About Post-National Integration in Norbert Elias’s Work: Towards a Socio-Historical Approach

At first glance, it may be surprising to consider the German-Jewish born sociologist Norbert Elias (Breslau, 1897–Amsterdam, 1990) as a reference of primary importance for thinking about the future of democracy and citizenship in Europe and beyond. Until recently, ‘classics’ of historical sociology as a whole have rarely been considered as highly relevant for investigations of the present state and future of relations between political communities in the age of globalisation. Moreover, in Elias’s work, which focuses on very long-term social (including political) processes in pre- modern and modern Europe, the major terms used in European Studies and in political theories on European Union – such as ‘legitimacy’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘citizenship’ or ‘democracy’ – are rarely mentioned. Elias was obviously not first and foremost a theorist of nationalism or a post-nationalist author. He would even have refused to be considered mainly as a political or social theorist, and even less as a theorist or as a philosopher tout court. Elias’s first doctorate was in philosophy but he was to abandon that discipline in favour of sociology, an intellectual break that deeply shaped his subsequent thinking (Elias 1994; Mennell 1998: 7-9). Elias’s sociology was then marked by the opposition between positive, descriptive or ‘reality congruent’ social sciences, on the one hand, and normative philosophy, sometimes denounced as unrealistic or utopian, on the other. In addition, he refused to consider politics or policy as a distinct sphere. Moreover, Elias’s historical sociology, in its more political aspects, mostly seems interested in the genesis of the state (Elias 1996; 1997), as were such sociologists as Anderson (1977) and Tilly (1993). However, a closer examination of his work reveals the undoubtedly central character of the question of social and political integration beyond the nation state. This preoccupation is already present in the conclusion of Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (1997, ...