Since the Boom: Continuity and Change in the Western Industrialized World after 1970

Abstract

This book deals with a research topic that has become highly politicized since the Trump presidency in the United States and the rise of strong nationalist and right-wing populist movements in Europe: the social and political upheaval linked to what is commonly described or named as the deindustrialization of the advanced capitalist countries in the West after 1970. Historians have been—by profession—shy to engage in debates on the present crises of Western democracies or the decline of organized labor due to the dismantling of large sectors of traditional industries “in the Western Industrialized World” (as this book calls western Europe and North America). But attitudes changed under the impact of present political conflicts. Today the door is open to innovative empirical research looking back to the last decades of the twentieth century and searching for the long-term consequences of the decrease of jobs in industry, mass unemployment, and increasing social and economic inequalities in the highly industrialized countries of the West.The German historian Sebastian Voigt has edited a book whose contributors engage such questions. Until very recently, most historians working on the transformation of industrial societies in the 1970s or 1980ss concentrated on national cases. This volume tries to transcend this status quo and open comparative views starting from the recent German debate about the transformations “since the boom.” In the German debate this term means that the end of the postwar period of high growth rates, based on high industrial output and employment, opened an era of cultural and political uncertainty and structural change. It ended around the turn of the millennium when new economic, social, and political patterns crystallized.This book uses case studies in West Germany, the United Kingdom, and France to echoes approaches dealing with the 1970s and 1980s as years of what Bruce Schulman has called “the great shift in American culture, society and politics.” For example, Jessica Burch writes on direct selling as a flexible response to mass unemployment and the loss of industrial jobs, and Eileen Boris examines the precarity of migrant domestic workers, mostly women, whose number grew rapidly as a result of the rising demand in middle- and upper-class families and couples profiting from their rise of income. These two case studies illustrate the social consequences of this shift in the United States, where the political, cultural, and social ruptures were much deeper than in western European countries. These two case studies must be read with an eye to the background of increasing economic inequality, deepening regional differences, and rising culture wars. Even the UK case, while generally nearest to the United States, is different. Sina Fabian underlines the ongoing growth of private consumption during the 1970s. The return of mass poverty in Britain resulted from the economic shock therapy of the Thatcher government during the crisis of 1980 to 1982 but must also be seen as the flip side of a new boom age of consumerism among the upper middle classes.The other six chapters are case studies on continental Europe (namely France, Netherlands, and West Germany). They highlight different economic and political aspects of this transformational period. Their common denominator is to insist on the specificities of their cases. Bart Hoogeboom and Marijn Molema show us that newly industrialized regions (like the northern part of the Netherlands) profited from the upheavals of the 1970s and did not fit into a general pattern of deindustrialization. Karsten Uhl insists on the impact of trade unions as actors in the economic and technological transformation of these decades. He shows how West German printing unions fought back rather successfully when new digital technologies threatened the very existence of their crafts and jobs. As in the United States, in France (and we may add in most other western European countries) migrants had to pay a big share of the social and economic costs generated by the technological transformation of industries. As Michael Kozakowski argues in his chapter on French migration politics after 1974, governmental politics worsened migrants’ legal and social rights, and mass unemployment undermined their economic situations. Franziska Rehlinghaus and Hartmut Berghoff highlight West German particularities in company culture. Rehlinghaus analyzes in-company staff training as a way of adapting to the technological shifts and economic uncertainties of the business cycle since the mid-1970s. Berghoff insists on the 1990s as the decisive decade of change in German business, bringing the particularities of Rhenish capitalism to an end and opening the door to financial market capitalism in Germany.The empirical evidence of these case studies undermines any linear trend model like “the deindustrialization crisis in the West.” Andreas Wirsching, in his chapter on French discourses on deindustrialization and globalization, interprets deindustrialization as a buzzword for cultural and political commentary on industrial regions struck hard by sectoral crises in their core industries from the 1970s to the 1990s. But the term does not cover the complexity of industrial and economic change in France during these decades. It opened the door to a kind of nostalgia that spread in many Western countries after the 1990s, when the prospects of a socialist left shrunk dramatically.This book resulted from a conference on industrial decline held in 2016, and it marks the starting point of debates on the changing worlds of labor in contemporary history. Since then, more and more historians have rediscovered these worlds as one of the crucial areas of crisis and change in Western democracies. Today, perhaps more than we did then, we insist on the international linkages of these transformations in western Europe and the United States with the postsocialist worlds of labor in eastern Europe or Asia and with the postcolonial worlds in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.