From Socio-Economic Frontiers to Identity-Based Divisions: The Social Pattern of European Populism
From Socio-Economic Frontiers to Identity-Based Divisions: The Social Pattern of European Populism

Summary/Abstract: This article reinterprets the rise of populism in Europe, which has typically been examined from a political angle, from a social perspective. It highlights two social distinctive features that have contributed to fuel illiberalism as well as populism. The first one deal with the inability of the Social State, as increasingly configured to respond to competitiveness and attractiveness, to offer adequate protections to the groups that are the most affected by the new socio-economic insecurities triggered by globalisation. The second one - a point often neglected –refers to the crisis of the social democracy (or industrial relations), a crisis partly masked by the expansion and increasing mobilisation of “social dialogue”. It stresses the growing instrumentation of social dialogue from dominant actors, to legitimate unpopular reforms at macro-level, and serve managerial needs at micro level, and its incidence in terms of narrowing the expression’s channels for social demands. This state of affairs has ultimately fuelled disillusionment that is as political - against governments, and the elites in power - as it is social. Interrogating the intricate connections between the political and the social, this article construes populism as part of a political operation intended to convert social issues into a question of identity. Behind the ambition to lump social demands under the lone banner of the “people,” populism operates within new internal boundaries that are frequently ethnic, as well as external boundaries that include nationalism and protectionism, while in the process weakening the vitality and creative potential of the political process.

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