Beyond Coal and Steel: A Social History of Western Europe After the Boom

With Beyond Coal and Steel, distinguished German historian Lutz Raphael has created a landmark study of deindustrialization in Britain, France and Germany from 1970 to 2000. He sees these three decades as a transformative epoch, and rightly so. The number of industrial jobs shrank by half in Britain and France and by a quarter in Germany. Steel plants, coal mines and shipyards disappeared. Many a mill town fell to ruin. The press at the time and scholars ever since have amply documented this upheaval. What makes Raphael’s book distinctive is his sophisticated comparative method and his focus not just on the catastrophe, which he fully describes, but also on how some new forms of industrial life created countervailing forces of stability amid wreckage. By the end of the century, many people suffered unemployment and the precarity of the low-wage service economy, while others built more stable lives through long-term attachments to industrial firms. Our now post-industrial era is also an industrial one still.

Raphael bases his study on survey data and a vast social science literature, but he makes the book fully a work of history by emphasizing chronology and the agency of his actors. Its eight thematic chapters (on economic restructuring, labour protest, residential reconfiguration and so on), are each organized to tell a story of change over time. His treatment, for example, of workers’ resistance to plant closures analyses labour militancy during and after pivotal moments of combat: the French steel protests in Denain and Longwy in 1978–79, Britain’s great coal strike of 1984 and turmoil in Germany’s Ruhr region in 1987–88. He accounts for why trade union power weakened sharply in Britain, less so in France, and only modestly in Germany. Likewise, his urban analysis traces the unfolding dynamics of change. As working-class families came to prioritize home ownership, they gravitated away from the old industrial cities towards suburban and semi-rural peripheries—to the detriment of the older labour, socialist and communist communities of solidarity that had flourished in the 1960s. By ending the book around 2000, he has less to say about workers’ growing allegiance to the populist right. But he highlights their diminishing ties to the left and their disillusionment with national politics, which he sees paving the way to later right-wing radicalization.

As a comparative historian, Raphael takes issue with scholars who, in his view, either overestimate the homogenizing effects of neoliberalism across countries or rely too readily on conventional accounts of how nations differ from one another. By exploring internal comparisons within countries of companies, regions and localities, Raphael paints a picture of greater, more convincing complexity. This strength comes through best in the final two chapters where he focuses on ‘company regimes’ (their form of entrepreneurial authority and worker–employer relations) and new residential geographies. How firms and towns navigated crisis and adaptation, he finds, varied more within countries than between them. Even so, Raphael shows that national-level differences still mattered immensely in multiple ways, such as in how welfare states supported workers or failed to, how countries reformed their systems of skill training or how they weakened (in Britain) or strengthened (in Germany and France) the institutional mechanisms through which workers could have a voice in their firms. Deindustrialization, he concludes, made these countries, and internally their regions and towns, less alike.

Raphael also pays close attention to the sociological diversity of industrial workers. How people experienced job loss—and the options that followed—depended heavily on their age, gender and citizenship status. The travails of migrant workers figure prominently in Raphael’s analysis of France and Germany throughout the book. Chapter seven on life courses, work and unemployment makes much of the continuing forms of discrimination women experienced across these decades, even as the two-income family was becoming more common by the 1990s. Generational differences among men, he shows, became especially stark, as older workers took early retirement in huge numbers, whereas younger workers lucky enough to have industrial jobs in the 1990s became more loyal to their firms (‘sitting tight’ in a safe refuge) and more identified with ‘the narrow world of work’, often at the cost of political commitments.

A study of such scope and insight should inspire scholars to pursue new avenues of research. As Raphael points out, we know too little about how deindustrialization changed cities and towns. Raphael includes the role of the EU in his study, but we still have more to learn about it, and likewise about the impact of transnational exchanges of people, capital and ideas, especially between Germany and France. Raphael makes a strong case for ending his study in 2000, but the continuing intensity of deindustrialization in the twenty-first century, most notably in France, invites studies that stretch the periodization forward. A major seminal work like this one both consolidates knowledge and opens up the field. Beyond Coal and Steel has given scholars new questions and bold arguments with which to grapple for a long time to come.