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7 Int'l Soc. Work 1 (1964)

handle is hein.journals/intsocwk7 and id is 1 raw text is: THE ROLE OF THE SOCIAL SERVICES IN DIFFERENT STAGES OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING IN EUROPE* Eugen Pusic ** PROCEEDINGS OF THE EUROPEAN REGIONAL SYMPOSIUM Editorial Note: The major documents from the European Regional Symposium held at the invitation of the German National Committee of the ICSW in Stuttgart in September, 1963 are printed in this issue. These include: the keynote speech, the reports of eight Commissions and the concluding speech of synthesis. The Commission reports were presented at a plenary session but were not formally acted on. Complete proceedings of the Symposium are also being published in French and can be secured from the ICSW Regional Office in Paris. I. E UROPE, with its roughly eight million square kilometers, is one of the places where people, by over 2,000 years of decisive thought and action have shaped a view of the human condition every- where, a universal perspective on the problems of man. The life of generations has been spent pur- posefully in working out solutions for these prob- lems. And what is left to us and to generations that follow are new questions for which new answers must be sought. It is, precisely, this tradition of questioning, of not taking things for granted, of probing beyond the established truths that is the deepest root of Euro- pean thinking and of European destiny. The development of an image of the world and of man's place in it is not continuous. It has a rhythm of its own resulting from the interplay of changing condi- tions of life and the action of reflecting, weighing, con- cluding, 'discarding by man-a-rhythm that provides the accents to the flow of history and leaves its impact on the structure of the individual personality. The point that divides one historical era from the next has been reached when old problems call for new formulations, when, first of all, new questions are needed to direct energies into new channels. How we see this development depends on the point from which we look on it. No perspective is by itself more valid than another. Its value lies in the meaning it gives to a specific pattern, in the light it sheds on a chosen section of the field. From the point of view of the relationship of man to his society, European history can be understood in terms of the deep-set opposing drives towards achievement and towards security. The contradic- tory, and simultaneous, tendencies towards new ex- perience and towards the protection of acquired posi- tion in the individual human being seem to be the ontogenetic reflection of the phylogenesis of society. The security of the original Pax Romana is shattered by the Great Migration introducing a period of tur- bulence only to be replaced by the relative stagna- tion of the Middle Ages. After an era of violent action, people are seeking security and finding it- morally in a religious universe, politically in the idea of a universal policy and in the practice of empires and of the church, and socially in the stable struc- ture of feudal society with its countervailing system of loyalties and obligations. Coinciding roughly with the Renaissance, the will for achievement begins once more to override considerations of security. In- tellectually this will is embodied in the rationalist approach and in a philosophy of freedom culminat- ing in the French Revolution, politically in the crea- tion of nation states, socially in the replacement of former rigidities by more elastic structures with an emphasis on social mobility. The new turning point towards security begins somewhere in the second half of the XIXth century with the great criticism of laissez-faire economics, with new equalitarian philosophies and with political movements towards mass co-operation. Its land-marks are the Russian Revolution, the introduction of planning into the economic and social sphere and the advent of the Welfare State. Security has again become pre- eminent as a social goal. At the same time, achievement and security are not opposites but mutually interdependent condi- tions. Achievement is the basis of security-no social security, for instance, without the achievement of highest productivity-just as security is the source of achievement. The relative security of life and property in the medieval order was one of the con- ditions for the Renaissance, and the social security *This was the keynote paper for the European Regional Symposium. ** Dr. Pusic, who is a professor of Public Administration at the University of Zagreb, is ICSW Vice-President for Europe.

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