The family in Europe: policy and ideology

Citation

Casey, G. (2001), "The family in Europe: policy and ideology", European Business Review, Vol. 13 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2001.05413aab.010

The family in Europe: policy and ideology

The family in Europe: policy and ideology

Gerard CaseyGerald Casey is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University College, Dublin. He is the founder of the Christian Solidarity Party.

Keywords Europe, Family life, Ideologies, Policy

The principal objectives of the 1957 Treaty of Rome were economic. In this Treaty, and in subsequent EU documents, family concerns, in so far as they were treated at all, were treated by and large obliquely, almost always in connection with what has come to be called "the reconciliation of family responsibilities and paid employment".

The Treaty made no direct provision for the welfare of families, and rights were afforded to women in their capacity not as mothers but as workers … Much less attention has been paid in official documents to women as mothers and to the family responsibilities of parents, except with regard to the family employment relationship[1].

Even in this context such reconciliation was considered largely on the basis of the individual worker rather than on the family as a whole. Commaille and de Singly ask "Does the European family exist? Does European family policy exist?" and they answer their own questions in this way:

We reply "yes" to the first question and "no" to the second. The European family exists even if differences are perceptible, whereas a European family policy does not, even if similarities may be detected[2].

The lack of a unified EU policy on the family does not mean that the EU is not interested in family policy. Far from it! According to a communication from the EU Commission to the Council of Ministers the EU has an interest in the family but this interest is based:

less on ideological grounds but more on such objective facts as the economic role of the family, the importance of the family as a touchstone for solidarity between generations, the irreversible desire for equality between men and women and the wish of women to have complete access to working life[3].

To regard such matters as the economic role of the family, male-female equality, and so on, as simply factual and not as the locus for ideological practice shows a certain lack of philosophical awareness on the part of the EU Commissioners for, as Lorraine Fox Harding remarks:

… even an ostensibly laissez-faire policy may contain implicit values, assumptions and understandings about what families are and should be like[4].

Narcissistic individualism, radical Egalitarianism and Utopianism

According to Andre Burguiere, the reasons for the crisis in the family are well known, and include

the outburst of an imperative and narcissistic form of individualism whose prime objective was personal development; the pressure of feminism which gave women easier access than before to higher education, a secure place in the workforce and positions of responsibility; the expansion of the Welfare State which took on a greater role in the care of children and provided specific allowances and tax advantages as compensation for the social handicap inflicted on single-parent households[5].

Of the factors Burguiere mentions I believe narcissistic individualism to be the most significant.

Narcissistic individualism signifies the positing of the individual against the family and community as the ultimate source of value and as the principal beneficiary of legal and political measures. Of course the individual is important. But in rejecting narcissistic individualism one is not rejecting the individual, one is simply rejecting a certain conception of the individual, a conception which locates the individual outside and over against the social matrix in which that individual can alone find fulfilment. It is because our political establishments have taken to heart the doctrine of narcissistic individualism that the Welfare State has become a surrogate Sultan to an ever increasing harem of single mothers.

Narcissistic individualism is a powerful ideological feature of many countries in the EU, especially the more industrialized ones. Where such individualism is ranked highly the effect is to create an understanding of the family as simply a place for the social existence of individuals rather than a social reality in its own right.

The obvious question regarding the status of the family under pressure from narcissistic individualism is put by Commaille and de Singly:

… given that … the importance of the individual over that of the family institution has been imposed, the question of the social status of the family is an extremely poignant one. What place does the family occupy in the conservation or reinforcement of social cohesion? What place will the European Union countries allow it to occupy?[6] (emphasis added).

Another dominant ideological strand animating contemporary political thought and action, is a radical egalitarianism. By "radical egalitarianism" I mean neither simple equality before the law nor a fundamental equality in human dignity between people but a conception of man which asserts that in essence there are no significant differences between one human being and another (in particular between men and women) which would warrant the emergence and the sustaining of systematically differentiated roles and functions in society. The presence of such differentiation is taken to be prima facie evidence of discrimination or inequality and the aim of the radical egalitarian is to eliminate it, usually by means of legislative measures. To the extent that it recognises any substantial difference between parent and child at all the aim of radical egalitarians is to flatten out the distinction between fathering and mothering into a generic non sex-differentiated parenting. On this view, there is no relevant difference between being a father and being a mother; anything a mother can do a father can do too, and vice versa. Alan Carlson remarks that:

full equality in sex roles… [is]…predicated on a devaluation – even elimination – of the family as an intermediate social structure. The origins of this ideology lay in the radical-liberal and Marxist writings of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this vision, men and women have no separate roles. Rather, they can claim but one shared role: being human. Parenting is viewed as a joint responsibility to be shared equally by men and women[7].

Utopianism is the third important ideological strand in contemporary analysis of the family. The driving force behind utopian thinking is the creation, as it were ex nihilo, of a pure and perfect society. Unfortunately, such a society requires the rejection of the facticity of human nature, the historicity of the human situation, traditions, customs, variety – in a word, all the things that make life interesting, all the differences that make a difference. Utopian thinking also implies a willingness to interfere, often in radical and coercive ways, with the free decisions and freely chosen arrangements of men and women, communities and societies. "It's for your own good" would appear to be the motto. Such a phrase is, of course, used by parents to children, and this again is characteristic, for the utopian in practice infantilises the citizens of his brave new world, "for their own good"!

The image of the totalitarian state towering over a mass of infantilised "citizens" was strikingly characterised by de Tocqueville almost 150 years ago. In his Democracy in America he wrote:

…the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world…The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest … above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes on itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willing labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Many utopias involve the collapsing of the distinction between the public and the private realms. Franz Schultheis comments that:

A key element common to classical social utopias – from Thomas Campanella to Charles Fourier – and all great revolutionary projects – from the theories of Saint-Simon to the anarchist movements – resides in the idea of a radical transfer of the functions of social reproduction from the context of family and the private sphere to that of the collective and the public sphere. Everything happens as though one had to attack the family institution, the driving force behind the reproduction of private property and social inequalities, in order to allow the emergence of a new type of man and a new form of society with neither divisions nor relationships of dominance between the classes, sexes and generations, still characterising modern civilisations to the present day[8].

The family, along with other intermediate social structures, is often considered by certain political regimes to be an obstruction to the achievement of their aims. Where we have a state relating directly to individuals, individuals dislocated from the nexus of natural, non-contractual personal relations, those individuals can be moved around, organised, and dominated much more easily than can those firmly embedded in community and family.

There is nothing very novel about suggestions to remove children from the natural setting of their families, the better to reconstruct them in another image and likeness. Lybyer remarks, in connection with the Ottoman Empire of Suleiman the Magnificent, that:

… Grandly disregarding the fabric of fundamental customs which is called human nature, and those religious and social prejudices which are thought to be almost as deep as life itself, the Ottoman system took children for ever from parents, discouraged family cares among its members through their most active years, allowed them no certain hold on property, gave them no definite promise that their sons and daughters would profit by their success and sacrifice, raised and lowered them with no regard for ancestry or previous distinction …[9].

Furthermore during the French Revolution, Bertrand Barere, a member of the revolutionary Committee on Public Safety, brazenly declared, "Children belong to the general family, to the state, before belonging to private families." Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just agreed that "children belong to the state" and recommended that children be seized from families and raised entirely by the state after the age of five.

The neo-liberal response

The neo-liberal response to what appears to be a phenomenon of family disintegration is to claim that the situation of the family is not worse than it used to be, it is just different! There is no need for panic.

The discourse around demographic change in EU countries is often expressed in terms of a crisis, a form of demographic if not moral panic. In particular, changes in family form are commonly seen as entirely negative – frightening and bound to lead to financial insecurity if not social collapse[10].

According to the authors of the EU Observatory report, this panicky misperception leads to calls for the prescription of a moral norm by promotion of the traditional nuclear family. (As if their own position did not embody moral norms! It always appears to be the case that other people try to impose their morality on us; whereas our position is morally neutral!)

Despite the depressing facts Ditch and his co-authors list a number of features that they think should lead us to think that things are not as bad as they seem. First, they claim, family change is not as rapid in the EU as it is in the USA and Japan. (Even if this were so, it does not follow that, because things are worse elsewhere, they are not bad here!) Second, they claim that there is significant variation in the experience of social and demographic change among the EU nations; for example, some countries have comparatively low levels of marital breakdown and lone parenthood. (Yes; but no credit here to the social planners. The rates are increasing among those with the lowest levels and there is no a priori reason to believe that they will not settle on a EU norm.) Third, many of the changes are not as bad as they seem. (This is really a variation on the first point and is just as irrelevant.) Fourth, some of the changes are actually good, for example, the ability of women to control their fertility, join the workforce, leave unfulfilling and possibly violent marriages, and so on.

However, change is change is change … Changes cannot be evaluated as good or bad unless compared to some standard of value. The first three reasons offered by Ditch and his fellow authors are signally unconvincing, and the last – that some of the changes are actually good – is a matter of argument. Furthermore, even if some changes are good considered in themselves, it does not mean that there are not associated costs that may be bad.

The values of liberty and equality are endemic in contemporary social and political thought. But liberty and equality are divergent ideals. If one grants liberty priority, then outcomes may well be unequal. If, on the other hand, one constantly readjusts outcomes to some predetermined a priori model of equality, then one cannot but infringe on liberty. In much social policy, the notion of equality dominates that of liberty, and the measures proposed by social planners are such as to bring about that blessed state.

The divergent ideals of liberty and equality can only be held together in fraternity, but fraternity requires a sustaining myth. In real terms, a man cannot be expected to make significant sacrifices for another distant and unknown human being. Human solidarity is evoked by sympathy, and sympathy is induced by identification. If, in some way, that other person is related to me, if we are members of the same group, the same family, the same community, the same nation; if we share a common history, common ideas, common language, common goals, common desires then I may be moved to assist him in his distress. Grandiose universalist conceptions, such as those currently dominant in EU ideology, cannot generate the commitment that will permit people to make sacrifices for others. The family is the archetype of the solidarity group, and political communities that present themselves as "family writ large" can, in an attenuated way, call forth sacrifice and commitment.

Family and marriage are becoming increasingly fragile institutions. We live in a fragmentary and fragmenting world. This might, perhaps, be a matter we could regard with indifference were it not that our personal identities, and thus our prospects for happiness and fulfilment, are closely tied to such institutions. Man is essentially a social animal and his personal constitution is mediated socially. When social structures disintegrate, the danger of personal disintegration is real and serious; that is why flourishing societies have given legal force and support to their fundamental social institutions, especially to the family. We are faced with the paradox that we are coming to regard the exercise of sexuality as increasingly a purely private affair, while, at the same time, the consequences of such free choices are burdens to be supported by society as a whole. One cannot have it both ways. As the Spanish proverb says "Take what you like – and pay for it!"

The first step towards solving a problem is recognising that you have a problem. But this is only the first step. If those problems are to be solved, we need to take the second step, that is, we must come to know the causes of our problems; then, and only then, is there any possibility of solution. We in the West have only taken the first step. We are still too committed to the neo-liberal ideology to be able to take the second step.