The risk-opportunity cleavage and the transformation of Europe’s main political families

Analyses of the last two rounds of general elections in the EU (old) 15 member-states, as well as of the 1999 and 2004 European elections, reveal some of the symptoms of what Key and Burnham called "critical elections": elections that mark a sudden, considerable and lasting realignment in the electorate, leading to the formation of new electoral majorities. I explore the hypothesis that these series of critical elections at the turn of the century are triggering a radical realignment under the pressures of a new fault-line of conflict aggregation -- one shaped by attitudes to globalization. As a result, an opportunity-risk cleavage is emerging which is challenging, and opting out to replace, the capital-labor dynamics of conflict that have shaped the main political families in Europe over the 20th century. This paper traces the dynamics of realignment in terms of shifts at four levels: 1) The public agenda of political mobilization; 2) The social composition of electoral constituencies 3) the ideological basis of party competition. On this basis, an alignment is taking place, on the one hand between the centre-left and centre-right midpoint around an "opportunity" pole and, on the other, the circumference of far-right and radical-left parties around a "risk" pole. To what extend will these pressures of realignment manage to unfreeze (in reference to Rokkan and Lipset) the established party-political constellations in nation-states remains to the determined. However, tensions between the analyzed pressures of realignment and existing institutionalized forms of political representation go a long way in explaining the current crisis within both Social Democracy and European Conservatism, as well as the rise of new forms of populism in Europe

The inverted postnational constellation: Identitarian populism in context

As exemplified by the pan‐European ‘Identitarian movement’ (IM), contemporary far‐right populism defies the habitual matrix within which right‐wing radicalism has been criticised as a negation of liberal cosmopolitanism. The IM's political stance amalgamates features of cultural liberalism and racialist xenophobia into a defence of ‘European way of life.’ We offer an alternative decoding of the phenomenon by drawing on Jürgen Habermas's ‘postnational constellation.’ It casts the IM's protectionist qua chauvinistic populism as ‘inverted’ postnationalism, engendered through territorial and ethnic appropriation of universal political values. As such, inclusionary ideals of cosmopolitan liberalism and democracy purporting humanistic postnationalism have been transformed by Identitarians into elements of a privileged civilisational life‐style to be protected from ‘intruders.’ Remaining within the remit of the grammar of the postnational constellation, trans‐European chauvinism, we contend, is susceptible to inclusive articulation. Foregrounding radical emancipatory social transformation would however require not more democracy, but a principled critique of capitalism

The Right to Politics and Republican Non-Domination

Against pronouncements of the recent demise of both democracy and the political, I maintain that there is, rather, something amiss in our societies with the process of politicization in which social grievances are translated into matters of political concern and become object of policy making. I therefore propose to seek an antidote to the depoliticizing tendencies of our age by reanimating the mechanism transmitting social conflicts and grievances into politics. To that purpose, I formulate the notion of a ‘fundamental right to politics’ as the opposite of the techne of policy-making. I articulate this right via a reconstruction of the logical presuppositions of democracy as collective self-authorship. I then recast the concept of non-domination by discerning two trajectories of domination – ‘relational’ and ‘systemic’ ones, to argue that in a viable democracy that takes full use of the right to politics, dynamics of politicization should take place along both trajectories; currently, however, matters of systemic injustice get translated in relational terms and politicized as redistributive concerns

Political Judgment for Agonistic Democracy

I articulate a model of conflict-based deliberative judgmen

The Costs of the Democratic Turn in Political Theory

The article explores the ‘democratic turn’ in political theory and the nascent ideological status of the concept of democracy in academic inquiry. The object of its scrutiny are those mechanisms intrinsic to theorising through which democratic theory might undertake an ideological function. As a test case, the inquiry examines the effect of the democratic turn Jürgen Habermas has undertaken in critical social theory of Frankfurt School origin. The original commitment of Critical Theory to emancipation from injustices afflicting capitalist democracies was pursued through a critique of ideology as part of the larger critique of the dynamics of capitalism. The critical enterprise was marked by suspicions, inherited from Marx, of the complicity of liberal democracy in capitalism's delictum. This allowed the pursuit of radical social change beyond the conditions for democratic citizenship. Tracing the deepening of the democratic turn in Habermas’s analyses of modern society, I note a transition from a critique of ideology to ideology-construction – a move in which the institutions of democratic citizenship become reified and overburdened with a task they are not equipped to perform – that of radical social transformation. Performed in this way, the democratic turn dampens critical theory’s emancipatory potency

Soziale Gerechtigkeit und die verschiedenen Varianten des Kapitalismus

This is a contribution ot a collection of classical texts on capitalism, from Adam Smith, G.W.F.Hegel, K. Marx, E. Durkheim, J.S. Mill, A. Sen, and A. Hirschman

Empowerment as Surrender: How Women Lost the Struggle for Emancipation as They Won Equality and Inclusion

This analysis addresses the way second-wave feminism, through its incontestable achievements in terms of both political mobilization and intellectual critique, failed to address the larger structural sources of the injustice the movement fought, thereby falling short of the lasting emancipation it aspired to achieve. This is a story of “failure by success.” I also chart a path for recasting the feminist agenda from the point of view of a broader critique of contemporary capitalism, in which instances of gender injustice are symptomatic of broader forms of domination to which men and women are equally subjected

Six ways to misunderstand precarity: Reflections on social angst and its political offspring

These reflections develop a comprehensive conceptualization of precarity as a condition of politically and systemically generated economic and social vulnerability caused by insecurity of livelihoods – a form of disempowerment, experienced as incapacity to cope, itself rooted in a misalignment between responsibility and power. Precarity, thus understood, is a transversal social injustice cutting across differences in social class, education, employment, and income. It harms people’s material and psychological welfare and hampers society’s capacity to manage adversity and govern itself. The article elaborates on the above conceptualization by addressing six fallacies in debates on precarity: 1: “There is nothing particularly new about insecurity”; 2: “There is nothing particularly bad about insecurity”; 3: “The cure of precarity is certainty and stability, this is best achieved by an autocratic rule”; 4. “Only the poor and the exploited are truly precarious”; 5. “Fighting poverty and inequality is sufficient to eliminate precarity”; 6. “The precarity of the rich is not important”

The ‘Crisis of Capitalism’ and the State – More Powerful, Less Responsible, Invariably Legitimate

This chapter traces the reconfiguration of the legitimacy relationship between states and citizens, and the related alteration of the semantics of the social contract since the advent of liberal democracies in Europe. This reconfiguration has fostered the recent emergence of a fourth modality of capitalism (as an institutionalized social order) after (1) the entrepreneurial nineteenth-century capitalism, (2) the ‘organized’ capitalism of the post-WWII welfare state, and (3) the neoliberal, ‘disorganized’ capitalism of the late twentieth century. A key feature of the new modality, in terms of the nature of power relations, is a simultaneous increase in the state’s administrative power and a decrease in its authority. However, due to a recasting of the legitimacy relationship between public authority and citizens, the deficient authority of states has not triggered a legitimacy crisis of the socio-economic system. A readjustment of the pathological relationship (from the point of view of democratic legitimacy) between public authority and citizens would require a stronger responsibilization of public authority in matters of social and economic policy