Politics and Social Visions
Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU
Maurizio Ferrera(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 14. March 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
464 pages
978-0-19-886331-1 (ISBN)
Description
The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration.
Politics and Social Visions explores this politically disruptive process from an ideational perspective, on the assumption that symbols and visions play a crucial role. In processes of polity formation, ideologies offer competing partisan views, but tend to converge along the 'communal' dimension, which defines the nature and boundaries of the emerging polity. This convergence has been a challenge for the EU since its origins, as it has required the construction of a coherent and acceptable image of Europe as a compound polity of nation-states with a divisive past. Maurizio Ferrera offers a reconstruction of how the main ideological currents have struggled - and often failed - to reconfigure their horizontal profiles (i.e. their images of the national within Europe) into a new vertical profile (i.e. an image of the European within the national). The challenge has been especially demanding for European left-wing parties, which have been largely unable to forge a shared and recognizable 'social vision' of the European Union. Only during the COVID pandemic have the seeds of a novel communal consensus emerged that might prove capable of defeating the anti-communal views of Eurosceptic ideologies and free market technocrats.
Politics and Social Visions explores this politically disruptive process from an ideational perspective, on the assumption that symbols and visions play a crucial role. In processes of polity formation, ideologies offer competing partisan views, but tend to converge along the 'communal' dimension, which defines the nature and boundaries of the emerging polity. This convergence has been a challenge for the EU since its origins, as it has required the construction of a coherent and acceptable image of Europe as a compound polity of nation-states with a divisive past. Maurizio Ferrera offers a reconstruction of how the main ideological currents have struggled - and often failed - to reconfigure their horizontal profiles (i.e. their images of the national within Europe) into a new vertical profile (i.e. an image of the European within the national). The challenge has been especially demanding for European left-wing parties, which have been largely unable to forge a shared and recognizable 'social vision' of the European Union. Only during the COVID pandemic have the seeds of a novel communal consensus emerged that might prove capable of defeating the anti-communal views of Eurosceptic ideologies and free market technocrats.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 233 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 29 mm
Weight
700 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-886331-1 (9780198863311)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Maurizio Ferrera is Professor of Political Science at the University of Milan and President of the Network for the Advancement of Political and Social Sciences (NASP). His research focuses on comparative welfare states, European Integration, and empirical political theory. He is the author of The Boundaries of Welfare (OUP, 2005), and in 2014 he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for a project on 'Reconciling Economic and Social Europe'. He is currently one of the three PIs on an ERC Synergy project 'Sovereignty, Identity, and Solidarity in the EU post 2008'. In 2021 he was awarded the Mattei Dogan IPSA prize for High Achievement in Political Science.
Author
Professor of Political ScienceProfessor of Political Science, University of Milan
Content
Envisioning Europe: An introduction
1: Politics, conflict, and ideology
2: The nature and causal autonomy of ideology
3: Political space, spatial frames, and sociality forms
4: Ideological structuring during the Golden Age
5: The age of unsettlement (1980-2010): From consensus to dissensus
6: The fragile ideological underpinnings of EU-building
7: Technocracy: Practice or ideology
8: The decommunalization of Europe
9: Free movement, Europolitanism, and citizenship
10: The solidaristic turn in public opinion
11: Crisis, catharsis, and recovery
12: Imagining possible futures
1: Politics, conflict, and ideology
2: The nature and causal autonomy of ideology
3: Political space, spatial frames, and sociality forms
4: Ideological structuring during the Golden Age
5: The age of unsettlement (1980-2010): From consensus to dissensus
6: The fragile ideological underpinnings of EU-building
7: Technocracy: Practice or ideology
8: The decommunalization of Europe
9: Free movement, Europolitanism, and citizenship
10: The solidaristic turn in public opinion
11: Crisis, catharsis, and recovery
12: Imagining possible futures