European activities

Some developments in European social psychology”

HENRI TAJFEL
University of Bristol

1. The background

The plenary conference of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology,

held in Louvain in April 1972, was officially the third such conference since the
Association was created; ‘unofficially’, there have been several more general meetings
since 1963. But do not let us be obsessive about counting. The present conference,
whatever its serial number, presents a unique opportunity for filling in the background
and clarifying our short and confused history. This seems quite important since many
new members of the Association have just been electcd and since this is just about ten
years from the time when a small, and progressively increasing, group of people became
concerned with the creation of an active and coopcrative enterprise in our subject in the
old subcontinent. There are also other reasons for wishing to take stock at this moment
of time. One is that the retirement from the Committee of four of its members (Irle,
Moscovici, Nuttin and Tajfel) out of seven and their replacement by newly elected ones
represents finally the departure (perhaps overdue) from positions of active and direct
responsibility of the remnants of the ‘old guard’; the new Committee of seven’ represents
a new ‘generation’ - the taking over by people who. although some of them have been
with us nearly from the beginning, had not been saddled in earlier times with direct
executive responsibilities. Our best wishes go with them, eagerly and a little anxiously
(the mother-hen complex is a tenacious one). The second reason is that, as we widened
and diversified our activities over the years, there are now more and more younger
social psychologists in Europe. particularly postgraduate students in many countries, to

* This paper is a shortened and revised President (Aix-en-Provence); Jaromir Ja-

version of the presidential report delivered
at the plenary conference of the European
Association of Experimental Social Psy-
chology, Louvain, April 1972.
1. This Committee consists of three con-
tinuing members: Claude Flament, the new
nousek (Prague); and Jaap Rabbie (Utrecht);
and four newly elected ones: Colin Fraser,
the new Secretary (Bristol); Claudine Herz-
lich, the new Treasurer (Paris); Jos Jaspars
(Nijmegen); and Peter Schonbach (Bochum).

Eur. J . SOC. PLyycliol.2 ( 3 ) , pp. 307-322

308 Henri Tajfel

whom it is all still a bit of a mystery. Our attempts at diffusion of information have
never been particularly effective or coordinated. At the same time, an increasing number
of younger scholars have had the experience of attending a summer school, or a small
group research meeting, or of listening in their own institution to a visitor from abroad
who came on an ‘exchange visit’ sponsored by the Association. The identity of this
cross-national Father Christmas has always been veiled in a penumbra of slightly sinister
mystery: who was the Association? What was this mysterious network?
For all these reasons, a brief and selective sketching of the background may be in
order. In doing this, I shall not gloss over some of our difficulties and some of our
problems, particularly those which are still with us today. I shall not, however, bore
everyone and myself with attempting, once again, to make a case as to why we need a
vigorous and indigenous growth of social psychology in Europe. This ground has been
gone over and over again in innumerable discussions over the years. I shall therefore
take it for granted that we do need such a development, and will be concerned with the
conditions that it requires rather than the reasons why.

About ten years ago, we were greatly helped by John Lanzetta (now at Dartmouth
College) who was spending two years in London, and after discussions with some of us,
undertook the task of getting together a group of European social psychologists who
were nearly all strangers to each other, though many of them had good academic con-
tacts in the United States. Lanzetta organized a small working committee which con-
sisted of himself, Mauk Mulder (then in Utrecht), Robert Pagbs (Paris) and myself.
We worked for some time, primarily to ‘identify’ social psychologists in Europe - a
task which appears a strange one today, ten years later. The first ‘prehistoric’ meeting
of European social psychologists took place at the end of 1963 in Sorrento (on the
principle that a beautiful place was no more expensive to meet in than a less beautiful
one). It was attended by about forty people, including several American social psy-
chologists who happened to be in Europe at the time. The meeting was a great success.
As usual, many papers were read and discussed; but much more important was the first
establishment of contacts between social psychologists from nearly a dozen European
countries, the discovery that they worked in nearly complete ignorance of their neigh-
bours, and the beginning of a determination that the bilateral contacts that existed
between each national group and our colleagues in the United States had to be supple-
mented by contacts across Europe.
A word needs to be said at this point about the American S.S.R.C. Committee on
Transnational Social Psychology and its crucial role in promoting and encouraging our
initial activities. The Social Science Research Council is constituted by the great
American social-science associations, such as the A.P.A., the A.S.A., etc. It delegates
much of its work to its various committees. The primary task of the one concerned
with social psychology, of which Leon Festinger was chairman for several years, was
(and still is) to develop, initiate, promote and help international activities and com-
munication in the subject. Its interest in ‘activating’ social psychology in Europe, after
 Some developments in European social psychology 309

the success of our first meeting in Sorrento, was underlined by the fact that it co-opted
some time after that meeting three European members (Koekebakker, Moscovici and
Rommetveit) who were able to help the Committee in continuing its European activities.2
This enlarged Committee, together with the one previously organised by John Lanzetta,
organised a second European conference in Frascati near Rome, which took place a
year after the first one, towards the end of 1964. This was the meeting at which the
decision was taken to create the European Association of Experimental Social Psy-
chology and at which its first ‘planning’ Committee was elected.
At the same time, and still with close cooperation and support of the S.S.R.C. Com-
mittee, we began to work at extending our contacts and communication with our col-
leagues in the socialist countries of Europe. As a result of much activity, of a number
of professional and personal contacts established through travelling to various countries,
and of the help offered by the Ford Foundation to the S.S.R.C. Committee, we were
able to organize less than a year later, in 1965, the first joint conference, which took
place in Vienna, of social psychologists from Western Europe, the United States and
the socialist countries of Europe. The scientific contacts and cooperative plans initiated
at that conference were further pursued a year later, at the International Congress of
Psychology in Moscow, where an informal meeting of social psychologists, chaired by
Leon Festinger, was called. The Vienna conference also marked the beginning of the
interest shown in our activities by the Ford Foundation. A representative of the Foun-
dation, Marshall Robinson, came to the conference and had extensive discussions with
many of the participants. The final result was the granting by the Ford Foundation
three years later, in 1968, of financial support for the activities of the Association.
At about that time, at committee meetings and elsewhere, many discussions were
taking place concerning the shape the Association should take. There was no doubt
about its principal aim: to encourage and instigate communication in Europe, to create
a milieu of social psychologists which would become a breeding ground for more
research, more training and more inventiveness in what was being done. The social,
political and cultural diversity of Europe was seen as an advantage rather than a hin-
drancc in the fostering of a second, and independently creative, intellectual centre of
social psychology. But there were the practical problems of how to go about doing this
through the new means that were at our disposal with the creation of the Association.
The problems of the name of the Association and of the nature of its membership
ciime to the fore simultaneously, both expressing the same preoccupation. Should it be
the European Association of Social Psychology or of Experimental Social Psychology?

2. The present membership of the S.S.R.C. Czechoslovak Academy of Science, Prague);

Committee is as follows: Morton Deutsch,
chairman (Columbia University, New York);
Donald Campbell (Northwestern University,
Evanston, Illinois); Leon Festinger (New
School for Social Research, New York);
Martin Irle (University of Mannheim); Ja-
romir Janousek (Institute of Psychology,
Harold Kelley (University of California,
Los Angeles); Serge Moscovici (Ecole Pra-
tique des Hautes etudes, Paris); Luis Ra-
mallo (FLACSO, Santiago de Chile); Henri
Tajfel (University of Bristol). The S.S.R.C.
staff member working with the Committee
is Dr. David Jenness of New York.
310 Henri Tajfel

Should the membership be open to all who wished to join or should growth be slow and
selective? In the event, the second alternative was adopted in both cases, not without
much heart-searching, acute conflicts and disappointments, some of which left bitter-
ness. The reasons for the two decisions (both, in a sense, restrictive) were several. We
did not wish to have an amorphous, mainly formal, large international body whose
activities would mainly be restricted to organizing once every few years one of those
large jamborees which have come to be known as ‘International Congresses’, and which
are usually separated from one another by several years in which nothing very much
happens. We wished to have a small group of people, which would grow slowly, would
have a membership active in research and/or in the promotion of the subject, and would
also be capable of creating strong mutual links. We started from about 40 or 50 people,
and wished to grow, on these criteria, by small but significant steps. Therefore, the
addition of new members was limited and was made dependent upon election and
recommendation by the existing members. We were clearly aware of the dangers in-
herent in such procedures, particularly in the possibility that it might create a tight
network of self-appointed ‘insiders’. But the alternative of ending up with a large and
amorphous ‘membership’ we judged as presenting greater dangers to the success of
what we wished to do. I shall return later in this report to the issue of membership.
The present position is that we have about a hundred members from about fifteen
European countries.
The term ‘Experimental’ presented another aspect of the same problem, and pcrhaps
one which was even more sensitive. In the many discussions that took place no one
understood the term in any very rigid or restrictive sense. It meant to represent our
preoccupation with developing work of a fundamental kind, a sort of ill-defined line of
division between what we wished to do and some of the applied work which, we felt,
was not likely at that time to create a Renaissance of social psychology in Europe.
There was no implication that we were, in any sense, against applied work in the sub-
ject; but rather, that - in fact - much of this applied work was, at least at the time,
concerned with projects of various kinds whose terms of reference were defined by
their patrons, commercial, industrial or national. The term ‘experimental’ did not really
express what we meant; many of us felt, and still do feel, that ‘experimental’ social
psychology is not necessarily the only way, or even the best way, to pursue knowledge
in this field. But no better term could be found to express, however imperfectly, the
aims that we set for ourselves.3
AS these discussions were going on, concrete activities continued. In the summer of
1965, the first European Summer School (Research Training Seminar) in Social Psy-
chology was organized in The Hague. We owe a great debt of gratitude to Jaap Koeke-
bakker (then in Leiden) who not only found funds for it but also took on the heavy

3. This has never been a satisfactory solu- poll conducted amongst those present (about
tion, and at the Louvain conference the one third of the total membership) produced
suggestion was made once again that ‘ex- a large majority against this suggestion. This
perimental’ should be dropped. An informal is not, of course, the end of the matter.
 Some developments in European social psychology 3 11

responsibilities of the Dean of the School. The faculty of the School came from Europe
and the United States. The students came from all over Europe.
Less than a year later, in the spring of 1966, another plenary conference (the first
‘official’ one) of the Association took place in Royaumont. Some of the members of the
C.S.R.C‘. Committee were present, including its Chairman, Leon Festinger. It was at that
conference also that the first ‘official’ Committee was elected, and at its meeting after
the conference Serge Moscovici was elected the first President of the Association. It is
a pleasure to take this opportunity to thank him for the manner in which he guided our
affairs for a number of years, both before and after the Royaumont conference. Mauk
Mulder, the Secretary, started soon afterwards initiating steps to give the Association
legal status - this was finally achieved, at a later stage, through legalization in The
Netherlands.
me success of the first Summer School led to plans for organizing another. This was
done again in conjunction with the S.S.R.C. Committee, continuing in its efforts on
our behalf - which were particularly vital at a time when we did not, as yet, have an
independent financial existence. The School took place in Louvain, in the summer of
1967. Anyone who had anything to do with it need not be reminded of the incredible
amount of work that fell to Jozef Nuttin who served as the Dean of the School. Once
again, advanced postgraduate students from many European countries, East and West,
met for a month, worked together and many became friends. Many of them are today
in university posts in their own countries, and the links forged in Louvain still remain.
In the Nuttin family house in Louvain one can see a stained glass window. This sym-
bolizes better than anything I could say the success of the School and the feelings of
its participants: the window was their joint present to the Dean at the end of the
School.
Our efforts to establish links with our colleagues from the socialist countries were
not, however, confined to inviting students from these countries to participate in the
Summer Schools. Already at the Vienna conference, plans were being made for
organizing another similar meeting. We received an invitation from the Czechoslovak
Academy of Sciences to hold this conference in Prague, and finally, in October 1968,
we gathered there.
This was a troubled time. I said before that T shall not gloss over some of the
problems and difficulties that we encountered. As I acted as chairman of the committee
preparing the Prague conference, I happened to have direct knowledge of the difficul-
ties, doubts and hesitations that became our lot after the events of the summer of 1968.
There can be no genuine European Association of Social Psychology that would not
encompass a wide diversity of political and social views - this is as it should be. Some
of us felt that we Fhould not go to Prague in October 1968, a few weeks after the
cvents of August; some felt that it was important to go. On the whole, both sides
remained very much on their positions, and some people who were invited did not
come. Many amongst those who went felt that we were doing the right thing; some
who came or who did not go still feel today that we should not have gone. The debate
312 Henri Tajfel

was passionate and sincere on both sides. An important lesson emerged from it from
the point of view of the Association: those of us who found ourselves on the opposite
sides of the debate, in which there was a great deal of emotional involvement at the
time, found that we were able to continue working together after the conference was
over. The co-operation within the Association and the personal friendships that were
formed over the years survived the conflict. We had thus our first material proof that,
despite our European diversity, we could work together in a cooperative scientific
(and social) enterprise.
Less than a year later, in the spring of 1969, again in Louvain, we had our first
plenary conference organized from our own funds. John Lanzetta, who was the first to
help start us off seven years earlier, was invited to it as our guest of honour. Between
1969 and 1972, the year of the present plenary conference, our activities have stabilized
and new developments took place. There have been more ‘small group research meet-
ings’ than ever before. A third Summer School took place in Konstanz in the summer
of 1971 under the able and devoted direction of Rudolf Cohen, of the University of
Konstanz. This was the first Summer School at which we were able to have a faculty
entirely from Europe (which was not only symbolic but also much cheaper!), and the
students came from twelve European countries, East and West. The plans for the
European Journal of Social Psychology, slowly and laboriously hatched, finally ma-
terialized as the first issue appeared in April 1971. This is again a point of this report
at which I have the pleasant duty of expressing a debt of gratitude; to Mauk Mulder
(Rotterdam), chief editor of the Journal, Gustav Jahoda (Glasgow), Serge Moscovici
(Paris) and Peter Schonbach (Bochum), his co-editors; and also to Mr. Bornkamp,
director of the Mouton publishing firm in The Hague and Paris who gave us his
unstinting support. Mauk Mulder will be retiring at the end of this year to be replaced
as chief editor by Jos Jaspars (Nijmegen), and I shall be taking the place of Gustav
Jahoda as one of the co-editors. In December 1971 appeared the first monograph in the
series of European Monographs in Social Psychology published by the Academic Press
in London. This first monograph (Social contexts of messages) edited by Ragnar Rom-
metveit from Oslo and Ann Carswell from Edinburgh is very much a creation of the
Association. It was based initially on the work done by Rommetveit’s working group at
the Louvain Summer School; this was followed up by an Association’s small group
meeting in Oslo, supported in part by the Norwegian Council for Science and Hu-
manities; and the work was continued through further ‘exchange visits’. The social
context of this particular message is, one hopes, quite clear.

2. Assessment of main activities

Before I can go further and discuss some of our present problems and future pos-
sibilities as I see them, I must engage in a brief assessment of what we have done until
now. If we learned anything at all in the last ten years, it is that miracles do not hap-
 Some developments in European social psychology 313

pen. The continuing growth of an undertaking which is both intellectual and social
(there has always been a strong undercurrent of mutual support between these two
aspects of our activities) must be based on our willingness to assess and re-assess as
often as possible. It seems to me that seven separate strands need to be looked at.

a) Plenary conferences. These are expensive and difficult to organize. Once again, in
1972, we happily left to Jozef Nuttin and Annie Janssen-Beckers the task of dealing
with the organization and the administration of the conference. It was obvious to those
present how much was done by our hosts to insure success. Unfortunately, much less
devotion and responsibility was shown by others. The estimates of cost of the con-
ference and the finding of a suitable location and of other facilities in Louvain were
seriously disrupted for a rcason which is as simple as it is difficult to understand:
several members of the Association who wrote that they would come did not turn up,
without as much as a word of apology, or changed their.minds at the very last moment.
It is no use pretending that this did not cause disruption of carefully made arrange-
ments and distress.
I do not think that the principal value of these conferences is of a scientific nature.
The papers which are presented vary, as usual, in their quality and they offer the usual
opportunities of discussing research in progress. But the opportunity to meet every two
or three years is valuable in its own right. Our colleagues in the United States have
been able to create channels of communication and of mutual feedback because they
live in a large-scale academic milieu which is relatively homogeneous. This is not the
case in Europe, nor will it be in the foreseeable future; and it is debatable whether we
should, even if we could, strive towards academic homogeneity. But we are still a
‘small subject’ in European countries; and again, it is debatable whether we should aim
for a rapid growth in size. I think that, in view of all this, the plenary conferences have
contributed in a significant way towards the creation of mutual contacts and of an
awareness that there exists an intellectual milieu of social psychology in Europe. Their
present rate of frequency - every two or three years - is probably just about right.

b) Exchange visits. These are visits of short duration; they are based on applications to
the Committee either by someone who wishes to visit an institution, or by an institution
which wishes to receive a particular visitor. It has always been surprising that relatively
few such applications were being received despite continuous reminders that the op-
portunity existed. Because of this, the exchange visits did not achieve as much as was
hoped. Perhaps the new Committee should have a good look at the manner in which
these visits are organized and the functions that they are supposed to fulfil.

c) Summer Schools. The reports one received about the three Schools which were
organized between 1965 and 1971 were, as might be expected, a varying mixture of
praise and blame. It is my opinion that, taking the long view, the Schools have been
immensely successful. I referred earlier to their role in initiating long-term contacts
314 Henri Tajfel

between younger social psychologists from various countries. But even in the short run,
they have had direct effects on the coordination and quantity of joint research and
cxchange of ideas. For example, the Louvain School led to further work together by
Rommetveit’s group; the Konstanz School was followed up by research mcetings of
Brinkman’s group in Amsterdam and Doise’s group in Bristol.
The crucial role of the Summer Schools in promoting and encouraging good stan-
dards of training and research goes together with their particular usefulness in creating
more exchange between younger social psychologists in Western Europe and in the
socialist countries. Our colleagues from these countries share this view; during a visit
I made to Budapest in 1970 it became quite clear to me that the participation of a few
good postgraduate students and younger lecturers in Summer Schools was the first
priority of my hosts.
As usual, some difficult problems remain. I should perhaps briefly draw attention to
two of them: the first is that the organization and running of a Summer School requires
a great deal of work from the person (usually the Dean) who is locally responsible for
it. As a result, there have often been serious difficulties (which, in fact, postponed the
third Summer School by about two years) in locating someone who would be prepared
to undertake the task and whose institution offered, at the same time, the required
facilities. The second major problem is the diversity of levels and backgrounds of the
students (sometimes combined with linguistic difficulties). But despite these difficulties
we must have more Summer Schools even if different new formulae for them have to
be tried out. The time to start planning for the future ones is now.

d) Small working group meetings. As I mentioned earlier, these meetings have been
quite frequent in the last few years. They proved to be one of the most important in-
gredients of collaborative research in Europe. Some of them took place as a result of
work done at a Summer School; some were planned independently. I think it is worth
enumerating some of the concrete academic results. Of the small group meetin25 held
in the recent years, three led to the publication of symposia in the form of books (one
already published and two in press); the proceedings of another took up a full issue of
the European Journal of Social Psychology (4, 1971); the proceedings of two others
were extensively reported in journal articles (Social Science Information, 1970, IX, 3,
and Znfernational Journal of Psycholinguistics, 1972, in press). There is no need to insist
that these meetings should continue. They require further initiatives of the individual
members of the Association and careful planning.

e) The European Journal of Social Psychology is now beginning to establi5h it5clf. T h e

number and quality of the papers submitted seem to be satisfactory. The two major
problems are: the number of subscriptions and the ‘personality’ of the Journn!. One
must hope that subscriptions will slowly continue to increase - here again we require
individual ‘propagandist’ efforts of members of the Association. As to ‘personality’, it is
perhaps important to remember that the editorial policy has been from the beginning
 Some developments in European social psychology 325

to accept and welcome a greater diversity of publications (in style, content and length)
than is often the case in other journals. A journal has no purpose unless it fulfils the
function of initiation and transmission of new forms of intellectual influence. This is
badly needed today in social psychology; and perhaps we should acknowledge the fact
by being less afraid of ‘speculation’ and unconventionality in what we write, submit for
publication, and accept for printing.

f ) European Monographs in Social Psychology are finally, like the Journal, beginning
to see the light of day, after years of slow hatching. One has been published, four are
in press, about half-a-dozen are in various stages of preparation. What I wrote earlier
about the first monograph edited by Carswell and Rommetveit, also applies to some of
the others: their preparation was intimately linked, from the beginning, with other
activities of the Association, such as the Summer Schools and the small group meetings.

g) Cooperative research in Europe. This is, of course, the acid test of the value of most
of our other activities. When Serge Moscovici presented his presidential report in Lou-
vain in 1969, he insisted that our undertaking will have to be judged, in the long term,
on the criteria of its intellectual creativity. I entirely agree with this view. In turn, as
Moscovici put it, this creativity was related to the development of joint and cooperative
research across Europe. H e had to add, however, that at the time of his report there
was still not much evidence of the development of such research. It is my feeling that
the last few years provide grounds for more optimism than would have been justified in
1969. One would have to document this ‘feeling’, and this should not be too difficult.
There is, however, no doubt that recently there has been a good deal of initiation of
joint research, and certainly an increasing number of publications co-authored across
national borders. This is true of journal articles, of some of the European Monographs,
and of some research planning which has recently come to my attention. There is no
need to stress the various difficulties - economic, administrative, etc. - which stand in
the way of such planning. But the fact that it is beginning to develop is, I think, un-
deniable.

3. Problems and prospects

In the course of preparing this report, I became increasingly impressed by the close
interdependence of all that has been done or attempted. One could multiply the
examples: small group meetings and joint research; Summer Schools and small group
meetings; publications and all these other activities, and consequently the dependence
upon them of the Journal and of the Monographs. All these interweaving strands
provide probably an adequate ‘operational’ definition of what I meant earlier when I
referred to the need to create a milieu of social psychology in Europe.
But serious problems remain, and bland optimism will not make them go away. The
316 Henri Tajfel

major ones are financial, political, those concerning membership policy and the level
of general involvement in the activities of the Association.
A simple and basic truth is that the Association cannot survive without funds. With-
out them the Committee cannot function, and - in my experience - without the Com-
mittee functioning properly nothing else would function; nor would we be able to
maintain the present level of activities and to initiate new projects. Even if the present
funds can be stretched for a time, in the long run the continuing active existence of the
Association depends on a good deal of individual initiative, both from the Committee
members and others. These initiatives must go in two directions: 1. securing general
grants for the Association; and 2. securing additional support for small group meetings,
exchange visits, Summer Schools, etc. The latter has been very successful in the past:
many members of the Association were able to provide 'external' support, fully or in
part, for the activities with which they were concerned. The list of international and
national organizations, private foundations, universities and research institutes which
helped us over the years is long and impressive. It is crucial that it should becomme even
longer.
A second problem arises which is partly financial and partly political. This is the
problem of our sources of support. For example, the major part of the costs of the
Konstanz Summer School in 1971 was covered by a grant from NATO for which we
applied in Brussels. We used other funds to insure the participation of students from
non-NATO countries, both in Western Europe and in the socialist countries. At the
same time, there are other examples of individual visits or. conferences which were, at
least in part, supported through the hospitality of official institutions in the socialist
countries. It is my firm conviction that we should use all the support that can be ob-
tained providing that it is not associated with any inhibitions of the freedom of the
decisions taken by the Association concerning its work. This freedom must involve
unrestricted publication, free choice of participants in any activity sponsored or co-
sponsored by the Association, free determination of the programmes of meetings, of
summer schools, of colloquia, etc. This is both possible and viable as long as the
Association includes, as it does today, people representing a great diversity of views
and backgrounds. In the last ten years, during which we have been helped by institutions
from all over Europe and also obtained grants from the United States, we have not
come across cases in which conditions inhibiting academic freedom were attached to
the support. We have our own policy, the major guidelines of which are simple: to
develop social psychology in Europe on an international cooperative basis, and to
develop it in a way which is intellectually free.
I do not believe that this readiness to accept cooperation from many sources is either
politically naive or that it is Machiavellian. On the contrary, it is naive to believe that
one can achieve today any form of international cooperation, scientific or cultural,
without accepting a combination and a synthesis of means originating from diverse
quarters, viewpoints, ideologies and policies. The new Committee of the Association
could fail in one of two ways: either by failing to obtain funds to support cooperative
 Some developments in European social psychology 317

activities when such support might be available; or by obtaining support in such a way
that its nature inhibits the freedom of decisions taken by the Association about its own
work. I should add that in saying all this I am taking advantage of the opportunity to
express freely my own views that is given to me by this performance of a presidential
swan song.
From a problem which is partly financial and partly political, I should like to move
to a related one which is mainly political. This is the problem presented to us by the
political diversity of Europe. It would be unrealistic not to acknowledge in our planning
of further developments that important differences exist which are parallel to the great
lines of the political division of Europe. First, there are the differenccs in the availability
of foreign currency, and thus in the case of travelling abroad; second, there is the
relatively greater flexibility in most Western European countries in the use of resources;
and third, the fact that, on the whole, fewer administrative arrangements are needed in
Western Europe than in the socialist countries to implement various plans and projects.
All this leads obviously to a certain asymmetry in the membership and the activities of
the Association. But a good deal can be done as long as we rememger that initiatives
must and can come simultaneously from both directions. It is again for the individual
members to take these initiatives, be they invitations for visits and seminars, suggestions
and hospitality for small group meetings, candidatures for Summer Schools, flow of
books, journals and offprints. The network which already exists should enable US to
do this through the Committee as well as through direct interindividual contacts and
exchanges of suggestions and plans. This keeping up of individual contacts, started
through the Association’s activities, is enormously important. Some time after my return
home from Louvain, I had a telephone call from a colleague in an English university in
which he is fairly isolated as a social psychologist. He said to me that the Louvain con-
ference was for him an exhilarating experience; but that now, on return home, he
became even more clearly aware of his lack of day-to-day working contacts with other
social psychologists. There is no reason why this lack of contacts should not be partly
remedied by keeping up the links made possible through the background of our activ-
ities. The intellectual and professional consequences of such contacts are slow to ma-
ture; but to judge from our previous experience, they do undoubtedly materialize in
the long run.
A fourth major issue which must soon be faced has to do with the membership policy
of the Association. The situation is very different today from what it was ten years ago.
when we began. To some extent, the existence of the Association is responsible for this
change, and this is one more reason why we have a responsibility to act. There has
been a rapid growth of social psychology in several countries, and a good deal of
interest in promoting such growth in others. Many young people came to the Summer
Schools; new posts, junior and senior, have been created in many universities; there is a
new generation of social psychologists in Europe, many of whom badly need to become
familiar with alternatives to the often restricted intellectual pockets in which they live
and work. The Association can and should play an important role in the creation of
318 Henri Tajfel

new cross-currents of thought and controversy. I have no doubt that the present restric-
tions on new membership, however justified they may have been in the past, are not
suited to today‘s conditions. I am not suggesting that access should become completely
free - this would not solve any problems and would probably create, quite unneces-
sarily, some new ones. But what we need is a very considcrable loosening up of the
membership policy of restriction on numbers. I know personally many younger (and
not so young) social psychologists in various European countries who should become
members and would like to. The initiative for this should come from us and not from
them. They should be informed about the background of the activities of the As-
sociation and invited to join, without having to wait for a year or two or more until
the date of the next plenary conference.
The size and nature of the membership brings me finally to the issue which is per-
haps the most difficult of all. I said earlier in this report that there has always been the
danger that the Association would become a group of self-appointed ‘insiders’. There
exists, in addition, an ‘internal’ problem of a similar kind, the roots of which go much
deeper than our present restrictions on membership. There is no doubt that in the past
there have been, by and large, two categories of members; a smaller group who were
at the focus of practically everything that was done: and a larger, more passive, group
of people who did not have either the opportunity or the inclination to become more
active. The results sometimes bordered on catastrophic: the ‘insiders’ became a closely
knit group of people often linked by personal friendships which have developed over
the years. They knew what was happening, took decisions about what was going to
happen, found themselves on many of the organizing committees of various kinds,
enjoyed much of it, and - let us face it - did a great amount of hard and useful work.
The ‘outsiders’ received letters, invitations, proposals, injunctions, voting papers - to
which often many of them hardly responded. There was the occasion when Jozef Nut-
tin, as the Secretary, included in the minutes of a committee meeting circulated to all
members of the Association an additional and fictitious ‘resolution’ to the effect that
the Committee decided to acquire a yacht (to be moored somewhere in the Mediter-
ranean) for its future uses and purposes (unspecified). As far as I remember, only two
or three letters were received expressing surprise or disagreement.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that, as always, there is an active minority and
a passive majority. What is a little more surprising is that despite the fact that this
minority never intended to be a self-perpetuating oligarchy and despite its continuing
efforts to the contrary, it was repeatedly thrown back on its own resources. I am as
clearly aware as anyone that, over the years, mistakes have been made, false starts
abounded, etc. etc. What is. however, even clearer is that most of the members of the
Association would readily agree that the balance has been very largely positive. And
yet one could tell a long tale of unanswered letters. unfulfilled undertakings, unpaid
membership fees, opportunities missed for lack of appropriate initiative, sudden jour-
neys one had to make because something that should have been done was not done,
desperate telephone calls - I could name some old and cherished friends in my dealings
 Some developments in European social psychology 3 19

with whom I developed a boringly predictable procedure: a letter followed routinely

by two or three telegrams to which, if I was lucky, an answer came perhaps three
weeks later.
It seems to me that the explanation is not psychological but sociological. The aca-
demic and research career structure in Europe is geared towards parochially localized
needs, functions and achievements. It is much more useful for someone in a junior
position to struggle on for local than for a wider recognition, it is better for him to
have an official seal of approval on a long drawn-out doctorate or some other title than
to spend a year working abroad with people who share his interests, but for which there
may be nothing to show on the officially approved maze of successive handicaps. By
the time seniority comes, there are so many additional duties, often of an administrative
nature, that it requires considerable effort to find time and energy for doing something
outside of one’s own backyard. The career structure in the European universities, East
or West, has not changed half as much in the turbulent sixties as it is often thought.
‘Democracy’ by and through innumerable committees is often restricted to trivial
issues; intellectual creativity, good research and even ‘relevant’ research of value have
never been produced by committee legislation. By contrast, openness to the outside
world is an important ingredient of all real intellectual advance.
We cannot change from one day to the next the parochial inwardness of the European
university systems. But there is a good deal we can do. We can start creating a ‘Euro-
pean university’ within the limits of our discipline and our well-established network of
mutual contacts, This European university need not wait upon the provision of bricks
and mortar,4 even if thereby one forgoes the advantages of contemplating the world
from the height of a Florentine hill. It would be fully feasible to create a well-organized
network of exchanges, both of faculty members and of postgraduate students. After all,
we would be doing no more than returning to a very old European tradition. We know
enough today to decide who we should like to invite for a month or so to our own
university to lecture, hold seminars, discuss research with students in any of a wide
range of specialized topics. Conversely, the same knowledge can be used to enable us
to send a student for a year to an appropriate institution if he wishes to work, for
example, on mathematical models, person perception, non-verbal communication,
human social ethology, social influence, intergroup relations, social psycholinguistics,
multidimensional scaling, analysis of group processes, etc., etc. Of course, it is a matter
of money; but money can be found if one is prepared to look for it and badger for it
for long enough. I believe that in creating such a mobile ‘European university’ within
our own limited perspectives, we could achieve two aims simultaneously. First, we
could provide an example of a relatively cheap and workable system for implemen-
tation on a wider scale. And second, in the long run. wc would contribute to the break-
down, at least in our own subject, of the present stifling institutionalized parochialism

4. The suggestions put forward here about recently had about this issue with Willem
a ‘European university without bricks and Doise.
mortar’ owe a great deal to discussions I
320 Henri Tajfel

whose aims and structure have nothing to do with our genuine needs, be they social,
intellectual or academic.

I have come nearly to the end of these remarks. Two points remain to be made. The
first concerns the possible misunderstandings that may occur because of the ‘European’
nature of this report. In the hope of preventing this, I can only repeat what I recently
wrote on the occasion of the publication of the first of the European Monographs in
Social Psychology:
‘For all these reasons, and many others, we must create a social psychology which
grows simultaneously in many places, even if in some of them growth will be
based, to begin with, on a transplantation from elsewhere. The European Mono-
graphs in Social Psychology do not set out to be ‘European’ in explicit opposition,
competition or contradistinction to anything else. All of them will present work
done in Europe; some will take advantage of the rich cultural and social diversity
of Europe; some could have been written anywhere. No discipline, however much
it may change in the future, can afford to forget its roots, and the roots of much
of contemporary social psychology are in the United States. But a discipline con-
cerned with the analysis and understanding of human social life must, in order to
acquire its full significance, be tested and measured against the intellectual and
social requirements of many cultures. It would be sheer conceit to write that this
is what we hope to achieve with the publication of the European Monographs.
What we do hope, however, is that they will contribute to the interest and creativity
of a discipline which, though potentially of great importance, has not yet managed
to break out of its various parochialisms.’

What applies to the Monographs, applies to everything else that has been mentioned
above. From East to West of Europe, we straddle many cultures, political systems,
zones of intellectual influence. The choice is ours: we can use our backgrounds in their
diversity or let it all remain isolated and constricted; we can establish contacts of mutual
respect and care with our colleagues, particularly in the developing countries, or be the
rich neighbours (since by today’s standards all of us in Europe live in a zone of
affluence) who only become interested when there is a return on investments; we can
create a rich and exciting milieu or remain in our semi-isolated pockets.
Finally, I wish to conclude on a personal note. The sixties were an exciting time of
new beginnings in European social psychology. Looking back, one of the most im-
portant aspects of all this activity that, for me, emerges and will remain is the sclid
network of friendships and communication, both personal and intellectual. There have
been, undoubtedly, conflicts and difficulties. There have also been innumerable occa-
sions of working together in friendship, in mutual support and in understanding, both
of similarities and of differences. My colleagues in the several successive committees
- past and present -- know it as well as I do; and I wish particularly to thank my six
colleagues of the Committee which is today being partly replaced - Claude Flament,
 Some developments in European social psychology 321

Martin Irle (the retiring Treasurer), Jaromir Janousek, Serge Moscovici, Jozef Nuttin
(the retiring Secretary), Jaap Rabbie - for the pleasure we all had in working together.
But there were also many others who shared similar experiences. I hope we shall
continue sharing them in the future.