The Changing Basis of Political Conflict in Advanced Western Democracies

The Politics of Identity in the United States, the Netherlands, and Belgium

A. Arwine, L. Mayer

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349455171, 9781137306647
• eBook ISBN: 9781137306654
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political conflict in Western democracies has traditionally emerged from politics rooted in competing ideologies and interests. With the rise of politics of identity, political conflict is morphing as political parties align themselves with identities, rather than ideologies or interests.

1

Introduction: The Forces Producing the New Politics of Identity

Abstract: The early post–World War II years saw the Western world mired in what appeared to be a fixed cleavage structure centering on issues relating to class and religion. The stability of this cleavage structure was shattered by forces unleashed by modernization as the bases of the old cleavage structure became decreasingly salient. Liberalism and conservatism were challenged by the changing structure of the economy as the urban industrial work force was diminished in numbers and strength. Religiosity was challenged by the secularization of the West. In their place, people sought meaning in their lives through new bases of identity by resurrecting the venerable concept of populism, a movement of non-elites focusing on identity with either the nation-state or an isolated and alienated sub-culture.

Key words: cleavages; stability; Occupy Wall Street; populism; modernization; conservatism; identity

Arwine, Alan T. and Mayer, Lawrence C. The Changing Basis of Political Conflict in Advanced Western Democracies: The Politics of Identity in the United States, the Netherlands, and Belgium. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137306654.

Over a generation ago Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan argued that the social cleavage structure of Western democracies and the party systems that represented that structure were “frozen” in four critical lines of cleavage: class or workers versus employers, churches versus government, subject versus dominant culture, and primary versus secondary economy (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967, 14–15). The party systems of the West in the late 1960s represented coalitions that had been essentially unchanged since the 1920s (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967, 50).

However, even as their analysis was published Western parties were already beginning to respond to social and economic changes and the old lines of cleavage were shaken. By the end of the century, the addition of rapid technological transformation brought further change, leading to unprecedented alterations in the arena of political conflict, especially, but not exclusively, in the United States. This volume seeks to understand these transitions and challenges in the United States, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Two aspects of the older cleavage structure of the West endured largely unchanged until recently: first, questions of church and state and the role of religion and, second, a concern for material well-being, including issues of class, property, and equality of distribution (Arwine and Mayer, 2008, 428ff). Despite other changes, alliances based on these cleavages were well maintained, resulting in a stable party system comprised of a few mainstream or major parties that competed for control of the state. Other smaller parties that emerged and disappeared were not serious contenders for such control.

This stability effectively ended as the twenty-first century began. As of this writing in early 2012, much of the Western world has been rocked by anomic street demonstrations whose agendas seem to go no further than an unspecified opposition to “the system.” This is especially true of the Occupy Wall Street movement which began in the United States and spread around the world. These populist movements are thus distinct from the opposition and protest movements against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, which were directed at a particular policy of the government. The Occupy movements oppose the structure of the political system and its relationship to ordinary citizens (Hacker and Pierson, 2010). This volume attempts to make sense of these almost unprecedented events and explain their impact on the U.S. party system, as well as look at comparable changes in the two European cases.

FIGURE 1.1 A causal model of modernization and political change

This is a book about change. The central argument in this volume is that, far from being frozen, the cultures, demographics, and cleavage structures of the West have undergone fundamental change, change related to the modernization process, and producing equally fundamental changes in the party systems and in the very bases of political conflict. This alteration of the culture of the West was triggered by the evolving state of technology which was in turn driven by the modernization process. This cultural change and its antecedents are illustrated in Figure 1.1.

The impact of modernization on the cleavage structure in the West

Compared to nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the West is considered the modern world. And yet, the process of modernization, with respect to technological development, is an ongoing phenomenon even in the Western world. The modernizing state of technology impacts the cleavage structure in two ways. First, modern technology marginalizes the role of semi and unskilled labor, which in turn reduces the salience of older class divisions. In the early stages of industrialization the emerging blue-collar work force in each of the three countries, on which this volume focuses, lacked an independent bargaining position but developed a sense of common interest and a readiness to challenge the inequality of material well-being between the workers and their employers.

Capitalism itself is ultimately transformed as the imperatives of modernization give birth to the modern corporation with its separation of ownership and management. This bureaucratization of the means of production leads to the minimization of risk rather than the innovation that creates wealth. Routinization thus discourages technological innovation (Crozier, 1964, 175–187; Schumpeter, 1950, 59–165).

However, the entrepreneurial segment of the population developed a sense of common interest in protecting their property rights. In more recent decades, technological progress is less financed by individual entrepreneurs than by the government or by foundations which fund most research leading to technological breakthroughs. The early stages of industrialization were characterized by class-based conflict between the working and middle or entrepreneurial classes. Labor unions emerged to utilize collective bargaining to give the labor force bargaining power and to mobilize the labor force to assert its interests vis-à-vis employers. As a result, party conflict in the first half of the twentieth century was characterized to a large extent by class-based conflict in which the industrial working class was represented by a center-left party variously called Labor or Social Democratic while the middle class or higher was represented by parties labeled Christian Democrat or Conservative. Examples of these two types of party dominated the political arena throughout the West, controlling up to 90 percent of the vote.

Modernization, however, brought significant changes in the structure of the economy. Skilled, educated, and credentialed workers were needed to function in the increasingly complex modern world. These workers gradually displaced their semi and unskilled predecessors. Small shops were displaced by the more efficient large chain supermarkets. Owners of small family farms and the peasantry were displaced by the efficiency of corporate farming. Clerks were displaced by computers. These marginalized segments of the population, angry at a world they did not understand, sought a new basis of identification defined by resentment of the emerging technological elites, as Eric Fromm argued in his classic study of the psychological impact of modernization (Fromm, 1941). This resentment of the impact of modernization has been epitomized by the “Wall Street Occupation” in 2011. The movement is a modern manifestation of a venerable concept in the study of politics: populism.¹

Populism in the modern world

The concept of populism refers to a social movement comprised largely of the non-elite segments of the population, often, but not always, the less formally educated segments of society. Members of a populist movement, rendered déclassé by the transformation of the modern economy, seek to restore their damaged self-esteem by identifying themselves as the embodiment of the values of their society. Populist movements are further characterized by a distrust of the institutions and leadership of their society and especially of the intellectuals of their society, people whose main occupation is the formulation and dissemination of ideas.

The people attracted to populist movements now acquire a sense of belonging and self-esteem that they lost during the modernization of their economy. This restored self-esteem may be enhanced by defining their movements in exclusivist terms, identifying those segments of the population that are not a part of the movement. When the populist movement is defined in racial or ethnic terms, other segments of that society can never belong to that movement. The emergence of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s constituted a particularly egregious example of racist populism. It drew its initial leadership from the marginalized segments of the population and its strongest early support from the German peasantry. Volkism, their term for populism, is a recurring concept in German political thought (Mosse, 1981). Argentina’s Juan and Evita Perón epitomized the phenomenon of populism in Latin America. They were charismatic authoritarians whose power base was the known as descamisados or “shirtless ones.” Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas was another charismatic authoritarian leader with a peasant-dominated power base.

The word “populist” describes an important emerging segment of the changing West more accurately than such pejorative terms as extremist or extreme right, which is how the emerging parties with a populist base have recently been characterized in the literature focusing on these bodies (Schain, Zolberg and Nossay, 2002; Betz, 1994; Norris, 2005; Kitschelt, 1995). Populist individuals, emerging parties, and movements are also clearly distinguished from the classic right which has had as its base the more affluent segments of society and had as a central concern the protection of property. Populism has also been emerging in those societies in which the “opportunity structure” – a set of institutions that either facilitate or impede the emergence of new parties – produces what is essentially a two-party system (Kitschelt, 1995; Diani, 1996). In such systems the outlet for emerging populist forces frequently involves the co-optation of an existing party, unlike systems in which the populist changes in the cleavage structure can be represented by the emergence of new parties.

The trend toward increased education, credentials, and socio-economic stature among Western publics erodes the traditional base of working class parties – Labor or Social Democratic – which are often compelled to redefine themselves (as with Britain’s “New Labour” party). Meanwhile, parties of the center right, focused on the protection of property, have also been experiencing significant losses in vote share.

The challenge to classic conservatism in the West

Thus populism has a resurgent role to play in understanding current changes in the nature of political conflict. In order to understand this trend, it is necessary to understand the classic roles of the mainstream right and left.

The classic or mainstream right has been known as Christian Democracy, Social Christian, Peoples’ Party (Austria), the Liberal Party (Australia), or simply the Conservative Party. In Canada, the center-right party was formerly called by the oxymoronic name of Progressive Conservative. The Catholic Party in the Netherlands merged with the two orthodox Protestant parties to form the Christian Democratic Appeal, a merger reflecting the diminished support for each of the three religious parties: the Catholic Party, the Calvinist Christian Historical Union, and the Anti Revolutionary Party of the Dutch Reformed Church.

All of these center-right parties shared many values and political agendas. All of them supported a capitalist economic system and accepted the winners and losers outcome of such a system. Hence, they were concerned with the protection of property. All of these parties, to a greater or lesser extent, supported traditional or so-called “family values.” Thus, their agenda included support for the institutions that promote such values, in particular Christian churches, and this agenda was carried out legislatively in states where they took power. Divorce was unavailable in some countries, abortion was generally criminalized and casual or promiscuous sexuality was strongly discouraged. Homosexuality was regarded as deviant behavior.

As we have already indicated, for better or worse modernization has weakened the hold of traditional religion on Western publics. The continuing advance of modern science has brought some of the principles or “truths” preached by traditional Christianity into question. Life was no longer, in the words of Hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short.” People became more concerned with the length and quality of life on earth and issues regarding salvation became less salient. Divorce became legal in both France and Italy, two countries whose politics were heavily influenced, if not dominated by, a traditional and authoritarian Catholic Church. Even abortion became available in certain circumstances and at particular stages in the gestation period in many western countries, a situation unthinkable a generation earlier.

Modernization meant as well a growing rate of secularization. While 90 percent of the French are baptized as Catholic, less than 10 percent regularly attend church (Curtis, 1997, 11). Despite the existence in Britain of an established church and the pervasiveness of symbols and ceremony of that church, only about 20 percent of the British attend church regularly (at least once a month). As early as 1989 some 45 percent of Italians (in the home country of the papacy) and only 29 percent of the West Germans were regular attendees at church (Mayer, et. al., 2001, 89). Church going among the Dutch Catholics declined from a peak of around 85 percent to around 38 percent by 1972 (Bakvis, 1981).

Several of the mainstream Christian Democratic parties responded to this growing secularization by distancing themselves from the church. The Austrian Christian Social Party in the post-war period changed its name to the Austrian Peoples’ Party. Similarly, the Italian Christian Democratic Party that had dominated or controlled every government in that country from the end of World War II to 1993 dropped its symbiotic connection with the Church and, in 1994, renamed itself the Italian Popular Party. In the Italian case the change was not helpful at the polls: shortly thereafter its electoral support dwindled to 11 percent of the vote. Growing numbers of Europeans whose primary identification and sense of the meaning of life had come from the Catholic Church and its associated political parties now sought new bases of identification.

In some cases, this new search for identity was resolved by a strong identification with the idea or symbols of the nation almost to the point of chauvinism. Some of the parties that represented this perspective were identified as on the extreme right (Minkenberg, 1992; Norris, 2005), but the central principles of these parties were not a more extreme version of the classic right. While the classic right attracted more prosperous and well-educated elites concerned with the protection of their proper...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: The Forces Producing the New Politics of Identity
• 2  Political Change in a Stable Two Party State: The United States
• 3  The Netherlands: Politics in a Fragmented Culture
• 4  Belgium: The Politics of Extreme Segmentation
• 5  Conclusions: Patterns of Change in Advanced Western Democracies
• Index