Social Theory and European Transformation: Is there a European Society?

The concept ‘society’ in social theory has generally presupposed notions ofcultural cohesion and social integration associated with national societies andthe framework of modernity. This older idea of the social emerged out of theexperience with institution-building associated with the rise of thenation-state and the transition from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’. The questionwhether European integration can articulate a conception of the socialindependent of national society is a major challenge for social theory. Thispaper explores changing conceptions of the social in recent social theory andapplies some of these ideas to European integration. It is argued that we needto rethink our notion of society: instead of a ‘transition’ the kind of socialchange we are experiencing today is that of social ‘transformation’, a conceptwhich suggests less the ‘end of the social’ than an emerging ‘network’ societybased on knowledge. Thus instead of trying to reproduce on the supranationallevel a model that has reached its limits on the national level, Europeanintegration needs to give expression to the emerging power of knowledge.Rejecting the notion of the demos and theethnos as inappropriate to European integration, the caseis made for a discursive understanding of democracy and knowedge.