Globalisering, maatschappijbeelden en democratie

Samenvatting

Globalisation, images of society and democracy. Starting from the idea that social life is basically a totality of collective representations, we analysed the major collective representations of society in relation with processes of economic and societal change, generally referred to as ‘globalisation’ . We could distinguish between six major images of society: the welfare society, the social exclusion paradigm, the market society, the risk society, the security society and the multicultural society. These collective representations of society imply different strategies to deal with problems of economic and social change in terms of adaptation. We singled out the multicultural society, which is especially in its communitarian version at odds with some basic principles of modern democracy. We argue that the different images of society, each of them emphasising an important societal problem, cannot be included into an overarching model of society without decreasing the democratic quality of society, as such a development would imply ‘the end of ideology’ and even ‘the end of history’. But also without such an undesirable attempt to ‘integrate’ the different images of society, there is a common deficit in all of the images of society in front of us: being phrased in terms of adaptation to ‘unavoidable’ technological and economic impacts on social life, they do not convey ideas about how to influence future societal and social conditions, both on the national and the European level. We discuss briefly this state of affairs and the necessity to escape from this rather unsatisfactory condition.