Boundaries, barriers and belonging

The present issue of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology takes printed form just as sociologists from Europe and elsewhere converge on Manchester, UK, to attend the 14th conference of the European Sociological Association. The ESA is the founder and publisher of our journal, and thus the bi-annual conference is an important event for the journal too.

This year’s conference is themed ‘Europe and beyond: Boundaries, barriers and belonging’. These three concepts evoke a wealth of cultural and political dimensions, to be addressed both at the conference and in its aftermath. The question of boundaries, firstly, is at the heart of the cultural-political nexus of sociology. As is well known, boundaries are constantly addressed in sociology, not least in the everyday work people engage in to create, promote, attack, or strengthen demarcations and divisions of various kinds and on different levels. There can be few demarcations and divisions that do not in one way or another inhabit the realms of the cultural and the political, just because boundaries are inevitably both about power and negotiation, and about the ways in which the world is shaped and perceived in the course of human interaction. Boundaries may be surprisingly permanent, rooted in habits of daily life over centuries or even millennia, giving (positive or negative) flavour and meaning to ways of life throughout Europe. Others are remarkably fluid, responding to, imposed by or manipulated by circumstances, thriving or even obliterated as the world around them changes.

Correspondingly, the question of barriers, often constructed when boundaries are enacted into cultural and material obstacles, is topical both within Europe and on its borders, where the vaunted political values of the EU – underlining human rights and equality – are, all too often, revealed to resemble nothing other than a gigantic but naked emperor. Contestation and debate over these values make up a heated, ongoing struggle both in the European Parliament and in the various arenas of the European public sphere, as well as in a plethora of national and micro-level cultural contexts in which the question of putting barriers around and between people takes place every day – whether between ‘us’ and ‘them’ or between ‘me’ and others who attempt to define the ‘me’ by force. Such struggles, at the centre of sociological concern, are all both cultural and political.

‘Belonging’, thirdly, evokes manifold practices and activities inherent to the processes constituting culture and politics. The question of belonging cuts through the entire scale of human social existence, from the national to the personal: the questions who we are, and where we belong or do not belong, underlie most of the cultural and political process we can detect. Yet images and imaginaries of belonging can be, and are being, manipulated so that populations are deceived about the real political processes impacting on their worlds. As happens so often, marginalised groups of those who ‘do not belong’ are blamed for damage inflicted by more complex, larger-scale political and economic groups and organisations, in processes that are harder to trace and to picture in terms of familiar daily practices. It is a prime task for cultural and political sociology to bring these processes to light.

And, finally, the notion of Europe and beyond is of course a self-evident dimension for an international journal. Significant proportions of populations can come to be preoccupied with belonging, or not belonging, to Europe, and with the boundaries and barriers Europe does or should involve; the continuing struggles over Brexit are only a particularly remarkable example of profound cultural-political preoccupations. For some, ‘belonging’ seems in itself to be a fearful idea, to be contrasted with a more consoling image of heroic isolation. The very thought of systems of cooperation, of allowing one’s own fate and fortune to be affected by adaptation to joint needs, is seen as threatening in terms of certain cultural / political imaginings of what social existence should be like. But the questions of culture and politics we address in this journal extend beyond such issues too. As our publishing record shows, we have been consistently eager to throw light not only on central but also on less obvious academic locations and contexts of inquiry – open to all the spheres the Conference currently interrogates.

As the editorial team’s message to all those organising, coordinating, and participating in the over 700 sessions of the ESA conference, we invite colleagues to engage with this journal and to address the cultural and political aspects of the sociological work they are currently conducting and discussing. There will be plenty to discover, we argue, because all sociological inquiry touches the dimensions we have outlined. We look forward to welcoming new, surprising approaches: while these are features of all original academic work, they often intensify when an author engages with new perspectives and traverses unfamiliar territories.

The current issue approaches a number of problematics that are central to contemporary struggles to understand the cultural / political nexus. First, the question of ‘liberalism’, seldom far from current sociological reflection, is approached in two separate ways in our first two articles. Joseph Galbo’s ‘Renovating the Roman Colosseum: Politics, urban restructuring, and the value of heritage in neoliberal times’ assesses impacts of economic ‘liberalism’ on competing ways of valuing heritage and, through doing so, on ‘intensely contested’ questions about citizenship, national identity and populism. His article explores how politically and economically driven approaches to culture impinge on the ways heritage is imagined, and, through the processes that result, how they affect even how the provisions of the Italian Constitution itself are imagined and interpreted. In Italy, both centre-right and centre-left politicians, Galbo argues, have ‘transformed’ the governance of heritage, not least with regard to the commercialisation of sites and the rewards offered to corporate sponsors of heritage works. For him, the crux of neoliberalism is states’ promotion of private-sector investment, including their own assumption of the financial risks entailed. While this blurs boundaries between state and corporate power, the results are not to the advantage of the state. These neoliberal policies have themselves given rise to disappointment at their lack of tangible public benefits, putting heritage issues at the centre of contestations about identity and citizenship.

In Italy, politicians have actively promoted private / public heritage ventures, on the shared assumption that liberal globalisation offers the only way in which political and economic life can be organised; this downgrades public struggles to issues of technocratic management. The logic of public/private partnerships has come to dominate the field of heritage in Italy, with concomitant tax-breaks and advertising opportunities for the private firms concerned. ‘Made in Italy’ slogans are affixed to items made in other countries ‘under less than ideal working conditions’, and heritage sites may be favoured less for their intrinsic merits than because they offer appealing branding opportunities to fashion houses. Galbo discusses these cultural and political intertwinements in relation to Rome and Article 9 of the Italian Constitution, intended to ‘safeguard’ the nation’s landscape and its ‘historical and artistic heritage’. What has this come to mean and how can it be related to active participation in the democratic life of the country, given voters’ current ‘sense of abandonment’ on the one hand and, on the other, ‘new emotional appeals to local attachment and identity’?

The subsequent article, by Troels Krarup, explores features of the cultural / political stream of liberalism from a very different point of view. He also deals with respects in which powerful forces attempt to render politics a matter of purely technocratic manipulation, but explores reasons for this development that contrast with the economic persuasions usually highlighted. While economic liberalism is significant among the German political elite, and is considered to have contributed to its support for austerity during the recent European financial crisis, Krarup joins a debate in which these economic convictions are framed in cultural terms rather distant from those associated with the schools of Manchester or Chicago. ‘German political and economic ideology in the twentieth century and its theological problems: The Lutheran genealogy of ordoliberalism’ explores a theological tradition among modern German-speaking Lutherans, an ‘anti-humanist’ form of political ethics that adduces moral reasons for reducing politics to technology. Krarup is not claiming there is a direct, causal line between ‘ordoliberalism’ of this kind and contemporary German politicians who can be identified now; rather, he is tracing the genealogy, in Foucauldian terms, of a set of ‘problems, concerns and concepts’. In a sense Krarup is bringing back into focus an aspect of one particular social imaginary that has helped to make it possible to envisage the world in a certain way – just as Galbo has traced changes in the ways culture is imagined in Italy.

Krarup stresses that ‘ordoliberalism’, very different from laissez-faire economic doctrines, emerged in the first half of the twentieth century from attempts to envisage a strong state that could ‘tame predatory capitalism’. The state’s role was intended to protect against abuses of market and state power by individuals, groups or companies. Precisely in order to carry out these protective tasks, it must remain strictly fair and neutral, offering a ‘third way’ between collectivism and capitalism. Krarup recalls that this idea of the de-politicised, de-humanised, technocratic state was seen as an appropriately ‘worldly’ authority in the Lutheran sense. The aim was not to try to promote justice, because justice, on this view, is the province only of God, but simply to curb the effects of human egoism and greed. Especially in its interpretation by Karl Barth, St Paul’s Letter to the Romans appears to commend comprehensive obedience to worldly authorities: the sinfulness inherent in human nature leaves scant room for active efforts to improve society. Duty and impartiality are the virtues to be pursued, in the context of complete submission to God. Krarup offers an absorbing account of the complexities and differences involved among the thinkers caught up in this stream of thought. Barth’s ‘radical divide between humankind and God’ ‘explains the strange combination of market and state in early ordoliberalism’, which did not promote a strong state in itself, but only as ‘a protector of the divine orders’. Nor were free markets promoted in themselves; they were seen as a ‘nonhuman mechanism of social order’, one that might, through competition, ‘curb the effects of egoism by anonymously and automatically opposing and counterbalancing individuals against each other’. Not least given the general assumption that there is a fundamental division in Western thought between theology and economics / politics, this casts an ironical light on some origins of contemporary convictions that are relatively rarely discussed.

If these two pieces were oriented towards critique, the next two articles accentuate constructive analyses. Seeking ways of generating and communicating knowledge about complex ecologies, John Parham’s ‘Biggish data: Friedrich Engels, material ecology, and Victorian data’ explores what he sees as Engels’ rather exemplary blend of big data, qualitative survey work, thick description and theory. Parham shows how Engels enables us to form new social imaginaries: getting our minds around aspects of the world that, without imaginative stretching, are too large and too complex to envisage at all.

He interprets Engels’ work as a precursor of contemporary approaches to ‘material ecology’ in terms of ‘thing power’, the ‘intra-actions of social and material agency’, and ‘transcorporeality’, all appropriate in the present time for trying to understand ‘hyperobjects’ that in themselves are so vast that we struggle to comprehend them. As Parham observes, the hyperobjects associated with the ecological crisis of today are neither disconnected nor entirely different from those with which the Victorians struggled: the intensification of agriculture, the development of radically new forms of city life, or the fossil-fuelled development of mass industry. Parham argues that, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels fused complex levels and types of data so as to generate new knowledge about these ‘social, material and ecological’ relationships.

Parham interrogates contemporary theorists’ attempts to come to terms with the ‘agential realism’ and social agency of matter, drawing attention to respects in which some theoretical innovators have neglected to take account of significant precursors in Marxian theory and method. Engels, indeed, ‘offers a precedent for an ambitious, multidisciplinary environmental humanities’, able to ‘unravel ecological complexity’ in just the ways demanded by twenty-first-century scholars. Parham explores, for instance, how Engels uses large-scale data in forms that can assist readers in affective modes of narrative and visualisation. Combining them with qualitative and hermeneutic descriptions, framed by socio-political theory, has effects not alien to what, say, Heather Houser commends nowadays. Engels measures data against lived experiences, eager to encounter individuals in their own homes and to understand their struggles; at the same time, he accentuates the ‘dangerously vibrant materialism’ of the physical world they inhabit and the ubiquitous and often destructive impact of this world. Engels’ is a work of social ecology that challenges views of human activity as privileged to stand outside the web of life, and it is ‘precisely’ his ‘pre-disciplinary’ freedom of methodological approach that, Parham argues, enables him to do this. Parham’s work could productively be connected with that of critical realist explorers of Marxism, such as Peter Dickens, Kate Soper, Andrew Collier, Andrew Sayer, John O’Neil, or Ted Benton; this will offer a rich seam to be quarried in the future.

In a continuation of the debate over their original article, ‘Power, Agency, Modernity: A Manifesto for Social Theory’, which we published earlier this year, Vasfiye Toprak, Isaac Reed and Michael Weinman respond to Risto Heiskala’s comment, published in the same issue as the original article. They explore and emphasise the implications of their rector-actor-other model, stressing that it forms only one strand of the three-dimensional core of their manifesto for social theory. For them, it is key to note that projects are the true site of agency relations, and for locating power and authority. This point is intended to overcome the misleading contrast between actions and intentions that bedevils so much Western social theory. In this context, Anthony Giddens’ social theory starts from the notion of a knowing, knowledgeable actor; this the authors reject as an appropriate beginning position. Nor do they wish to subscribe to the common theoretical assumption that action itself must be ‘heroic’, typically resisting, altering, or opposing; projects have a hugely wider intrinsic variety. Moreover, these authors present ‘agency’, as opposed to the simpler ‘action’, as fundamentally social; in ‘broadly Aristotelian’ fashion, they focus on congeries of customs, habits, laws, conventions, and relational links to other people: tele or underlying directions. Their aim is to offer an original and constructive approach to analysing the symbolic representations of social power that make possible human action and agency as such.

In our book review section, first Leonardo Avritzer reviews The Civil Sphere in Latin America, edited by Jeffrey Alexander and Carlos Tognato, a most timely volume given current developments in that region. The editors explore and defend their concept of a democratic civic sphere in ways with which Avritzer takes some issue; he applauds their choice of empirical cases but argues that these cases themselves underscore Latin America’s struggle ‘between the civil and the uncivil’: a continuing challenge for theorists of democracy. Then, remaining with the question of democracy but returning to the history of German thought, Christopher Adair-Toteff reviews Wolfgang Neugebauer’s work, Otto Hinze: Denkräume und Sozialwelten eines Historikers in der Globalisierung, 1861–1940. Neugebauer stresses that Hinze should be thought of primarily in terms of his central concern with the state and its constitution, ‘an astute and realistic political observer’ who was fascinated by the ways in which politics and political structures help to determine cultures. Lastly, Jukka Gronow reviews Elisabeth Schimpfössl’s Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie. The sudden appropriation of extreme wealth making up the fortunes of rich and super-rich Russians is unique in world-historical terms, but it is the cultural consequences among those involved that Schimpfössl accentuates here. On the basis of eighty interviews in a variety of locations, she documents how the individuals in question, or their children, embrace the values of the cultured and philanthropic bourgeoisie with affiliations to the intelligentsia. But these persons remain, Gronow argues, vulnerable to the political organs of the state. ‘It remains to be seen,’ she remarks, how they will preserve both their fortunes and their perceived legitimacy in future.