Approaching Regional and Identity Change in Europe

Abstract

What have been the effects of de-industrialisation across key European regions over the past forty years? The decline of industrial economies came to define many parts of Europe during this time, radically altering ways of working and notions of livelihood formed over time. Once distinctive regions and localities shaped by economic development evolved as sub-systems of much wider national formations and traditions, which were commonly shaped through conceptions of nation and state, culture and economy. From the early nineteenth century, the emergence of the Industrial Revolution began the uneven transformation of European nations. Already by the 1950s in most parts of Europe and in other industrialised nations, specific regions had developed distinct identities primarily through the increasing importance and the dominance of industrial work: this could be found, for instance, in coal mines, in factories, in shipyards. Yet as radical economic restructuring in many of these areas began after the 1970s, there was a fragmentation of these established structures, formations and traditions. New products and production methods and technologies and the growth of the service sector rapidly altered the condition of labour, the nature of communities and the lives and experiences of people. One rapid and major effect of this was the rise of unstable and precarious social conditions, leading to the development of flexible forms of work, irregular working hours and a growing discontinuity and transformation in working lives (see Beck, 1992; Sennett, 1998; Thornley et al., 2010).