ ethnic, social, and cultural fabric, characterised by decreasing

cultural space for pluralist subcultures in ‘civil society’ as one goes through the region from

west to east, it is not hard to understand how the ‘Good Life’ might well be the life of

normative conformity.345

In parenthesis to these early-modern religious influences, one might find that the

absence of feudalistic social relations and the longevity of strong absolutist royal

bureaucracies have historically resulted in coordinated service nobilities, a middle class

closely bound to the crown, and a widespread agricultural class of freeholding peasants. In

this scenario, agents of such absolutist confessional states have had great potential to work

through ‘Society’ as a conceptual mechanism for the pursuit of pragmatistically realised

Christian-Enlightenment principles.346 The supporting relationships and norms of

obedience have therefore been historically maintained not by military conscription or

vulgar political coercion, but by the sermon, in a regionally specific early-modern union of

crown and mitre.347 These are the broad contours of some of the oft-cited historical-cultural

specificities of the Nordic region that are relevant for contemporary Nordic political

organisation, socio-economic action, and industrial relations.

There are numerous potent objections to any dangerously simplified version of this

historical analysis. One must beware of generalising ‘Nordic’ historical experiences and

identities at the expense of the individual Nordic countries. There is a temptation toward

the romanticisation of certain agents and institutions (i.e. the image of the free-Nordic

peasant), and there are many versions of this analysis that often fall victim to the too tidy 343 Sörensen. “On Kings”. pp 367-368. 344 Ibid. p 365. 345 Stenius, H. “The Good Life is the Life of Conformity: The Impact of the Lutheran Tradition on Nordic Political Culture” in The Cultural Construction of Norden. pp 169-171. 346 Witoszek, N. “Fugitives From Utopia: The Scandinavian Enlightenment Reconsidered” in The Cultural Construction of Norden. pp 74-75. 347 Sörensen. “On Kings”. p 369.

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and formulaic teleological tendencies implicit in this ‘path-dependent’ approach.348

Likewise, one should not underestimate the importance of 20th Century political struggles

in the Nordic countries in effecting long-term industrial change, as in the case of Finland,

nor of the role of political parties, as in the case of the Social Democratic Party in Sweden.

Nevertheless, the point I wish to draw from this excursion into the North is that such

historical region specificities do have explanatory value and must be taken seriously in any

attempt to understand current regimes, practices, and structures beyond our present

obsession with social scientific and system theoretic models.

In light of the discussion of the concept of ‘Society’, it does seem that without a

contextualised sensitivity to such historical differences, and there seems little firm evidence

of such sensitivity, the Social Dialogue threatens implicitly to assert an ill-defined

industrial relations procedure upon more peripheral participants, whether national or

regional in its bid for “solidarity”, or in other words, ‘conformity’.349 The implication of all

this is that as the European Social Dialogue applies a single set of procedures, norms, and

regimes that are unwittingly representative of the core region of Europe, it does so in a

manner incompatible to peripheral regions, whose historic experiences, traditions and latent

political norms will implicitly resist and confuse attempts at coordination. There is always

the danger that “because industrial relations systems are nationally [or regionally]

embedded, economic internationalisation alters the preconditions for their functioning and

perhaps survival”.350 Furthermore, regardless of the eventuality of resistance, the

consequences of this can only be to damage the possibility of satisfying the Dialogue’s

essential validity claims, particularly of ‘Power Neutrality’ and ‘Ideal Role Taking’.

The closely related two elements of European asymmetric relations that I mentioned

above operate discursively and conceptually. The different historical experiences of regions

and their respective linguistic communities have also contributed to a divide in historical

semantics surrounding the state-society relation, industrial relations, and the wider political

field. Looking yet again at the Nordic societies, the semantics of many concepts might well

be shared within the Nordic region, but clearly differ from those of other European regions

348 Østergård, U. “The Geopolitics of Nordic Identity: From Composite States to Nation-State” in The Cultural Construction of Norden; Kettunen. “A Return to the Figure of the Free Nordic Peasant”. pp 260-262. 349 Hyman. “Trade Unions and the Politics of the European Social Model”. p 16. 350 Ibid. p 3.

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and linguistic groups, often the result of different historical experiences and languages

through which to express them:

“Paradoxically, in post-nation-states, in ‘a globalised world’ where the borders between nations are supposed to be of less importance, our words increasingly acquire meaning and context through contrasting our own experiences with those of others”.351 However, within these regions, though words may differ across a region’s internal

boundaries, there are shared key concepts. We can see that amongst the Nordic countries,

languages may differ from country to country, yet “they nevertheless look upon the world

in the same way. They share the same value system, rooted in common historical

experiences as part of a uniform Lutheran culture, where culture, state and church were

inseparable parts of a cohesive social structure”.352 It is important to identify key concepts

and analyse their varying usages without attempting to create common definitions, as the

Social Dialogue implicitly does, either by aiming to create ‘consensus’ over key concepts

or by falsely assuming a ‘concord’ over them.353 The outcome of such attempts is more

likely to induce passive ‘consent’, and all the connotations of subordination and disparity

that this word implies. Taking the example of Nordic societies, the Social Dialogue allows

certain key concepts that are semantically linked to certain ‘core’ European regions and

linguistic communities to take a privileged place in the decision-making discourse.

Consequently, key concepts which are alien to the context of Nordic societies go on to form

the basis for decision-making in the Social Dialogue thus placing ‘peripheral’ Nordic

societies at an implicit disadvantage in communicative action.

The core concept of the ‘social partners’, which pervades the Social Dialogue,

makes a good illustration of my point. One can see the great bearing of the concept in the

consensual claims of the Dialogue where “the mutual reconciliation of interests refers to the

commitment of social partners to identify common objectives and priorities so that they can

address current issues together”.354 We see in this apparently reasonable statement the

assumption that these ‘social partners’ do have common objectives and that these form the

basis for consensus. Now, though the Nordic region includes a number of different 351 Stenius, H. “We Have Cows in Finland Too”. Open Democracy, November 2001. p 2. 352 Ibid. p 3. 353 Ibid. pp 2, 4. 354 Ishikawa. “Key Features of National Social Dialogue”. p 11.

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countries and linguistic groups they do share a common history, to a rather high degree, and

therefore have a common understanding of how key concepts are apprehended and used,

situated in this common history, facilitated by a common set of geo-political experiences

and environmental conditions. In Nordic industrial relations, the participants have been

traditionally referred to as ‘labour market parties’. This semantic meaning persists even

across such a radically different language boundary as that of Swedish and Finnish, in

which ‘labour market parties’ are arbetsmarknadsparterna and työmarkkinaosapuolet

respectively. The common semantic understanding of the concept of ‘labour market parties’

comes from the somewhat shared Nordic experiences of industrial relations.

20th Century Nordic industrial relations have been heavily conditioned by inter-war

period class conflicts, and heavily class-oriented civil war in the case of Finland. The

Nordic ‘social democratic’ regimes seem to have been created from a pragmatic process of

conflict and compromise between antagonistic industrial classes often under the auspices of

facilitating Social Democratic parties (mainly in Sweden). These industrial and political

processes and outcomes have been characterised by a certain degree of rational, pragmatic

realisation of a universalising ideology in a common culture of Reformation-Enlightenment

principles of self-betterment, education, and social action – the so-called “Lutheran peasant

Enlightenment”.355 Two related principles are underpinning this historic vision: the

normalcy of wage-work and the universalist idea of social rights based on citizenship.356

In relation to the former of these principles, the Nordic concept of work has been

founded on the normative notions of work-as-a-duty and work-as-a-right, more in Sweden

and Finland than in the other Nordic societies, thus promoting work as a route to autonomy

and individual empowerment.357 The historic adjustment to the normalcy of wage-work and

to the socialisation of production has entailed the adoption of three ideological elements:

the ‘spirit of capitalism’, the utopia of socialism, and the idealised tradition of the peasant

as mentioned above. It should be clear from what has been said that it is the last of these

355 Sørensen, Ø; Stråth, B. “Introduction: The Cultural Construction of Norden” in The Cultural Construction of Norden. p 24. 356 Kettunen. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Partnership”. pp 36-37. 357 Kettunen. “A Return to the Figure of the Free Nordic Peasant”. p 265.

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three elements which is specific to the Nordic societies.358 The over-bearing use of the

concept of the ‘social-partners’ in all documents pertaining to the Social Dialogue not only

sets agendas but also illuminates how the ‘core’ regions of Europe are asymmetrically

placed to affect a marginalisation of regionally specific industrial relations stories, in this

case the Nordic story, and thus failing to live up to the validity claims of implicitly

consensual decision-making. Worse than this, the enforced spread of such culturally

incompatible concepts might serve to undermine existing concepts at the domestic level

with all the consequences that this entails.

In parallel to the asymmetric dynamic of the repetitive use of the ‘social partners’

concept, one can also see how the concept of ‘Society’ is understood, and has functioned, in

a way that is specific to the Nordic region.359 In historic Nordic discourses of ‘Society’,

there has persisted a characteristic proximity, almost synonymity of state and society in

perceived spheres of activity. In Nordic consciousness ‘Society’ has consisted of a two

sided moral relationship between individuals and the state. This proximity has allowed, not

the state to dominate civil society as in traditionally ‘liberal narratives’, but rather society to

dominate the state. In Norden, ‘Society’ has acted as a legitimising concept that provides

reflexive criteria for the state’s exercise of power, and a functional substitute for utopia or

God. This is something that the ‘Modern’ concept of ‘Society’ has done more generally, as

we have already covered in the chapter 3.2. In the specifically Nordic sense, ‘Society’ has

acted as a means of immanent critique for itself, providing normative standards for its own

criticism. The case of the Swedish notion of the folkhem (the People’s Home) illustrates the

most ideologically elaborated example of this reflexively normative set of standards which

are established by the extension of the concept of ‘Home’ out to the social level. This is a

concept with certain regional specificity in itself.

By combining this particularly Nordic understanding of ‘social partners’, industrial

relations traditions, and Nordic ‘Society’ we come to quite a coherent set of Nordic

cultural, social, and historical specificities. In conclusion I will just touch on the interesting

358 Kettunen, P. “Lönarbetet och den Nordiska Demokratin i Finland” in Kettunen, P; Rissanen, T. (eds.) Arbete och Nordisk Samhällsmodell (1995), Papers on Labour History IV: The Finnish Society for Labour History. pp 255-280. 359 Kettunen. “A Return to the Figure of the Free Nordic Peasant”. p 267.

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idea of what has been called the Nordic ‘Virtuous Circle’ of society.360 This Nordic idea

posits the existence of a virtuous circle, based on the close association of civil society and

state as mentioned above, institutionalised in the class compromises which began the Social

Democratic era in the 1930s. These class compromises are a manifestation of a virtuous

circle of economy, politics and ethics and secularised adaptations of the homogenising

power of the Lutheran tradition. Society and state are then a moral idea, a kind of ‘imagined

community’.361 Within the virtuous circle ‘Society’ is both subject and actor, has rights and

duties, goals and values. The inter-war industrial compromises were therefore not just

compromises but also declarations of efficiency, democracy, and solidarity as core values.

The idea of work as duty rather than right overrode all these values, especially in Finland,

as a concomitant of Lutheran ethics and the demanding natural conditions of Norden.

Gunnar Myrdal, the Swede who coined the ‘virtuous circle’ idea in the mid-20th Century,

criticised both the ‘metaphysical’ belief in the harmony of individual interests, and the idea

of a spontaneous equilibrium that is inherent to the self-regulating market mechanism in the

Market Society.362 Myrdal’s values of national society and the ‘us’, as subject of the

virtuous circle, cannot be defined by international competitiveness, the dominance of which

must be resisted in relation to the other aspects of the virtuous circle.

This implies that when social equality and solidarity fall out of the virtuous circle

leaving economic competitiveness alone, as I have claimed is increasingly the case with

adoption of the Social Dialogue, the virtuous circle so integral to the political ‘successes’ of

Nordic societies is endangered. In the Nordic countries “all good things have to form a

virtuous circle and only such things are good that can be placed in the virtuous circle of

society”.363 It does seem that the virtuous circle incorporates both the need for ‘habituation’

and the idea of political ‘embeddedness’ outlined by Polanyi and it resembles Hyman’s

‘Eternal Triangle’, which is constituted by the three directions in with trade unions and

industrial systems are always drawn (Market, Class, Society).364

I have tried to show, through these examples, how the attempts to standardise the

usage of certain key concepts in the Social Dialogue serves to “corral people into a chorus

360 Kettunen. “The Society of Virtuous Circles”. 361 Anderson, B. Imagined Communities (Verso 1991). 362 Kettunen. “The Society of Virtuous Circles”. p 160. 363 Kettunen. “The Society of Virtuous Circles”. pp 170-171. 364 Hyman. Understanding European Trade Unionism. pp 3-5.

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of approval for common values, which are taken for granted with little or no room for

questioning [them]” in socio-economic decision-making.365 The dominating connotation of

the ‘social partner’ is that of parity of interests and powers, tacit endorsement, shared

general aims, shared norms, and automatic consensus. The indiscriminate use of such a

concept as the ‘social partner’ not only errs in its false assumption of uniformity, but also

threatens to exert an asymmetric power relation across Europe’s internal boundaries giving

little thought to the idea that:

“a sensible, civic-minded European debate requires that we share key concepts and symbols, but at

the same time acknowledge separate local, regional, social and gender experiences. It must aspire to identifying key concepts and analysing their different usages without trying to arrive at common definitions”.366 The consequence, otherwise, might be ‘consent’, but not ‘consensus’.

365 Stenius. “We Have Cows in Finland Too”. p 4. 366 Ibid. p 5.

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4. Conclusion

As the thesis has been more of a continuous exploration of ideas, there is less need

for a lengthy conclusion at the end, but more of a summing up. Having come to the end of

the thesis I am now in a position to recapitulate some of the conclusions made during the

analysis in light of the research questions outlined in the first chapter.

We have seen how words carry, not just referential meaning, but force and power to

shape discourses and to set unrecognised agendas. The language used in the Commission’s

presentation of the Social Dialogue has demonstrated this potential facet of language quite

clearly and, in this case, the agenda which has been set is that of the competitive

imperatives of the Lisbon Strategy. Without any apparent recognition of this, and under the

false impression that the Social Dialogue provides an unquestionably open and neutral

environment for socio-economic decision-making, the demands of the Social Policy

Agenda threaten, through the Social Dialogue, merely to establish passive ‘consent’ to its

objectives rather than encourage the creation of active ‘consensus’ based upon the

recognition of possible divergences in interests and goals amongst industrial participants.

I have also tried to show how language, through a theory of speech acts, can

provide the normative basis for an intersubjective theory of ‘consensual’ decision-making

secured in an ‘ideal speech situation’ from Habermas’ theory of communicative action, and

that the Social Dialogue represents this situation in practice. However, though I would be

cautious about making such a categorical statement about such a man, it seems that

Habermas fails to provide a practical procedure that is adequately defended against forms

of political domination and so, in his failure to deal with power relations, he actually sets up

an ideal mechanism for broader political and social integration and assimilation into the

‘one-dimensional society’. In our particular case, the deficits of Habermas’ theory seem to

lead to a failure to effectively critique the Social Dialogue. Behind this failure seems to lie

the impression that Habermas is substantially more optimistic and uncritical about

Modernity than both Max Weber and his earlier predecessors in the Frankfurt School, such

as Horkheimer and Adorno. I think that, as might be seen from the lengthy treatment in

chapter 2.3, the earlier critical theorists can provide a potentially stronger dialectic critique

113

that is less of a normative grand theory and more relevant to a decentred understanding of

power, such as I have outlined in my criticisms of the Social Dialogue.367

The benefit of a conceptual approach to research comes from how concepts can

synthesise the epistemological traditions of rationalist-idealism and material-empiricism

and therefore supply a credible means of comprehending phenomena. In addition to this,

the historically sensitive treatment of concepts in this thesis has hopefully highlighted the

significance of changing contexts, not only for the linguistic determination of meaning, but

also in order to see how changing historical circumstances affect the operation of concepts

as epistemological media. For instance, if changing historical contexts alter the matrices of

semantic meaning associated with the concept of ‘Society’, how can that concept continue

to mediate between the thinking subject and the external world in the manner to which we

are accustomed. As we retreat from ‘Society’, and all its connotations of ‘modern’, rational,

and politically purposive action, we also retreat from those ways of acting that are

dependent upon it. The understanding of ‘Society’ presented in the Social Dialogue evinces

no recognition of this and one might suppose that as the introduction of ever broadening,

softening, and more amorphous modes of policy coordination and communication continue

to erode the assumptions and categories of ‘Society’, the Commission will still insist on

envisaging ‘Society’ as an effective medium to implement purposive change. The result of

this is that the attempt to implement policies through a concept which is increasingly

defunct in our historical context will probably be ineffective in achieving its goals of being

democratic, consensual, and political.

A more likely hypothesis is that, in the absence of a potent concept capable of

realising purposive political action, it is less likely that we will be able to shape our futures

and more likely that we ourselves shall be fashioned by the integrating and colonising

tendencies of a highly capitalised global economy driven by the imperatives of international

competition. By establishing the Lisbon Strategy as a set of priorities for action we seem to

think that we are engaging in a ‘politics’, but this is a view of politics that claims conflict to

be an evil, that we Europeans all have the same set of ultimate goals and interests, and that

a ‘successful’ realisation of the Lisbon objectives will mean that every one is a winner.

Such wishful thinking could hardly be described as a healthy and active politics.

367 Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (1980). p 89.

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On the contrary, the view of the Social Dialogue and the Lisbon Strategy held by

the EU institutions maintains the implicit attitude to political activity characteristic of our

current ‘air du temps’ explained at the outset of this work. Politics is an inconvenience, a

counter-productive break upon the almightly need to compete internationally. Until we

learn to express our political visions in a way that is both coherent and apposite to our

historical context, and until we develop the conceptual categories necessary to do this, the

impersonal forces of the market shall continue to determine our fate.

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