About Post-National Integration in Norbert Elias’s Work: Towards a Socio-Historical Approach

At first glance, it may be surprising to consider the German-Jewish born sociologist Norbert Elias (Breslau, 1897–Amsterdam, 1990) as a reference of primary importance for thinking about the future of democracy and citizenship in Europe and beyond. Until recently, ‘classics’ of historical sociology as a whole have rarely been considered as highly relevant for investigations of the present state and future of relations between political communities in the age of globalisation. Moreover, in Elias’s work, which focuses on very long-term social (including political) processes in pre- modern and modern Europe, the major terms used in European Studies and in political theories on European Union – such as ‘legitimacy’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘citizenship’ or ‘democracy’ – are rarely mentioned. Elias was obviously not first and foremost a theorist of nationalism or a post-nationalist author. He would even have refused to be considered mainly as a political or social theorist, and even less as a theorist or as a philosopher tout court. Elias’s first doctorate was in philosophy but he was to abandon that discipline in favour of sociology, an intellectual break that deeply shaped his subsequent thinking (Elias 1994; Mennell 1998: 7-9). Elias’s sociology was then marked by the opposition between positive, descriptive or ‘reality congruent’ social sciences, on the one hand, and normative philosophy, sometimes denounced as unrealistic or utopian, on the other. In addition, he refused to consider politics or policy as a distinct sphere. Moreover, Elias’s historical sociology, in its more political aspects, mostly seems interested in the genesis of the state (Elias 1996; 1997), as were such sociologists as Anderson (1977) and Tilly (1993). However, a closer examination of his work reveals the undoubtedly central character of the question of social and political integration beyond the nation state. This preoccupation is already present in the conclusion of Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (1997, completed in 1939), often considered as his magnum opus, which reveals that, at this early stage in his writings, Elias questioned the relationship between nation-states and democracy. He continued to do so in later essays, especially in the crucial text, ‘Changes in the We–I Balance’ (1991, written in 1987), on which I will focus in the following discussion, and in Humana Conditio (2010, written in 1985). Now, the nature of this ‘link’ – historical and contingent, or, alternatively, conceptual or necessary – has led in the past twenty years to a well-known opposition between the so-called ‘post-nationalist’ authors and the ‘national republicans’, in France, or the ‘liberal’ or ‘civic nationalists’, in Great Britain (see Lacroix 2002; 2004). Even though Elias did not directly confront the problem of transcending national borders in conceiving of, and implementing, democracy in European Union, his intuitions can be read in relation to these recent debates about the pertinence of the national-democratic and post-national paradigms. It is true that Europe in the sense of the actual European Union does not really receive close attention in his writings. Quite obviously in Elias’s view, European integration, if it would really take place, should rather be considered as a first step or as a transitional phase towards a more global, worldwide integration. Nevertheless, he demonstrated through all his work how much historical sociology is relevant for thinking about European integration and the very nature of the European Union. In ‘Changes in the We–I Balance’, Elias did not explicitly examine whether democracy can, or should, exist beyond the nation state, although it appears quite obvious, as in Humana Conditio (2010), that the nation-state is not the end of history. The originality of Elias’s sociology lies elsewhere, and is twofold. On the one hand, it is to be found in Elias’s forceful suggestion that any immediate political problem has to be considered in the light of long-term developments (see Déloye 2000; 2008) and in an all-embracing sociological perspective. Recently, Stefano Bartolini’s book Restructuring Europe (2005) is an exceptional attempt to adopt a genuinely long-term socio-political perspective in order to understand the centralising processes that led to nation-states and to European integration. However, it remains focused on politics whereas Elias’s more comprehensive approach includes the domains of psychology and the emotions. On the other hand, Elias’s originality consists of his determination not to turn observations into norms or values that could legitimate particular conceptions of politics. If one forgets that sociological, self detached, standpoint, then Elias’s propositions might sometimes seem similar to nationalist ideas, of course referring to civic or liberal nationalism (see Miller 1995; 2000) that considers the nation as the ‘ultimate horizon of a political identity’, or at least to the notion that democracy cannot be detached from the national frame. First of all, Elias strongly insists on the importance of affects and emotions for all kinds of collective identities, including political ones, and for every social and individual process of integration. Furthermore, his writings lay great stress on the enduring importance of the ‘national habitus’ (Elias 1991; 1996), particularly in the case of the old European countries. Finally, Elias sometimes seems to define the community as founded on conflicts with outsiders, both inside the community (Elias 2008), at the cultural or national level (Elias 1996), and beyond (Elias 1991), which at first glance resembles the fashionable idea (after Edward Said) of ‘the Other’. In this paper, I will challenge this ‘national’ or culturalist reading of Elias’s work, a reading that insists on the importance of belonging to a national community that one can find in the French sociologist Dominique Schnapper’s essay La communauté des citoyens (1994). I will show that Elias’s intuitions, by giving a crucial role to democratisation processes, contribute much more to deepen, from a sociological standpoint and in a critical way, the conceptions articulated by the post-nationalist authors – first of all the concept of ‘constitutional patriotism’ advocated by Jürgen Habermas[2] (1998; 2000) and that of ‘post-national identity’ presented by Jean-Marc Ferry (1992; 2000; 2005). And yet, according to Elias, European union, European unity or European integration, is not, first of all, a matter of values or ideals, political will or belief. More generally and less consciously, the growing repulsion towards suffering and pain would reveal a growing emotional identification between human beings over the centuries, though most obviously within their particular nation-states. However, just like Habermas, Elias suggests that a democratic political community could not be entirely based on such a feeling, although it is a ‘civilising’ one. This is because of his rational preferment that leads him to argue that people should rather base their acts on an understanding of the reality of their social relations. Moreover, there is no reason to consider as typically European in any meaning of the term that conscience-formation process associated with a widening circle of mutual identification. Elias admittedly studied the civilizing process by focusing on modern Western Europe at first, but it has never signified that European people have to be considered as ‘civilized’, compared to others, or even ‘more civilized’ thanks to cultural specific features, or in the vanguard of such a decentred conscience-formation process thanks to a specific European process. Not only did Elias severely criticise all nationalist and Eurocentric positions but, in the twentieth century more than ever before, humanity as a whole has to be considered as the real social unit of reference in a wholly interdependent world. In what follows, I firstly propose to review briefly the main ideas of the theory of the civilising process from state formation to globalisation that provides the framework for a long-term historical sociology. In this first part I will emphasize the crucial question of the links between the nation-state and democracy in the twentieth century that constitute the background of the current discussion between (liberal, civic) nationalists and post-nationalists. Second, I will show how the question of post-national interdependence and integration appears as a central problem in Elias’s ‘political’ sociology, that always considers distinctly and together national, European, and global levels in a processual way. Third, I will tackle what are, according to Elias, the main obstacles to post-national political integration in terms of the endurance of national habitus, and will insist on the importance of not conflating the sociological study of such a phenomenon with its political justification. I will end with some comments on Eliasian post-nationalism and on his ‘realist cosmopolitanism’. My opinion is that the stimulating tension between Hobbesian and Kantian inflexions in Elias’s work, already analysed by Andrew Linklater in the field of international relations theory (Linklater 2004; 2011), is interestingly questioned when post-national integration in Europe or civic patriotism is at stake. My hypothesis is that, from an ‘Eliasian’ standpoint, the sociological study of long-term historical processes would not only reveal what separates Europeans from each other, but also what (temporarily) binds them together, ‘for better and for worse’, and what (more definitely) binds Europeans to the rest of the world