How Europe’s Political Parties Abandoned Openness—and Left Populism to Fill the Void

Western parties stopped defending openness decades ago—now populists dominate a fight no one else dares to enter.

The last time large numbers of western European parties actively promoted both liberal and internationalist causes was the 1970s, though there was a strong flurry of internationalism in the 1990s. These facts provide grounds for the populist claim that recent liberal reforms have been sprung on an unsuspecting population, but they also support the argument that few parties have been trying to persuade citizens to support the causes of the open society. The populists have been left an almost clear field.

The evidence for these assertions can be found by tracking parties’ manifesto commitments since the 1940s in the Manifesto Project, an analysis of which can be found in my Rethinking Political Identity: Citizens and Parties in Europe. At the heart of the issue are parties’ positions on material and cultural questions on the polarity: inclusion versus exclusion. Material inclusion refers to positive policies on the social state; exclusion to an insistence on market forces; cultural inclusion to liberal, internationalist stances; cultural exclusion to conservative, nationalist ones. Parties’ positions on these variables indicate the identities within the electorate to which they hope to appeal.

The party-political world with which western Europeans have been familiar was rooted in identities forged in struggles over inclusion and exclusion on grounds of social class and religion. Most voters knew who they were and, in general, which political parties appealed their identities. Inevitably, the strength of these weakened as both industrial employment and religion declined, the bitter conflicts of the mid-20^th century softened into compromise, and the generations associated with those conflicts died. Post-industrial, secular European societies do not produce social identities with political implications in any way resembling those of the past.

Familiar party systems have therefore drifted towards an entropy of meaninglessness. The major disputes among the old parties on the material continuum, mainly concerning the relative weights of state and market, have lost none of their importance. But the groups that had been the bearers of different sides in the conflict are disappearing. The parties have taken for granted the rumps of their old support bases, and then competing for the great mass of voters with little or no political identity, more in the manner of rival supermarkets competing for customers than political movements rallying citizens to a cause.

We should have known this must happen some day. Political scientists had been talking about partisan ‘dealignment’ since the 1980s, and by 1996 Piero Ignazi was writing that two new forces were emerging out of the declining post-war landscape: environmentalism and xenophobic nationalism. Now the change is upon us, and we know that it is xenophobia that must be confronted. Certain political entrepreneurs realized that national identity – a social identity we nearly all possess – could easily be translated into a political one to fill the identity gap, provided enemies of the nation could be identified and hatred incited against them. As J. McKenzie Alexander has cogently argued, the open society, once the proud boast of western liberal democracy, has become perceived as an enemy. Growing levels of immigration and some general discontent with globalization provided a major impetus to xenophobia, and in very recent years terrorist attacks and the financial collapse of 2008 have thoroughly shaken confidence in the established parties.

Environmentalism has been the only other new force. Its rise predates that of xenophobia; it deals with a more vital and practical question; and yet it has recently been left behind by the latter. The environment is not a social identity in the way that class and religion once were or nationality is. On the other hand, environmental concern is not randomly distributed. It is mainly found among young, better educated populations of cities with advanced post-industrial economies.

Successful post-industrial cities are also the locations where xenophobic parties are least successful. These flourish instead in declining, ex-industrial towns and quiet, non-industrial places that seem untouched by the modern world. They are essentially parties of pessimistic nostalgia. Two features of the contemporary world on which they focus are immigrants and the increasing prominence of women in occupations and activities that used to be male preserves. Many white men see life’s opportunities narrowing, and believe that in that narrowness matters could improve only if there was less competition; if immigrants were sent away and women returned to the kitchen. But where people of all kinds see themselves living in environments of growing opportunities, they are likely to welcome openness and diversity, and not to reduce their political identity to immediate zero-sum antagonisms.

The conflict between exclusion and inclusion, closure and openness, thus remains central to politics. The problem is that very few parties believe there is any future in appealing to the latter concerns, as these do not coalesce around a strong identity like nationalism. There is therefore a growing consensus among conservatives, social democrats and many liberals that they must join the hunt for exclusionary identities.

But political entrepreneurship should be able to find ways of building coalitions based on a coherent appeal to openness and innovation. Public service employees are likely to support inclusion, as they encounter the importance of the public realm daily in their lives. Women, especially younger ones, have little reason to support a populism that often seeks their exclusion. Citizens of neglected places – prominently including white males – should be persuadable that their towns need to share the advantages of contemporary economic activities, especially those in the green economy, rather than negatively seeking the exclusion of others.

The exhaustion of the old parties in no way means that the struggle between inclusion and exclusion has lost meaning and vitality. Our problem is that, with the exception of greens and some minor parties, few political leaders have the courage to be bold protagonists for future-oriented openness and generosity of spirit, leading us with increasing speed to a monopoly of the narrow-minded.