Page 23 [23]
OCR
Introduction: European politics nowadays ] 21 that already very high international inegualities keep on increasing at the global level (Piketty 2013, 552-554). By the way, a strong polarisation also exists and persists in regional disparities within the EU. For many European citizens living in deprived areas, closing this gap remains wishful thinking and an unkept promise that seems to never materialise. Inegualities have always been a major destabilising factor in all societies and political systems throughout history. Its conseguences cannot be underestimated in contemporary wealthy European societies with a robust middle-class. As Piketty warns: the impoverishment of the middle-class would very likely trigger a violent political reaction (Piketty 2013, 556). One reason for this is that the loss of relative economic position - typically in the middle-class — usually translates into a feeling of loss of status, making many individuals perceive economic distress as a personal identity crisis (Fukuyama 2018, 89). While economic troubles are easier to solve through sound policies, identity-related anxieties are much more difficult to deal with. b. Dealignment and realignment Since the 1970s, European societies have also undergone a “great transformation” of their structures and value systems (Magone 2011, 76-136). This is often captured through the emergence of post-modern knowledgebased, secularised, post-material, and individualised societies, with all of these factors having a major political impact. The rise of post-modern knowledge-based societies and the spreading of secularism bring us back to Seymour Lipset’s and Stein Rokkan’s theory of social cleavages. They identified four historic social cleavages that had structured European politics: the class (owner/worker, employer/employee), the ruralurban (primary/secondary sectors in economy), the church-state (religious/ secular), and the center-periphery (dominant/dominated culture) cleavages, forming the basis of party systems and structuring politics in general. Beyond this, they also claimed that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflected, with few but significant exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920s (Lipset and Rokkan 1967, 44), commonly referred to as the ‘freezing hypothesis. However, traditional social cleavages started waning and frozen party systems started de-freezing in the early 1970s. Arguably, the most important change has been the transition into service societies with an emerging tertiary (services) sector at the expense of the primary (agriculture) and secondary (industry) sectors in economy. All parts of Europe went through this transition in the past decades. The country-by-country data compiled by Steffen Mau and Roland Verwiebe make this trend very clear: in the EU-15 Member States, employment decreased from 16.2 to 3.4 per cent in agriculture, and from 37.4 to 23.2 per cent in industry, while it increased from 54 to 73.5 per cent in - private and public - services between 1970 and 2008 (Mau and Verwiebe 2010, 153-154).
