When Culture Becomes Politics. Thomas Pedersen

– the scepticism that constitutes one of the key features of Europeanness.

Some post-modernists like Baudrillard have argued that the USA is the quintessential post-modernist nation; that “there is only simulation” in the USA.⁴³ While this is an interesting observation – and one should perhaps add that if this is the case it is in part due to the French export of postmodernism to the USA – on Euro-American differences, it is certainly only a half truth. As always with post-modernists, the evidence is impressionistic, and Baudrillard is silent on the power of religion in the USA and does not appear to have come across examples of the personal Christianity that is one of the hallmarks of the modern USA.

Yet, the key weakness in post-modernism is that the experience and existence of the acting subject is obscured by post-modernist emphasis on the textual interplay of meaning.⁴⁴

      While post-modernists typically define identity in terms of texts and language, integrism defines personal identity in terms of duration, life-projects, character and chosen value-structure. Thus the Self is assumed to be coherent and potentially autonomous. Integrism conceives human beings as historical beings, who construct an extended Self on the basis of personal memory. This permits us to conceive of historical continuity and unified identities in the absence of regulating structures. Finally, Integrism regards Man as a cultural being with certain innate, non-rational needs. It follows that integrism is not incompatible with the expectation that citizens will uphold certain cultural traditions.

The integrist approach is also at variance with cultural theory in political science in its influential, institutionalist vintage, although integrism shares with cultural theory the view that … “the boundary line between the political and the non-political is not self-evident” and that political science ought to try to incorporate a theory of cultural action in its theoretical universe.⁴⁵

To talk about cultural action takes us away from the unhelpful notion that “solidarities” are institutional.⁴⁶ Obviously, the institutional conception of solidarity is convenient for power-holders, but this does not make it a reliable guide as to how society functions. The integrist view has other implications. From this perspective the concept of political culture needs to be re-defined in terms of a bundle of individual orientations towards politics. As we have seen, it may be useful to introduce the term individual life-projects. At the aggregate level these life-projects amount to converging ways of life. This kind of thinking makes political culture less predictable but also deprives it of the vagueness and inertia characterizing the more structural and institutionalist theories of political culture. From an integrist point of view it becomes easier to understand for example, why Central and Eastern Europeans could suddenly within a span of 10 years shed the legacy of decades, not to say centuries of tyranny and authoritarianism.

      Integrism prefers the concepts of “duration”, “life-projects” and “ways of life” to the more structural concept of political culture. This is because once we talk about ways of life, we as citizens rediscover our freedom of action. We rediscover the fact that what we normally see as the Community or the Culture with capital Cs, are in actual fact just a unique aggregation or totality of individual ways of life, an aggregation of personal identities. To understand how seemingly uniform ways of life may nevertheless sometimes appear we need to examine the role of exemplary ways of life and the role of cultural leadership and cultural entrepreneurship. Thus Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip that “there is no such thing as Community – there are only individuals” here acquires a new and hopefully more adequate and less selfish meaning.

      To emphasize Man’s immaterial needs and unique potential is not tantamount to assuming an ever-present selflessness. Rather the idea is that the Self discovers or internalizes the capacity for social action. It is interesting that even Adam Smith, famous for his theory about the cold logic of market forces, recognized that altruism broadly conceived was a fundamental feature of Mankind. More specifically, he posited that man has a capacity for showing sympathy. How this was to be reconciled with his notion of economic man and the role of market forces remains unclear. In Germany there is even a scientific literature on the so called “Adam Smith problem” – which refers to the question to what extent Adam Smith contradicted himself in both claiming that Man is social and asocial. Significantly, Adam Smith’s discussion with himself demonstrates, how exceedingly difficult it is to uphold the purely utilitarian conception of Political Man.

Let us for a moment return to Ronald Inglehart’s observations regarding the interrelationship between post-materialist values and support for the EU and regarding the prevalence of post-materialist values within the young generations. His theory constitutes a typical example of holistic, sociological research. It generalizes on the basis of holistic concepts such as education and generational values. Inglehart’s theory has been shown to contain serious short-comings: Janssen’s test showed that … “apart from the role that skills appear to play in the formation of attitudes, the theory … appeared of little use in describing and explaining changes in public support for European integration”.⁴⁷ And even the result regarding the role of skills can be questioned: First, it may be a spurious relationship, since the most skilled EU citizens may also be the ones who profit most from EU-actions. As Janssen points out one of the fundamental problems with Inglehart’s theory is his rather static image of the EU as fitting primarily post-materialist needs. EU integration in practice has been shown to be very materialistic and guided by low economic goals.⁴⁸ Secondly, an impressionistic case approach indicates problems with this hypothesis. Thus in one of the most EU-sceptical societies – Denmark – EU-opponents are not generally low-skill citizens.

Several key aspects of this sociological theory would appear to have been falsified. Take the proposition that the UK’s EU-scepticism is caused by an exceptional position regarding value climate and/or cognitive mobilization (skills). While the proposition holds, when one compares the UK with France and Germany in 1988, although an updated analysis might reveal a somewhat different picture, a comparison between the UK and Italy shows the severe limitations of the theory. The case of Italy in 1988 … “shows that a relatively materialist country, and also the least cognitively mobilized country, has the most supportive, public opinion”.⁴⁹ The more fundamental problem with Inglehart’s influential theory is that it argues at a high level of abstraction using vague, holistic explanations that do not take into account historical factors and the special role of personal elite identities within a highly centralized policy-making structure like the EU. The historical factor would seem to be particularly important; thus the sociological approach has little to offer in trying to come to terms with the new diversity of an EU of 27 members. As regards citizen attitudes, they appear to be much more unstable than assumed by sociologists.

It is symptomatic that analyses of globalization tend to stress its ambiguities to the point of becoming indeterminate. Michael Zürn argues that it can produce both fragmentation and integration.⁵⁰ If that is so, how useful is this rather vague concept anyway? Indeed, globalization has not done away with religious feeling, or with other forms of non-rational politics. To be true, religious feeling is much stronger in regions where poverty is rampant than in regions like Europe, where affluence is wide-spread. Yet, in America decades of affluence has not led to a decisive weakening of religious feeling – in fact the reverse seems to be the case. In some other parts of the world the weakening of nations has perhaps caused citizens to seek fulfilment of their need to belong in new religious groupings.

      It must be stressed that globalization does not necessarily lead to cultural homogenization. Globalization has various dimensions, and a disaggregation of the concept is helpful. As consumers,