Lecture delivered on the occasion of the award of the Amalfi Prize to the author for The Global Age in Amalfi, Italy

30th May, 1998

Martin Albrow

The future of Europe concerns us all here because we gather in the name of Europe. We invoke it as the frame for our deliberations even when its not the focus of our concerns. If we feel discomfort at Europe's exposure to global risk it is because we have to direct attention to what we took previously for granted.

The name `Europe', even only as the name, is important for us, in titles of journals, conferences, web searches or prizes. Merely to consider such texts in which `Europe' appears is sufficient to take us into the cultural theory of discourse and narratives which has been one of the most exciting intellectual developments in our time.

My impression is that this theory has yet to make an impact on people who work directly for the institutions of Europe. When it does it can help to bring Europe into better focus for everyone's benefit. For the shaping of Europe is discursive practice as much as political and economic project.

Not that Europe is in bad shape. It is hardly fashionable in the social sciences to praise achievements, certainly not those of politicians, business people, or the military. But look back to 1945 and we might consider what has been achieved in our time to be astonishing.

Of course a vast number of people have contributed to Europe as it is today, including social scientists. But it does tend to fall to us to be the professional Jeremiahs, always looking at the downside. So even if we concede that Europe is in not too bad a condition at the moment we can always supply off-the peg-doom scenarios.

There are at least four deeply depressing future images of Europe in common circulation at the moment. The first has been known for some time as Eurosclerosis. This expresses a negative attitude to the development of rules and procedures with Europe-wide validity. It is mainly an extension of a long tradition of opposition to bureaucracy and standardization, a projection from nation-state experience to Europe as a whole.

In fact opponents of bureaucracy have long sought to provoke wider discussion on the future of Europe by suggesting that its spirit belongs more to ancient Egypt or to China. For Nietzsche China was synonymous with cultural ossification.

At the present time lower rates of economic growth in Europe are cited as confirming evidence of corporatist senility.

In contrast a second scenario sees European bureaucracy as the Juggernaut. Still impersonal, disregarding the people, it has become the runaway machine. Unending economic growth is proof that it is out of control. Again the civilizational reference is interesting. There is a long pedigree to this image of the negative side of modernity, Europe's very own product. But as with Chinese ossification there is an implied civilizational contrast. The Indian imagery expresses the sense that European identity is not comfortable with this mechanistic frame and needs to find its mystic source.

The struggle to liberate this repressed identity provides the third doom laden scenario. In this case the restructuring of European institutions stress the boundaries which contained old conflicts and releases identities which burst out with primordial force especially as nationalism, but also even as localism. Far from a modern future, postmodern disintegration beckons. The civilizational contrast is now assumed to be with our own primitive origins.

Then finally there is the most general conflict of civilizations: Europe against all the rest, being overwhelmed by globalization. This is hubris, where the rest of the world repays us for our arrogance by adopting our own methods and outlook and sweeps us aside. Whether entering as immigrants or as cheap competitors from afar foreign peoples threaten the end of Europe.

There may be other negative scenarios around but these go to the heart of constituting Europe in world-historical narrative. For what else are we doing if we talk about the future of Europe unless it is trying to get hold of the direction of the history of our own time?

Now it is against this background that we should evaluate the chances of success for a strategy for Europe. We may borrow the language of business and call these doom-laden pictures `scenarios' but they are really drawn from the narrative repertoire of our time, which is public, non-technical and the means whereby we make sense of the direction of events.

There was a time, certainly in the nineteenth century and for some even today, when these stories represented the working our of laws. The juggernaut image combined with an analysis of economic crises the limits to growth could generate a forecast of the collapse of capitalism or industrial society.

But increasingly we separate analysis from narrative. I think one of the reasons for the current popularity of Karl Polanyi's work on the `great transforamtion' is precisely his insistence that we could not derive the character of society from an analytical model of market economics and that historical transformation was both more comprehensive and open for the future than anything that could be imagined by economics.

This means that we are becoming used to the idea that analytical accounts of the economy and tracking the future course of history are two very different operations. The idea that the latter could be derived from the former was the prejudice of what we can now view as old modern theory, attacked so vigorously in mid-century by Karl Popper.

But Popper we can now see as a late-modern, along with the postmodernist Lyotard, because they denied our need for world-historical narrative, even as they affirmed its difference from science. The fact that there are a variety of competing narratives today is no more justification for denying their importance for public discourse than the diversity of morals is a reason for rejecting morality.

The popularity of global scenarios is ample evidence for the continuing demand to locate ourselves in a grand narrative. At the same time the sheer pessimism of our four alternative dooms suggests more than a trace of both high and late modernity. The pervading sense of decay and disintegration owes as much historically to a belief in predestination as it does to scientific analysis.

Now I am not saying that there is never any reason for pessimism. The problem is we can always find reasons for it and if that is only what we seek, then this says something about us and not the world. If as social scientists we are going to offer something better than oracles or astrologers we need a realistic rather than a pessimistic attitude.

The old pessimism was based in the modern fact value distinction, the facts always fall short of the values. Our realism today is based on the distinction between the actual and the potential. We narrate the actuality of our time, the special configurations of circumstances which make it unique, from our varying personal standpoints. Our sciences provide the analyses and diagnoses which allow us to imagine alternative scenarios for the future and to determine our own potential.

I wrote The Global Age for several reasons. One of the most important was to propose that we had to grasp our own time in its unique configuration and therefore in contrast to other times and places, but at the same time to uphold the essential requirement for effective analysis that we seek to identify truths which cross times, places and cultures.

It therefore seeks to steer a course between theoretical dogmatism, which claims to have found the final truth and radical relativism, which treats all opinions as equally valid. These are the besetting sins of the academy which give the whole of our vocation a bad name with the wider public. The common sense of practical people knows that you cannot take theory too far and that there are some values you have to defend.

The actuality of our time I have sought to grasp by penetrating the pervasive discourse of globality. This I treat as much more than hype or buzzword. The language of the global plainly occupies not just the advertisers mind-set but also the politician's strategic thinking and the imagination of our counter-cultures. The reference in that language to the globe connotes a shift in the frame of contemporary experience which is as fundamental as the shift which ushered in the period of modern European history.

This means for me that the global is not just an extension or a consequence of the modern, but sits across its path transversally as an obstacle and even in some cases as a reversal, but in any event as a dispersal, a decentering and a delinkage. The flow of history which modernity assumed it could control or at least steer, is stemmed by globality. Like the Ganges or the Nile the deep and powerful mainstream finishes in a widening delta of meandering currents.

But we can make sense of this shift, or rupture or transformation, although extraordinarily the state seeks to spend millions of euros on great research programmes around iconic terms like development, integration and transformation while preserving from enquiry the very mystery of the words themselves, their meanings.

We make sense of these transformations by following the careers of the great transhistorical concepts as they lodge themselves and find their place in the new circumstances. In The Global Age I have paid most attention to the great concepts of state, society, and citizenship arguing that each possesses a meaning which crosses millennia and civilizations, but that their concrete form in the Global Age is so different from that envisaged in old modernity that we have to reformulate them. In doing so we perform an analytical function and clarify the special nature of the age in which we live.

So in the case of the state I have argued that its reality as the organised enforcement of a public good means that it no longer exists simply as nation-state. Indeed the nation-state is a historically limited form of the state which is being replaced by a world and even global state. The arguement is not simply logical. It rests on the observation of the activities of state officials worldwide.

In the case of citizenship I argue that the multiplicity of levels of state organization, from local to global and the continual process of the rationalization of daily activities of general publics so that they are incorporated into systems, which they critically both monitor and stimulate, means that the state is being performed by the citizen. This performative citizenship is different qualitatively from the ancient participative, Aristotelian form, and also from the modern rights and duties form.

At the same time I would not claim that this is the first time this notion as arisen. It is potentially intuitable in any society. For Adam Ferguson in 1767 `a right to do justice and to do good is competent to every individual' and the only limit on this is power.

Thirdly as far as society is concerned I argue that the global reference point makes us critically aware of the process of association and reproduction of social relations outwith the frame of the nation-state. This is the liberation of society from the nation-state. Some might see it as the resassertion of civil society, but that notion expresses too much its origins in the eighteenth century. For me it is the reassertion of society as such.

Well, in brief, is as one of my friendlier reveiwers has said, this is not a study of The Global Age but only of a prolegomenon to the Global Age. He is right because my position is that the implications of these shifts requires a renewal of theoretical and empirical work across the whole range of our sciences. How could one person possibly execute a whole paradigm?

On the other hand it is entirely reasonable to ask me to apply these ideas. If they cannot prove their use even in one instance then we should not waste our time with them. So very briefly today I want to suggest that they are useful in the context of Europe, precisely because they provide us with a distance from any of the scenarios which are currently on offer.

There are three features of the Global Age which are particularly relevant to the case of Europe. I will outline them and then consider their implications for what is often thought of as the key problem of the moment, the question of democratic legimitacy.

The three I will describe as

1. The internationalization of technical systems

2. The floating of nationality

3. The liberation of territorial locality

The first is a particular source of agony for advocates of a strong Europe. Without a doubt the main thrust of the work of the European Commission is to create the single market, systems for economic transactions, production standards, customer protection, fair competition across Europe. In a way the beginning of the Euro will be the most dramatic expression of that thrust and the greatest success to date.

So why do I say that this is a source of agony? For two reasons.

The first is that the process of standardization itself, by its own logic springs the boundaries of Europe. The search for rational standards, which are technically robust brings with it the requirement that they should fit international standards. There is no point in having standards of air safety simply over Europe. Indeed they are contradiction in terms. Only worldwide standards guarantee that flights over Europe will be flown by competent pilots from anywhere. So standardization involves European officials in constant discussion and negotiation with their counterparts in key agencies in the United Nations, NAFTA, WTO and so on, as well as with the officials of member countries.

The second is that standardization is also chaotic, namely it does not proceed simply from one centre. Paradoxically centralized imposition and control of standards is defective in principle. Neither the requisite knowledge nor power is available. Witness the failure of the Soviet system and the problems of Microsoft.

Standardization works best through the development of multilateral negotiation and accord, in other words through the generation of norms, as a sociologist would understand this process. Of course monitoring and control of breaches then becomes a vital function. But we should never confuse that with the origin of the norms, which arise out of the pragmatic accommodation betweeen the conflicting requirements of separate and competing agencies.

In the case of Europe we are dealing with a multi-centred set of agencies, working towards what many call `integration', but which is more reasonably understood as the development of common standards, which rather than separating Europe from the rest of the world, effectively reduce that separation.

A vivid example of this is the establishment of the Euro. The Commission in Brussels put in preparatory work but most came from the European Monetary Institute in Frankfurt, and the negotiations up to the Brussels Ministerial Council were conducted by the Monetary Committee of the Council of Finance Ministers. They were approved by the European Parliament. The Commission, the Council, the Institute, the Parliament are all independent and none of them are sovereign. Between them they have created what will be a world-wide medium of exchange.

Europe has no central directing agency. We have no sovereign European body. We have the Treaties and the European Court and the Court of Auditors in Luxemburg but they are not sovereign. This is a far cry from the nation-state, and `ever closer Union' will not produce that. Many imagine that this will be achieved by greater `integration' and that this means greater central control in the fashion of older nation-states. But if my sociological account of the formation of norms is correct then the current focus on standardization will never achieve that.

The agonies of those who get themselves locked into a debate about the future of Europe as a super-state arise out of their attachment to a language of the nation-state which belongs to the past. If learning a language is difficult, unlearning one is even more so. The European Union is a kind of state, but a new kind, such as we have never before experienced. It is not sovereign, it is not based on a nation, its territory has no continuous land boundary, and it has no single centre of authority. But it exists, more or less imperfect, like any human construction.

Which brings me to my second feature of Europe in the Global Age. This is the floating of nationality. The `nation-state' was a figure of speech which expressed the programme of the modernising Western sovereign states in the emerging international system of the nineteenth century. Most of the so-called nation states of the contemporary world are not based on single nations. Only a minority of European ones are: contrast the Netherlands at one extreme and Spain and Britain at the other.

Nationality and citizenship are not the same thing. The fact that we now have citizenship of the European Union does not create European nationality, any more than being a citizen of Paris makes a Parisian nationality. One of the accompaniments of globalization has been the acknowledgement of the nation as a cultural force which transcends state boundaries. We express this when we invoke `the peoples of Europe' or the `peoples of the world' and there is a general recognition that nations, which far outnumber nation-states can never hope to achieve the sovereignty which so called nation-states had.

But conversely, nation-states now no longer expect to moblise the nation as once they did. State sponsored nationalism has given way to multi-culturalism to the extent that sovereign states increasingly admit to the rights of ethnic minorities.

In other words there is a growing disjunction between state and nation, between sentimental attachment to a national identity acquired at birth and a rational commitment to working for a public good. Foreigners can also be good citizens.

I call this the `floating of nationality' because once the nation is recognised as distinct from the state so the quality of belonging to the nation is no longer controlled and like any other cultural resource may move freely in the world, as it does in the arts, sport, entertainment, business even. The symbols of the nation are available in a global cultural field and far from disappearing down a homogenizing mixing machine they acquire a new sharpness and distinctiveness contrasted with the standardized systems the state administers.

To this extent the new Europe as a new focus for sentiment maintains a cultural identity with difficulty. For cultural globalization does not provide it with the symbols of common experience which nations possess. It enhances old identities distinct from statehood, but the new European Union is statehood above all else, a product of responsible statesmanship, neither business enterprise nor land of our fathers.

Nationality floats above land and sea and this brings me to my third key feature of Europe in the Global Age. The delinkage of nation and state is also one of the bases for the new autonomy of locality. The territorial division of the world between nation states was mirrored in modernity within nation-states which produced a micro-order of territorial jurisdictions. In the language of old modernity `local' was territorial and contrasted with central forms of government. `Local' versus `global' implies a different field altogether.

Much of the arguments in globalization theory surround how we can conceptualise local/global relations when the globe enters into the local. There was no doubt in old local versus central government arguments that if the central entered the local that was the end of the local. But now we effectively see that the global entering the local actually differentiates the local, even produces it. That follows from the fact that the global is itself without centre and its relations with localities are infinitely various.

But this effectively means not only the separation of the local from its dependence on centres, but also its relative autonomy even from its immediate neighbours. Local geographical areas now seem to take on a character which is derived from forces both out of state control and far distant in their origin. Governments are continually trying to catch up on local changes; the economic hot spots of the world arise almost accidentally.

The liberation of the locality is a feature of the contemporary transformation which attracts far less attention than the activity of multi-nationals but is equally far reaching in its consequences for the new Europe. It is a counterweight to nation-state definitions of European interest and Brussels often looks to it as an ally as it struggles to maintain its own autonomy vis-a-vis governments. But it too is double edged. The new localities in their globality are as independent of Brussels as they are of Rome or Paris.

Now none of these features of contemporary Europe, the internationalization of systems, the floating of nationality and the liberation of locality, has any clear relationship to democracy. It is for that reason that very often the source of Europe's failure to become a focus for its citizens is diagnosed as democratic deficit.

But here the diagnosis is part of the problem, namely it depends on a view of the nation-state which focusses on representative democracy as the key element binding the people to a centre. But it is precisely that which is in decline, not just in Europe but in the United States and everywhere in which the three processes are at work.

Put at its crudest why when the nation-state no longer calls on its citizens to serve collective causes, in particular in fighting wars, should they treat its demands as more important than those of nation, locality or system? People experience in daily life that increasingly the real issues which affect them are outside nation-state control.

For none of the processes I am describing is an intended one, a project in the sense of a controlled pursuit of an end. For although standardization is intended it happens not as was planned; although the nation fires the imagination it has no direction; the locality pulses with a vitality which originates from outside community organization.

The processes I describe are facticities, outcomes of social relations which go beyond the associational and communal activities of individuals and yet which they seek to shape and control through those activities. The residents' associations, mutual aid groups, voluntary service associations, special interest groups of all kinds react to and seek to turn these impersonal frames of social relations to human advantage. By comparison the older groups of industrial society, trade unions, employers associations and political parties look increasingly like relics of the past.

If we talk about democracy we are concerned with the formation of collective will. We have associated this in the Modern Age with the nation-state, and its characteristic form of democracy has been representation by electing the members of a state assembly of some kind, with or without a leader elected by universal suffrage.

The salience of this kind of democracy for electors depends on there being issues on which collective decision is appropriate. For the moment the persistence of large scale state systems which require taxation is sufficient to retain what interest there is. But a ballot every five years or so hardly guarantees democratic control over taxation levels which appear largely as the outcome of purely technical decisions. If there is a collective will it moves so slowly and within such constraints that it escapes the attention of most citizens.

What they do notice are those processes which appear to elude collective decision making, the qualities of neighbourhoods, the fates of their own people, however defined, and whether systems work. In this respect everyday social relations appear to escape collective control.

This is not the point to elaborate a theory of democracy for the Global Age, but it is necessary to point out that collaborative and participatory decision making, not dependent on representation, is a genuine determination of the collective will. What, following Habermas, John Dryzeck has called discursive democracy, is a notable addition to our way of thinking about new political institutions appropriate to our time. We should not decry the continuous negotiations which take place between the multiplicity of agencies and associations in the new Europe. These include officials, but also the so-called social partners, and representatives of ethnic, religious, regional, age and gender interests.

The other point I would make is that the Modern Age emphasised representation as the bottom up balance to top down government. Now our representatives need to be brought back in touch with those who elect them, not every five years, but on the basis of answerability, delegation, and mandates. These are powerful methods of local control which the centralising state long ago dismantled, but they have a place in any serious attempt to reform democratic insitutions. For the liberation of locality has not yet empowered the people who live and work there. They only have the freedom to walk unprotected through the irradiated fields of globality.

Nothing of what I have said about democratic reform in the new Europe suggests the creation of a new nation-state, nor does it propose any new pan-European institutions. Indeed none exist at the moment. Of the 15 European Union states, 11 have joined the new currency. 6 states are being considered for possible membership of the Union. 31 European states are outside. One state outside the conventional definition of European territory, namely Turkey, has applied to join. Two states within Western Europe have decided not to join the Union, Norway and Switzerland.

So when we talk about Europe in the Global Age to what do we refer? Is it a state, a nation, a territory, a culture, a common experience, a trading organization, a society. Well there are bits of all of these to which we allude when we refer to Europe. Contextually we normally make it clear on any particular occasion, but in general Europe figures in our language in a diverse, multi-faceted way.

For that reason we might if we are simply hard-headed scientists rule out the use of the term Europe altogether as being too ambiguous and tied to the everyday language to make it a fit and proper topic for our concern. That way leads us to scholarly and scientific irrelevance.

For Europe in everyday discourse is an actuality. Does this mean we have therefore to acknowledge a fault in the contemporary world so that language can no longer be used with clarity and sense? Well we must reject that too, perhaps a caricature of the postmodern imagination. For there is no new dissolution of reality in what I have depicted.

Indeed we are faced with the problem which historians and interpreters of the time have always faced, namely how to grasp the nature of the largest agencies in human history, whether we call them peoples, or nations, or civilizations. The Greeks and others have given them the names of Gods, for good reason it seems to me, because they have each their unique shape and move in mysterious ways.

It is not the temper of our times to view Europe as the virgin carried off by Zeus in the form of a bull. We prefer to acknowledge Europe as essentially human, but in relations with nature, the cosmos and other human beings. It is therefore no more easily definable than it was in Herodotus' time.

It is human product in the sense that any one household, hospital, church, town, army or factory is a human product each with its own interesting and peculiar shape, movement and mood. That makes them all more than just societies, because they are involved in intricate relations with materials, ideas, machines and buildings. We may very well speak though of domestic, religious, urban society as a facet of their actuality.

Bruno Latour calls them hybrids. This strikes me as a rather inadequate term for these resting places in humanity's Odyssey but it is certainly difficult to find a name for such diversity. I am inclined to `human collectivities' precisely to foreground the human in them. Europe is one of the grander ones of these, and for 2500 years has appeared in the self-report we call history. It is a unique configuration unlike any other, and engaged now in an epic encounter with global forces.

Within Europe the European Union is a kind of state but, compared with the nation-state is polycentric, open, ragged at the edges, and porous. The nation-state is by contrast a lattice, with clear boundaries, impervious to the outside, closer to Max Weber's image of the iron structure from which our world has escaped.

As for European society and economy this extends far further than the Union and is indeed the mainspring for the enlargement of the Union beyond the 15 states. That may be obvious in the affirmation of a free market. But to the extent that the Rome treaty made a commitment to ever closer union, in invoking principles of co-operation, it transcended nation-state boundaries and released society from their sovereign control. We are talking about an expanding society, not a new nation-state.

To this extent and contrary to much received opinion there is an elective affinity between the creation of a new Europe and what more generally is called globalization which is more important for the future than the constitutional arrangements enshrined in the Treaties.

For us to be able to appreciate the qualities of Europe in its contemporary transformation we need to escape from the set opinions of the immediate past and recognise it for what it is becoming, not for what we have failed to make it. It is certainly becoming much more than any project the past conceived. To this extent it belongs to the Global Age rather than the Modern which preceded it.