Social Capital in Europe: Trust, Sociability, Community Life

Social capital, a recent notion that appeared in the 1990s, refers to the nature and quality of the bonds linking individuals in a society and their ability to develop trust and maintain relationships. We learn much about these topics from the surveys of European values that form the core of this special issue of Futuribles. Vincent Tournier presents the various lessons in this article. First, he stresses the diversity of social capital in Europe, as measured by the level of interpersonal trust and community participation (trade unions, political parties, religious movements, sporting associations etc.) and also by more concrete probing regarding the neighbours one would be happy (or unhappy) to have. He then offers various strands of explanation of the level of trust or mistrust: a correlation with the degree of statism, level of wealth (inequalities in income and wealth being more influential factors in generating mistrust than the degree of statism) and religion (countries with Protestant traditions showing a higher level of trust) etc. He concerns himself lastly with the links that exist between interpersonal and political trust (opinions about democracy and institutions, the preference for a “strong man” to govern the country etc.), which are admittedly real but are not to be over-exaggerated. In all these areas Tournier presents the overall findings and the finer variations within each country. He also looks more closely at the situation of France and at the argument that social relations are deteriorating and mistrust increasing there. This would seem to be a catastrophist view, which the findings of the Values Study do not entirely support when analysed more subtly.