What is the real state of the union?

In his "State of the Union" speech, January 28, 2003, US president George W. Bush called for both :

• "an economy that grows" and creates more jobs - through lower taxes on dividends and greater investment – and;
• more solidarity between Americans: "doing the work of compassion … one heart and one soul at a time".

Considering recent developments in our societies, one can doubtwhether it is possible to carry these two objectives forward together,for two reasons.

The first is that economic growth in American capitalism is slow, especially in new job creation.

In the last two decades of the last century, neo-liberal governments ofAnglo-Saxon countries tried to deal with the problem of unemployment,but the final structure of employment in these countries wasdramatically different from before.

Unskilled, precarious, and low-wage service jobs had replaced the skilled jobs of the Fordist era of industrial production. The US economy seems to accelerate in its growth, but this growth is mainly financial: profits increase, but proportionate job creation does not follow.

The central fact is that this pattern, which may have been emphasized by short-term developments, underpins all economic development of recent decades.Substituting capital for labor seems to be one of the most prominentfeatures of corporate policies of the past 20 years.

American capitalism is a short-term, stock-exchange funded, profit-oriented type of capitalism, among others possible. In this type of capitalism, employment suffers more. Not only does this capitalism emphasize external flexibility and workforce mobility, favoring short-term contract relationships and individual career paths, it also considers the workforce as nothing more than an "adjustment variable" likely to undergo variations in perimeter or volume according to the needs, real or unreal, perceived by management.

This type of capitalism, clearly, is hostile to the spirit of community that has underpinned other models of capitalist economic development. It is articulated with liberal and neo-liberal ideologies, characterized by individualism and social class egoism, and it favors an abstract, mathematical view of economics seen as an intellectual domain apart from other social sciences.

In reality, this economic policy has created a new working class, living off poor jobs or social welfare, with no prospects for the future. Immigrants have been used to reconstruct this new working class, economically poor, educationally impoverished, and politically passive - although it powerfully spreads its values over broad factions of society, notably youth who do not necessarily belong to the underclass. A new language, music, and fashion carries values of abandonment to short-term pleasure, limitation of personal or collective ambitions, and laissez-faire attitudes in all areas - a kind of "underclassization" of society.

In the final analysis, this economic policy is also - and probably foremost - a social policy.

It did not involve only the US and Britain. It appeared later in Continental Europe and elsewhere. Social-democrat and socialist parties helped its implementation. What had been called "Capitalism from Rhineland", a type of capitalism inspired by community spirit, that involved more social welfare and corporate staff stability and had proved its efficiency in Germany and Scandinavia (as well as in Japan), is disappearing under the impact of the "new" American model spread through globalization. Thus, in the last decade, among other similar evolutions, German management has become more hierarchical and individualistic, following the American influence.

The second reason these large objectives - a growing, job-creating economy along with more solidarity and compassion - seem incompatible in the long run is that the values promoted by American capitalism have a negative effect on the solidity of society.

We are better paid, better fed, better housed, better educated, and healthier than ever before. We have faster communication and more convenient transportation, and our average disposable income in constant currency is more than double that of the mid-1950s. Life expectancy has risen from 47 (1900) to 76 years.

However, from 1960 until the early 2000's, our countries slid into a deepening social recession that dwarfed the comparatively briefer economic recessions often dominating news and politics. Since 1960, the divorce rate has doubled, the recorded violent crime rate has quadrupled, the prison population has quintupled, the percent of babies born to unmarried parents has sextupled, and cohabitation (a predictor of future divorce) has increased sevenfold. The American National Commission on Civic Renewal combined social trends such as these in creating its 1998 "Index of National Civic Health" which has plunged since 1960. Suicide mortality has increased by around 60% in the past 45 years - suicide is one of the five leading causes of death for people 15-24 years old.

The concept of "social capital" is another way to formulate the problem. Social capital, according to a definition by sociologist Francis Fukuyama, is an instantiated informal norm that promotes cooperation between individuals. It is therefore embedded in traditional virtues like honesty, the keeping of commitments, trust, reliable performance of duties, reciprocity, and the like.

Professor Robert Putnam, at Harvard University, fed a debate on the erosion of social capital in the US in an article published in 1995 called "Bowling Alone", and later in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. What he shows is that people who used to join bowling leagues have, in recent years, dropped out and instead simply bowl with friends. And the same holds for membership in practically all other voluntary associations: Since the mid-sixties, religious affiliation, membership in labor unions, affiliation with school associations, and membership in (and volunteering for) civic organizations have declined more or less steadily. Similar observations can be made about the decline in participation in U.S. national, state, and local elections over the last three decades. Similar relative declines are evident in political rally attendance, and local organization committee membership.

Yet many students of the new democracies that have emerged over the past decade and a half have emphasized the importance of a strong, active civil society for the consolidation of democracy.

Many of us did not need Putnam's research to experience the difficulty in mobilizing people within movements or projects oriented towards the good of the community. Most political parties, unions, and associations have difficulties keeping their members, even in the countries that have less individualistic cultures, such as Germany and Japan. It is all the more difficult to institute these organizations. Aspirations for change exist, but few are those who actually are willing to invest their energy or financial means; mistrust and fear of taking risks dominate their feelings and behaviors.

If social capital is an instantiated norm (a set of norms or mental attitudes underlying actual behaviors), it follows that the manifestations of the decline of social capital in our countries derives from the transformation of these norms and attitudes. The erosion of the social link - and beyond that, the erosion of underlying social capital - must therefore be analyzed in terms of systems of values. The less the systems of values include social capital, the less they will induce actual behaviors likely to strengthen the social bond.

In 2001 in the North of France, in a train, a girl was raped by seven adolescents. There were 200 people in the train - no one moved. This is a clear example of a situation generated by the lack of feelings of belonging to a community. The first explanation is radical individualism and indifference. The second explanation is fear of not being supported by others.

Radical individualism is familiar from contemporary values that encourage people to think that they can find happiness and self-accomplishment without the community, instead of finding them within the community. Paradoxically, however, it seems difficult for even reclusive personalities to find happiness without some harmonious interaction with others.

This is notably the thesis of the Communitarian network. In 1991, Professor Amitai Etzioni, a George Washington University sociologist, became known as the "guru" of the Communitarian movement. Etzioni, influenced by ideas drawn from traditional German community spirit, contended that the tension between personal privacy and the common good should be diminished through a limitation on the importance of individualism.

Individualism, though, is not the only component of the new system of values spreading within our societies from the late 1960s. A second important element is based on the concept that accomplishment and happiness are found in pleasure. This is the hedonic component of contemporary morality. This covers sexual pleasure, as shown by the success in the 1970's of Emmanuelle, a novel by Emmanuelle Arsan, (and film), for which an unrestricted sexuality was becoming an honor, inverting, more than rejecting, traditional values. In this culture, personal attractiveness and youth become capital values. This is exemplified in the novels of Michel Houellebecq. Consuming goods also can be a source of this pleasure supposedly guaranteeing happiness in opposition to the sterner former morality, which insisted on duties, responsibilities, work and constructive values. Of course, the Communitarian Movement similarly suggested balancing individual rights with responsibilities.

A third major component of contemporary Western morality is consumerism. Much has been said about the consumption-oriented society. Control over others, through processes of possession, domination, and seduction, are the main mechanisms at work here. Wealth is supposed to be the natural aim of human action and the sole source of prestige, respect and social status. This is of course encouraged by marketing campaigns that sometimes run very deep, such as those purveyed by the automotive industry. There are people who withdraw from business and worldly preoccupations, and turn towards the wisdom of countries where spirituality is still rooted in the culture. (Gandhi had defined Indian identity as a spiritual one, opposed to Western "materialism".) This is a reaction against the excesses of possession values, for which is substituted detachment. In general, spiritual consciousness and preoccupations are progressing significantly in the Western countries, as evidenced in clothing and hairstyle fashions and musical trends expressing the fascination Westerners feel for the spiritual far East.

The TISR MODEL, elaborated by Patrick Hunout in the years 1995-1996, is an attempt to reach global understanding of the current transformations occurring in our contemporary societies. This diagrammatic model represents the consistency that exists between three dimensions: economic flexibility that produces precariousness, immigration that produces anomie, and individualism that produces a cellular, atomistic society.

These three trends contribute to further destruction of the social link. Individualism first helps develop "autonomous" and "proactive" individuals, whose behaviors adapt in a quicker, easier way to economic and technological changes in the market economy, and whose sophisticated tastes (presented as a way to "personal identity") allow some outlet for innovative, often useless, products.

By contributing to the destruction of ancestral community links, individualism then facilitates the recourse to mass immigration that emphasizes class inequalities and favors the authoritarian governance of society. In turn, multiethnicity further breaks up ancestral community links, and thus contributes to strengthening individualism that eventually tends to become the only way to survive in a society deprived of a collective project.

In the heart of the quest for the "self" that contemporary individuals believe to be a process that frees them from the weight of societal and family constraints hides a new, infinitely subtle form of slavery.

In these conditions, our societies have become very fragile. George W. Bush said in his speech that "in all these efforts, however, America's purpose is more than to follow a process - it is to achieve a result: the end of terrible threats to the civilized world". But aren't threats to civic society dangerous too?