INTRODUCTION
Perspectives on a history of Western European society after the boom

Between 1970 and 2000, every country in Western Europe was affected by profound and structural change which was propelled by various crises. This book is concerned with the circumstances and consequences of this change, whose main characteristic is the multi-faceted decline of the industrial sector in the different national economies or economic areas. As a result, it is often defined as ‘deindustrialization’ and described as a transition from an industrial society to a service society. The ‘old’ industries, the steelworks, coal mines, dockyards and textile factories, which had been the backbone of these economies during the decades of the postwar economic boom, disappeared during this process of change, taking away millions of jobs. Industrial employment decreased, but at the same time, and closely linked to this, the industrial sector experienced a significant increase in labour productivity. As far as technology is concerned, these decades were marked by the spread of electronic and computerized data processing in all areas of industry, from production to customer services, with far-reaching consequences. On the whole, the structural change described in this book was a long-term trend which we in Western Europe have become accustomed to, much as we would to any natural phenomenon. From a historian’s point of view, this is a basic process, comparable to the increase in life expectancy or the diversification of lifestyles.

This process had numerous and serious social consequences. While in most countries in Western Europe in the mid-1970s industrial workers made up by far the largest social group, both by profession and by status, nowadays most people in these countries work in a wide variety of jobs in the service sector. This caused major changes in Western European societies over the last three decades of the twentieth century, which still reverberate today. Whereas in the boom years industrial expansion in the three countries in this comparative study – Britain, France and West Germany – was accompanied by full employment, from the beginning of the 1970s there was a return of the mass unemployment of the interwar period, especially of youth unemployment and the long-term unemployed. At the same time, industrial knowledge was either devalued or redefined, careers had to be reinvented and life plans revised. Flexibility became the buzzword of the period.

Bidding farewell to the industrial labourer also meant bidding farewell to the industrial futures that still inspired the collective imagination of Western European societies around 1970. They now restyled themselves as ‘post-industrial’ or ‘service’ societies, eagerly assisted in this redefinition by social scientists, political advisers and journalists. Industrial society immediately began to be given its own history as a phase of Western European modernity that had come to an end. Museums and monuments began to be built or extended to commemorate the first era of industrialization; sometimes this structural change was even accompanied by whole regions being turned into museums.

A history ‘from below’

Tracing such a fundamental, long-term and comprehensive process always runs the risk of slipping into a narrative pattern whose rhetoric implies a more or less inherent inevitability. It is a pattern preferred by politicians and contemporary analysts, then as now, to cloak their current pragmatic goals in a gold-leaf mantle of historical philosophy. To avoid this risk, I have chosen a different narrative perspective for this book, focussing on the lives and experiences of industrial workers. The protagonists of my social history of industrial labour are the workers themselves, male and female, skilled and unskilled, who found themselves increasingly sidelined and to a certain extent invisible to the public eye when future opportunities and risks were being discussed. The advantage of this perspective for writing a critical history is obvious: it is easier to discover the ‘cost of progress’ – that is, the processes of social decline and the increase of social inequality and marginalization – than if I were to adopt the position of those who emerged from this long transformation as ‘winners’, such as the employers and employees in the information technology (IT) and finance sectors, in marketing and consultancy or in research and development. A social history written from the perspective of these groups would no doubt bring out the undeniably impressive opportunities and potential of a new ‘post-industrial’ order far more strongly than it does here. On the other hand, it would offer fewer insights into the dynamics of the growing social inequality linked to these structural changes, which has become increasingly evident since the turn of the century.

By the mid-1990s, the issue of social inequality had more or less disappeared from the socio-political academic debate in Western Europe. It returned all the more intensely nearly twenty years later, not least because of Thomas Piketty’s acclaimed studies.1 With it came a heightened interest in the negative social effects of the post-industrial order. It suddenly became clear how limited the opportunities for participation were (and still are) for those with little or no income or possessions. It also became clear how little social recognition they received for their work and skills, and still do receive from the media and the public in everyday social interaction. One of the aims of this book is to show how this increase in the imbalance of economic, political and social inequality was seen from the point of view of ‘ordinary people’ in the reality of their daily lives. Another aim is to examine the forces that were mobilized and the institutional barriers that were erected to counteract the social consequences of this trend. The book also aims to contribute to the understanding of the current crisis of liberal democracy. The roots of this crisis can now be traced back clearly to the topic of this book: the decades of upheaval in the industrial societies of the West. Structural transformation led to tangible changes in social conditions in Western democracies.2 I again use the perspective ‘from below’ to examine whether the way these basic conditions were transformed for workers meant that basic forms of ‘social relational equality’3 were eroded.

A history ‘from yesterday’

When the ‘fat years’ of the economic boom after 1948 came to a definitive end in Western Europe a quarter of a century later, sections of the industrial workforce suffered the same fate as farmers and craftspeople had several decades earlier. During their own lifetime, they became part of a future past, with no prospects in the present, let alone in the future. They were to a certain extent overtaken by events. In their attempts to understand processes of structural transformation, historians rarely take the perspective of such actors seriously. In this book, I aim to combine the perspective ‘from below’ described above with the less familiar perspective ‘from yesterday’. In this way, I attempt to counteract the effects of a common professional disease that often seems to afflict contemporary social history, which is to follow a sociological view of future-oriented trends and so to discover the beginnings of anything new primarily in the social phenomena of the immediate past. This is ultimately based on an obsession with narratives relating to progress or growth, whereas narratives relating to the decline or disappearance of social groups or entities tend to be met with silence or indifference.4 In contrast, I will devote the following chapters to examining the changes affecting the living and working conditions of a shrinking industrial workforce in order to bring to light aspects of living and working environments neglected even today. Depending on the country or region, this will reveal lines of continuity and forces of stability which have together contributed to give the three Western European societies in question their specific profile – a profile, incidentally, that in some respects entirely failed to meet the expectations of a post-industrial order.

My thesis is, therefore, that the upheavals in Western European societies can only be understood if we consider the tension between the spheres of experience of the existing industrial society and the horizons of expectation of the emerging ‘service society’. These tensions had been mounting since the mid-1970s. The numerous protests, strikes and conflicts that accompanied the process of deindustrialization show, for example, that it, too, had a history of politicization, whose impact is still felt today. Looking at concrete occupational biographies also reveals how complex and disparate the real lives of those directly affected by structural transformation were. Ultra-stable and precarious worlds existed side by side, as did old and new patterns of order and different horizons of expectations specific to certain generations and groups. Some enjoyed repeated promotion and long periods of affiliation to one company; others faced unemployment and threats to their livelihood; others experienced labour migration or the power of local ties. The interpretive schemes that shaped politics and society in the three countries examined here were correspondingly diverse.

Reference points for a social history of...