Social Pacts Research Articles

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Responsive corporatism without political credit: social concertation, constructive opposition and the long tenure of the Rutte II cabinet in the Netherlands (2012–2017)

This paper analyses the unexpected return of social concertation in the Netherlands under the Rutte II government (2012–2017). Despite political fragmentation, electoral volatility and intensified EU budgetary surveillance, between 2012 and 2017 the Netherlands witnessed several social pacts that proved vital to the enactment of long-awaited reforms, allowed the government to turn post-crisis fiscal deficits into surpluses, and helped regenerate economic growth. After describing the contextual differences with the Dutch ‘miracle’ years of the 1980s and 1990s, we reveal a novel institutional logic of responsive corporatism whereby, first, a social pact with civil society actors is agreed which, then, becomes a launching pad for the de facto minority government to enlist parties from the ‘constructive opposition’ in these agreements to deliver anticipated reforms. Unlike the 1980s and 1990s, however, pro-active engagement with the social partners did not pay out electorally, in particular for the social democrats.

Grief Aesthetics

Abstract An excerpt from an experimental series, “Grief Aesthetics” is a lyrical essay on intimacy and writing. The essay participates in the double black study of eroding and composing a new sentence, a new sentence sounded in refusal (of the social pact of writing, of grammar), a new sentence forged in friendship (of thinking with, of writing with). On one level, “Grief Aesthetics” is concerned with inherited grief, the remains of stolen life, the residual desire for romance in contemporary black art. The essay considers the loss of romantic love in conversation with Terence Nance's feature and short films An Oversimplification of Her Beauty and Swimming in Your Skin Again, in conversation with a single recurring line from a poem in Taylor Johnson's Inheritance. At another level, “Grief Aesthetics” is a sort of ars poetica on the process of writing and at this level is preoccupied with the poetic line, the sentence (thinking about sentences), the space in writing, the mundane moments in between the emergence of a line or series of lines and declension as it occurs in the gaps. At every turn “Grief Aesthetics” practices creating in “commonsense” (a shared feeling, a shared aesthetics) among contemporary artists whose works evoke a sense of grief, (dis)placement, loss, loneliness, homelessness, desire, tenderness, friendship, bliss.

How Fluid is the Special Statute of Autonomy of Trentino Alto Adige/South Tyrol? The influence of the Court of Justice of the EU, the Council of Europe and the Italian Constitutional Court on the Process of Implementation

This article intends to examine the different legal and institutional factors that have contributed to the fluidity of the minority protection system in Trentino Alto Adige/South Tyrol, referring to the contribution of the EU, the Council of Europe and constitutional jurisprudence. To do so, it focuses on the main principles governing minority protection. To what extent have these factors succeeded in correcting the rigidities inherent in the Statute of Autonomy? The article analyses the evolution of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the EU that has redefined some principles of the Statute of Autonomy, the contribution of the Council of Europe and the jurisprudence on census, quotas and membership of linguistic groups, the legal principles guiding the education system and, finally, the influence of the Italian constitutional jurisprudence on the concept of closed farmyard (‘maso chiuso’/‘Der geschlossene Hof’). In the conclusions, the article highlights how openness to the EU and the European context has contributed to the fluidity of the system and protected the prerogatives of new groups that are emerging alongside the three traditional language groups, such as bilingual people and new minorities (immigrants). These developments and the new needs of society must be taken into account in the reform of the new Statute as a new social pact.

Social Pact as a Way to Implement Biopolitics and Social Management

Social Pact as a Way to Implement Biopolitics and Social Management

The Epistemology of the South, Coloniality of Gender, and Latin American Feminism

AbstractThis article provides a Latin American feminist critique of early decolonial theories focusing on the work of Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel. Although decolonial theorists refer to Chicana feminist scholarship in their work, the work of Latin American feminists is ignored. However, the author argues that Chicana feminist theory cannot stand in for Latin American feminist theory because “lo latinoamericano” gets lost in translation. Latin American feminists must do their own theoretical work. Central to the critique of the use of gender in decolonial theory is an analysis of the social pacts among white capitalists and white working-class men that not only exclude white women but make citizenship and democracy impossible for men and women of color in the metropolis as well as in the colony. By revealing the nexus between gender, race, and democracy, not only is the coloniality of gender apparent, but also the coloniality of democracy.

Democratizing memory and the question of Black difference in Brazil (ca. 1980–1988): The transformation of the Serra da Barriga (Alagoas), from haunted “Black territory” to national memorial in the transition between dictatorship and democracy

By voiding the previous social pact, including the predominant conception of racial integration, the Brazilian military regime (1964–1985) created the conditions for a radical understanding of Black difference, which found its leading motif in the memory of the Quilombo of Palmares, a historical community of rebel slaves. A new Black movement understood its cultural and historical experience as containing a utopian legacy, an alternative for a Brazil marked by racism and inequality. To overcome its problems of legitimation, the regime set into motion a process of gradual democratization. The need to symbolically and culturally accomplish this transition created an institutional breach for the memory politics of the Black movement. In this context, the inclusion of the Serra da Barriga, a site of the war against Palmares, into national cultural heritage became the testing grounds for novel politics of culture that changed both the understanding of Brazilian nationhood and Black difference, as represented in the memory of Palmares.

The end of the social pact in Europe (1981–2008)

Between 1980—during the 'double dip' crisis—and 2008, the European social pact, born of the armed and revolutionary defeat (in part of the countries) of Nazi fascism, ended. In exchange for disarmament and the end of the revolutionary struggle, in 1945–47, a specific form of counter-revolution was designed in Europe, outlined in Yalta and Postdam, which erected the European Welfare State and full employment in 1945–47 in exchange for workers abdicate from the struggle for power. In this article, we argue that this period –known as 'European social pact'—began to break down with the anti-cyclical measures of 1980, which opened doors to the generalisation of precarious work to new generations, after the defeat and/or cooptation of the main unions, from 1986, before the fall of the USSR. Precariousness that after the anti-cyclical measures of 2008 extended to almost the entire working population in Europe, subject to increasingly intense, brutal and precarious working conditions.

It’s not just where you stand, it’s how you got there: social pacts and manual worker support for radical right-wing parties

ABSTRACT We utilize the literature on social pacts to argue that governments can reduce manual worker support for the radical right by engaging in an inclusive process of decision-making with unions. Our analysis examines 11 Western European countries between 1999 and 2017 and employs a Heckman selection model. We find that when left or mainstream right governments complete social pact agreements, manual workers become less likely to support radical right-wing parties (RRPs); but when such governments fail to convert social pact proposals into social pact agreements, manual workers become more likely to support RRPs. We also find that social pact agreements have a greater effect on manual worker support for the radical right when they occur under mainstream right governments, but that failed social pact proposals have a greater effect on manual worker support for the radical right when they occur under left governments; and that the social pact formation process matters more for the RRP support of manual workers who belong to a union than those who do not. Our results suggest that manual worker support for the radical right is not only a function of issue voting or socioeconomic and policy outcomes, but also features of the policymaking process.

Sobre los paradigmas de la violencia

Violence constitutes a complex phenomenon as well as historical constant. This explains that various thinkers and writers have tried to define, interpret and classify it. Violence destroys the most sacred of human rights, the right to life. In particular, genocide and other crimes against humanity, war crimes, sporadic and isolated acts of violence – other situations of violence–, terrorism and organized criminal violence, are the modalities of collective violence responsible for majority of the violent deaths that severely question the social pact. Hence the urgent need to carry out a review of the paradigms of violence and the most pernicious types of violence that cause the greatest damage to the social dimension.

The need for a social pact to facilitate urban mobility planning

In this article we have sought to identify strategies to facilitate urban mobility planning in Brazilian cities. These plans follow bold guidelines, such as giving priority to active and collective public transport modes. The challenge, therefore, is to overcome the resistance of social agents who are unwilling to make sacrifices for the benefit of the community. Among the methodological procedures, the authors analyze the main challenges facing urban mobility in Brazil, introduce Mancur Olson's ideas on the logic behind collective action to transport engineering and evaluate two proposals for an urban mobility pact: that of the then President Dilma Rousseff and that of the Ipea. The result of this analysis points to the need for an urban mobility pact following “win-win” reasoning. A pact that involves not only the public authorities, but also various private social agents, and according to “win-win” reasoning: they win if they participate and the community wins with their participation.

Cross-border identity as a daily resistance tactic in a time of global health emergency: Gorizia-Nova Gorica go borderless

ABSTRACT Ulrich Beck represented risk society as the overcoming of the nation states as the container of the respective civil societies. The social contract which was at the base of the construction of what Anderson defined the imagined communities, sanctioned the renunciation by the populations of part of their prerogatives of freedom in favour of the security guaranteed by the sovereign power. The present global health emergency seems to have proposed the same social pact: more security and less freedom especially of movement of people segregated within the apparently resurging nation states by new borders and walls. The remaining residue of globalisation is its economic-financial globalism. Yet ethnographic analysis along border areas reveals a consolidated cross-border identity experienced in people's everyday life as a tactic of resistance against the erection of new self-containment barriers. This contribution aims to analyse the salient aspects of this phenomenon in the city of Gorizia, which for decades has constituted an integrated metropolitan area of the Italian and Slovenian zones, defining a specific cross-border identity shared by both Italian and Slovenian citizens. This identity has not given way in front of the walls that have been restored in recent months in order to contain the contagion and therefore could represents what de Certeau defined as a tactic of resistance that in the present case bears witness to the invention of an increasingly cosmopolitan daily life.

75 Years After the Social Pact: A Brief History of the Socio-Technical Evolution of Social Security in Belgium

Belgium was one of the first countries in Western Europe to celebrate at the end of 2019 the 75th anniversary of a generally compulsory social security system. But this was done with a certain reluctance as if the main actors, the administrators of the system, were alienated from the original principles. In this contribution we examine how this social security evolved by also taking socio-technical factors into account. To establish that the current system has indeed moved a long way from the basic principle of 'solidarity', and rather has the characteristics of a large technical system in which individual needs can be detected and an individual compensation system can be developed. Provided that the insured assumes responsibility and actively participates in the welfare society. This is the paradigm of the Third Way, which is complementary to the technical foundation of the current network system. The role of administrators (intermediaries as trade unions, health insurance funds, etc.) is limited in this respect, hence the lukewarm revelry in the celebration of a system in which they hardly recognize themselves.

The social events of May 24, 2008 in Sucre-Bolivia

This research has a highly complex object of study which resulted in a challenge for the team coordinator and the research team. The establishment of the Constituent Assembly in 2006, generated a set of expectations around the country, the possibility of leaving behind the water and gas war and above all ensure that the social sectors get an inclusive Political Constitutions, in other words the constructions of a social pact that allows after more than 180 years Bolivia as a Republic, a national cohesion. Because of the hegemonic political interests and lack of clarity of the opposition, the legitimate request to include an item in the debate of the assembly created an area of confusion within the constitutional assembly, so it‘s impossible to understand what happened on May 24, 2008 without doing a review from the Bolivian state and its political practices The conceptualization as racism of the social facts of May 24, 2008 was a heavy trial a priori the fact with the one we had to lead the work; our results lead us to discuss the political practices of the Bolivian state since 1825 and the genesis of it, the possibility of getting a test in which civil society and the state has a violent political practice is a contribution to search for the construction of citizenship.

The Political Implications of Urban Displacement: Notes from Two Fieldwork Research Projects in Casablanca

Abstract Resettlement programs have always been in the political agenda of public institutions and administrators of Casablanca since its growth during the French Protectorate. Today real estate and private multinational capital sneak into local and national powers, pushing public authorities to clear land for new urban development through demolition and resettlement of local residents. The dwellers of areas such as the old town centre (medina) and the slums (karyan) increasingly react to displacement by challenging this urban agenda frontally with their bodies and words, but often also deploying what James Scott calls “weapons of the weak”, i.e. implicit acts of resistance and symbolic dissent. Reversing Asef Bayat’s statement, we consider residents of these stigmatized neighbourhoods “revolutionaries without a revolution”, partisans of an intimate cause of their own, that aims at having a home and surviving in a hostile city. Our reflections are the product of two separate fieldwork researches: one with the inhabitants of informal neighbourhoods, another with residents and former residents of the old medina. The two cases show how resettlement affects the sense of belonging and of cohesion of low-income classes by uprooting the founding element of the everyday life: the house. The uncertainty about the possibility to keep their own home deeply conditions the implicit social pact with the monarchy apparatus, and may represent one of the conditions that are undermining the allegiance to the monarchy itself.

CROSS-BORDER IDENTITY AS A DAILY RESISTANCE TACTIC OF COSMOPOLITANISM IN A TIME OF GLOBAL HEALTH EMERGENCY: GORIZIA-NOVA GORICA GO BORDERLESS

Ulrich Beck represented cosmopolitan society as overcoming the nation-states as the container of the respective civil societies. In order to understand these profound changes, sociology itself appears inadequate, populated as it is by definitions that Beck considers as zombie concepts: “the conceptual apparatus of the sociology of modernity appears in crisis because it is inadequate to describe the situation of societies in which the borders of the nation-states that contained them have dissolved in an extremely rapid period. Rather than a definitive departure from that sociology, Beck’s invitation to the international community of sociologists is to recalibrate their concepts in a cosmopolitan perspective» (Porcelli 2005: 8). The social contract, which was at the base of the construction of what Anderson defined the imagined communities, sanctioned the renunciation by the populations of part of their prerogatives of freedom favouring the security guaranteed by the sovereign power. The present global health emergency seems to have proposed the same social pact: more security and less freedom, especially people segregated within the resurging nation-states by new borders and walls. The remaining residue of globalisation is its economic-financial globalism. Ethnographic analysis along border areas reveals a consolidated cross-border identity experienced in people’s everyday lives as a tactic of resistance against the erection of new self-containment barriers. This contribution aims to analyse the salient aspects of this phenomenon in the city of Gorizia, which for decades has constituted an integrated metropolitan area of the Italian and Slovenian zones, defining a specific cross-border identity shared by both Italian and Slovenian citizens. This identity has not given way in front of the walls that have been restored in recent months in order to contain the contagion and therefore could represent what de Certeau defined as a tactic of resistance that in the present case bears witness to the invention of an increasingly cosmopolitan daily life. In this respect, the main points of the project book submitted for the candidacy of Gorizia-Nova Gorica as European Capital of Culture 2025 will be examined. The title of the bid book itself specifies the cosmopolitan identity of the area under analysis: “Go borderless”.

A Marcha da Família com Deus pela liberdade em São Paulo: direitas, participação política e golpe no Brasil, 1964

Este artigo pretende aprofundar estudos sobre a atuação de grupos e lideranças políticas de direita durante a crise política dos primeiros meses de 1964 que culminou no golpe civil-militar e na instauração da ditadura. Para tanto, elegerei como objeto a Marcha da Família com Deus pela Liberdade ocorrida em São Paulo no dia 19 de março de 1964, a primeira das diversas que ocorreram no país naquele ano. Especificamente, a proposta é estudar os discursos mobilizados por grupos de direita organizados, a partir do estudo de quatro aspectos do repertório político das direitas naquele momento: a evocação do papel da mulher; a articulação do discurso e a prática política cristã; a defesa da democracia e a necessidade de proteger a ordem constitucional. Todos esses aspectos adquiriam certa unidade e congruência pelo forte sentido anticomunista que os atravessavam.

Amnistías y Derecho internacional en perspectiva histórica: Bartolomé de las Casas vs. Hugo Grocio

Toda amnistía genera un conflicto de valores de difícil solución. ¿Cuál es el “bien” a priorizar en las circunstancias que facilitan la propuesta de amnis­tías? ¿Castigar penalmente los ilícitos más graves u ofrecer puentes de plata que faciliten la paz a costa de la obligación de castigo? En el pensamiento occi­dental hubo un momento crítico en la racionalización de la ‘validez’ filosófico-jurídica de esta figura. Las Casas formuló la primera teorización sobre la vali­dez limitada de las amnistías a partir de su teoría del ‘pacto social’. Un siglo después Grocio respondió con la teoría del ‘dominio eminente’ del soberano que propugnaba la validez de cualquier amnistía fijada en tratados por razón de su utilidad pública. La postura grociana se impuso hasta finales del s. XX.

John Locke—Theorist of Limiting and Supervising Political Power by Citizens

This paper aims to analyze John Locke’s ideas on the limited political mandate of the institutions of power, and the need for their supervision and sanctioning by citizens when they violate their duties. It emphasizes the topicality of these ideas, pointing out that they represent two fundamental principles in the functioning of the rule of law, defining the current democracies. Locke justified them starting from the hypothesis that society was founded by people through a deliberate pact, so that the common good could be promoted more effectively, and the legitimacy of political power is conditioned by the observance of this task. Therefore, if political power violates the social pact, it can be overthrown by citizens even by force. The author then raises the question if the use of force to change a political regime can still be justified today. Her answer is that this is an objective mechanism, which appears implacably in all unjust societies, and the only way to defuse it is for states to permanently respect the rights and freedoms of all citizens.

A terminological study about university-society relations: third mission, socioeconomic surroundings and the evolution of the role of academia

The relationships and interactions between universities and society that go beyond the teaching and research missions have been termed differently by various groups of scholars and in different countries and are more commonly known by the term “university extension”. The different views and interpretations of university missions relate to the development of the understanding of the role of this institution in society. In respect to this, the purpose of the article was to present, based on extensive literature review, the conceptualization of the main terms commonly used to express the university-society relations: third mission, outreach, extension, vinculacion, engagement-community and civic. The research results allow us to conclude that the terms studied arise from very similar situations and purposes, namely: teaching and research missions and responsibilities of the university vis-a-vis new visions of the social pact or contract between academic science and society.