In this final issue of Volume 11 of European Societies, there are articles on ‘Forms of Political Integration’, covering imperial integration, coalition formation, and trans-national processes, and on ‘Selection, Merit, and Mobility’, covering employment skills, gender disadvantage, and vocational tracking.
The first article related to political integration is by Magali Gravier of the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. Gravier addresses the major question of whether moves towards European unity and the establishment of a new political constitution would constitute Europe as a new imperial system. From the perspective of comparative, historical sociology, she constructs a conceptualisation of Empire as a composite and authoritarian political system with a dominating center and dominated peripheries and that follows a strategy of territorial extension and that disseminates an imperial identity and culture. Rejecting the ideas of Negri and Hardt on economic empires, Gravier concludes that the EU is not a political empire, but is more than a mere federation combined with economic integration. Europe, she argues, is undergoing a process of Imperialisation. Gravier's article contributes to our understanding of the European system and to ongoing debates in political sociology concerning Imperial systems.
Peter Nedergaard of the Department of Political Science in the University of Copenhagen looks at the formation of political coalitions within the EU. His focus is on the implications of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) through which consensual decisions are sent to the Council of Ministers. His theoretical points of reference are studies in rational choice theory and decision-making, using their arguments to explore power, interests, ideology, and culture-based explanations of coalitions. He shows that coalition formation is most likely when member states share a similar economic and political characteristics and when they can demonstrate ‘best practice’ in relation to these characteristics. Thus, coalitions are associated with the major politico-economic models and trajectories found in Europe.
Noémi Lendvai of the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol and Paul Stubbs of the Institute of Economics in Zagreb, Croatia adopt the concept of the ‘assemblage’ to explore trends in social policy formation in south east Europe, questioning some of the path-dependence assumptions that underlie many arguments on European unity. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, they employ the idea of an assemblage to refer to loose and fluid networks of processes and flows that connect the constituent parts into a decentralised field of activity. Trends in south-east Europe do not result in a single welfare regime but a complex and contradictory assemblage of welfare policies. Using related concepts of translation and intermediaries, they show the complex character of political processes in emergent regional spaces.
The paper on ‘Employers’ Demand for Qualifications and Skills’ by Laura Dörfler and Herman van de Werfhorst of the University of Amsterdam introduces the section on ‘Selection, Merit, and Mobility’. They trace the increasing requirement for qualifications and skills in job advertisements in Austria over the last twenty years. This increase was not in relation to vocational employment, as this type of work was of declining significance in the labour market. Rather, there is a greater reliance on formal educational qualifications and, especially in the service sector, social skills. Dörfler and van de Werfhorst suggest that this reliance on social skills may make social background more pertinent as a factor on employment and so exacerbate class differences.
David Reimer (Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, Germany) and Stephanie Steinmetz (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) explore aspects of higher education in their paper ‘Highly Educated but in the Wrong Field’. Using Labour Force Survey data, they examine gender differences in level and topic of study in Spain and Germany. They show that the disadvantages experienced by women in both countries — and especially the chances of unemployment, vary according to whether they have studied in a predominantly ‘male’ subject. Marita Jacob and Nicole Tieben of Mannheim University, Germany, are concerned with the transfer of students between vocational and non-vocational tracks in secondary schools in The Netherlands and Germany. Survey data show that differences in class background and motivation to status attainment are important, though these effects are both variable and changing. These effects are generally weaker in The Netherlands than in Germany.