The European Dream by Rifkin Jeremy

Author:Rifkin, Jeremy [Rifkin, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2006-12-15T19:49:54+00:00

Sociologist Andrew Barry makes the point that the network, in the European Union, has become

a way of both transcending the political conflict between welfarism and neo-liberalism, and as a way of developing a form of public intervention which animates social and economic actors instead of creating a dependent or protective relation between the state and its clients.24

It should be added that public policy networks are also a way of ensuring that unbridled market forces don’t gain inordinate sway over the affairs of society.

With public policy networks, politics becomes a 24/7 affair, just like commerce. In the new world of instantaneous information and communications and continuous feedback loops, there are no longer beginnings or endings to political engagement, but only relentless political discourse.

The density of exchange and the multiplicity of interests mitigate against any downtime. Governance ceases to be a bounded activity and metamorphoses into an open-ended process. Politics, in the new European sense of the term, has come to mean all of the purposeful activity that people and G O V E R N M E N T W I T H O U T A C E N T E R

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organizations engage in, through either formal or informal networks, to effect their interests and goals. Participatory democracy migrates to the far edges of space and envelops duration, becoming an all-consuming human endeavor. Everything in society becomes politicized, and anyone left out of the governing networks risks falling far behind the political process, with little chance of catching up to the flow of the game.

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Romancing the

Civil Society

POLITICS INthe nation-state era operates along two poles—market and government. EU politics, by contrast, operates between three nodes—commerce, government, and civil society. The shift from

two-sector to three-sector politics represents a radical progression in the evolution of political life, with profound import for how we human beings organize our future. If two-sector politics made the Enlightenment vision viable, three-sector politics makes the new European Dream realizable.

The Forgotten Sector

The civil society is the realm perched between the marketplace and government. It is composed of all the activities that make up the cultural life of individuals and their communities. The civil society includes religious institutions, the arts, education, health care, sports, public recreation and entertainment, social and environmental advocacy, neighborhood engagement, and other activities whose function is to create community bonds and social cohesion. The civil society is the meeting place for reproducing the culture in all of its various forms. It is where people engage in “deep R O M A N C I N G T H E C I V I L S O C I E T Y

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play” to create social capital and establish codes of conduct and behavioral norms. The culture is where intrinsic values reign. The civil society is the forum for the expression of culture and is the primordial sector.

Despite the civil society’s importance in the life of society, this realm has been increasingly marginalized in the modern era by the forces of the market and nation-state governance.

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