The Old Europe
European society was largely dominated by rich, hereditary, landed oligarchies. Most of the members of these groups also enjoyed nobility. Human society has never existed without élites, but those of the post-industrial world are numerous, diverse, and difficult to assess in their relative importance. Before 1800 matters were much simpler. Most wealth, most power, most privilege, and most prestige tended nearly everywhere to be concentrated in the hands of a single social group, universally recognizable. Like all social categories, it was considerably blurred at the edges, with an infinite number of local variations. No one term used by historians–aristocracy, landed interest, privileged order, feudal class–captures its full character. Yet the reality was concrete enough. It was the basic feature of social organization throughout Europe.
The French state was held to comprise three orders or estates:–the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate (Forsythe, 1994). This division originated in the medieval organization of society into those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked. The nobility had done the fighting–noblemen still regarded the military career as peculiarly their own. Nevertheless in practice the nobility seldom invoked any justification other than the fact that it existed and always had. When the estates-general, representing all the king’s subjects, met, the nobility and clergy elected their own representatives and sat in separate houses. The nobility had a complex internal hierarchy of titles. At the top came the princes of the blood royal and (in 1775) forty-seven dukes and peers; together they made up the peerage, the élite among the élite. Below them came ever more numerous categories of marquises, counts, viscounts, barons, knights, and esquires without further distinctive title. All nobles enjoyed a number of privileges. They took special precedence on public occasions, carried swords, boasted distinctive coats of arms, received special treatment in the courts, and above all benefited from certain fiscal advantages. (Forsythe, 1994) They were personally exempt from the taille, the basic tax, although in certain areas they often paid it on the basis of their landed possessions. They contributed to a number of other taxes at special rates. They were indeed subjected to various new taxes introduced from 1695 onwards, but taille exemption remained an essential touchstone of noble status. Equally essential was a certain lifestyle–’living nobly’ without manual work (which included retail trade). Those who broke the rule underwent derogation, or loss of nobility, which might entail the degradation of the offender’s whole family, since noble status was transmitted through the male line to all children.
Organization of the nobility into an order was common throughout Europe. In Sweden, much of Germany and most of the Habsburg domains the nobility was represented in a separate house of the diet or estates of the realm. In Hungary and Poland they alone were represented (Stares, 1992). In Spain the nobility was an order with clearly defined limits and prerogatives; while in the Italian mercantile republics of Venice and Genoa noble families had their names entered in special public ‘Golden Books’. Equally common was the principle of hierarchy within the order. Scales of titles were universal, except in Poland. In Hungary the diet was divided between an upper house of magnates sitting in person and a lower consisting of representatives of the lesser nobility. The Emperor Charles V had organized the Spanish nobility into a small élite of grandees (of whom there were 113 in 1707), a larger body of titled nobles, and an enormous army of proud but untitled gentlemen–the notorious hidalgos, a category drawn so widely as to include every male inhabitant of certain Basque Provinces.
The prohibition of manual or degrading work was in most areas even stronger than in France, and it was reinforced by the prejudices of nobles themselves (Flynne, 1995). The same applied in Spain’s satellite, Naples, but equally in Poland, where the repeal in 1775 of the rule against trading had no noticeable effect. In Sweden, Prussia, and certain other German states the formula was stated in more functional terms. Nobles denied common outlets for their energies were expected, more or less explicitly, to serve the state in the army or the administration (Wessel, 1991). The great and surprising continental exception to this rule was Hungary, where the nobility thought of itself as a nation of free men not to be bound by artificial restrictions. If there was prejudice here, it emanated from the domesticated, absentee magnates of Vienna, not the local petty nobility who were so often its mainstay elsewhere.
The New Europe
The European Community also did much to assuage concerns about Germany and facilitate unification. The Federal Republic’s membership in the EC helped reassure those countries that feared the new Germany would once again embark on an independent course with ominous consequences for the rest of Europe. In the process, the EC received an added boost with the decision to buttress further economic and monetary integration with political union.
It is not entirely true, however, that Germany has ceased to be a point of contention. History–both recent and more distant–still haunts the minds of many. Divided or united, Germany has always been a great power or a pawn at the core of Europe and has always exerted a decisive influence on the continent (Ziring, 1993). As a great power, it was too strong not to seek domination, but it was too weak to dominate for long. While the “Yalta system” temporarily solved the German question by dividing the country and incorporating its two halves into antagonistic alliances, unification has raised the concern that a sovereign Germany will now dominate the continent.
It is not just memories of the past, however, that cause the new Germany to loom large in all the schemes designed to establish a new order on the European continent. Germany is now too powerful not to play a central role (Reinicke,1992). Unification and the demise of the inner and outer empires of the Soviet Union have removed traditional international constraints. Old dilemmas have vanished, including the need to import security from the United States at the cost of sovereignty and the desire to accommodate the Soviet Union at the cost of commitments to the Western alliance. This does not mean that Germany no longer needs to rely upon allies–above all the United States-or participate in security arrangements within NATO, the West European Union (WEU), or the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) to prevent potential conflicts. Nor does it mean that Germany no longer has to worry about potential trouble east of its borders or that the country is not constrained by new vulnerabilities or liabilities (Stares, 1992). What it means is that the political, geographical, and symbolic boundaries of German power have expanded. Geographically, both unification and the demise of the Soviet empire have shifted Germany’s center of gravity eastward, situating the country again at the heart of the continent and at the crossroads of its flows and interactions. Germany is now the country in Europe surrounded by the greatest number of neighbors. Politically as well as geopolitically, the united country has regained its sovereignty and may become more powerful than ever, especially if its important partners to the east and west fare badly for any reason.
In many respects, Germany’s preeminent economic position within Europe has defied rational expectations. The rise in production and exports and the growth of structural surpluses has promoted prosperity in Germany, but its high prices–due in part to rising labor costs and a strong currency–should, on the face of it, have curbed exports and checked production. The answer to this apparent contradiction lies in the notion of a “virtuous circle.” 9 For many years Germany has specialized in the production of high-quality equipment and chemical products that have remained in almost limitless international demand regardless of price. Far from hindering exports, the strong currency and higher prices have led to increased growth, higher wages, and ultimately internal stability. External growth and internal stability have thus complemented one another. In fact, Germany’s entire socioeconomic system has been adapted to meet international demand–and has benefited from it.
Many challenges faced by contemporary France are challenges to French identity because they call into question both key dimensions of what it has meant to be French, and the specific compact that the French people have had with their state (Flynn, 1995). None of the above is meant to argue that external factors are more important than the internal to the identity problems France faces today. Indeed, the most important dimensions of France’s identity problems are probably internal: the profound structural changes in French society over the past several decades have not yielded a new pattern of social harmony; immigration is challenging the myth of France as an open, absorption society; the centralized French approach to economic and social management is under severe challenge by the global economy; political ideologies have collapsed and political party structures have lost much of their importance in the organization of daily life — all subjects of other chapters presented in this volume. But it is also clear from the above analysis that the international context in Europe contributes in an important way to France’s identity dilemmas both by challenging its essence and by forcing a change in its content.
The problem is that the direction in which the content must naturally move provides, at least in the short run, an increased challenge to the essence. It is going to be very difficult to separate Europe as a vehicle for pursuing France’s national interests from a Europe that disputes traditional views of French sovereignty and thus a core piece of the myth of the French state (Wessell, 1995). Thus, in coming to grips with the future shape of European integration, which itself cannot occur in isolation from coming to grips with the relationship between the two halves of Europe, the French inevitably must confront that myth. If that myth remains strong and thus a key to how the French define their national interest, then using Europe as a policy to pursue French interests will become exceedingly difficult because in the end it becomes almost impossible to pursue the policy without using the symbol of Europe. Under these circumstances, it will be almost impossible to reconcile a Europe compatible with domestic political needs with a Europe that allows France to maintain a leadership role in shaping its future. The next French president faces an acute task — one that Mitterrand attempted to address but with only partial success — of bringing the myth of state into line with international realities. If he fails, he will fail to have the symbols at his disposal to legitimize his policies at home, and French European policy will remain a subject of substantial political controversy.
France today is very different than the country de Gaulle inherited in 1958. While it is not a country of first rank, as the general always claimed it must be, it has accomplished an incredible transformation during the postwar period, a transformation many of its European partners have failed to achieve. France is no longer fractured; it has overcome its historic divisions even as it must confront new and difficult cleavages. France no longer requires the Gaullist rhetoric, even if it once did, to help manage its domestic affairs. Indeed, the residuals of that rhetoric, although meaningful to a hard core minority, may well have become a source of division that is keeping France from dealing more effectively with the challenges of shaping the new Europe.
The reality today is that most of France has become more comfortable with its multiple identities. The challenge is to make the adjustment so that the debate over France’s role in Europe is not a debate over alternative visions of France, but over what being European should mean. This will require bringing French notions of sovereignty and the state into line with contemporary European realities. France must adjust the essence of its identity in order to give new content to that identity in the new Europe. A failure of the former will make the latter a continuing problem, weakening Europe and France in the process.
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