Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right (Contemporary Employment Relations)

CHANGING WORKING LIFE AND THE APPEAL OF THE EXTREME RIGHT

Contemporary Employment Relations Series Editor: Gregor Gall Professor of Industrial Relations and Director of the Centre for Research in Employment Studies, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK

The aim of this series is to publish monographs and edited volumes on all aspects of contemporary employment relations including human resource management, employee branding, shared services, employment regulation, the political economy of employment, and industrial relations. Topics such as mergers, corporate governance and the EU – in the context of their affect upon employment relations – also fall within the scope of the series. Aimed primarily at an academic readership this series provides a global forum for the study of employment relations. Other Titles in the Series Human Resource Management in Russia Edited by Michel E. Domsch and Tatjana Lidokhover ISBN 978-0-7546-4876-5 Employment Contracts and Well-Being Among European Workers Edited by Nele De Cuyper, Kerstin Isaksson and Hans De Witte ISBN 978-0-7546-4575-7

Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right

Edited by JÖRG FLECKER Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle Arbeitswelt (FORBA), Austria

© Jörg Flecker 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Jörg Flecker has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

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Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Changing working life and the appeal of the extreme right. - (Contemporary employment relations series) 1. Working class - Europe - Political activity 2. Working class - Europe 3. Right-wing extremists - Europe 4. Industrial relations - Europe I. Flecker, Jorg, 1959322.2'094 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Changing working life and the appeal of the extreme right / edited by Jörg Flecker. p. cm. -- (Contemporary employment relations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-4915-1 1. Working class--Europe--Attitudes. 2. Work environment--Europe. 3. Radicalism-Europe. 4. Conservatism--Europe. 5. Populism--Europe. I. Flecker, Jörg, 1959HD8376.5.C48 2007 331.2094--dc22 2006031601 ISBN: 978-0-7546-4915-1

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right: A Variety of Approaches Jörg Flecker PART 1

CHANGING WORKING LIFE AND THE APPEAL OF THE EXTREME RIGHT IN EUROPE

Chapter 1

Addressing the Link between Socio-Economic Change and Right-Wing Populism and Extremism: A Critical Review of the European Literature Francesca Poglia Mileti and Fabrice Plomb

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Potentials of Political Subjectivity and the Various Approaches to the Extreme Right: Findings of the Qualitative Research Jörg Flecker, Gudrun Hentges and Gabrielle Balazs Perceived Socio-Economic Change and Right-Wing Extremism: Results of the SIREN-Survey among European Workers Yves De Weerdt, Patrizia Catellani, Hans De Witte and Patrizia Milesi

PART 2

NATIONAL VARIETIES OF ATTRACTION

Chapter 4

Variants of Right-Wing Populist Attraction in Austria Jörg Flecker, Sabine Kirschenhofer, Manfred Krenn and Ulrike Papouschek

Chapter 5

Two Psychological Routes to Right-Wing Extremism: How Italian Workers Cope with Change Patrizia Catellani and Patrizia Milesi

vii viii ix xii

1

9

35

63

87

105

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Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right

Chapter 6

Public Safety – Private Right: The Public-Private Divide and Receptiveness of Employees to Right-Wing Extremism in Flanders (Belgium) Yves De Weerdt and Hans De Witte

123

Chapter 7

The Welfare State Under Pressure: The Danish Case Eva Thoft and Edvin Grinderslev

149

Chapter 8

Widespread Competition and Political Conversions Gabrielle Balazs, Jean-Pierre Faguer and Pierre Rimbert

165

Chapter 9

Changes in the Work Environment and Germany’s Extreme Right Gudrun Hentges and Malte Meyer

189

Different Roads to the Siren Songs of the Extreme Right in Hungary András Tóth and István Grajczjar

201

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

References Index

Individual Expressions of Right-Wing Extremism – Understanding the Affinity to Radical Populism in Observing the Changes in the Work Field: The Case of Switzerland Fabrice Plomb and Francesca Poglia Mileti Conclusions and Policy Implications Jörg Flecker

217

239

249 267

List of Figures Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2

Overview of core concepts and main research questions 63 Path analytic model on the relationships between perceived change in the job domain, social identity, receptiveness attitudes, and right-wing party affinity 78

Figure 6.1

A public- and private-sector pathway to ERPA

145

List of Tables Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1

Table 3.2

Table 3.3

Table 3.4

Table 6.1

Table 6.2

Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 6.5 Table 6.6

Number of interviews carried out in each country/ total number of interviews Number of interviewees according to political orientation Perceptions of socio-economic change during the previous five years (percentage of respondents and mean perceived change for each dimension) Association of background variables with receptiveness and affinity (results of a regression analysis, standardized regression coefficients) Association of receptiveness attitudes with extreme right-wing party affinity, overall and per country (results of a regression analysis, standardized regression coefficients) Do certain categories experience more (or less) socio-economic change? Differences between public- and private-sector employees on work change and work-life situation (LS means, analyses of variance) Differences between public- and private-sector employees in political orientations and receptiveness to the extreme right-wing Bivariate correlations of work-related changes with elements of extreme right-wing receptiveness (by sector) Results of a regression analysis on ERPA in both public and private sector, controlled for gender, age and education Results of factor analyses, after varimax rotation Pearson correlations between four variables measuring extreme right-wing receptiveness

37 39

66

72

75 83

141

142 143 144 147 148

Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 10.4

Sympathy with extreme right Chauvinism Powerlessness Final cluster centres (k-means cluster)

215 215 215 215

Table 11.1

Left-right self-identification in 2003 and 1998 in Switzerland

219

Notes on Contributors Gabrielle BALAZS is a sociologist with the CNRS at Centre d’études de l’emploi (CEE). From 1996 to 1999 she worked at the Centre de sociologie européenne du Collège de France. She holds the Habilitation à diriger les recherches. She is a coauthor of La Misère du Monde (edited by Pierre Bourdieu, Seuil, Paris, 1993). Patrizia CATELLANI is professor of Social Psychology of Politics at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy, and since 1998 director of the Applied Social Psychology Laboratory of the same university. She is co-editor of The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking (Routledge, 2005) and contributed to Extreme Right Activists in Europe: Through the Magnifying Glass, edited by Bert Klandermans and Nonna Mayer (Routledge, 2006). Yves DE WEERDT is a senior research associate at the Higher Institute for Labour Studies (HIVA) of the University of Leuven, Belgium. His main research topics are social stratification, quality of work and socio-political attitudes of employees. His research so far has mainly been commissioned by the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research and the European Commission. Hans DE WITTE is professor at the Department of Psychology of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U. Leuven). He teaches Work and Organizational Psychology and is member of the Research Group on Stress, Health and Well Being of his Department. He is member of the Steering Committee of the European Values Study and editor of Job Insecurity, Union Involvement and Union Activism (Ashgate, 2005). Jean-Pierre FAGUER is a sociologist with the CNRS at Centre d’études de l’emploi (CEE). He holds the Habilitation à diriger les recherches. He is a co-author of La Misère du Monde (edited by Pierre Bourdieu, Seuil, Paris, 1993). Jörg FLECKER is director of the Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle Arbeitswelt (Working Life Research Centre – FORBA) in Vienna and external professor of economic sociology at the University of Vienna. He was the co-ordinator of the SIREN project. He co-edited Herausforderungen der Arbeitswelt. Beiträge zu neuen Arbeitsformen, Geschlecht, Informationstechnik (Rainer Hampp, 2001) and is the author of Die populistische Lücke (edition sigma, 2006).

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István GRAJCZJAR is scientific workmate at the Institute of Political Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, teaches at the Institute of Sociology at the ELTE University of Budapest on theories and history of sociology, labour market, migration and politics and currently works on his dissertation on the labour market situation and the appeal of extreme right ideologies and attitudes. Recent publications include Amplification of the Connection between Economy and Education (Hungarian Ministry of Education, 2003). Edvin GRINDERSLEV holds a master of Psychology from the Copenhagen University. He was assistant professor at the Psychological Laboratory of Copenhagen University and has been, from 1995 onwards, senior research consultant at CASA (Centre for Alternative Social Analysis) and recently joined Københavns Energi, where he is Human Resource consultant and organizational psychologist. Gudrun HENTGES is Professor at the Hochschule Fulda – University of Applied Sciences in Fulda, Germany. Before she was assistant professor at the University of Cologne, Seminar of Social Sciences, Section of Political Science. She is co-author of Themen der Rechten – Themen der Mitte. Zuwanderung, demografischer Wandel und Nationalbewusstsein (Leske+Budrich, 2002) and co-edited Zuwanderung im Zeichen der Globalisierung (VS-Verlag, 2006, 3. ed.) and Massenmedien, Migration und Integration (VS-Verlag, 2006, 2. ed.). Sabine KIRSCHENHOFER is a sociologist working on socio-psychological effects of increasing insecurities in working life at the Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle Arbeitswelt (FORBA) in Vienna, Austria, from 2000 to 2004. Currently she works as a systemic psychotherapist in a counselling centre for women. Manfred KRENN is a sociologist and has worked as a senior researcher for the Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle Arbeitswelt (FORBA) in Vienna, Austria, since 1992. His main research areas are care work, experience based knowledge, organisation of work, technological and organizational change, industrial relations, elderly workers. Malte MEYER studied political science, sociology and modern history in Marburg and worked as a research associate at the University of Cologne, Seminar of Social Sciences, Section of Political Science. He is the author of Neuanfang in der Defensive. US-Gewerkschaften unter Handlungsdruck (VSA-Verlag, 2002) and currently prepares a PhD-thesis on social movements against poverty and social insecurity. Patrizia MILESI is Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy. Her research activity has developed in the area of cognitive social psychology applied to judicial and political contexts, with a special focus on counterfactual reasoning. She contributed to Extreme Right Activists in Europe: Through the Magnifying Glass, edited by Bert Klandermans and Nonna Mayer (Routledge, 2006).

Notes on Contributors

xi

Ulrike PAPOUSCHEK is a sociologist and has worked for the Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle Arbeitswelt (FORBA) since 1996. Her main research areas are work and gender, equal opportunities, female labour market participation, working conditions, education and qualification. She co-edited Herausforderungen der Arbeitswelt. Beiträge zu neuen Arbeitsformen, Geschlecht, Informationstechnik (Rainer Hampp, 2001). Fabrice PLOMB teaches sociology of work at the Universities of Fribourg and Neuchâtel in Switzerland and holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Neuchâtel in the field of work and integration of young people. He was guest research associate at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2001–2002. His main research interests are the growth of unemployment and new forms of professional integration of young people. Francesca POGLIA MILETI is an associate Professor in sociology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Neuchâtel in the field of migration and interethnic relations. She was a guest research associate at the University of Colorado in Boulder (CO, USA) from 1995 to 1997. Her research interests include also work and unemployment, youth, new technologies and right-wing extremism. Pierre RIMBERT is a sociologist at the Maison des sciences de l’Homme in Paris. His research focuses on working class on one hand and on media on the other. He is the author of De l’autre côté de la barrière. La reconversion ‘patronale’ de syndicalistes ouvriers dans les années quatre-vingt-dix, in Reconversions militantes (Limoges, Presses universitaires de Limoges, 2005). Libération de Sartre à Rothschild (Paris, Raisons d’Agir Editions, 2005). Eva THOFT was research consultant at the Centre for Alternative Social Analysis (CASA) where she focussed on work place assessments, psychological working environment and trade unions. She recently joined Carl Bro as a specialist of working environment and changes in work. András TÓTH is senior research fellow at the Institute of Political Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and external collaborator at the European Trade Union Institute, Brussels, and the Institute for Interdisciplinary Social Science, Free University Berlin. He contributed to Globalisation of Work and Patterns of Labour Resistance, edited by J. Waddington (Routledge, 1999).

Acknowledgements The book is based on the project ‘Socio-economic change, individual reactions and the appeal of the extreme right’ (SIREN) funded by the European Commission’s Directorate General Research under the programme Improving Human Potential and the Socio-Economic Knowledge Base (IHP) (Contract No. HPSE-CT-2001-00058). We would like to thank Virginia Vitorino at the European Commission, who saw the project through its early stages, and especially Giulia Amaducci, the project’s scientific officer at the EC, for the support she gave to the project throughout its lifetime. The authors would also like to thank all the people who allowed us to interview them for the many new insights about attitudes to work, society and politics they supplied. We would like to extend our thanks to all those who established contacts with interviewees and provided useful background information on different sectors and industries, as well as the Eurisko agency and the local survey institutes who carried out the telephone survey. Our thanks also go to our colleagues in the participating institutes who supported us during all phases of the research. We are indebted to the organizers and numerous participants of the workshops held towards the end of the project in Paris, Recklinghausen, Budapest and Brussels for their helpful feedback on the SIREN research and the expertise from many different areas of research and policy-making they contributed to the project. Our special thanks also go to David Westacott for proof-reading and to Christine Wiesbauer for the layout of the book. The editor and the authors are particularly indebted to Christine Wagner, who not only ably administered the SIREN project as project officer at FORBA but also organized and supported the production of this book, which, without her commitment, could not have been published.

Introduction

Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right: A Variety of Approaches Jörg Flecker

For the last two decades, extreme and populist right-wing parties have been highly successful in many European countries. They are now represented not only in national parliaments but also in the European Parliament. In some countries, right-wing populist parties were even able to come to power through coalition governments, such as in Austria or Italy, or, as in Denmark, to gain influence by supporting a minority government. These political trends have triggered debates about the reasons for the rise of the populist and extreme right. A common argument has been that populists succeed in seducing the ‘losers’ of modernization, i.e. people who cannot keep pace with the dynamic socio-economic change in present-day society. On the same theme, observers often blame the blue-collar workers, whose alleged support for the far right has in their view made the political shift possible. Close scrutiny of electoral behaviour, however, has raised doubts about such an explanation (Collovald 2002). What is more, the popularity of the thesis of the ‘modernization losers’ is in stark contrast to the surprising scarcity of empirical evidence to support it. One of the reasons is that data is only available on the socio-economic characteristics of voters for right-wing populist and extremist parties (Lubbers 2001), while there has hardly been any systematic empirical research into how people are actually affected by socio-economic change and how this impacts on their political orientation. This is exactly the void this book aims to fill. The series of articles investigates the interplay of the far-reaching transformation of working life in recent years and the growing appeal of political right-wing populism and extremism in Europe. It explores people’s perceptions of socio-economic change and the individual and collective reactions people develop in order to come to terms with it. It raises the question of whether, and to what extent, changes in the employment system and in working life contribute to making people receptive to xenophobia, nationalism and racism. In bringing together two fields of research that have hardly been related up to now – research on changes in working life, labour market developments and social security on the one hand and, on the other, analyses of political orientations and rightwing populism and extremism – this book aims to make a significant contribution to the deeper understanding of the subjective reactions to socio-economic change and their political reverberations. In particular it provides empirical evidence on the

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Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right

relation between socio-economic change and the rise of right-wing populism and extremism in Europe, which has by and large been lacking so far in the academic and public debates. We generally use the term right-wing populism and extremism or, synonymously, the extreme right to describe the wide variety of political parties, movements, ideologies or programmes ranging from the xenophobic and welfarist Danish People’s Party to the openly racist and anti-democratic MIÉP (Hungarian Justice and Life Party) in Hungary. The research presented here, however, is not about parties, their militants and hard-core electorate. Nor is it about skinheads, neo-Nazis or hooligans. Rather, the focus is on the political orientations of people from different social milieus and political camps; political orientations that people develop to make sense of the social and political world by adopting ideologies and political messages of the extreme right. These are not a clear set of ideas and political propositions based on a distinct ideological framework. On the contrary, rather than interestgroup politics, right-wing populism can be seen as identity politics (Steinert 1999), which is often contradictory and changeable. Despite this openness, right-wing populist parties in Europe do have some common ideological elements (Betz 2002) that clearly overlap with the defining elements of right-wing extremism, such as racism, nationalism and authoritarianism. This is why right-wing populism cannot be seen as a new phenomenon in contrast with right-wing extremism; the difference is rather one of degree. As a consequence, and despite the completely different political and academic landscape, our research takes up some of the arguments put forward by research on fascism in the early 20th century, such as threats of the social decline of middle classes due to economic crises and concentration of capital (Lipset 1960) or detrimental and anonymous market forces leading to feelings of powerlessness (Fromm 1983). The book is based on the European research project ‘Socio-economic change, individual reactions and the appeal of the extreme right’ (SIREN) carried out by an international consortium between 2001 and 2004. Funded under the European Union Directorate-General Research programme ‘Improving Human Potential and the Socio-Economic Knowledge Base’, the project consisted of integrated investigations at international level, rather than being a combination of country studies. The aim was to analyse subjective perceptions of and individual reactions to recent socioeconomic change and, in particular, changes in working life and, on this basis, to establish how experiences in working life influence political orientations and to what extent the threat of social decline and precarious living conditions contribute to the rise of right-wing populism and extremism in many European countries. Thus one of the main objectives was to assess whether and to what extent particular conditions and changes in the employment system and in working life make people receptive to xenophobia, nationalism and racism. The research covered eight countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland. In the project’s qualitative research phase, the eight teams conducted a total of some 300 qualitative interviews on the basis of common interview guidelines. The samples in all countries covered different socioeconomic situations and different political orientations, i.e. people both ‘receptive’ and ‘non-receptive’ to right-wing populism and extremism. The interpretation and

Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right

3

analysis was conducted on the basis of common procedures and resulted in interview reports and country reports. Taking the results of the qualitative research and the review of the literature on socio-economic change and right-wing populism and extremism as a basis, a structured questionnaire aimed at interviewing a representative sample of workers in the eight different European countries was developed. When available, it used reliable questions and scales developed in previous cross-national surveys. In total, some 5,800 workers were interviewed by telephone in 2003. Samples closely matched the working population in each country. While they are based on a joint, integrated research project, the contributions take different research approaches to the link between changes in working life and right-wing populism and extremism. These are based on the disciplines of sociopsychology, sociology and political science, they comprise qualitative, interpretative analyses and quantitative, hypothesis-testing evaluations and they stress different aspects of the complex object of study relating to industrial restructuring, changes in the welfare state, differences between the public and private sectors and the importance of social milieus and family socialization. The contributions in the first part present the overall results of the project at European level, including comparisons between the countries. The second part reports on findings from the different countries involved. The contributions focus on different aspects taking individual countries as exemplary cases. As a result, the second part brings together a variety of perspectives rather than collecting uniform country reports. In their chapter, on the basis of an extensive literature review carried out in all eight countries, Poglia Mileti and Plomb discuss the link between socio-economic change in Europe and the contemporary evolution of right-wing populism and extremism in the European national contexts. Following a brief discussion of the numerous suggestions in the literature concerning definitions and terminology, they explore the important factors related to political fields and actors that most scholars consider to be relevant for the development of right-wing populism and extremism. The core of the chapter consists of a discussion of the ways scholars address the link between socio-economic factors and right-wing populism and extremism. It also provides critical comments on the interpretations, explanations and conceptualizations found in the literature. The contribution by Flecker, Hentges and Balazs presents the main results of the interpretations of approximately 300 qualitative interviews carried out with employees of different sectors in the eight countries. In a first step, they outline the methodical approach to the qualitative research used in the SIREN project. The main part of the contribution presents, first, the subjective perceptions of the changes in working life and, second, the differing coping patterns and political meaning structures. Finally, taking some of the typologies brought out of the qualitative analyses as a basis, it illustrates the conditions under which socio-economic change can lead to right-wing extremist orientations and the ways in which this can come about. The findings show that the ‘demand-side’ of right-wing populism and extremism can be better understood by considering feelings of injustice and insecurity and feelings of powerlessness which are often caused by changes in work.

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Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right

De Weerdt, Catellani, de Witte, and Milesi present the main findings from the telephone survey of 5,800 employed respondents in eight European countries. First, they discuss the socio-economic changes that have been experienced. Second, the contribution focuses on two aspects of right-wing extremism: ‘receptiveness’ to right-wing extremism and ‘affinity’ to a right-wing extremist party. It reports the differences according to background characteristics of respondents and analyses the association between the receptiveness attitudes and the evaluation of an extreme right-wing party. The chapter describes the link between socio-economic change and right-wing extremism and highlights the role of social identification processes in this. The analysis reveals two main psychological routes leading to a preference for a right-wing extremist party: a ‘winners’ and a ‘losers’ route. Finally, the authors describe the characteristics of workers who are more likely to follow one or the other of these routes. In their contribution, Flecker, Kirschenhofer, Krenn and Papouschek take up the issue of variety in the attraction to right-wing populism by presenting a typology developed on the basis of the qualitative research findings in Austria. The types show a diversity of attraction, which on the one hand mirrors the changeability and inconsistency of right-wing populist rhetoric, aims and objectives, but on the other hand also indicates how different social milieus shape political reactions. Overall, they present the following reasons for such diversity: different ideological elements to which the interviewees are responding, differences in social milieu, variations in the changes experienced in the working world, and gender differences and thus differing life contexts and experiences of discrimination. In analysing how Italian workers cope with socio-economic change, Catellani and Milesi reveal two psychological routes to right-wing extremism. Qualitative interview analyses of a sample of Italian workers show how changes in working conditions, perceived either positively or negatively, may lead people to develop extreme right-wing attitudes. They highlight two different psychological routes leading to right-wing extremism, according to whether people perceive the change they have experienced at work as positive or negative. In both routes, identification processes appear to play a relevant mediating role. In particular, a lack of possibilities for identifying with meaningful social categories (e.g., the work group) appears to increase workers’ insecurity and, as a consequence, the development of ethnocentric and authoritarian attitudes. The chapter thus uses in-depth qualitative analysis to complement the findings from the quantitative survey. Using qualitative and quantitative data on Flanders, Belgium, de Weerdt and de Witte investigate differences between workers in the private and public sectors in relation to three topics: (a) the perception of socio-economic change, (b) extreme right-wing receptiveness and voting intentions, and (c) the relationship between both sets of variables. The qualitative research is used to develop hypotheses that are then tested using data from the quantitative survey. The results indeed indicate that there are significant differences between workers from the public and private sectors both in the experience of changes at work and in political orientation and receptiveness attitudes. The contribution by Thoft and Grinderslev on Denmark brings together the analysis of experiences in working life with changes in the welfare state. Regarding changes

Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right

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in work, the accounts given in the qualitative interviews support the assumption that changes in working conditions may lead to a perceived lack of recognition. Those who express pronounced xenophobic-populist attitudes often say they feel let down by unions, actors at workplace level or representatives of the political system. In the public services, a negative assessment of recent changes points to increased pressure of work, fewer benefits and poorer services for the elderly. This reflects a widespread concern about the welfare system, in particular the health service and elderly care. Taking up explanations offered by right-wing populists, people explain the worsening of welfare provision by relating it to immigration. Balazs, Faguer and Rimbert take the theoretical approach of Pierre Bourdieu used in the study ‘The Weight of the World’ as their starting point. Using interviews with residents of former steel-industry-based areas devastated by industrial restructuring and with employees of a multi-national computer company in the ‘French Silicon Valley’, this contribution provides a description of how working and living conditions in France have deteriorated: first for the working classes and second – because of the worsening economic crisis – for the skilled middle classes. It shows how this entails the social downgrading of a whole section of the wage-earning population. The contribution attempts to explain the processes that shape representations and the political involvement of individuals who suffer from social and economic insecurity. On this basis the authors describe and explain the ‘political conversions’ that have led to the growing support for right-wing extremism in France. In their contribution, Meyer and Hentges argue that the public debate on the social origins of right-wing extremist attitudes has so far wrongly focused primarily on the people who considered themselves to be losers in the ‘modernization’ processes. Their presentation of the findings of the qualitative research from Germany shows that the respective interrelations are far more complicated. Right-wing extremist currents in their overt as well as in their more subtle expressions address conformist and rebellious moods at the same time, and appeal to people from various social milieus and political factions. They show that the neo-liberal constellation of these different social forces – chiefly legitimated in terms of competitive nationalism – has to be examined if we are to understand its right-wing extremist implications. The chapter by Tóth and Grajczjar on Hungary accounts for the particularly profound political, societal and economic shifts the country has experienced, especially since 1989. They argue that this has led to status inconsistencies that differ markedly from what can be observed in the other countries covered in this study. Based on the qualitative interviews, the authors construct an interpretative model that takes into account the political socialization in the family, the career path and the perception of one’s current social and employment status. On this basis, the authors analysed the data of the quantitative survey to find differences in the attraction to right-wing extremism in Hungary. They point out that there is a large potential pool of voters for the extreme right in Hungary and at the same time put forward an explanation for the weak results of the right-wing extremist party in recent elections. On the basis of qualitative research in Switzerland, the chapter by Plomb and Poglia Mileti aims at presenting a variety of individual expressions of right-wing populism and discussing their link with the changes affecting working life. Switzerland has

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seen a dramatic rise in support of right-wing or radical populism. In considering both structural changes and individual experiences at work, this contribution aims to describe sociological processes that can lead to people being attracted to extremist ideas. The contribution shows that radical discourses expressed by individuals are embedded in these people’s ‘political subjectivity’, i.e. the way in which they make sense of the social world and argue how it ought to be. For working people, political subjectivity is strongly related to the way they are linked to their work and to the meaning they attach to it. If working life is subject to far-reaching change – as has been the case over the past ten years – workers’ political subjectivity is affected and so, consequently, is the way people perceive the changing society. The objective of the concluding chapter by Flecker is to summarize the findings and to present the policy implications of the research. The research showed that the following policy issues are highly relevant when it comes to analysing the preconditions for the rise of right-wing populism and to offering alternatives: work organization and working conditions, insecurity and inequality, workforce ageing, migration and political representation. Rather than presenting particular policy measures, it addresses fundamental problems and discusses the implications for policy making in the light of the research findings. Overall, the study describes socio-economic change as it is perceived by those who are affected by it and thereby, in particular, seeks to give a voice to people in the shadows of social and political life. With regard to the political reactions, the findings show that socio-economic change and, in particular, changes in working life have in fact contributed to the increased support for right-wing populism and extremism. But in contrast to popular views, it makes clear that it is not only the ‘modernization losers’ or the blue-collar workers who are to blame: people in different social positions who have experienced socio-economic change differently are attracted to the extreme right for completely different reasons. Attraction to the extreme right can be found, though to a different degree, with both ‘losers’ and ‘winners’, both blue-collar workers and managers, both men and women. Corresponding to the openness and incongruity of the ideologies put forward by right-wing populists, people thus take a variety of approaches to their political messages. This explains the large potential pool of sympathizers and voters for these parties, a potential that seems to be considerably larger than voting intentions and voting behaviour show. This variety also means that it is futile to argue over the reason for the rise of rightwing populism and extremism as there is, in our view, more than one main path of attraction to the new political sirens.

PART 1 Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right in Europe

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Chapter 1

Addressing the Link between Socio-Economic Change and Right-Wing Populism and Extremism: A Critical Review of the European Literature Francesca Poglia Mileti and Fabrice Plomb

Introduction Like most of the scholars studying the emergence and the success of rightwing populism and extremism, we are led to admit a plurality of causes of this phenomenon. The numerous and diverse interpretations are subordinated, in the first place, to the diversity of social and political realities itself and, secondly, to the disciplinary, methodological or paradigmatic approaches used to grasp it. Among them we also find approaches focusing on socio-economic components as major explanation variables. Providing an extensive literature review on right-wing populism and extremism would go beyond the objectives of this chapter; we will instead be more specific and discuss the link between socio-economic change in Europe and the contemporary evolution of right-wing populism and extremism in the European national contexts. Thus, the purpose of this literature review will be mostly related to the way scholars address the question of a possible link between this political development and the socio-economic variables. The empirical results and interpretative suggestions presented in the further chapters of this report need to be read with at least a minimal knowledge of what has been written on this particular subject. Indeed, the central hypothesis addressed – the impact of changes in working life on the development of right-wing populism and extremism – cannot be seen in isolation from a larger research context, that is, firstly the evolution of right-wing populism and extremism in Europe in the last twenty years within an increasingly globalized economic and social environment and, secondly, the published literature in political science, sociology, socio-psychology, etc. Not surprisingly one finds in the literature that socio-economic elements (of all kinds) are admitted as playing a role in the emergence and the success of rightwing extremism or populism. The literature on the subject considers socio-economic variables in general as attributes of the voters or conditions of a larger context as having facilitated the success and/or the emergence of specific parties or movements. Numerous theories addressing the socio-economic conditions lack precision, do not

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define their components or do not even state precisely the status of these variables in the explanations of what some authors call the resurgence of populism. If, as we have already stated in a previous review, most of the authors assume the existence of a link between socio-economic variables and the development of right-wing populism and extremism (Poglia Mileti et al. 2002), they do not go much further than stating it without proposing convincing arguments in terms of explanations and interpretations, as we will see later on. Indeed, the link made by many authors’ associates’ statements related to the macro-sociological level (economic crises, individualization processes, tightening of the market, etc.) and individual reactions expressed by a populist affinity or vote. Not much is said about the processes that takes place in between. By the same token, we very rarely find empirical research trying to test this specific link (Poglia Mileti et al. 2002). As an example of characterizing social and economic elements, we can borrow the arguments of Mazzoleni, who, from an analytical point of view, distinguishes two types of factors. In his view, the first are to be considered ‘conditions of emergence’ of right-wing populism and extremism and the second should be taken as ‘conditions of success’. The socio-economic variables are part of the conditions of emergence – being related to what he considers to be the three major crises of these last decades (socio-economic, cultural and identity, politico-institutional). The second kind of factors are those constituting the conditions of success, such as changes in the political field (electoral and institutional context), the strategies of the political actors, their ideology or organization (Mazzoleni 2003). In this view, parties appear as ‘political entrepreneurs’ able to exploit or even capitalize on opportunities offered by the social and economic environment, such as preoccupations or states of frustration in the population. This perspective tends to interpret socio-economic variables as a general context. Since we are interested in questioning the link between socio-economic change and political reverberations and developments, we will somehow reverse the perspective: we will consider with Mazzoleni the changes in the political field as necessary ‘conditions of success’ for right-wing populism and extremism, but will show that they are not sufficient to explain the actual phenomenon. Our aim is not to argue the relative importance of socio-economic variables in the explanations of the populist success of this last decade, but to try to understand how scholars deal with them in approaching this subject. Yet, in understanding the place scholars allocate to socio-economic variables, we cannot escape a larger perspective introducing other kinds of elements (related for example to the changing political field). Indeed, we will see how the different realities are interconnected and must be taken as such in order to understand the social, political and ideological emergence and success of right-wing populism and extremism. These will be discussed as far as they help to understand the link between socio-economic factors and the development of rightwing populism and extremism. This chapter is structured as follows: we begin with an attempt to discuss the way definitions and terminologies are addressed and how the literature on the historical phenomenon may be related to the one treating the actual situation. We continue in presenting the important factors related to political fields and actors that most scholars consider to be relevant for the development of right-wing populism and

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extremism. The core of this chapter will consist in discussing the ways scholars address the link between socio-economic factors and right-wing populism and extremism and in parallel proposing critical comments on the interpretations, the explanations and the conceptualizations. Terminologies and definitions In addition to the diversity of political realities and the variety of scientific approaches, we can count on a large range of definitions, classifications and terminologies used to describe the phenomenon we are interested in. Borrowing an expression from Cas Mudde, the attempt to define and classify the parties, the movements and the ideologies of the ‘extreme right family’ (Mudde 1999) may easily lead to what he calls a ‘war of words’ (Mudde 1996). Indeed, over the last ten years a great number of terms and numerous definitions have appeared. The term populism and the adjective populist are increasingly used in the public and political spheres, which adds to the difficulty of finding a scientific agreement on the definition of right-wing populism. In the literature, a variety of terms can be found that have no consensual definitions within the European academic community, which vary from author to author and are not used in a systematic way. Hence we can find labels such as right-wing extremism, radical right, national populism, libertarian populism, right-wing populism, radical right-wing populism, new populism, neo populism, etc. This multitude of terms is symptomatic of the diversity of approaches and views in this research field and may also reveal the divergences of explanations. Before entering the literature on the explanations of the phenomenon, we will discuss the concept of populism, and continue by presenting different ways of classifying it. As ironically suggested by Taggart (1995), populism is a notoriously difficult concept. There is no need to say that populism is a polysemic term lacking a scientifically consensual definition (Canovan 1981; Ionescu and Gellner 1969). Until the 1980s, we can say that populism had a relatively precise usage: it was employed to designate historical situations or movements (such as the Russian elite at the end of the 19th century, farmer populism in the American Mid-West, Poudjadism in France, Peronism in South America, etc.). Now its use seems to flourish in very different fields and for designating a vast range of realities, at the same time blurring a possible consensual signification. If populism can be used to designate parties throughout the political continuum, we will here only take in account the ones that can be situated on the right and extreme right of it. However, despite the multi-purpose usage of the term, some common features can be found in almost all of the terms. Almost all authors agree on what can be defined as the ‘populist style’ or the ‘political spectacle’ (Edelman 1988) that is present in the new kind of political play, but also the tendency to hierarchical organization structures inside the parties and the presence of a charismatic leader (Haider, Bossi, Blocher, etc.) able to be the ‘voice of the people’. Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion (1995), offers a more in-depth description of this concept. He describes populism as a steadfast yet inconsistent style of political rhetoric deeply rooted in the 19th century. He assesses

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populism as a movement that can swing to the left or the right and can demonstrate tolerance or intolerance. Assuming and stating that populist parties or movements are representatives of the ‘people’, the term ‘populist’ is often used to characterize an ideological tendency, a movement or a party which explicitly refers to the people as an important entity. This means a kind of political mobilization based on discourses relaying the ‘popular aspirations’ (Hermet et al. 1998) and appreciating the virtues associated with the common people. Summing up, we can say that one of the core elements of the populist structure of argumentation is a pronounced faith in the ‘common sense’ of ‘ordinary people’ and the belief that common people, despite possessing moral superiority and innate wisdom, have been denied the opportunity to make themselves heard. For some authors, such as Annie Collovald (2004), the focus on the term populist may be misleading and may bring confusion between ‘populist’ and ‘popular’. According to Collovald there is a risk of putting the responsibility for developing racist and exclusive ideologies primarily on the lower societal strata. Her critique is of course addressed at politics and discourses in the media, but also concerns the scientific approach, which tends to focus on the ‘ordinary people’ to explain right-wing populism and extremism, forgetting the role played by the media and the contents of political campaigns. This means, for example, that scholars tend to look closely at the votes of the lower social classes. Collovald shows how in France observers tend to forget to analyse statistics on the more educated voters, who – in a by no means so small a proportion – also contributed to Le Pen’s electoral successes. Moreover, in her view, this conflation of popular and populist tends to stress theories related to déclassement and the frustration of the lower layers of society and makes it possible to speak more easily about ‘authoritarianism in the popular classes’. We will see in effect that these kinds of explanation are frequently sustained without there really being any study of the socio-economic background of the voters (Collovald 2004). As far as ideology is concerned, one interesting aspect underlined by Silvia Kobi in describing populist ideology is the ‘over-promising’ element in two domains – democratization and safety (Kobi and Papadopoulos 1997). Again, over-promising in democratization refers to the central role given to the people, and over-promising safety introduces the ‘law and order’ orientation. Opposition to the traditional political system, or at least to the anti-elitist position, is clearly one of the most important components of right-wing populism. Moreover, the populism to which ‘people’s parties’ refer invokes exclusionist identities based on a ‘politics of the “heartland”’ (Taggart 1995). The ‘heartland’ is often the nation (or a region) and can explain the use of the term national populism. We also understand that the attempt to define the people in an exclusive way is correlated to the antiimmigration ideology, which is the second major constant in populist rhetoric. The SIREN analyses of the kind of exclusionism and nationalism of right-wing populist parties in Europe show that it is closely related to the kind of criteria on which each country constructs its vision of a national identity (Poglia Mileti et al. 2002). Some authors have used the well-known concept of Kirchheimer’s (1966) ‘catch-all’ parties to characterize parties referring to the people and having no clear ideological profile. This designation can now be questioned, since most of the ‘catchall parties’ have in the meantime become ‘cartel parties’ (Katz and Mair 1995),

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having consolidated electoral loyalties, being more moderate and having a wider electorate base than populist ones. Using the term ‘catch-all’ parties may indicate that populist parties are not founded on a programmatic or ideological basis. It is true that parties defined as being populist tend to adapt their agenda, but we can still trace some ideological features common to such parties. Based on the literature, we can say that the populism under investigation here lies on the right of the left-right continuum and consists of the following common features: • • • • • •

A more or less accentuated nationalist ideology; A more or less virulent anti-immigration rhetoric; A more or less liberal position and anti-state-intervention position on economy; More or less importance attached to individual and entrepreneurial ethos; A more or less anti-system and anti-elite position; A more or less law-and-order attitude.

If we have already given a few arguments that scholars suggest for using the term populist, we will now discuss the reasons why some do not want to adopt the term extremism. With regard to general political trends the term may touch a sensitive social and political sphere. Yet, as Altermatt and Kriesi suggest, the extremist thinking of the right is not characterized by a uniform concept of the world or a coherent political concept, supported only by specific movements. It can appear in any statement of one’s opinion and on different topics. It can be expressed by people, in programmes, organizations or publications, hence covering a wide spectrum of political positions (Altermatt and Kriesi 1995, 4). According to Cas Mudde, right-wing radicalism or radical right are terms that are in general more used than the term of right-wing extremism, except for some German scholars. For the German tradition, the use of extremism implies elements that refer to unconstitutional positions (e.g. the elimination of free democracy), whereas ‘radical’ only implies that there is an opposition to the principles of the constitution. Except for some Nazi or skinhead groups, the existing parties, groups or individuals are opposed in different ways to some principles of constitution or to the established elite but do not hold unconstitutional positions. If defining the phenomenon seems difficult, neither is it easy to classify different forms of right wing radicalism. Ignazi’s categorization (1992, 9ff), which is based on three criteria, offers a good starting point: • • •

the spatial dimension as a minimum criterion to identify parties located at the extreme right end on the right-left continuum; the ideology making it possible to separate parties with a clear fascist legacy from the others; the support for or rejection of the political system.

This classification leads to a clearer distinction of parties and movements with a fascist legacy. Building on this categorization, Paul Taggart (1995) offers an

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alternative set of explicit labels making it possible to differentiate between neofascist parties and new populist parties. And, as Cas Mudde might add, the term neo-fascist is nowadays used only for groups that explicitly want to restore the Third Reich (for the Italian case the Italian Social Republic) or which hold to Nazism as an ideological reference point (Mudde 1996, 230). The neo label used by Taggart also indicates that even if neo-populist parties show similarities with others (well-known older populist movements (American, South American, Russian populist, Poujadism in France, etc.)), they have distinguishing idiosyncratic features engendered by the post-war historical and political context and, as some authors suggest, by the collapse of major ‘meta-narratives’ (Taggart 1995). An alternative classification is proposed by Betz (1993), who distinguishes two categories based on the relative weight the party attributes to three important features of its programme, which are anti-immigration, nationalism and economics: • •

neo-liberal or libertarian populism tends to be more focused on the neoliberal economy; authoritarian or national populism puts forward a strong national exclusive and social-security programme.

The use of ideological criteria for classifying the different parties is common in the literature. Another example is given by Kitschelt (1995), who proposes a more detailed and nuanced vision of the parties and movements concerned along these criteria: •

• •

new radical right is a combination between neo-liberal, xenophobic and socially conservative beliefs related to the advancement of left-libertarian movements and the more general questions related to multicultural societies; anti-statist populism supports a strong neo-liberal ideology but moderate xenophobia and does not present evident social-conservative beliefs; welfare chauvinist populism is when xenophobia and conservatism are associated with a defence of the welfare state with national preference.

Within the SIREN project we operated most of the time with the terms right-wing populism and right-wing extremism: this decision was taken after looking at different definitions and terms used in the respective national contexts; the usage of both terms appeared necessary in order to fully cover the political and ideological phenomena in all eight countries under investigation (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland). For the definition of right-wing extremism we took into consideration definitions by authors such as Betz, Heitmeyer, Holzer, Gärtner and Jaschke, who have put forward the following ideological elements of right-wing extremism: • • • •

nationalism; militarism; authoritarianism; ‘Führertum’ (leadership).

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Following Steinert (1999), we defined right-wing populism as identity politics in contrast to interest-group politics, invoking common interests ‘of a category that in any case no longer have a common interest, but to whom a common identity is attached as the basis for policy and political representation’ (Steinert 1999, 6). Enemy images are particularly useful for populist agitation as they attract attention, passions and a common upsurge in feelings as well as creating a closing of ranks (ibid.). While populist strategies are characterized by not being restricted by a clear set of ideas or by the need to ground political propositions in an ideological framework, the rightwing populist parties in Europe nevertheless have a distinct ideological platform. This includes, among other things, a restrictive notion of citizenship, demands for a culturally homogeneous community, and the view that society’s benefits should be restricted to those who have made a substantial contribution to society (Betz 2002b). What follows from this is that right-wing extremism and right-wing populism are not distinct phenomena, rather the difference is one of degree. Right-wing populism should not therefore be seen as a new phenomenon contrasting or competing with right-wing extremism (Butterwegge 1996, 28). Back to the historical phenomenon If numerous authors tend to distinguish neo-fascist parties from radical right wing populist parties within the extreme right, we cannot avoid a brief discussion about the literature on the historical phenomenon related to fascism and Nazism1 in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. We will not be able to deal with the enormous amount of literature and we do not intend to present – even briefly – the different theses and arguments related to the origin of fascism, its success, voters, leaders and so on. We rather chose to underline the similarities between analyses of this particular historical period in Europe and those of today. This may provide more impact on this chapter and on the findings and results of the empirical study developed in the following ones. An interesting reference is surely Robert O. Paxton’s recent book on fascism and Nazism and its bibliographic essay2 (Paxton 2004). As is the case with right wing populism, this shows that they are complex, multiform phenomena that should be viewed as processes. The first argument underlines the difficulty of understanding fascism and Nazism through an ideological definition alone, since Paxton shows that political programmes may change with context and historical developments. He uses examples to demonstrate that there is not much coherence between ideologies and actions, or between rhetoric and practice (Paxton 2004, 21). More than an ideological content, the specificity of these parties may be grasped by the relation between what is lived as an ‘historical destiny of a people’ and its ‘mystical leader’ inspired by romantic ideas (Paxton 2004, 35). Here, we can find some similarities with the arguments developed by the Frankfurt school about seduction based on irrational sentiments. 1 For our demonstration, fascism and Nazism will be studied together most of the time, even if they do present a lot of differences (but we will not discuss those here). 2 From which most of the references given here are taken.

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Paxton’s definition of fascism, which is a form of political behaviour (sustained by nationalist militants) that is obsessed by the decline of society and therefore tries to fight it in defending unity, energy and purity, is quite interesting. Forgetting democratic liberties, fascist parties tend to aim at a dual goal: internal cleansing and external expansion (Paxton 2004, 373). To define classical fascism, Paxton speaks of ‘mobilizing passions’, which are expressed by a feeling of belonging to a pure community which is going through a crisis and feels like a victim. Priority is given to the group over individuals. The cultural and nationalist identities are reinforced and correlated to the rejection of strangers. This may explain the explicit anger against materialism, socialism and liberalism expressed by the leaders. There is a natural justification of the elected people governing through a strong authority (Paxton 2004, 374-375). If we cannot compare the horrors of Nazism to today’s populist parties, it is nevertheless interesting, from a sociological point of view, to note that what Paxton calls ‘mobilizing passions’ are quite similar to what we could find in the discourses of European workers.3 As for the actual phenomenon, we can distinguish the social and economical pre-conditions from the political aspects for the encoring of fascism. As far as socio-economic elements are concerned, some authors go back to the first crisis of globalization in the 1880s (Paxton 2004, 82), characterized by a decrease in the number of family farms, rural depopulation, competition between the craft industry and manufactured goods, as well as the first massive flow of immigrants from western Europe (Italians, Spanish and Jews). The first big crisis of the 19th century happened in 1920s and 1930s. The Marxists considered this to be a crisis of capitalism (characterized by economic dysfunctions, unemployment, inflation, social tension). Indeed, the great depression of 1929 reveals the impotence of traditional parties and the victory of outsiders (Paxton 2004, 80). The link we are interested in (socio-economic changes and right-wing extremism) implies that we analyse the role played by different interest groups, social layers or professions. Recent studies show that members of all social classes voted for the Nazi party (Childers 1983 in Paxton 2004, 389). The thesis according to which fascism is supposed to have been supported by the middle class (Lipset 1960) is called into question by the role played by the working class (Fischer 1996; Caplan 1995). Some authors show how certain professional groups or organized interest groups, such as doctors (Lifton 1989) or lawyers (Gruchmann 1988), were linked to fascism. They also underline forms of cooperation uniting the business world – like the chemical consortium studied by Peter Hayes (1987) – and Nazi regimes, even if the former did not share Nazi values. The role of farmers should also not be forgotten. They were amongst the first to support fascism and Nazism, even if they did not gain much power in practice (Paxton 2004, 401) The literature covering the years of war focuses on the political field and the possibilities of contamination from the crisis jumping from one field to another, as reflected in Philippe Burrin’s expression: ‘the magnetic field’ of fascism. A political crisis that, without actually rocking the institutions or shaking up the major political forces of the country, nevertheless created a permanent climate of civil war. An 3

See specific chapters dealing with Swiss and Italian cases.

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external crisis ultimately determined by the policy of Hitler’s regime, which once firmly established in power proceeded to destroy the European order (Burin 1986, 1995). Some authors insist on the gap left open by the failure of democracy (BergSchlosser and Mitchell 2000) and on the Weimar Republic (Mommsen 1996) as being the pre-conditions for the radical movements’ accession to power. In parallel to this kind of political crisis of the traditional parties, observers identify the emergence of a new way of doing politics and a change in the European political culture oriented toward a mass politics against socialism and liberalism. What is now the ‘populist style’ can without doubt find an echo in the way the Nazis staged their public discourses and used propaganda. More specifically, they ‘manipulated the resentment and fears of ordinary Germans’ (Paxton 2004, 116) and spoke to all the German people, targeting various groups with specific promises and measures that could contradict each other (Childers 1983). The fascists appealed to the people and rejected the outgroup formed by the current leaders in the same way as they differentiated between the members that deserved to be protected and the others who did not. The fact that this kind of discourse aimed at all the people was nevertheless specifically designed for some particular groups in the population could explain that the ‘voluntary cooperation of all citizens’ in fascist regimes (in the Nazi Germany, in particular) did not pose a direct threat to the average citizen (Johnson 2001; Gellately 2003). The Nazi regime, composed of a mixture of elements borrowed from constitutional elements of the government and conservative features of the civil society, was so complex that this complexity went far beyond what Mommsen called ‘a polycracy’ (Mommsen 1997). The political realities of the right-wing populist and extremist parties In order to be able to discuss the different explanations scholars give for the differing political and social situations, it is useful to provide a brief description of the relevant right-wing populist and extremist parties. Austria The Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ – Freedom Party of Austria) was founded as early as 1956 and has a long but not unbroken right-wing extremist record. Today the FPÖ considers itself to be part of the ‘New Right’ and bases its ideology on an ethno-nationalist conception of Volk – understood as an organic and intrinsically unequal community. Austrian patriotism and the anti-pluralism of the FPÖ is coupled with a strong anti-immigrant attitude and sexist vision of society. Immigrants are seen as social scroungers and criminals. The FPÖ also adopts an anti-European posture fighting the cultural levelling that supposedly stems from it. The populist nature of the FPÖ appears clearly in the anti-elitism stressed in the party’s discourse that contrasts the ‘industrious and hard-working Austrians’ to the big interest groups or the opportunist political elite.

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Belgium (Flanders) The Vlaams Blok (V-B, Flemish Block) originates in the Flemish Movement. The party split away from the more moderate Volksunie, which joined federal government in 1977. The main reason for its electoral success during the nineties is not Flemish regionalism but the party’s overtly racist propaganda against immigrants and its campaign for an ‘ethnically purified’ national community (Fisher 2001). As a consequence, all internationalism such as Marxism and ‘savage’ liberalism are strongly opposed. Denmark The Fremskridtspartiet (Progressive Party) troubled the post-war political system as early as the 1970s with a middle-class revolt against the welfare state. Together with the second populist party, the Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party), they defend an anti-elitism and anti-immigration, law-and-order ideology stressing the importance of traditions and moral values and condemning deviance from the norm. While the Fremskridtspartiet can be regarded as a party of pure-and-simple neoliberalism, the Dansk Folkeparti has a somewhat more social- and welfare-chauvinist profile. Both Danish parties took a clear position against European integration. France The electoral success of the Front National (National Front) in 1984 marked the onset of the tidal ‘third wave’ of right-wing extremism in western Europe. The National Front is a law-and-order party that opts for military authority to fight the decadence of civilization. In opposition to the other parties and political elites, which it regards as lazy and corrupt (especially the left), the National Front reveals an antiparliamentarian position. It stresses the national preference of French people over immigrants or strangers and legitimates latent racist and anti-immigration discourses. Immigrants are seen as invading France and being responsible for unemployment, criminality and are a threat to public safety. Germany Die Republikaner (REP – The Republicans) are a product of the mid-1980s when the major conservative parties finally seemed to accept the heritage of social-democrat Ostpolitik. Its major arguments are based on a revanchist and revisionist politics and racist slogans. Hungary The Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja (MIÉP – Hungarian Justice and Life Party) is a party by-product of the struggle between the moderate and radical factions of the then governing Christian conservative party (MDF – Magyar Demokrata Fórum). The radical wing of the party rejected the liberal economic policies of the government. The special feature of the ethnocentric nationalism of the Hungarian Justice and Life

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Party is that it targets the alleged conspiracy between the former communist elite, Hungarian left-wing liberals and international capital of Jewish origin to exploit Hungarians and to destroy their national culture and identity. The Hungarian Justice and Life Party calls for a reconstruction of the democratic state, which would lead to the completion of the transition through the uprooting of the former communist elite and their influential liberal allies and the dominance of family-centred Christiannationalistic values across the nation. Italy The resurgence of Italian right-wing extremism occurred after the breakdown of the First Republic in the early 1990s, when the MSI not only changed its name to Alleanza Nazionale (AN – National Alliance) but was also allowed to form governmental coalitions with other right-wing parties in the mid-1990s. The ideology of the National Alliance is based on a state nationalism stressing authority, hierarchy, meritocracy and inequality, privileging traditions and moral values expressed in the motto ‘God, nation, family’. The National Alliance favours presidentialism and is opposed to the past and present political system, considering democracy as a means to an end rather than a basic value. Whereas the neo-fascist parties always adhered to an authoritarian central state, the Lega Nord, the other right-wing populist party, is regionalist, defends authoritarian values and presents xenophobic and anti-system attitudes. Switzerland The nationalist tendencies of the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP – Swiss People’s Party) aim to protect the independence, autonomy and neutrality of Switzerland, its identity and culture. Consequently, it is opposed to the participation or integration of the country to supranational organizations such as the Nato, the European Union, etc. The fear of losing one’s identity to the outside echoes the fear of immigrants (especially refugees) and multiculturalism on the inside. Apart from the anti-immigration positions and its law-and-order ideology, it demands less state intervention and more individual responsibility. It has strong anti-elitist and antipolitician discourses without expressing anti-system positions. The conditions of success This section is aimed at discussing briefly what Mazzoleni calls the ‘conditions of success’ or what are sometimes called ‘offer theories’ (as opposed to the demand theories related to the attraction/affinity of the voters), which are related to the political field, its structure, its changes, organization and its actors. Our aim is here to give an idea of the ‘offer theories’ and to show that they should not be opposed to the ‘demand theories’ and can be related to socio-economic variables. We will not discuss specific case studies or present particular analyses that are the concern of political science, for example the idea that the convergence of dominant parties on a certain number of economic problems and neo-liberal discourses have allowed more a radical

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polarization of positions. We know – as Koopmans and Kriesi observed for Switzerland – that different kinds of political parties emerge in relation to the constraints and opportunities defined by institutional structures, political cultures related to national identity (Koopmans and Kriesi 1997). They have contributed to the success of rightwing populism and extremism but do not constitute the centre of our investigation. Spectacularization, personalization of politics and influential actors As has already been said, right-wing populism is also related to other elements as a ‘structure of argumentation, a political style and strategy’ (Betz and Immerfall 1998). Indeed, almost all authors recognize the importance of specific persons and leaders in the success of populist movements and parties. The authors who support this argument tend to insist on the importance of a leader whose charisma and personality become visible thanks to the media. The ‘political entrepreneurs’ (who can be politicians, opinion leaders, extra-parliamentary groups) set the political agenda as well as the public conception and definition of ‘problems’, such as, for example, the immigration issue and anti-Muslim sentiment (Gaasholt and Togeby 1995; Hussain et al. 1997; Hussain 2000; Karpantschof forthcoming). We often found that the role played by influential actors related to these arguments – actors such as cultural and intellectual elites acting in extra-parliamentary groups (Karpantschof 1999, 2000 and forthcoming) or in more close-knit circles, as has been noted in Hungary by Körösényi (1991). The ‘effet Le Pen’ (Plenel and Rollat 1984) in France, Haider in Austria or Blocher in Switzerland seems, then, to be the result of the spectacularization of politics, combining personalization of political actors, planned political strategy and mediatization of political debates. Strategies of the parties and the volatility of the electorate Strategies of the parties are also considered as an element in the electoral success of right-wing populist and extremist movements and parties. Authors state that parties, traditionally more ideologically oriented, tend to modify their strategies in order to attract larger or specific strata of the population. This ‘strategic and programmatic shift’ (Lipset, Childers, Falter, Betz) is of crucial importance in explaining the rise of right-wing populism in the context of social modernization. For Ivaldi, the ideological shift towards social problems, for example, is part of the parties’ strategies and can be seen as political opportunism (Ivaldi 2000). If these arguments implicitly refer to supposed socio-economic changes that have affected modern society, they are not seriously taken into account in these theories. Changing party strategies also seems to have been successful, since the electorate has been affected by a structural change: we are speaking of a general breakdown of voter loyalties, and greater electoral volatility which observers have recently noted. So the concomitance of specific strategies adopted by right-wing populist and extremist parties and political volatility (Franklin 1992) has succeeded in mobilizing ‘disenchanted voters’. As Childers states, parties sought to gain from the ‘fundamental breakdown of voters’ identification’ with the traditional parties of the bourgeois centre right (Childers 1983, 127). We can relate this volatility in voting

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attitudes to more general individualization processes leading to a diversification of biographies where a vote constitutes a choice at a moment and does not imply a strong identification. This may explain why people turn to right-wing populist and extremist parties but seems to be in contradiction with some arguments stating that the success of right-wing populism and extremism is related to the longing for a strong (for example national) identity. Indeed, theories supporting the thesis of a radicalization of the principle of cultural exclusion (Betz 2004) affirm that in an increasingly pluri-cultural and ethnically mixed world people need to have a sense of identity in order to be able to face the changes. Inadequate answers from the traditional parties and political powerlessness A number of explanations for the success of right-wing populist and extremist parties are linked to the inadequate answers given by traditional parties to the needs of the population. This combines the feeling of disenchantment and resentment towards the political elites, the established parties or even the political system having been unable to manage the rapid change in the economic and cultural environment (see Betz 1994, 170). The arguments addressing the inadequacy of what the traditional parties offer in response to voters’ expectations are part of the theories of ‘political alienation’, ‘political powerlessness’, or the ‘protest vote’ (Ptak and Schui 1998; Jaschke 2001 and Falkenberg 1997 for Austria; Mayer 1999 and Perrineau 1997 for France; Vecchi 1993 for Italy; Bozóki 1994 for Hungary; Kobi 1993 for Switzerland). If the first tend to stress feelings of powerlessness towards politics, the second interpret voting for a right-wing populist party as a protest. Authors interested in this approach assert that the traditional political parties no longer meet the expectations and the needs of the population or interest groups. They vote for right-wing populist or extremist parties not because they are strongly convinced by their ideological arguments or guided by interests but to protest against traditional parties, thereby also showing a lack of confidence in politics. Some authors argue that when there is nothing left to protest against, the votes for right-wing populist and extremist parties would sharply diminish, as Stouthuysen (1996), for example, thinks is the case for the Vlaams Blok. In some cases, the growing distrust in the political establishment can be seen as a consequence of political affairs and scandals that have affected all of Europe in recent decades, as Perrineau shows for France (1997) or the Dutroux case in Belgium. In underlining the crisis of legitimacy of the existing political system, Ignazi (quoted by Karapin 1998) links it with the political and cultural changes that have induced a neo-conservative reaction, which comes down to less state and more market economy on the one hand and the re-activation of traditional values on the other – central issues within the ideologies of right-wing populism and extremism. Interestingly, radical left and radical right movements originated from the same political fracture, since they both contest the traditional political system. Opposed in the political field, the emergence of one may influence the other as has been showed for example with the Swiss Automobilists’ Party reacting to the demands of the environmentalists (Taggart 1995). The success of right-wing populism and extremism then shows the helplessness of the traditional political class in finding remedies for social problems related to

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economic and social problems (unemployment, immigration, etc.). Some authors maintain that the weakness of social democracy and the revolutionary left leaves a political void that can be filled by the extreme and populist right. This in particular relates to how growing insecurity and social inequality are dealt with in political discourses (Mahnkopf 2000; Zilian 2002). If socio-economic changes are presented in the literature as one important element in the origin of specific expectations that traditional parties have been unable to answer, not much is said in the literature about the processes. What are the individual psychological processes or the collective mechanisms implied in the different steps from structural change to individual votes? Nor can we find many empirical studies that attempt to operationalize the concepts of resentment, powerlessness, etc. and that try to test these hypotheses. Ideologies of the parties What then are the answers right-wing populist and extremist parties offer to voters? What ideological shift guarantees their success? Since they are at the centre of the analysis of the phenomenon, we cannot ignore the importance of the ideological and programmatic propositions we have already presented. If we have to discuss the importance of ideologies in the comprehension of the phenomenon and its success, we actually have to be careful at this point not to confuse the reasons people may give for voting for right-wing populist and extremist parties (or adhering to their ideologies) with the actual causes of this attraction. Saying that right-wing populist and extremist parties are successful thanks to their xenophobic background certainly gives indications on the profile of voters for right-wing populist or extremist parties. However, it provides no serious explanation as to why some people would be more attracted than others, for what reason and through what processes this may happen. To answer these questions we have to tackle other elements, the ones we have called the conditions of emergence or existence of right-wing populism and extremism. The complex link between socio-economic change and right-wing populism and extremism It appears that authors or studies that explicitly reject a potential causal relation between socio-economic changes and right-wing populism and extremism are in a minority position. More numerous are studies or arguments that refer to such a link but state that a causal relation is not very plausible. The majority of the literature, however, remains rather general and vague in its explanations. Both in the Swiss and French literature, for example, we find numerous publications that invoke the importance of socio-economic changes, but very few that explain the nature of the connection. In the Austrian literature, at first sight the hypothesis of a causal link between socio-economic changes and right-wing populism and extremism seems to be supported by most authors’ literature. However, a closer look at the arguments reveals that this potential link is rarely argued in any detail. In the Hungarian literature, socio-economic changes are often seen as one cause among many, such as the peculiarities of party formation, the nature of the transition

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to democracy and the widespread existence of xenophobic sentiments. In the Danish case, socio-economic change seems to be part of the explanation, and authors mention the influence of social actors such as the media, political parties, authorities, cultural elites and other opinion leaders that also seem to contribute significantly to the creation of widespread attitudes that are also offered by right-wing populism. These few statements show the complexity of the link we are interested in. Right-wing populism and extremism not only comes in many different shapes, its emergence also has multiple reasons. Socio-economic changes are usually not seen as the only one, but as one of several factors, mainly in combination with what we have called the ‘conditions for success’, which are the characteristics of the political system or the influence of the media. Besides, socio-economic variables are not precisely defined. It is difficult to classify the different theories because they are founded on different explanation variables or causes, paradigms, levels of abstraction, disciplinary contexts, etc. We will nevertheless try to present different approaches and to distinguish the different ways in which socio-economic variables are integrated in the different theories. Generally, the first inclination of social scientists in order to better understand a phenomenon is to proceed to a descriptive analysis to determine what kinds of individuals or groups are concerned by it. It almost seems that reviewing the European literature describing the social basis of right-wing voters adds to the confusion instead of helping to comprehend the phenomenon. However, the general picture of these voters still seems to be represented by the figure of the male bluecollar worker (or unemployed) with a low level of education (Lubbers 2001, 230). With reference to the Eurobarometer data it can be said that supporters of right-wing populist parties are somewhat less educated than the population as a whole, more frequently come from a declining middle class or the unskilled working class, are more often unemployed and more frequently anticipate a worsening of their situation (Kriesi 1999, 408). However, we will see that these results cannot be generalized and taken as a basis for further theorization, since others studies contradict them or at least call for a more nuanced approach. The difficulty in presenting a clear picture of the supporters of right-wing populist and extremist parties consists of three major elements. First, national realities are different and so the reason for being attracted by political programmes may be different in each country. Second, the approaches and methods (except for the European and standardized survey) do not measure and study the same aspects of the phenomenon. Third, the socio-economic status and the related social conditions alone cannot explain a right-wing attitudes. General explanations linking socio-economic context and the emergence of right-wing populism and extremism For Scheuch and Klingemann (1967) the potential for developing right-wing extremisms exist in all industrial societies and should be seen as a ‘normal pathological condition’ of modern democracies. These assumptions are typical of a position integrating socio-economic elements as a vague and general context

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giving birth to populism. Indeed, the affirmation of extremism being a ‘functional disfunctioning’ of modern societies provides no clue to understanding the complex processes related to this phenomenon. Even if they are more precise, the majority of authors consider socio-economic elements as a general context and relate it to the concept of globalization, modernization, etc. Ptak and Schui (1998) for example stress that through a turn to neoliberalism even right-wing populist parties have called into question the basic consensus of economic and social policy. Others, such as Enyedi and Körösényi (2001, 94) in Hungary, mention globalization, the rise of inequality and unemployment as causes for the radicalization of right-wing movements. In France, some authors see the reason for supporting Front National in the economic and social crisis and its disintegrating consequences, such as unemployment, delinquency, precariousness and social insecurity (Bourdieu 1992). Multi-causal interpretations Another option is to integrate socio-economic variables (often without defining them) to a set of causes that have produced what is called the new populism. More often, we find a combination of cultural, historical and political factors (Rémond 1982; Taguieff 1986). In France, for example, historians have highlighted that ideological affiliations of Front National voters follow the periodic resurgence of a protest vote. Within this perspective, ‘national populism’ would constitute the popular version of an identity reaction specific to the 1980s, provoked by cultural and economic globalization, European integration and the collapse of communism. As an example of multi-causal explanations we can cite Neugebauer (1998), who gives the following list of reasons for the rise of the FPÖ in Austria: public disenchantment with politics and traditional political parties (caused by political scandals, party patronage and privilege); the role of parts of the media and politicians (in stirring up resentment against foreigners, in particular after the dismantling of the ‘iron curtain’; debates focusing on ‘welfare scroungers’ and criminality, fuelled by the same players); rapid changes in the traditional economic and social structures leading to insecurity, fear, frustration and aggression within the affected groups (e.g. the decline of the nationalized industries, technological change, the rise in unemployment and international competition). Indeed, arguments related to socio-economic questions are most often combined with political explanations. In Hungary, for example, Bozóki focuses on the transitional crisis, the opening up and restructuring of the economy, the neoliberal economic policies, growing insecurity and frustration and the difficulties of younger people in adapting to the new economy (Bozóki 1994). The crisis of the ‘welfare state’ Another way to consider economic variables in the explanations is to consider them through the way states redistribute socio-economic resources by way of welfare policies. These theories emerged in the nineties and focus on the ‘crisis of the welfare state’ (Betz 1994; Kitschelt 1995) and put forward general statements that show right-wing populist and extremist parties developing in countries where the

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welfare state is (or was) strong. The core of the argument consists in saying that where there is no welfare state, there has been no debate on the welfare state and no potential demand for neoliberalism and preference for nationals in the repartition of the resources from the state. For example, countries where a fully fledged welfare state does not exist, such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland, right-wing populist or extremist parties have not been successful. The crisis of modernity Another major thesis putting the socio-economic variables at the centre of its analysis is the one related to what is called the ‘crisis of modernity’. This term does not imply an economic crisis; for instance the most successful years of the Danish People’s Party (1997-2001) – including not least the historic right-wing electoral victory of 2001 – coincided with a period of economic prosperity not seen in decades. Rightwing populism and extremism is the consequence of a profound transformation of the socio-economic and socio-cultural structures of western democracies or, on a more structural and general level, the transition from industrial society to postindustrial society. The difficulty with this thesis is that a wide range of changes seem to intervene and authors do not agree on the relative weight to give to one or the other. We will therefore not detail the authors’ specific arguments but will summarize the ones they most often suggest as being potential factors in the emergence of rightwing populism. These are: • • • • • • • • • • •

obsolescence of skills; spread of precarious situations; development of new technologies; flexible speculations; individualized careers; erosion of established subcultures, milieus and institutions; loss of traditional collective identities; emergence of contextualized identities; individualization of risks; social fragmentation; questions of immigration.

We can see that some arguments can be seen as part of the process of the so-called individualization of society. Others are of a different nature. These changes are often cited as general context, but their influence on political opinions are rarely tested as such. In general, explanations referring to the ‘crisis of the modernity’ consider socio-economic changes as a general context in which individuals have to move and find their place (for example Altermatt and Kriesi 1995; Betz 1994). This thesis was prominent in the 1980s and90s, defended (among others) by Betz, and conceived the evolution of right-wing extremism (the term ‘extremism’ was more usual then) as being the result of a transition from industrial capitalist society – and the welfare state – to a society organized by post-industrial capitalism. These analyses were oriented both on individual and structural levels, arguing the incapacity of the state

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to manage the process of globalization. This means, in a way, that the post-industrial logic of individualization (the confidence in the market) has been accepted as a fact and has been profitable for right-wing populist and extremist parties, which had proposed neoliberal economic programmes, less state intervention and a reduced welfare state, and by the same token had been pushing deregulation, privatization and self-enterprise in order to improve national competitiveness. Insecurity, resentment and political opportunism Well-known theories relate insecurity (understood as a consequence of the crisis of modernity), feelings of fear and resentment and being attracted by exclusive political offers. The theories of resentment tend to address the question in focusing on a psychological malaise, on one hand, and on a political response on the other. Right-wing populist and extremist parties would answer this resentment by the wellknown scapegoating mechanism and proposing simple solutions. These parties are presented as very conscious of these frustrations and ready to exploit them. Beck argues that traditional parties have not reacted to modernization and, taking Austria as an example, sees the success of the FPÖ as ‘an expression of crisis phenomena associated with the modernization of “post-industrialist” societies; [and as] a consequence of the reduced room for manoeuvre in redistribution which has been noted in connection with modernization: established parties and institutions are being “punished”’ (quoted in Falkenberg 1997, 187). Indeed, since the second half of the 1990s authors have observed a political opportunism (Ivaldi 2000), with extreme right-wing parties increasingly orienting their programmes on social questions and promising social protection to nationals rather than presenting liberal economic programmes. Increasing insecurity is not only at the core of the individualization thesis but also at the centre of studies on current developments in working life. Dörre (1997), for example, argues that the strengthening of the market principles in capitalist societies has reduced these societies’ capacity for the social integration of wage labour. Even groups such as the core workforce and the ranks of skilled workers are today affected by social insecurity, which is felt particularly strongly given expectations of continuously improving living standards and reduced labour-market risks. This feeling of insecurity may lead to defensive attitudes, such as a ‘reactive nationalism’, and to attempts to stabilize the ‘self’ by accession to imaginary communities. In his study on youth who are attracted to right-wing extremism, Zilian (1998) argues that both the political climate and the situation on the labour market have changed: not only have resentments against ‘welfare scroungers’ and foreigners increased, but immigrants actually do exert a certain pressure on labour supply that should not be ignored. Under the influence of the general political climate, rightwing extremist youth gangs interpret globalization as favouring ‘cosmopolitans’ and discriminating against ‘locals’ and the members of the lower classes. Thus locals seek shelter within their community (Gemeinschaft) and put up resistance against its devaluation. For Zilian (2002), socio-economic and political reasons for the rise of right-wing populism are therefore closely linked: recent changes in working life have deepened the divisions within society (also stated by Enyedi and Körösényi

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(2001) in Hungary). The pressure on the labour market has been transformed into feelings of resentment against foreigners and ‘welfare scroungers’, as Zilian observed for a specific section of young people attracted by right-wing populism and extremism. These feelings of resentment and the exclusionist reactions are not regarded as spontaneous emotional states. Authors who adhere to this hypothesis also take into account the fact that these views are influenced by party-political stress on the legitimacy of anti-egalitarian positions and by the media. In fact, people’s resentment must find a correspondence in the parties’ own explicit propositions (see the offer theories). These theories clearly point to socio-economic changes (insecurity, precarization, etc.) as the causes of the fear. The logic of explanation is similar to the one adopted in the ‘political powerlessness’ theories: people are (economically and politically) frustrated and they turn to right-wing populist parties. Yet the assumption that those who suffer the negative effects of socio-economic change are the most likely to be attracted by right-wing populism and extremism is often not verified by empirical data on the effects of particular changes, on the effective perceptions of these changes and the psychological but also collective mechanisms leading to support for right-wing populism and extremism. The ‘losers’ of modernization Another important explanation relating socio-economic changes and right-wing populism and extremism is mediated by the concept of the ‘modernization losers’, which claims that changes are increasingly challenging for the individuals who have to adapt to them. Individuals with more appropriate resources can be expected to be among the winners of post-industrial modernity; the others will belong to the ‘losers’ group, unable to cope with changes. At a more psychological level we are talking about the anxiety and confusion, the feeling of insecurity caused by a lack of appropriate cultural, social and material resources, by a lack of self-confidence in the face of globalization and the complexity of modern society (Gaasholt and Togeby 1995; Andersen 2000; Taguieff 1986). The concept of the ‘loser’ provides a nice metaphor to express the difficulties of adapting and the suffering of the people, but it also seems to lead to more confusion. Indeed, we are confronted with the problem that there is no sociological definition or at least description that would be empirically informed of what a ‘loser’ is. Most of the time, ‘losers’ are considered to be the people from the lower strata of society, since they are supposed to possess fewer resources to face socio-economic change. This is also why some authors, such as Egger de Campo for instance, clearly reject the ‘modernization losers’ thesis, arguing that there are no data in Austria on how young blue-collar workers who have moved from the social-democratic SPÖ to the FPÖ were actually affected by these changes and on how they perceive them (Egger de Campo 2000, 99, 189ff). In Germany, a few research projects, in particular on younger people, have pointed out that it is not necessarily those suffering disadvantages through socioeconomic change who are more likely to support right-wing extremist ideologies (see Heitmeyer et al. 1989; Held et al. 1992; Leiprecht et al. 1992). These arguments can

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also be put forward with regard to Switzerland, where the heterogeneity of the rightwing populist voters and of the ‘losers’ of modernization has been demonstrated through socio-demographic studies, (Kriesi 1999; Kriesi et al. 1998); they could be found in the labour sector of production (blue-collar, unskilled workers, unemployed) but also in the small-business sector (e.g. shop owners and farmers). In a German study on trade unions and right-wing extremism, Fichter shows that socio-economic status must – at least – be related to trade-union affiliation and specific convictions (democratic versus authoritarian ones) to understand extreme-right attitudes (Fichter 2006). The fear of déclassement The theory of déclassement also tends to show that it is not only the working class that may be interested in right-wing populist and extremist parties. For Seymour Lipset (1960), one of the most influential authors of this approach, fascism and post-modern radicalism are responses of a middle class that sees its social position and status, if not its very existence, threatened by the process of modernization. From this point of view, right-wing populist and extremist movements and parties have been successful because they have managed to exploit the middle class’s immediate fears triggered by the economic crisis. In this analysis the focus is put on the subjective perceptions of a downward social mobility of what Lipset called the ‘petty-bourgeois’, related to the threat of a proletarian socialist revolution, as Betz (1994, 24) puts it. The ideology of success Interestingly, studies in Germany have shown that it is not necessarily the socially and economically disadvantaged or those suffering through socio-economic change who may be more likely to support right-wing extremist ideologies (see Heitmeyer et al. 1989; Leiprecht et al. 1992) The results of the empirical research project conducted by Held et al. (1992) point in the same direction and contradict the dominant assumption that young people in extremely uncertain positions are more susceptible to political right-wing orientations than young people in stable circumstances. It is important to note that, in most cases, racist or nationalist ideologies do not stand on their own but are combined with other ideologies: ideologies of success, adaptation, advancement and sexism. Moreover, the study by Leiprecht et al. showed that it was those considered by today’s standards as being upwardly mobile or at low risk with regard to employment instability who demonstrated an affinity to right-wing extremist dogma and ideology. In Hungary, another line of literature argued that the support for the MIÉP by successful young entrepreneurs and professionals was based on the hope of stabilizing their position in a closed ethnocentric market economy (Tamás 2001). Political scientist László Kéri, in an interview in 2001, related the rising popularity of MIÉP among Hungarian university students to their uncertainty as to whether they would find a suitable job after finishing their studies.4 While socio-economic 4

Interview in Népszabadság, 2001-10-12.

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variables play an important role in this context, they do not refer to any lack of resources needed to face changes. In terms of explanation, it would be closer to the ‘fear of déclassement’ than the ‘losers theory’. It can be understood that the projected fears of social and economic displacement are not only relevant for the less advantaged within and by processes of modernity but also to those with most to lose. The culturally and socially deprived As we have already stated, numerous approaches tend to focus on individuals and their reactions to changes (economic, cultural, identity) but very few explanations try to utilize the concept of milieu or social space to understand the phenomenon. This would present an alternative sociological approach, because it has been seen that socio-economic status does not seem to be a clear predictor for voting for rightwing populist and extremist parties or sustaining their ideas, as Kriesi underlines in analysing the profiles of voters in the Swiss case in 1998 (Kriesi et al. 1998). Also, according to Vester, a proclivity for authoritarianism can be found at all levels of society (Vester 2001b, 299). He concludes that people of all social strata approach and deal with the phenomenon of modernization and globalization in various ways. These strategies primarily depend on mentality. Vester utilizes the theory and methodology of ‘social space’ along with empirical data to further substantiate his hypothesis. Nonetheless, with further investigation and the usage of his categorization of four major social groups (cf. Vester 2001b, 310f) as a basis for comparison, he ultimately concludes that the socially deprived (nearly 27 per cent) are highly receptive to right-wing populism and extremism (Vester 2001b, 329). These results are close to the study that Hermann and Leuthold (1999, 2001) conducted in Switzerland, which took the concept of ‘milieu’ as a mediator between social position and political expressions linking economic and cultural capital. Hermann and Leuthold’s results show that education and income tend to determine the conservative (traditional) versus libertarian (modernist) dimensions. The lower the education and income, the more the tendency is to vote in a traditional way. Feelings of powerlessness with regard to one’s own destiny and the world in general tend to reinforce the fear of change and lead to personal withdrawal and, in consequence, to a fear of the ‘other’ and of the exterior (conservatism). The concept of ‘power’ in Anthony Giddens’ sense (as a possibility to act differently) may explain the relation between the possession of economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu) and an orientation towards more liberal and modernist attitudes. The self-consciousness that one can have an impact on one’s destiny increases the confidence in institutions and in a social change that can be influenced in a positive direction. Other studies show that people with conservative views tend to be less open to new groups (De Witte and Billiet 1990). The theory of symbolic interests argues that right-wing populist and extremist parties attract less or not yet societally integrated people. Another explanation advanced by Billiet and De Witte observing the situation in Flanders is that for less societally integrated people, there are fewer barriers to negative attitudes and radical votes (Billiet and De Witte 1995).

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The threatened economic interest theory One assumption of the threatened interests theories is that people who feel their material resources are threatened tend to develop a preference for the ingroup (most often this means the national group), whose access to resources is to be extended and strengthened (Lipset 1960; Falter 1991). While these theories insist on the material and economic side of the question, other explanations keep the idea of a competition for the access to resources but are in favour of state responsibility and intervention in the provision of collective goods and the redistribution of resources. Indeed, the profound structural and economic transformations have increased social inequalities and affected the working classes, who are living through a profound crisis, which for some authors, such as Immerfall (1998, 251), is ‘largely psychological’. In a period characterized by social conflict, loss of traditional (identity) markers, and economic insecurity (real or perceived), group relationships tend to be constructed on the lines of access to social and economic goods. Anyone who does not belong to the national majority group (immigrants or ethnic minorities) is perceived as a supplementary threat. In this sense, foreigners become the ‘others’ because they endanger the imagined homogeneous community of nationals, but also because they embody all the insecurities of the future (Wimmer 2000). Xenophobia is seen as a response to perceived competition with immigrants over work and social benefits and is an appeal to a national unity in order to preserve the privileges for the nationals. Welfare chauvinism is another concept tackling this phenomenon. Some authors – taking the perspective of the rational choice paradigm – reject this thesis (Nannestad 1999). These theses need to be qualified in two respects. First, evidence supporting the economic threat theory does not necessarily explain the influence of socio-economic change on political reactions. Although the theory assumes that negative attitudes towards immigrants are the consequence of feelings of economic threat, this has never been tested as such. Rather, research only finds that blue-collar workers and the low-skilled are more receptive to these attitudes or shows that right-wing populist and extremist attitudes are closely linked to unemployment, i.e. economic issues. Second, findings suggest that cultural differences may also lead to the development of negative attitudes towards immigrants, translating into a vote for the extreme right. This implies that the theory of ‘threatened economic interests’ should be widened to incorporate diverse attitudes towards immigrants in a more differentiated way, based on economic, cultural or other factors. The focus on cultural and identity factors: An alternative explanation? Attitudes towards migrants It is common to underline the importance of immigration in the development of rightwing populism and extremism. Many authors demonstrate this by showing that the voters for right-wing populist parties are more xenophobic than average (Andersen 1999, 203-210; Gaasholt and Togeby 1995, 140). In doing this, they try to describe the profile of the different categories and go back to voters’ cultural but also socio-

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economic characteristics. Indeed, it has often been observed that low ethnic tolerance correlates with age and low educational levels (Mikkelsen 2001, 144) and that it is the less educated, blue-collar workers and elderly people in particular who are relatively likely to vote for right-wing populist parties (Andersen 2000, 8f). Yet it is difficult to tell precisely how these particular voters have been affected and threatened by socio-economic change and how this led them to support right-wing populism and extremism. Gaasholt and Togeby (1995) identify the level of education as the true determinant of ethnic tolerance, related to psychological (cognitive) resources that depend on education. These statistical correlations again tend to provide a better idea of specific social categories concerned by these questions, but are not satisfying in their interpretations of the development of right-wing populism and extremism. There are many explanations for the low tolerance towards immigrants, e.g. objective clashes or subjective dissatisfaction that influences ethnic tolerance, or even social marginalization and cognitive resources can be connected to these antiimmigration attitudes. The link between anti-immigration attitudes or xenophobia and voting for right-wing populist and extremist parties is controversial. Some explanations focus on immigration as a factor triggering extremism, in particular in France, referring to voters who are forced to live in close proximity with communities that have different sets of values and ways of life. For some authors, such as Sayad, this thesis seems to be confirmed by correlations between the regional distribution of Front National votes and areas with a high density migrant population (Sayad 1999). Kitschelt shows that there is little correlation between voting for right-wing populist or extremist parties, xenophobia, and migration (Kitschelt 1995, 60ff). Especially when xenophobia is high, the anti-immigration issue is not a reliable basis: right-wing populist and extremist parties have been more successful in countries with a small foreign-born population (Karapin 1998, 224). Yet questions related to immigration are cited among others as causes for the advancement of right-wing populism and extremism. Most of the time, the theories related to immigration are close to those of fear or frustration. The (real or perceived) threats with regard to immigration are – according to the literature – as follows: • • • •

threat to personal safety; threat to the culture; threat to the welfare state; threat to the job security.

In general, we could claim that migrants are the embodiment of a rapidly changing world and nation-state impotence. A kind of ‘moral panic’ propagates the fear of seeing society descending into chaos because of an uncontrollable flow of immigrants (Pnina Werbner quoted by Wimmer 2000). Betz (2004), for instance, points at reactions related to the defence of one’s identity and culture; the central idea is that ethno-pluralism tends to reinforce (through counter-reactions) xenophobia, reactive identities, national identities.

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Identity reactions and the radicalization of cultural exclusion Some other researchers have pointed out an identity reaction to globalization (Taguieff 1986). If socio-economic changes have affected the relationship between individuals and society, some authors – like Betz – tend to underline the importance of the socio-cultural sphere (Betz 2004). The radicalization of the principle of cultural exclusion is presented as a strong motor for populist attitudes, votes and ideas. In a world that is becoming increasingly multicultural, right-wing populism and extremism rejects the pluralist model, putting forward an ethno-cultural, racist and nationalist doctrine. At the individual level, the psychological model seems the same; parties, if we follow Betz (2004), offer interesting propositions in terms of ‘fixed’ identities to individuals who live in the context of the erosion of collective identities and are faced with a flux of contextualized identities. ‘Identity theories’ see right-wing populist and extremist propositions, such as nationalism and exclusive discourses, as a substitute identity for the loss of traditional and collective identities engendered by modernization. The loss of traditional links, the erosion of collective identities and all the processes related to what is called fragmentation or individualization are combined with an increasing insecurity, fear and isolation and impact on identities. They can be of the type of a need to identify with a strong community, a search for ‘imaginary communities’ (Andersen), a protection of ‘natural’ communities or be considered as such defensive attitudes as reactive nationalism (see among others Dörre 1997; Altermatt and Kriesi 1995). Ignazi insists on the fragmentation of today’s society as an element in understanding post-industrial radicalism, which may lead to the subjective need to defend ‘natural’ communities, qualifying these general reactions as a ‘silent counterrevolution’ (Ignazi 1992, 2000). Secularization and the emphasis on personal fulfilment is balanced by the search for clear hierarchies and clear, well-defined social, national and racial identities. The focus here is on the kind of substitute people are looking for when they are faced with change. We have seen that the individualization and the loss of social ties take place in the cultural, social or the economic sphere. So if the reaction of looking for stronger identities is situated at a cultural level, the causes may also be connected to socio-economic variables. For example, the erosion of the structure of work (Perrineau 1997) and the dissolution of traditional working-class culture (Svensson and Togeby 1991) may contribute to a form of identity crisis, which in turn might contribute to increasing patriotism and a growing identification with the national community, which has apparently taken place since 1980 (Gundelach 2001). Conclusions The aim of this chapter was to discuss the existing literature on the link between socio-economic variables and right-wing populism and extremism. The difficulty in presenting clear and linear arguments is due to the complexity of the phenomenon and the diversity of the political realities depending on the national context or specific parties involved. Contradictory explanations may also be related to the

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variety of the scientific approaches (paradigms, explanations), the level of reality covered by the explanations (structural, collective, individual) and the diversity of the methodological tools used in empirical research. Without forgetting, of course, the multiplicity and polysemy of the terms used to define the phenomenon and the different ways in which criteria are adopted for classification from a theoretical as well as a concrete standpoint (which party in which category). Moreover, the difficulty of connecting socio-economic variables and political developments is related to the lack of precision in defining socio-economic variables, their status in the theorization and their role in the processes leading to the emergence and the success of right-wing populism and extremism. We can nevertheless underline a few points from our analyses of the European literature review. A large part of the research concentrates on the socio-economic characteristics of voters. The general picture is that unemployed, blue-collar workers and people with low levels of education are more likely to vote for right-wing populist or extremist parties (Lubbers 2001). Yet socio-economic characteristics can only partly be understood as indicators of the effects of socio-economic change. There may be blue-collar workers, for example, who benefit from such changes and highly educated people who suffer adverse consequences. The important role played by a changing socio-economic context in the rise of right-wing populist and extremist movements and parties is sustained in most of the literature. As we have seen, only a small minority of authors or studies explicitly reject this factor. It is interesting to note that authors not only point to growing insecurity but also to inequality and deepened divisions within European societies. The theories related to the crisis of modernity underline the multiple changes that have affected modern societies and present them as causes for the development of right-wing populism and extremism. With the ‘modernization losers’ concept, some authors try to show that individuals not sufficiently armed to face changes are at risk of being attracted by right-wing populism and extremism. There is the danger of designating – a priori – who the ‘losers’ (the economically disadvantaged people) are and then jumping to conclusions. Indeed, the review of the literature provided some indication that it is not, as is often assumed, only the so-called losers of modernization who are likely to be attracted towards rightwing populism and extremism. While social and economic disadvantages and marginalization can in general be seen as a breeding ground, the rise of right-wing populism and extremism does not seem to be a matter of economic or material disadvantage alone. The literature reviewed points to a wide variety of elements of socio-economic change that might be worth taking into consideration. Some authors focus on long-term changes in basic principles of societal integration and argue that individualization may lead to anomy and social pathologies. More often, and more pertinent to our research, specific economic changes and their consequences for the employment system are addressed. This refers in particular to economic globalization including the transition of state-socialist economies to capitalism, the tendency that workers are once again exposed to market risks to a larger extent – which leads to increasing insecurity and precariousness – or the growing complexity of society due to supranational integration and the spread of new information

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technology. However, it is clear that socio-economic changes are one among several reasons for the strengthening of right-wing populism and extremism. We have seen that the incapacity of the established parties to answer the new questions related to these changes may also have pushed some towards right-wing populism and extremism. When looking at theories considering cultural dimensions and related identity processes as central, we found that nationalistic, exclusive positions are also reactions to the loss of social ties, and a ‘multi-culturalization’ of modern societies. We showed that arguments are not fundamentally different to the ones presented in theories invoking socio-economic variables. To conclude, we would like to insist on the complexity of the question of the potential link between socio-economic change and right-wing populism and extremism. In fact, there are no direct cause-and-effect processes through which certain socio-economic changes that trigger insecurity and fear automatically result in particular political reactions. Depending on the social milieu, their position within social space and their mental disposition, individuals process similar experiences and interpret similar events in entirely different ways. Nevertheless, we found a recurrence in the argumentations that does not depend on the national context, on the parties or on the social categories and which can be applied for all the different intervening causes. Indeed, the driving force of the support of right-wing populism and extremism always seems to be an individual reaction to a specific context; almost all approaches try to explain right-wing populism and extremism by describing general developments (social, economic and political), but concentrate the explanations, interpretations and argumentations at the individual and psycho-social levels. We encountered numerous concepts at the centre of the argumentation that are not scientific (from the perspective of sociology, socio-psychology or political science), with no precise definitions and not operationalized for empirical research. These notions include, for example, ‘resentment’, ‘frustration’, ‘losers’, ‘powerlessness’, etc. This lack of an alternative understanding of the phenomenon leaves a great deal of room for future research in the domain. We think that the following chapters will begin to fill it.

Chapter 2

Potentials of Political Subjectivity and the Various Approaches to the Extreme Right: Findings of the Qualitative Research1 Jörg Flecker, Gudrun Hentges and Gabrielle Balazs

Introduction In the academic debate on the success of right-wing populism and extremism in Europe there is widespread agreement on the importance of socio-economic change and processes of deprivation. At the same time, however, the limitations of explanations based on socio-structural characteristics of voters become obvious. Neither can the rise of the extreme right simply be attributed to a particular social category particularly affected by socio-economic change, such as the blue-collar workers (Collovald 2002), nor do people in favourable social positions necessarily display lower levels of support for right-wing populism and extremism (Betz 1997). Detailed research into how people are actually affected by socio-economic change and whether this makes them susceptible to right-wing populist and extremist ideologies has so far, however, by and large been missing. It was the objective of the qualitative research within the SIREN project to look at changes in working life from the vantage point of those affected and to understand the relative advantages and disadvantages involved. This was intended to take into account the world view of our interlocutors, their images of society and of their position within society, their aspirations and hopes related to work, employment and standard of living and related to concomitant social status and social integration. Research into the subjective perceptions of socio-economic change also aimed at analysing how experiences in working life interfere with people’s constructions of identity. This was intended to result, first, in a description of the actual meaning of current changes in work and employment for those concerned and, second, to provide a representation of its consequences for people’s ‘political subjectivity’,

1 This chapter was presented at the 15th Conference of Europeanists, Chicago, March 30 – April 2, 2006. We would like to thank Prof. Dr. Andrei Markovits (The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) – discussant of the panel – for his helpful comments, stimulating suggestions and motivation.

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which in turn should make it possible to understand people’s political reactions and hence the appeal of right-wing populism and extremism. In empirically investigating experiences in working life and their consequences for political orientation we were sceptical about the hypothesis of the ‘losers’ being drawn towards right-wing populism and extremism (e.g. Falter and Klein 1994) and therefore also wanted to deal with those benefiting from current socio-economic change. The foundation for this scepticism was twofold: first, we assumed that subjective perceptions and interpretations are decisive for understanding individual reactions, because these depend on whether people feel threatened or inspired by socio-economic change; this means that objective socio-economic positions do not necessarily correlate with subjective perceptions of these positions, so that objective ‘winners’ might perceive themselves as being threatened by decline or having to fight hard to stay on the ‘winning’ track. Second, we were interested in empirically following the theoretical hypothesis that the increasingly influential regime of neoliberalism inspires a new form of right-wing extremism with ‘competitive nationalism’, an ‘ideology of success’ (Schui et al. 1997; Butterwegge et al. 1998; Leiprecht et al. 1992; Held et al. 1992) and ultimately social Darwinism as core ideological elements. Should this hypothesis prove valid, not only might people in precarious or declining socio-economic positions be susceptible to right-wing extremist ideologies but also precisely those in positions of advancement. In this chapter we will present the main findings of the qualitative research within the SIREN project on the basis of the individual country reports and the European synthesis report (Hentges et al. 2003). The first part of the chapter will explain the methodology in some detail, because both the complexity of the research questions and the sensitivity of the topic make it particularly necessary to lay open the research design and procedures. In the second part we will describe how experiences in working life contribute to potentials of political subjectivity that can be targeted by the extreme right. While in this part we will present only the strongest interrelations between perceptions of socio-economic change and political orientations, in the third part of the chapter we will highlight the wide variety of modes of attractions or political conversions that were found in the qualitative research. The aim is to show that there is by no means just one major reason for the success of right-wing populism and extremism. Rather, people from various social categories, and people who have been affected quite differently by socio-economic change, may use extreme-right ideology in their interpretation both of society and of their own living situations or may sympathize with right-wing populist or extremist parties and politicians. Understanding attractions: The qualitative research methodology Between them, the eight teams conducted, on the basis of common interview guidelines, a total of 313 qualitative interviews and analysed 279 of these. The samples in all countries encompassed different socio-economic situations which we termed ‘advancement’, ‘threat of decline’ and ‘precariousness’ and different political orientations, i.e. both people ‘receptive’ to and ‘non-receptive’ to right-wing populism and extremism (for details see below). The interpretation and analysis was

Potentials of Political Subjectivity

Table 2.1

Country Austria Belgium Denmark France Germany Hungary Italy Switzerland

37

Number of interviews carried out in each country/total number of interviews Total number of interviewees 32 42 36 40 52 42 37 32 313

Selected interviewees 32 42 31 32 52 32 26 32 279

Men 20 36 18 20 42 21 13 23 193

Women 12 6 13 12 10 11 13 9 86

conducted on the basis of common procedures and resulted in interview reports and country reports. As a methodological instrument we chose the qualitative problem-centred guided interview. Moreover, we referred to principles of interviewing that Pierre Bourdieu described in his chapter on ‘Understanding’ in La Misère du monde (1992). The internationally standardized guidelines included the following subject areas: employment history, subjective perceptions, affectedness by and interpretation of socio-economic change, and political attitudes and orientation. This instrument was used indicatively and not coercively: each research team translated it into the national context and proceeded according to its usual research methods. Moreover, the structure and the process of each interview was determined by the situation of the interviewee rather than by the specifications of the interview guidelines. The interviews were tape-recorded. An average interview lasted an hour and a half; a few lasted beyond two-and-a-half hours. The transcriptions of the interviews in a generally reader-friendly manner allowed us a detailed account of the content. While all interviews were at least briefly summarized, altogether 96 detailed and in-depth interview analyses with extensive quotations were translated and provided by the eight research teams. In addition, each country team summarized the interpretations of all interviews and described the findings in a country report. Selection principles of the interviewees and description of the sample Three principles prevailed in the construction of the sample and in the selection of interviewees: Their affectedness by socio-economic change, their receptiveness to right-wing populism and extremism and the economic sector they are employed in. Regarding the affectedness by socio-economic change three categories were developed: •

Advancement People working as self-employed or employees who experienced an improvement of their occupational situation, of their income and their current or future chances on the labour market. What counts here is

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38

•

•

not high income or security per se but the professional advancement made possible by socio-economic change in the chosen sectors. (Threat of) decline People who were (still) in (long-term) employment but who were affected by worsening conditions (e.g. wages, working conditions, type of work, flexibility/mobility demands, etc.) and/or increasing insecurity, such as company restructuring. (Increasing) precariousness People working freelance (e.g. on a contractfor-work basis or as freelance employees) and who were unable to earn a secure long-term income on this basis; people in short-term employment with a high level of insecurity, people in early retirement and unemployment.

The construction of these three categories was based on objective situations or positions in the world of work (e.g. employment conditions, wages or known changes in the conditions in a previously nationalized company) and not on the subjective assessments of the interviewees regarding decline, precariousness or advancement. Regarding the affinity to right-wing extremism we already mentioned above that right-wing populism and extremism comprise a wide variety of ideologies, movements and parties with marked differences according to national political traditions. However, following the argument that there is a common ideological core and that the difference between right-wing populism and right-wing extremism is one of degree rather than kind, we used a common definition of core ideological elements for the analysis of people’s ‘receptiveness’ to the extreme right. The following dimensions, ‘measured’ with a categorization ‘instrument’ adapted for this particular purpose, were used to define the ‘high receptiveness’ category: • • • •

Outgroup rejection (e.g. xenophobia or rejection of minorities); Ingroup favouritism (e.g. nationalism); Right-wing authoritarianism (e.g. authoritarian attitudes); Anti-system feelings (e.g. being disillusioned with politics plus rejection of democratic structures).2

This tool allowed us on the one hand to address the particularities of each country and on the other hand to compare their common features. The aim of the overall sample was a well-balanced distribution of the interviews over the categories of ‘low’ and ‘high receptiveness to right-wing populism’. The characteristic of ‘receptiveness’ was the most difficult to establish in the selection of interviewees, as it could only be verified in the course of the interview analysis. This meant that in seeking interview partners, the research teams concentrated on those for whom a high receptivity to right-wing populism could be presupposed (on the basis of the opinions of

2 Two other projects conducted in Germany within the last years labeled this dimension as ‘“gut reaction” triggering disaffection and disdain for the political process and the socioeconomic and political system as a whole’ (Fichter 2006, 12) or as ‘rebellious variant (…) mostly be found in the “zone of disaffiliation” and the “zone of precariousness”’ (Dörre et al. 2006, 23).

Potentials of Political Subjectivity

Table 2.2

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Number of interviewees according to political orientation

Country/No. of interviews Austria/32 Belgium/42 Denmark/31 France/32 Germany/52 Hungary/32 Italy/26 Switzerland/32 Total

Receptive 17 16 15 11 19 18 11 19 120

In-between

9 6

19

Non-receptive 15 26 16 12 33 8 15 13 140

intermediaries). If this was not confirmed in the course of the interview or in the assessment, then the person fell into the group of low or non-receptiveness. Finally, the political orientation of interviewees turned out to be distributed as in Table 2.2. Economic sectors The first economic sectors chosen by all European partners were public services that had been liberalized and privatized. This (previous) public ownership constituted the condition of a comparison between the different national qualitative surveys, in spite of the weight of national specificities. We also selected sectors that had undergone major changes in terms of industrial dynamic (decline or advancement). The choice of telecommunications facilitated the study of liberalization policies: great waves of mergers involving public companies, restructuring, lay-offs and widespread competition. Finally, the sectors chosen for this study have, as a rule, been subject to rapid change during the last ten to fifteen years. The issue of this rapidity was of crucial importance. It is in fact the one condition allowing the observation of the assumed link between socio-economic change and the attractiveness of ideas of parties of the extreme right. While it is difficult to perceive long-term tendencies of change, it is indeed possible to describe the manner of individuals’ reaction to increasingly rapid changes of their professional life. How did we make contact with the interviewees? According to the principles of research stated above, we contacted the interview partners mainly through privileged informants, who at the same time enabled us to understand the impact of change on each working milieu and led us directly to people most affected by the changes. They improved our method of selecting from the working milieus that interested us and thus enabled us to base this study not on a mere collection of unrelated interviews but on milieus in which the people encountered share certain common conditions. The informants were trade-union officials, shop stewards and works-council representatives of various political tradeunion fractions. In addition to trade-union sources, research teams in Italy, Belgium and France asked company human-resource managers to contact interviewees. Some

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participants were contacted through the broader circle of acquaintances (e.g. friends or job colleagues of acquaintances previously unknown to the researchers), who were asked whether they knew people working in various socio-economic conditions who would be willing to give us an interview. This was especially helpful for the access to interview partners working as freelancers. After first contacts had been established, we proceeded to recruit participants through the snowball technique: interviewees were asked to introduce us to a person in similar working conditions, without mentioning their political orientation. Polling institutes specializing in voter surveys were also used in some countries to gain access to people with extreme-right sympathies. Other recruitment methods also included: candidates for local elections (Germany), newspaper advertisements (Germany), private internet websites with both work-related and right-wing populist content (Germany), work foundations and training schemes in the search for former course participants (Austria), rural municipalities (Austria). The main difficulty encountered is encapsulated in our hypothesis: If there were a link between socio-economic change and right-wing populism and extremism, how could population groups that have been hardest hit by socio-economic change be interviewed? How can an academic researcher establish a relationship of trust with the most anomic and/or dominated persons? All teams encountered difficulties in making contact with interviewees receptive to right-wing extremism. Attraction to right-wing populism and extremism as a selection criterion tends to ward off the most self-censored individuals or to favour the most militant. It was also difficult to contact lower-level employees, temporary workers, precarious employees and the unemployed. Temporary workers are hard to contact and very hard to motivate for an interview outside working hours. These problems explain the unbalanced aspect of some countries’ samples, especially with regard to gender, age, and unemployment variables. Being aware of these biases and of their inevitability, we tried to control their effects rather than claiming they do not exist. We avoided the positivist illusion of a representative sample and paid special attention to potential biases related to the mediation and arrangement process of the interviews. The problems and lessons of the selection of interviewees that the various teams might have encountered were discussed in depth. Getting into contact and building a relationship with the interviewees was a specific task in its own right. Contact with interviewees was aided by prior knowledge of the areas. Regular visits allowed us to build up a relationship of confidence with the providers of information, the purpose of which proved to be positive in neutralizing the suspicions that are almost systematically aroused by the curious questioning of a ‘stranger’. Socio-economic change and political subjectivity: The formation of the ‘demand’ for right-wing populism and extremism In all the countries surveyed, the interpretation of the interviews revealed interesting interrelations between people’s experiences at work or on the labour market and their views on politics. To some extent it was even possible to account for recent changes in political orientation and party preferences with reference to such experiences. In the

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following we would like to summarize the main impact that changes in working life have had on receptiveness to right-wing populist or extremist ideologies, messages or politicians. Our main concern in analysing political reactions to experiences of socioeconomic change was not opinions, voting behaviour or party affiliation. We were interested in political orientations in a much wider sense: these include images of society and normative or moral ideas of social order, concepts of justice and feelings of injustice relating to social life, aspirations for happiness, the need for recognition and cultural identity, etc., which constitute ‘potentials of political subjectivity’ (Dubiel 1994). Material and symbolic consequences of socio-economic change may result in a release of potentials of political subjectivity if, in a ‘populist moment’ in history, ‘collective experiences of injury, fear of losing one’s status and thwarted hopes for happiness of some groups of the population are dropped, as it were, from established discourse and become “floating potentials”, at odds with the traditional spectrum of political orientation’ (Dubiel 1994, 203f). Consequently, the interpretation of subjective perceptions of changes in working life should help us to understand why particular ideological elements, political messages or styles of politics of right-wing populism and extremism may become attractive to particular groups of people. The empirical research started from the hypotheses that people interpret increasing insecurity and other adverse changes in working life in different ways and that political reactions vary depending on social milieu, mentality, gender, biography, age, social status, geographical and cultural context, etc. We therefore neither assumed that there was a mechanistic relation between socio-economic change and political views, nor did we presuppose that socio-economic change was the main reason for the rise of right-wing populism and extremism. There was also agreement that there are several theoretical reasons for why changes in working life may increase the receptivity to the extreme right. In the following we describe the main reasons: feelings of injustice, insecurity and fear of ‘déclassement’, and the violation of values leading to anomic conditions. Injured sense of justice3 A number of interviews in all the countries under investigation showed clear connections between the conditions and changes in the world of work and the receptiveness to right-wing populism and extremism. One such connection can be located in experiences that have injured people’s sense of justice and in their experience or fear that, in spite of hard work and sacrifices, they are not able to maintain or attain the standard of living and social status they have previously enjoyed or which they aspire to. These interlocutors see themselves as not being rewarded for their subordination – in some cases even being punished. The feelings of disappointment and anger are directed against those who, in their eyes, have a ‘good life’ without subjecting themselves to the impositions and risks of an increasingly pitiless world of work. These are the politicians on high and secure incomes, the refugees who 3

The names of interviewees mentioned in the following have been changed.

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are ‘looked after by the state’ and the long-term unemployed, who allegedly do not want to work at all. A related aspect is growing competition or unfair competition on the labour market or in a particular field of economic activity. Understandably, illegal employment of (clandestine) immigrants in tourism, for example, is a bone of contention for unemployed waiters. But in the construction industry, too, illegal employment and wage dumping have given rise to conflicts between local workers and immigrants from central and eastern Europe. In Germany, competition between eastern and western Germans following German reunification is also mentioned, as is competition from ethnic German immigrants from other countries. The experiences people have suffered in the world of work are varied. They range from the privatization of companies and early retirement to the loss of jobs through plant closure, relocation or the threat to employment due to a crisis in the industry. This may lead to a frustration of expectations and hopes due to the loss of income and status. But it may also imply that people are slowly realizing the drop in rewards for hard work and subordination – in terms of living standards and societal integration – and the insecurity of such rewards as do exist. Among the group of people in socio-economic situations that we classified as being under ‘threat of decline’ or ‘precarious’, there is a predominating impression of being humiliated and betrayed: ‘I feel betrayed, you know. Betrayed and punished’ (Mr Oster, post office employee in early retirement, Germany); ‘I worked properly and I feel I’ve been punished for it’ (Ms Frank, semi-skilled worker, electronics industry, currently unemployed, Austria); ‘We’re too decent, too bloody stupid, too honest’ (Mr Bouler, retired railwayman, France). The longing for respect and recognition turned out to be an important topic and common denominator in most of the interviews. The experience of not being honoured for having put up with the hardships of work ‘without moaning’ leads to profound frustrations. Often this feeling is accompanied by the perception that asylum seekers and the ‘work-shy’ are systematically favoured. These other groups seem to attract aggression for obviously escaping the exacting demands of work – and they ‘still live well’. The emotions involved often cannot be understood without reference to the pains of work, the physical and psychological strains that people have to accept, while living in a rather precarious situation. The immediate working conditions therefore seem to be crucial to understanding individual patterns of interpretation: First, in a situation of a breach of an implicit contract or, in other terms, the termination of reciprocity, feelings of injustice can be expected to be the stronger the higher one estimates one’s contribution or costs, e.g. in terms of sacrifices or physical and psychological damage. Second, the pains of work need to be repressed and may thereby lead to aggression against others, mainly those who are perceived as being able to avoid such pains illegitimately. In some cases the problem is not the worsening of working conditions as such but rather the unchanged hardships of industrial work under conditions of increased employment insecurity and rising costs of living. In the world of white-collar workers, the threat of decline is sometimes less visible. As in the case of Mr Imhof, a Swiss IT specialist in the chemical industry, it may be confined to the perception that a new management does not recognize professional experience, commitment and achievement. The ensuing damage to the concept of social justice, the perception of foreign managers and consultants as an

Potentials of Political Subjectivity

43

intrusion and a threat makes it difficult to adapt. This is hard for a highly conformist person, and may lead to even stronger demands for others to adapt and assimilate, which are emotionally articulated when discussing the issue of immigration. It was not only those who have experienced adverse consequences of changes in working life who showed an aversion to weaker groups in society. Such a reaction can also be found among those who had been able to improve their position but still suffered an increased workload, unlimited working hours or great flexibility demands. Mr Müller, for example, a relatively well-paid telecom-worker with civilservant status in Germany, who suffers from stress at work, projects his aversion onto all those who do not sacrifice and torture themselves in a similar way for the benefit of the company and the national economy. His call for forced labour for the unemployed – ‘They should get a shovel in their hand and have to shovel a cubic meter every day’ – and his plea for the brutal destruction of municipal structures he suspects of being corrupt indicate that although his political affiliation is centreleft he is nevertheless susceptible to right-wing extremist strategies as a solution to problems in society. Other examples show that perceived insecurity of the viability of the company may strengthen such authoritarian views and lead some to despise colleagues who do not perform well enough. This exclusionist pattern of meaning can easily be transferred to the level of the nation state, whose economic viability, according to the ideology of ‘competitive nationalism’, is under threat. In Hungary the economic transition undermined living standards and increased insecurity for many. Even those who successfully maintained or improved their material situation usually had to achieve this with incredible effort. This includes, for example, generating additional income by taking a second or third job or, as in the case of Mr Iró, by setting up and running an enterprise in addition to fulltime employment. Interestingly, the point of reference for comparison is often not the parents but the grandparents and the economic situation between the two world wars. Interviews in Hungary suggest that the (threat of) decline in living standards and precariousness can reinforce or even mobilize the prejudices that might have been acquired during family socialization. This may in fact lead to voting for an extreme right party. There is no denying that anti-Communism has a great influence, as it is transformed into a scepticism against the political elite and may thereby lead to an affinity to the extreme right. Often, the experiences related to working conditions also nurture the feeling that ‘those up there’ who take the decisions do not know anything about the actual conditions of work. There are people sitting at the top, and they don’t have a clue about what’s going on in the factories and the community. They’re just busy making as much money as possible. (Ms Jørgensen, unskilled worker in the printing industry, Denmark)

Contrasting the ‘people’ to the elite was also frequent in one group of Swiss interviews (see Plomb et al. 2002). Identification with the middle classes, the milieu where ‘people are gaining their livelihood correctly without being able to afford [anything] whatsoever’ (Mr Bollinger, department manager, in early retirement, Switzerland), is the common basis of these individual stories. ‘We’ is used frequently when

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referring to the domination from above (‘they think we are idiots’), in particular from ‘politics’ and from ‘the ones who take the decisions’. The ‘people’ accordingly constitute a moral category: the ones who are working hard to get out and who are subject to the ‘irresponsibility’ of the economic and political elite. This expression is also used when talking about a sentiment thought to be shared by everyone, namely feeling one’s household budget being minimized by the charges, the pressure or the incomprehension of governmental bureaucracy (taxes, health insurance, indirect taxation, family allowance, etc.). The ‘people’ (called ‘workers’ by some) are thus an industrious and silent majority suffering from pressure from ‘above’. This vision of the social world is evidently held by interview partners whose careers consist mainly of daily personal investments in maintaining their standard of living. Some of the women we interviewed clearly expressed their feelings of injustice in relation to the double disadvantage they suffer as (blue-collar) workers and as women: they add to the equation their experiences of discrimination, problems at work and in employment that stem from patriarchal family relations, and the virtual impossibility of reconciling paid labour with motherhood. Not being able to maintain economic independence from a life partner in spite of hard work and far-reaching sacrifices is what hurts some of them most. Others, after having given up their own career-related hopes and dreams, are more concerned about the fate of their children. What makes some of the reproduction-oriented women attracted to right-wing populist views is, on the one hand, a lack of childcare facilities, school quality or access to vocational training and, on the other, the recognition of their motherly self-image, which is denied to them by the centre-left middle class. From a sociological perspective we can conclude that socio-economic change forces people to reconsider and re-evaluate their position in the social world. They may find themselves in an ‘untenable position’ if, for example, their current status and income no longer reflects their qualifications or their cultural capital. It may lead to a situation in which material and symbolic rewards are no longer perceived as offsetting efforts and sacrifices. This is highly relative and may be caused by changes in work, such as increasing work load, lack of recognition or precarious employment. But it may also stem from a threat to living standards because of the increased cost of living. Both may impact on the way people make sense of their working life, on how satisfied they are in general or how they are able to come to terms with physically and psychologically damaging working conditions. This perceived balance or the ‘mode of attachment’ to work seems, in many cases, to be at the core of the relation between socio-economic change and political reactions. But these political reactions are not necessarily xenophobic, nationalist and authoritarian. First, we could also find democratic solidarist reactions. Second, the process in which feelings of frustration and injustice attach themselves to particular issues or symbols is strongly influenced by the media and by what is on offer in politics (Butterwegge and Hentges 2006). Insecurity, fear of ‘déclassement’ and feelings of powerlessness Insecurity emerges as one of the most important issues from the subjective accounts of the consequences of recent changes in working life. While in general this theme is highly relevant to most of the interviewees, the particular degrees and forms of

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insecurity addressed and the meaning attached to them differ widely. These range from precarious living conditions and perceptions of profound ambiguity of a world that is hard to understand on the one hand to calculable risks of one’s market position on the other. Unemployment, precarious employment and self employment with low income usually mean high levels of insecurity of material existence. Thinking about the future becomes difficult; usually, people in such situations give up making plans for their lives and tend to adapt passively to whatever happens to them. Social insecurity can thus imply a loss of control over one’s life. People in open-ended employment also report increased insecurity. The main sources of this are continuous restructuring of companies and workplaces, changing technology and skill demands or increased workloads and stress levels that question whether the job is feasible in the long run. In liberalized public services even employees with civil-servant status report insecurity stemming from being moved around to different departments. The way people cope with changes and increasing insecurity also varies and depends on a number of circumstances. One of these is whether people are used to having insecure employment or not. For obvious reasons, employees in the former public-service sectors who had sought security in their occupational choice often find it most difficult to cope. In contrast, for many self-employed insecurity has always been part of their working life, which some have learned to live with. Objective socioeconomic positions often do not correlate with the subjective perceptions of these positions and their stability: we can conclude that different frames of interpretation, social and cultural capital (and the extent of trust in its value and usability), expectations (building on past experience) as well as strategies of coping with change impact on assessing increasing insecurities as challenge or threat: some interviewees who were unsackable civil servants felt very threatened by restructuring measures (in the post and telecoms sector) whereas advancing interviewees in objectively insecure and risky positions felt or showed themselves fairly confident about their jobs and futures. Apart from the experience and mentalities of individuals, forms and meaning of occupational insecurity are influenced by the family background and the way the welfare society is organized. At a general level, there is already a clear connection between such insecurity and loss of control on the one hand and, on the other, right-wing populism and extremism that addresses the population as a passive victim of overpowering opponents, often without going into clearly defined interests (Dubiel 1994; Steinert 1999). There is also a connection with ‘competitive nationalism’ as people frequently express feelings of powerlessness relating not only to their own socio-economic situation but also to the state of the country or society as a whole: ‘We are finished economically and we are completely powerless. Germany has lost its standing in the world’ (Mr Marzahl, purchasing agent in the construction industry, Germany). Another general relationship can be seen in the fact that, in their stories, people who feel threatened by the immediate future seem to focus on the past. This quite often leads to nostalgic accounts contrasting the good old days with the unpleasant present and the frightening future. This corresponds to the backwardly oriented utopian political messages of right-wing populism glorifying traditional communities.

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At a more specific level, the interpretation of the interviews showed different reactions to feelings of insecurity and powerlessness. Some are clearly authoritarian, others exclusionist, and many reveal a perceived lack of political representation. These reactions can be illustrated with the following examples. The case of Mr Vanhaard, a Belgian railway worker, is a good example of an authoritarian reaction. When his wife lost her job through the bankruptcy of the national airline she worked for, he suddenly realized that working in a state enterprise does not guarantee employment security. The perceived insecurity leads him to criticize not only government policy, but also his colleagues. He is very harsh towards people who cannot cope with the changed pace of work. Analyses of this interview showed that Mr Vanhaard reacted to the threat in an authoritarian way, by condemning the ‘slackers’, people who, in his eyes, do not work hard enough and therefore jeopardize the viability of the company and, hence, his own job and pension scheme and therefore his own future. Turning to political authoritarianism, the interviews revealed that, in a state of general insecurity, attention and hope can be directed at all those who still appear as players, that is, as capable of action and having an effect. Mr Pammer, an Austrian social democrat, blue-collar worker and later a minor salaried employee, was always aware of the fundamental dependence on corporate decisions, but now has the growing feeling of being a plaything at the mercy of a volatile economic situation which he sees as an emerging threat to his survival. Following the partial relocation of the plant, management wanted him to transfer to Hungary, which he was able to resist on health grounds. Even though a job was found for him in the company, it is highly insecure. And it is clear to him that at the age of 45 he will not find another job in the region should he lose this one. For him, this experience calls into question not only the trade union but also the parties, as these are not in the position to protect him from the loss of his job. Alongside the acute threat to his own job, the creeping decline of the region, to which he is emotionally very strongly attached, injures Mr Pammer’s identity. He therefore sees the safeguarding and creation of jobs as the most important socio-economic aim. Players who in his opinion have the actual power to swim against the tide of relocation of production to central and eastern Europe and to create jobs in Austria, and politicians who appear as ‘strong men’ therefore appear to him fundamentally as shining figures. Feelings of insecurity and powerlessness in the face of developments in the company, the labour market or in the global economy are aggravated by the perception that political representatives no longer provide any protection. Workers’ representatives appear to be incapable of action and are seen to have ‘surrendered’ to the employers or ‘swim along’ with them. This relates to the general level of asymmetric power relations between the increasingly mobile capital on the one hand and trade unions with a continually declining membership on the other, which forces labour to make concessions. But it also relates to immediate support for individual workers in the case of trouble. At this level the picture is mixed: while some respondents made a clear difference between workers’ representatives in the company and on the shop floor on the one hand, and politicians on the other, others

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also report a lack of support from their union when they were in dispute with the employer. Ms Frederiksen illustrates such a case. She was made redundant after years of hard work because she suffered from a serious allergy, which made it impossible for her to do her cleaning job. She was helped by a dermatologist and after many years of toing and froing she was finally awarded industrial compensation. About her trade union she says: I don’t think the union can take credit for that, because they didn’t lift a finger to help me – they did nothing to help me find another job. I was not offered other work. That was wrong, I feel, because they could easily have got up and said: She has slaved for so-andso many years, so we feel she deserves an easier job. (Ms Frederiksen, former cleaner, Denmark)

Although in the event she did not do so, she had considered voting for Pia Kjærsgård, the leader of the Danish People’s Party. Here again, the public acknowledgement of one’s problems and the political interest in the workers’ world appears to be one of the populists’ strong points. In this way the interviews revealed a crisis of representation which seems to exist in industrial relations but which is strongest in the field of party politics. Our analysis of the interrelation between insecurity, powerlessness and political orientations revealed yet another, seemingly contradictory connection, which can be termed ‘conformist rebellion’ (Hentges and Meyer 2002, 55). Racism is – at least for some of our interviewees – a strategy to articulate their protest against social injustice in an officially accepted and authorized way. Even if they were exposed to leftist class struggle or social equality slogans (which, as everybody knows, they rarely are), it appears to be quite improbable that these would be accepted without difficulty. After all, the danger of further marginalization and isolation would be far greater than if they were to advocate semi-official propaganda. In calling for an extremely authoritarian reintegration of the Volksgemeinschaft, some extreme right-wing German respondents idealize mechanisms that have turned out to be very effective in subordinating their own economic and emotional needs to the will of powerful agencies and institutions. What can be seen as conformist in terms of class relations appears in the perception of most interviewees as a rebellion against pressures for political correctness. As far as problems stemming from immigration are concerned, many voiced the feeling that they are ‘not allowed to say anything’. It is understandable that the consequent uneasiness makes xenophobic utterances by right-wing populists appear so ‘refreshing’. It is therefore a rebellion in the double sense of protesting against injustice and of violating political correctness, and it is conformist as it is in line with the partly concealed views of the economically and politically powerful. Overall, the interviews indicated high levels of perceived job insecurity, which was sometimes expressed openly, sometimes hidden behind wishful thinking of job stability and only given away indirectly, in throw-away remarks, such as ‘in two years’ time – if I am still here’. Job security is perceived as being threatened mainly by plant closures or relocations, by fierce competition between companies,

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which may result in bankruptcy, and by company restructuring and rationalization. But it is also related to high and increasing workloads and demands for flexibility and mobility, which make workers doubtful whether they will be able to cope or to reconcile work and family obligations in the long run. Our interpretations showed that people who turned out to be receptive to extreme right ideologies or messages tended to attribute the causes of negative affects individually and to express the conviction that in coping one can only count on oneself. Psychologically, such strong individualistic and meritocratic beliefs can be explained with reference to dissonance-reduction processes: if the salience of their category of identification is low, even people in poor socio-economic conditions may justify and support the system that is at the origin of their disadvantaged position (Jost et al. 2003). Furthermore, this result is consistent with research showing that internal attributions (for example of poverty) are typical of conservative people (Heaven 1994; Zucker and Weiner 1993). Receptiveness to right-wing populist or extremist views was not only found in individualistic psychological coping strategies – which, on the one hand, enhance work ethics and achievement orientation and, on the other, increase the fear of failure and the perceived risk. It was also present in individuals whose social strategies, in contrast, focus on membership and stress the reliance on the individual’s reference group. Defensive psychological reactions, including nationalism and antiimmigrant feelings, are likely in the case of individual strategies, but also with social psychological strategies if the reference group is assumed to have been dissolved (Martinelli et al. 2002, 46). Similar to problems in the world of work, which are barely recognized in public, insecurity is also not taken up by public discourse in a way that represents the concerns of ordinary people. A good example of this is the enlargement of the European Union, which was presented in a rather positive way by mainstream politics in many member states. Having experienced plant relocation to Hungary and other central and eastern European countries and new competition from immigrants on the labour market after 1989, interviewees in Austria expressed concern over the consequences of full membership by these countries. While Mr Daxhofer, who enjoys a secure position in the IT industry, talks about the ‘queasy feeling’ he has on the subject, an unemployed female worker in a declining old industrial region speaks of ‘panicstricken fear’. As the immediate concerns and legitimate interests of workers in this context are not addressed by other parties it is easy to understand how right-wing populists may take advantage of such potentials of political subjectivity. For some, low income and long working hours, which again are sometimes a strategy to compensate for lower income, result in a retreat from social life, which they simply cannot afford any longer. As they interpret it, social life no longer works and life outside restricted social contacts becomes something strange or foreign. This alienation from society may lead people to see foreigners as symbols of a social life that has become foreign to them, and, consequently, can be seen as basis of xenophobic resentments. The phrase ‘soon we will be the foreigners’ used by several of our respondents should therefore not be misunderstood as simply expressing a perceived threat to cultural identity by immigration. Rather, it seems to express alienation channelled by the dominant discourse on problems of society. What

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this may point to is nothing less than the endangered integration of sections of the working class into society. The violation of values and the emergence of anomic conditions It is obvious that it is not solely the upheavals of working life that impact on potentials of political subjectivity. The literature on right-wing populism and extremism often addresses more general and more long-term socio-economic change such as ‘individualization’ in which traditional societal institutions such as the family or the occupational group lose their former security and protective function. This may lead to social isolation, insecurity of action and to feelings of powerlessness – anomic conditions that can be targeted by right-wing extremist ideology (Heitmeyer et al. 1989; Endrikat et al. 2002). The complexity and the contradictions of contemporary society may lead to problems of orientation. In such a situation, extreme-right ideological elements, such as anti-outgroup positions or authoritarianism, may help individuals to create a subjective sense of consistency (Zoll 1984). We addressed these hypotheses in our research because consequences of individualization, the violation of values or forms of anomy were touched on in the interpretation of interviews on life plans, working biographies, insecurity and views of the social world. A general finding from our research sample is that the more concrete interrelations between socio-economic change and receptiveness to right-wing populism or extremism already discussed in this chapter seem to be much more salient than general tendencies such as the loss of orientation, values or social ties. Anomy theory therefore only provides additional explanations, relating in particular to rural regions or particular social groups where the erosion of traditional communities, characterized by specific relations of reciprocity and social identities, is only a more recent phenomenon. The following exemplary cases illustrate conditions in which the more immediate connections between changes in working life and receptiveness to right-wing populism and extremism described so far in this chapter did not seem to provide a full understanding and, consequently, the wider context of societal change had to be taken into account. 38-year-old Ms Veitschnig with civil-service status, who has been employed at the Austrian post office since leaving commercial college and has recently risen in the hierarchy, addresses the problem of high workload: ‘Then you come home ... I say, like a squeezed out rag, I often say.’ In this perspective, a nostalgic look back at the ‘good times’ in the past, in which one could work more slowly and had more time for work and the customers, is noticeable. But Ms Veitschnig presents as equally important a second aspect of change, which she also sees in a negative light: the ‘break-up’, i.e. the restructuring of the company which accompanied liberalization and the increasing pressure on employees to sell, to raise turnover. She sees the ‘scrapping for customers’ in which the social norms of honesty and decency are violated as ‘repulsive’. Strong feelings about the loss of values and community ties were also found with other interviewees from the same rural farming region near the Austrian border to a central-European neighbour country. They see the current economic and political changes as a menace and to some extent they feel

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their cultural identity as threatened. Foreigners represent an issue to which this threat can attach itself. Ms Kántor from Hungary, is a university graduate in psychology and head of the marketing department of a Hungarian telecommunications company, holds similar views. Her workplace experiences, developing marketing psychology and observing marketing strategies of other companies, reinforce her belief that the consumer society is promoted by deceitful marketing campaigns that only serve the companies’ profit interests. Her increasing dislike of her current position is partly connected to this resentment towards the excesses of consumer society. For her, the really dangerous process in modern history is globalization. Globalization is a process that destroys local communities, traditions and national cultures. Her negative perception of globalization intertwines with the belief that globalization is moved forward by a small circle of the Jewish financial elite. She clearly shares some of the major themes raised by the MIÉP but does not vote for this right-wing extremist party because she clearly differentiated herself from the ‘angry’ people supporting the MIÉP. Another example is Michel Rust of Switzerland, who is just starting his career in research and development in a transnational company. Although he in fact distinguishes himself from the milieu of small regional enterprises (workers, precision mechanics and other ordinary people in the technical domain) he partly shares their values. Delivering high-quality work is highly valued and can lead to uneasiness when conditions do not make it possible to live up to such values. This element of his value system influences the way he draws boundaries, e.g. when it comes to the ‘mixture and flow of migrants’ with ‘different mentalities’ who are corrupting Swiss principles of work. What is particularly interesting in this and similar accounts is the definition of a ‘milieu of morality’, which the interview partners oppose to the population categories (managers, immigrants) whom they hold responsible for the detrimental changes in society. These illustrations from the qualitative interviews in different countries are intended to show the prevalence in some of our interviews of an uneasiness with the loss of values and of closely integrated communities. This means that, in addition to feelings of injustice, fear of ‘déclassement’ or feelings of insecurity clearly related to the world of work, we also found examples of political subjectivity, which can be addressed more generally by the backward looking utopias of unspoiled communities or the law-and-order and anti-immigration policies of right-wing populism and extremism. But some qualifications need to be added here: First, in contrast to theories focusing on this level of interrelationship, our findings suggest that this is only of secondary importance; we can assume that the attraction of political messages, styles of politics or ideologies of right-wing populism and extremism can more often be accounted for by reference to the more concrete reasons described in the previous parts of this chapter. Second, it is not always the ideological elements of racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism and nationalism – providing orientation, opportunities for identification or support to damaged social identities – that make right-wing populists or extremists attractive. If people adopt the principles of neoliberalism combined with ‘competitive nationalism’, support for right-wing populism and extremism can also be driven by economic considerations – globalization as a challenge to the national economy leads to a call for a strong authoritarian government

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improving the conditions for competitiveness at international level. Another nonideological reason for political support for right-wing populists or extremists can be found in the perceived lack of democracy – whether it is experience of nepotism and corruption or the feeling of not being able to participate, of not being represented in the political game. This means that, while right-wing populists are rightly presented as a threat to representative democracy, the reasons for their success can partly be found in undemocratic conditions of contemporary European societies at local, regional and national levels, but also at the level of the European Union. It is this and other aspects we will now address in discussing the reasons for right-wing populism and extremism, including those unrelated to socio-economic change. Variations of political conversions In the previous section we described the major interrelation between perceptions of socio-economic change and potentials of political subjectivity found in the interpretation of the interviews. This presentation however did not fully depict the wide variety of how people’s experiences may lead them to refer, in their interpretation of reality, to elements of right-wing extremist ideology or to find politicians or political messages of the extreme right convincing. We would like to present this variety in some detail in order to avoid the impression that certain elements of socio-economic change and particular individual reactions to them can be seen as the main reason for the success of right-wing populism and extremism. Most political conversions are therefore dealt with in this section. Even though our research focuses on the appeal of the extreme right we have to bear in mind that this particular political conversion is just one among a wide range of different patterns of interpretation and coping. The empirical data provides information about the conversion from one position or camp to political abstention, illustrates political conversions that tend toward ‘voice’ and provides examples of conversions from one position to another. Negative experiences in the world of work, which led some to follow right-wing populist arguments, strengthened the social-democratic, conservative or liberal convictions of others. The first variations of political conversions presented below relate more or less directly to experiences in working life. In the interpretation of these cases it became clear how frustrations, injuries, intensified competition or over-identification with the company contributed to particular political orientations and to the sympathy for right-wing populism and extremism. Other types of political conversions, which will be dealt with subsequently, refer to wider societal developments such as problems of the welfare state and, in particular, in elderly care, consequences of globalization or the downsides of the multicultural society. Some of the patterns presented below are typical of several if not all countries under investigation, while others are more country-specific and can be read as national particularities.

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Political conversion as a reaction to experiences in working life I. ‘I cannot bear such injustice ...’ – the shock of unemployment or involuntary early retirement Those greatly affected by unemployment not only suffer from diminishing income and reduction in living standards, but also run the risk of developing ailments related to psychological or ‘psychosocial’ stress. The unemployed suffer from ‘moments of financial insecurity, problems of social integration, self-confidence and disorientation in time’, aspects which form the basis for a stable and healthy identity. Long-term unemployment is often accompanied by difficulties in coping with one’s daily life as well as social stigmatization. The use of socially unacceptable methods for combating unemployment is often attributed to the inability of the person caught in this dilemma, rather than to the system that created the situation (Kieselbach 1996, 187–88). In our interviews it also became clear that losing one’s job may lead to severe shocks and social isolation. The experience that all the efforts, achievements and sacrifices, partly of decades, no longer counted for anything foster intense feelings of injustice. These, in turn, may induce people to change party allegiance and, for want of another interpretation, to embrace the division between ‘nationals’ and ‘immigrants’ as a main structural principle and, consequently, to support the demand for national preference. It is not just unemployment that needs mentioning here. In each country we encountered phenomena including psychosocial stress among civil servants, whitecollar and blue-collar workers affected by some forms of early retirement. In the course of privatization, which has increased rapidly since the beginning of the 1990s, employees of former state enterprises (with a medical recommendation) were the first to be retired early, receiving their pension from the state. Similarly, in the declining industries (mining and steel), corporate management, together with the works councils, developed ‘social’ plans. One avenue to reduce personnel was the early retirement. While some of the early retirees shared in this decision and enjoy early retirement, others indicated that they did not retire voluntarily. This new situation (retirement as early as the mid-forties) not only causes financial difficulties but also gives rise to enormous emotional stress – problems that are discussed only with hesitation. II. ‘But at some point your body just won’t function anymore’ – women workers in precarious living conditions Right-wing populism and extremism is often perceived as a solely male phenomenon, since most of the party leaders, activists, militants and propagandists are men. Media coverage furthermore stresses the strong male image of the movement of the extreme right, since the reports focus mostly on violent attacks, on street riots or even on sexual harassment. Within the last few years several interesting research projects have been conducted by various scholars focusing on gender aspects of the parties, organizations and ideologies of the extreme right. The findings show that, while the leaders of the parties and movements are nearly almost men, we can find women as activists at a lower level, but also as party members, sympathisers, supporters or voters for parties of the extreme right. As far as political attitudes are concerned, the results of recent research projects show that at this level the gender gap tends to vanish: women turn out to be just as prone to supporting

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far-right ideologies as their male colleagues (Bitzan 1997; Rommelspacher 2000; Hentges 2002; Köttig 2004; Antifaschistisches Frauennetzwerk et al. 2005). In highly industrialized societies, two differently organized areas of life confront each other. We could also interpret them as different spheres of influence in society, subject to different governing principles. Women have the task of reconciling these at the moment conflicting structural principles and logic in the realm of production and reproduction. The social integration of women takes place in both work in a family and a reproductive capacity as well as in work in the market place. Women must do justice to such demands in different areas and combine reproductive and productive tasks and thus become subject to a ‘dual societal role’ (Becker-Schmidt 1987). These two social realms are not judged equally. Instead, market-generated work is considered ‘work’ while family responsibilities are considered private matters. Since family-related work is usually primarily carried out by women, the consequences influence integration into the paid workforce. Women are over-represented in the lower levels of the employment hierarchy, so that one may speak of a gender-specific segmented employment market. Coping both with stressful work and the double burden is often only possible for a limited period: [The job] wasn’t bad, but unfortunately that is when I had the nervous breakdown. That’s when it became clear, I always thought, that if I try my best that I would make it ... But at some point your body just won’t function anymore. ... I just couldn’t manage: my job, my son, the shifts. And then at some point my son said to me: Mama, I‘m afraid I may lose you as well. (Ms Renger, Germany)

Such experiences lead to strong feelings of injustice and may make women particularly sensitive to the gap between the politicians on the one hand and the ordinary citizens on the other. During the numerous interviews it became obvious that the experiences of women could not be reduced to the realm of employment, because, along with reports of their vocational/professional experiences, the female interviewees include their daily life experiences against the background of their ‘dual societal role’. The necessary division between occupation and family became a subject of discussion along with questions of educational and school policies as well as neighbourhood conflicts. Some of the female interviewees criticized the supposedly overly liberal immigration and asylum policies of the various governments. They also saw a threat posed by (female and male) foreigners in competition for employment and the social safety net. A particular variation of the extreme right-wing attitude of women is expressed by their observation that (female and male) foreigners from Islamic societies pose a threat to western women’s emancipation. III. ‘You really do start to hate them’ – the devaluation of subordination to norms of achievement and hard work The work ethic and the expectation that everyone should abide by the achievement principle are at the centre of the interviews that serve as examples here. The interviewees firmly identify with their status as blue-collar workers, see themselves as part of the hard-working community, and

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disassociate themselves vehemently from so-called social scroungers. A thorough analysis of the interview material reveals that the ‘community of decent and hardworking people’ has something in common, namely the deterioration of working conditions over recent years or problems maintaining standards of living with the income they get for hard work. Those who have not yet been affected by the processes of rationalization and massive reduction of personnel and are still employed indicate that they suffer increased work loads, stress, consolidation of work and enormously high levels of anxiety. Often they are threatened by the Damocles sword of dismissal, which induces them to accept such conditions, to quietly acquiesce and not to rebel or take to collective measures in defence. Some of the interviewees report health problems (digestive and heart troubles as well as sleep disturbance) which they attribute to the deteriorating working conditions. The suffering under the worsening working conditions – which is often mentioned only in passing – makes itself heard in other ways: those who apparently succeed in withdrawing from this imperative, especially foreign welfare recipients, the unemployed and, at the moment, even early retirees, are viewed by working people who, having internalized the ‘protestant work ethic’, quietly put up with their living and working conditions and feel angered by these alternative concepts. They demand that others should abide by the law of paid employment according to the motto: Those who do not work, neither shall they eat. Immigrants who do not work and receive welfare benefits provoke particularly emotional reactions: ‘They come here, they get plenty of money, they can buy a house and everything. You really start to hate them. Then you ask: Is that right? Is the system right in doing this?’ (Mr Kammer, Germany). IV. ‘Normally the socialists are the ones for the people’ – working-class identity and pragmatic change to right-wing populism We found examples of the renunciation of social-democratic parties and a turn toward either right-wing populist or extreme parties in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany and Switzerland. Reports of the interviews emphasized either disappointment over the broken promises of socialdemocratic governments or disillusionment with governments in which social democratic/socialist parties participated, as was also the case in France with the French Communist Party (PCF). The disappointment extends most often to the labour unions, which are no longer perceived as having the power to represent the interests of labour. Based on the fact that the interviewees in question felt a strong identity as workers and were, according to their traditions, solidly anchored in the labour milieu, provided it still existed, the conservative parties were not an acceptable alternative. They are confronted by the following alternative: either they do not vote at all or they vote for a right-of-centre party that claims to have taken up the interests of the ‘ordinary man’. V. ‘But there comes a time, when you’ve had enough’ – white-collar workers and the threat of social decline A sense of insecurity based on continuous restructuring or repeated job-loss as well as the subjective feeling of threats to one’s cultural identity and the sentimental turning to nostalgia can be found in many interviews we

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conducted with white-collar workers or civil servants. Some of those interviewed have in common that they see themselves exposed to the danger of social decline although they still enjoy a relatively secure social status. An unfavourable management decision or an illness can mean that they can no longer afford the house or apartment, going on holidays, etc. Others have already lost occupational stability and, in order to more or less maintain their standard of living, they have to be highly flexible, commute long distances and accept jobs widely deviating from their vocational identity. The frustrations make themselves felt in suppressed anger, which may attach itself to foreigners if those become the symbol for one’s own social decline or if they are presented as receiving what they don’t deserve. VI. ‘Transformation means torturing oneself’ – Upwardly mobile employees paying a high price and over-identifying with the company Trying to understand sympathies for right-wing populism and extremism with a particular subset of the research sample, namely the ‘receptive’ part of the ‘advancement’ category, often showed that the political conversion occurred in connection with an improvement of the occupational or professional position. Typical examples are promotions to management grades, for example in privatized companies that are in constant processes of restructuring. Partly, this promotion leads to status inconsistencies because those concerned have a relatively low level of education. Surprisingly, the improvement of the social position contributes to the political conversion. One reason for this is the price these people pay for their occupational success: they not only suffer from long working hours, high workloads and stress, but in their sandwich position they also have a clear view of the worsening of overall working conditions, e.g. in the process of privatization and restructuring. The second reason is that occupational advancement often heightens the identification not only with the job but also with the company. This, in turn, further strengthens performance orientation and the demands put on subordinates, colleagues and workers and citizens in general. The political conversion itself can take various forms. Some had a clear allegiance with the social-democratic party, others were floating voters; some are inclined to ‘ethnicize’ social problems more strongly than before, others show intensified rigidities and work ethics. Some people’s frustrations and feelings of alienation can be understood against the background of the upheavals in privatized companies such as the post and railways. Others’ reactions are clearly influenced by the general ideology of ‘competitive nationalism’, which induces them to radicalize their work ethos and their identification with the company so that they easily embrace exclusivist and nationalistic ideologies of the extreme right. Conversions caused by wider social change and properties of the political system VII. Members of the middle class with a conservative and nationalist mentality the mid-thirties, the economist, David Saposs stated:

During

Fascism ... [is] the extreme expression of middle-classism or populism ... The basic ideology of the middle class is populism. ... Their ideal was an independent small property-owning class consisting of merchants, mechanics, and farmers. This element

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Members of the middle class opposed both capitalism and ‘big business’. A quarter of a century later, in his book The Political Man, Seymour Martin Lipset referred to this thesis, which had already been presented in the mid-1930s, and extended it as follows: each social class could choose a democratic or extreme form of expression: ‘The extremist movements of the left, right, and centre ... are based primarily on the working, upper, and middle classes, respectively’ (Lipset 1960, 132). Rightwing extremism recruits its followers from the same social class that supports the liberal parties. Lipset argues that socio-economic crises caused the former followers of liberal parties to turn to right-wing extremist parties. The NSDAP owed its election successes primarily to the old middle classes which, due to the processes of modernization, were threatened by decline and loss of class status. Several examples of the thesis presented by Lipset are evident in our empirical material. Some of the managers, entrepreneurs or self-employed turned from the conservatives to the FPÖ after Jörg Haider took over the party, are fascinated by Gianfranco Fini, became local activists of the German Republikaner after having voted CDU for years, etc. These political conversions are based on a conservative and often nationalistic political orientation formed through socialization processes in the family, in local milieus or in schools and youth organizations. The radicalization they represent is not always triggered by experiences in working life. If so, these may relate to unfair competition through the local political monopoly by a conservative party or to a failure in setting up a business, which results in loss of status and living standard. Authoritarianism, nationalism, calls for discipline, individualism and meritocracy are the ideological elements that make the extreme right attractive to economically successful members of the middle class as well. VIII. ‘You just can’t treat the elderly the way you sometimes hear about’ – plea for a better welfare state and protection of the national majority During recent decades the social welfare safety nets established by the western-European states has experienced massive changes. Without exception, for the interviewees of the countries we examined, the future of the social welfare state and social security became the subject of discussion. Younger employees, in particular, heavily emphasized the question of whether or not their pensions were still safe. The discussion of the intergenerational treaty was linked to feelings of injustice and insecurity in view of one’s own perspective for the future. The Austrian and German researchers, in particular, encountered many interviewees who felt threatened by the dismantling of the welfare system. These assessments took on a special role in the Danish example. The Danish interviewees criticized the fact that the older generation, which had created the Danish welfare society, were now being forced to suffer as it was dismantled. Here the interviewees express their own dismay but exhibited concern for the senior citizens. The criticism of the eroding social security systems is associated with an ideology of exclusion: in times of scarce resources there would have to be a guarantee that immigrants were

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not to profit at the expense of the majority population of the social welfare state (see Chapter 7 of this volume). IX. ‘In Switzerland, we are quite fond of a piece of work well done’ – the dynamics of globalization threatening national identities The interviews do not just focus on such topics as justice/injustice and security/insecurity but also on the loss of a (supposed) national or cultural identity. The respective references vary: in some cases the national collective is at the centre, in other cases it is in the region, the city or even the particular neighbourhood. In some cases the reaction can be traced back to experiences in working life. A manager, for example, who accepted early retirement after a merger of his company, having to recognize that the new AngloSaxon management principles had devalued all his achievements; a technician feels uneasy because of the dissonance between his personal and locally rooted work ethic and the new ‘mentalities’ of the globalized working milieus of advanced technology; a telecom employee, who became the victim of successive waves of restructuring that made his rich experience worthless, strongly resents ‘Americanization’ of the workplace and of society. Such experiences may result in the feeling that conditions of attachment as well as the investments in their professional lives have been utterly destabilized even if, in material terms, those affected have managed to profit in a way from the changes affecting the economy and the labour market. The destabilization may lead to a longing to safeguard the nation and its culture against foreign influence and immigration. Several interviewees have experienced immigration more directly as a threat: they claim that they do not recognize ‘their street’, ‘their village’, ‘their town’, ‘their region’ any longer, that they cannot orient themselves; in short, they complain about the loss of their cultural identity. Significant environments such as family, school, colleagues and neighbourhood, which long functioned as emotional support, are now subject to serious changes and lose the emotionally stabilizing function they once had. X. Double frustrations in family careers and individual career paths: Patterns of extreme right mobilization in Hungary In Hungary, a country that has undergone an intense economic, political and social transition since the early 1990s, we noticed that in addition to immediately recognizable economic changes (for example at the place of work or within the social security systems), family traditions are enormously important in determining political attitudes. The transition to market economy was accompanied by a far-reaching crisis: almost two million jobs disappeared, living standards declined and insecurity became the normal way of life. Even those who were successful in the private sector achieved this with incredible effort: literally all their time apart from sleeping was devoted to working in two or more jobs. The extreme right-wing party MIÉP was not particularly successful in turning widespread frustration into votes. Those interviewed who did vote for MIÉP or showed sympathy for the party did not just have reasons to do so on the basis of their experience in working life. Rather, frustrations stemming from failure or too high a price for success in the rapidly changing economic environment tend to reinforce and mobilize anti-communism and anti-Semitism, views acquired through socialization

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in a family which, after having suffered under the communist regime in the 1950s, was deeply frustrated by the political transition because they felt that the old elite was able to maintain its positions (see Chapter 10 of this volume). Alternative political reactions: Experiences in working life strengthening socialdemocratic or conservative political positions The question of the attraction towards the extreme right is just one aspect of the more general question about the political effects of socio-economic change. In the analysis of the interviews, we concentrated first on biographical paths marked by radical conversions in the perception of politics, ideology and, sometimes, voting behaviour. However, within the European research sample one can find many excellent examples of ‘conversion’ taking various directions: political conversions that tend toward ‘defection’ – from one position (e.g. from the social-democratic view) to abstention; political conversions that tend toward ‘voice’ (Hirshman 1972) – from one position to another (from ‘revolutionary left’ to social democracy; from left-wing to extreme-right, from right-wing or centrist views to extreme right, from commitment to political parties to commitment to social vocational associations; from an apolitical attitude to trade unionism, etc.). The subject of the enquiry of course made it necessary to pay particular attention to conversions to the extreme right. Yet this focus should not lead us to lose sight of the fact that, in each country involved in the SIREN project, the majority of people do not vote for extreme-right parties. Right-wing extremist attraction is a minority phenomenon. In addition to the political conversions discussed above, it is necessary to point out that we also found other forms of political conversion, which cannot be presented here in detail. Many people had had the same experiences as those described above but showed no attraction to right-wing populism and extremism. On the contrary, some were strengthened in their, say, socialist convictions. Some of these persons were highly active in social life: retired workers involved in charitable work or in local politics, young workers engaged in trade unionism, early retired managers organizing cultural activities, or employees dedicating their spare time to family life. Others, though showing some ideological affinity to the extreme right, consciously distance themselves from the followers of extreme-right parties: the young, self-employed ‘winners’ of technological and economic development partly displayed economic-liberal world views bordering on Social Darwinism, partly shared anti-Semitic and nationalist views with the extreme right, but they do not want to have anything to do with the parties of the mediocre people and ‘angry losers’. Others, on the contrary, have suffered loss of status as a result of restructuring and have found themselves, in particular markets, competing against members of a socially inferior group. Nevertheless, they have not been attracted to right-wing extremism. Why them and not the others? Political socialization in the family and the social milieu, mentalities and psychological dispositions do play an important role. A further explanation refers to the convertibility of skills or social and cultural capital which allows people to pull themselves out of ‘untenable’ positions (Balazs et al. 2002). Unlike the skills of technicians, engineers or administrative personnel,

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the practical skills of a rolling-mill worker or foundry worker cannot be adapted for new jobs or activities. But individuals with political and cultural skills, such as the know-how to organize demonstrations, negotiating skills, skills needed for contacts with journalists, economic or managerial knowledge associated with tradeunion responsibilities, can be retrained or use their competences in various other activities. Conclusions The qualitative interviews of the SIREN project were aimed to lead to an understanding of subjective perceptions of socio-economic change and of points of attraction of right-wing populism and extremism. The analysis of changes in working life and of politics from the vantage point of workers and citizens gave rise to conclusions on how experiences in the world of work may be transformed into potentials of political subjectivity. What can be inferred from our sample of more than 300 in-depth interviews is that socio-economic change is in fact an important factor in explaining the rise of right-wing populism and extremism in various European countries. Only rarely in the interpretation of interviews focusing on how people are affected by socio-economic change was this not a decisive contribution to the understanding of the attraction of the extreme right. There are, however, also other issues such as, for example, discontent with mainstream political parties, the crisis of political representation – especially of the working class – or family-socialization issues that it was not possible to describe in this chapter (see Hentges et al. 2003, 123ff). However, the finding that socio-economic change can be perceived in different ways and that individuals’ political reactions actually point in opposite directions supports arguments maintaining that the weakness of social democracy and the revolutionary left leaves a political void that can be filled by the extreme and populist right. This in particular relates to how growing insecurity and social inequality are dealt with in political discourses (Mahnkopf 2000; Zilian 2002). There is widespread agreement in the literature both on working life and on rightwing populism that the erosion of traditional structures of working life impacts on the political system. The reason for receptiveness to right-wing populism and extremism is seen in the economic and social crisis and its disintegrating consequences, such as unemployment, delinquency, precariousness and social insecurity (Bourdieu et al. 1992; Perrineau 1997; Sennett 2000; Kitschelt et al. 1995 and 2001; Castel 2000). In the literature, this interrelation between changes in working life and support for right-wing populism and extremism is theorized in different ways (see also Flecker 2002): The erosion of norms and values leaves people with outdated normative orientation and tensions between their values and their actions. The dissolution of traditional social milieus and the recourse to allegedly natural categories such as race, gender and age form the prerequisites for a resurgence of right-wing extremism (Heitmeyer 2002). Focusing on the problem of increasing complexity and intensified contradictions in social life, populist messages and, in particular, scapegoat theories and authoritarian views can help individuals to create a subjective sense of consistency in their apprehension of social reality (cf. Zoll 1984). In a world where traditional

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institutions no longer provide orientation, views and concepts based on ethnicity, anti-elite sentiments or ingroup/outgroup distinctions may fill the gap. A related theoretical argument points out the damage to social and personal identity caused in periods of accelerated socio-economic change. In addressing imaginary ethnic or national communities, right-wing populism serves the need to compensate for lost certainties and offers opportunities for identification that may help to stabilize the self (Ottomeyer 2000; Dörre 2001). According to the findings of the qualitative research within the SIREN project, providing orientation and stabilizing identities do of course play a certain role, but they are not the only and not even the prevailing factors. Within the main patterns that emerged, other theoretical considerations seemed to be more helpful for the understanding of people’s receptiveness to extreme-right ideologies. More indications were found for theoretical views stressing that the individuals affected by far-reaching socio-economic change need to reconsider their position in the social world. In this respect the following main patterns emerged from the interpretation of interviews in all countries under investigation. The first pattern involves intensive feelings of injustice stemming from frustrations of legitimate expectations relating to various aspects of work, employment, social status or standard of living. Company restructuring, redundancies, early retirement, new management styles or intensified competition on the labour and housing markets devalue qualifications, acquired experience, previous hard work and sacrifices and bring to nothing the expected rewards for the subordination to the demands of a pitiless world of work. The experiences differ widely and may range from layoffs out of the blue or involuntary early retirement to the lack of recognition of professional experiences and contributions. Such frustrations are often expressed as feelings of injustice: people refer to other social groups that do not subordinate themselves to the hardships of work to the same extent and who are taken much better care of or who are able to arrange things for themselves illegally. These are, on the one hand, managers and politicians with high incomes, ‘golden handshakes’ and generous pensions and, on the other hand, people living on welfare instead of working or refugees supported by the state. The core theme is that the ‘decent and hard working’ and therefore morally superior people are being betrayed and that they have to realize that it was stupid to stay honest and loyal and to subordinate themselves to the exacting demands of an increasingly cruel world of work. This means that political messages and ideologies of right-wing populism that address the double demarcation of ‘the people’ from the elites on the top and from the outcasts at the bottom of society quite easily find a resonance. A second clear pattern in the mental processing of changes in working life has at its core the fear of déclassement, the insecurities and the feelings of powerlessness that are associated with industrial decline, precarious employment or the devaluation of skills and qualifications. The experience of being a plaything of economic developments or anonymous powers can be clearly linked with right-wing populists’ addressing the population as a passive victim of overpowering opponents. The same goes for people’s nostalgic accounts of the good old (working) times and populists’ glorification of traditional communities. In some cases, authoritarian reactions to insecurity and powerlessness could be observed, while others made clear that

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a lack of political representation contributes to the feeling of not being protected as workers. People attracted to the extreme right seem to be convinced that they can only count on themselves. Since social-democratic parties have shown less and less interest in the workers’ world, the public recognition of the problems of social decline and precariousness seems to have become one of the competitive advantages of populist parties. A third pattern could be found with people who had experienced occupational advancement, e.g. through promotion within the company. As a consequence, some tend to identify very strongly with the company and its goals. Regarding their work ethic, the performance orientation seems to be strengthened, which raises the demands they put on their colleagues and subordinates. They tend to believe in the power of the individual’s abilities, internalize the rules of a neoliberal capitalist system and often even seem to share an ideology of Social Darwinism, i.e. the ‘survival of the fittest’ on the (labour) market. Intense competition, which leads to long working hours, high workloads and an increase in the often repressed pains of work, seems to strengthen such views. It became obvious in the interpretation that the dominant ideologies of neoliberalism and competitive nationalism in combination with the experience of ubiquitous and enforced competition, both between companies and between people, may make people receptive to modern forms of right-wing extremism. Differences between countries result from different aspects of socio-economic change being experienced at the time of the research, but also from the different agendas of the various right-wing populist or extremist parties. Regarding the competition on the labour market – but also in other fields such as housing – the consequences of the reunification and the immigration of ethnic Germans from central and eastern Europe played a major role in Germany, while in France it is the population and, in particular, youth with a north-African background or in Austria refugees from the Balkans that dominate the debates. In Hungary it is people’s struggle with the consequences of transition combined with anti-communist legacies and the condemnation of parliamentary democracy as a ‘puppet theatre’, whereas in Switzerland economic difficulties coincide with the damage to the image of Switzerland and the vanishing of traditional Swiss particularities. While in Denmark and Belgium the deterioration of welfare provision was strongly linked with the issue of immigration, the main point in Italy seems to be the combination of high levels of insecurity and a deep distrust and disenchantment with politics. These differences in the ways in which right-wing extremists and populists take advantage of discontent are in fact variations on a common theme. In addition to national variations, the forms of individual political conversion differed widely. There is, in our view, no such thing as one main path to right-wing populism and extremism. This reflects the programmatic and partly ideological openness and inconsistency of most right-wing populist and extremist parties and their forms of addressing widely varying population groups. As the presentation of the varieties of political conversion showed, people in different social positions who have experienced socio-economic change differently are attracted to the extreme right for completely different reasons. This may explain the large potential of sympathizers and voters these parties have, a potential that seems to be considerably larger than voting intentions and voting behaviour show.

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Chapter 3

Perceived Socio-Economic Change and Right-Wing Extremism: Results of the SIREN-Survey among European Workers Yves De Weerdt, Patrizia Catellani, Hans De Witte and Patrizia Milesi

Introduction In this chapter we report and discuss the results of the third phase of the SIREN project: the survey on subjective perceptions of socio-economic change and rightwing extremism in eight countries. In this introduction, we first of all discuss the core concepts and main research questions. Next, the design of the survey is presented. Main research questions The core concepts of the survey (and main research questions of this chapter) are shown in Figure 3.1. Our first research question relates to the perceptions of socio-economic change (SEC). Had the respondents experienced (positive or negative) socio-economic change during the previous few years? An analysis of the possible impact of SEC on political attitudes obviously needs to start by charting this ‘independent’ variable. Figure 3.1 shows that we will be analysing two components. First, we will report on the perception of socio-economic change as such. Next, we will also report on some additional variables, related to the current situation of the respondents (e.g. the evaluation of their current income). Answering this research question will also include reporting on differences according to background variables (such as age, gender, and occupation): which category experiences more (or less) SEC?

1. Perception of • (1a) socio-economic change • (1b) current situation

Figure 3.1

3. Link ?

2. Evaluation of right-wing extremism • (2a) Receptiveness to ERW attitudes • (2b) Affinity to ERW parties • (2c) Link between attitudes (a) and affinity (b)

Overview of core concepts and main research questions

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The second research question refers to our ‘dependent’ variable: the evaluation of right-wing extremism (ERW). Here too, two components are distinguished. First, we will report on the ‘receptiveness’ of our respondents to extreme right-wing attitudes. On the basis of a literature review (sustained by the results of the qualitative interviews), five attitudes that seem to be relevant in predicting an extreme right-wing party preference are identified. We will analyse whether our respondents endorse these attitudes and will examine differences according to background characteristics. Second, we will analyse the affinity of our respondents to extreme right-wing parties: are they in favour or against the local extreme right-wing party in their country and how had this affinity evolved over the past five years? Again, we will examine differences according to background characteristics. Finally, we will also analyse whether the various receptiveness attitudes are indeed associated with an affinity to an extreme right-wing party. Our third and final research question relates to the link between the perceptions of socio-economic change and the evaluation of right-wing extremism. Is it true that respondents who experienced socio-economic change are more attracted to extreme right-wing attitudes and similar parties? In analysing this link, the role of social identification processes will be highlighted. We will also examine the presence of different psychological routes leading to a preference for a right-wing extremist party (e.g. a ‘winners’ versus ‘losers’ route), and identify the characteristics of workers who are more likely to follow these routes. In answering these research questions, we will report the results regarding the global sample, without much reference to the separate countries involved. Readers who are interested in the results of a specific country can check them in the original report (De Weerdt et al. 2004). Survey design Starting from the results of the qualitative research and the review of the literature on socio-economic change and right-wing extremism, a structured questionnaire was developed aimed at interviewing a representative sample of workers in the eight different European countries: Austria, Belgium (Flanders only), Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and (the three regions of) Switzerland. The questionnaire consisted of 71 questions covering seven different areas. When available, reliable questions and scales developed in previous cross-national surveys were employed. The basic questionnaire was written in English and translated into the local languages afterwards. The way in which the various concepts were operationalized will be illustrated later when discussing the results. Data collection was carried out by private survey institutes in each country, coordinated by the Eurisko institute in Milan. The telephone survey (CATI: Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing) was carried out between mid May and early July 2003. The duration of an average interview was 15 minutes. Filter questions ensured that only employed respondents born in the country and having performed paid work for at least five years were included in the sample. Quotas were set on regions, town size and gender.

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A total sample of 5,812 workers was interviewed. Except for the Swiss sample, which included 893 respondents, the other country samples consisted of about 700 respondents each. In each country, samples closely matched the working population, even though a slight under-representation of blue-collar workers, low educated respondents, and extreme right-wing voters was noted, as it is often the case in survey research. The country samples were weighted in terms of key demographics (region, town size, gender and age) in order to increase representativeness. Perceptions of socio-economic change Socio-economic change during the last five years All respondents were asked whether they had experienced socio-economic change in their work situation during the last five years. The question was: ‘Compared to five years ago, would you say that the amount of work you have to do has clearly increased, increased, stayed about the same, decreased, or clearly decreased?’ A similar question was asked regarding job autonomy (‘the possibility to make your own decisions at work’), the social atmosphere at work (‘how well people interact’; answering categories: ‘got worse’ versus ‘improved’), job security, and the financial situation of the family. The last variable is the only one that goes beyond the work situation of the respondent, since it refers to their family as a whole. Table 3.1 contains the answers to these questions (percentages and means). The results in Table 3.1 show no uniform trend. Some aspects of the work situation have improved during the last five years, whereas others have got worse. On average, job autonomy has increased (44.7 per cent reported an increase, whereas only 10.2 per cent reported a decrease). This suggests a positive evolution, since job autonomy is associated with an increase in well-being (e.g. Karasek and Theorell 1990). The financial situation of the family has also improved (39.8 per cent reported an increase, whereas 23.5 per cent reported a decrease). However, these positive trends are counterbalanced by some negative ones. Most striking is the increase in the amount of work. No less than 60.6 per cent of the respondents reported an increase in workload, whereas only 14.0 per cent reported a decrease. This evolution seems to be a negative one, since an increase in workload is consistently associated with a decrease in wellbeing (e.g. Karasek and Theorell 1990). On average, the job security of our respondents had also decreased slightly: for 27 per cent job security had decreased, whereas only 18.1 per cent reported an increase. Finally, the results regarding social atmosphere are remarkable too, as on average no change is noted. The group reporting an improvement of the atmosphere at work is exactly the same size as the group reporting that the atmosphere had got worse (in both cases about 26 per cent). Evaluation of the current situation Information on experienced change in the past five years was completed by asking some questions about the current situation of the respondents. First, respondents were asked the following question: ‘In your opinion, how large is the probability

Table 3.1

Perceptions of socio-economic change during the previous five years (percentage of respondents and mean perceived change for each dimension)

Amount of work Job autonomy Social atmosphere Job security Family finance 1. Clearly decreased/got worse 2.8 1.8 4.1 5.4 3.4 2. Decreased/got worse 11.2 8.4 21.9 21.6 20.1 3. Stayed about the same 25.3 45.1 48.4 54.9 36.7 4. Increased/improved 37.7 32.2 19.7 13.3 32.5 5. Clearly increased/improved 22.9 12.5 6.0 4.8 7.3 Mean perceived change 3.67 3.45 3.00 2.90 3.20 Note: For ‘social atmosphere’, the answering categories ranged from 1 (‘clearly got worse’) to 5 (‘clearly improved’). For all other variables, the answering categories ranged from 1 (‘clearly decreased’) to 5 (‘clearly increased’). Source: SIREN survey.

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that you will become unemployed in the near future?’ (see De Witte 1999a). For self-employed respondents only, the question was formulated as follows: ‘In your opinion, how large is the probability that you will have to close down your business in the near future?’. Respondents could rate this probability on a five-point scale, ranging from ‘very small or impossible’ (1) to ‘very large’ (5). While about 10 per cent of the wage earners (9.6 per cent) rated this probability as very or rather large, 76.5 per cent of them rated it as rather or very small. The percentages were similar for the self-employed (12.1 per cent very/rather large; 74.2 per cent very/rather small). So, on average, job insecurity was felt to be relatively low. In order to measure the evaluation of their current income, respondents were asked to rate the question ‘How would you evaluate the total amount of the income of your household?’ on a four-point scale, ranging from 1 (‘We do not have enough, and have huge difficulties to get by’) to 4 (‘We have more than enough, we can even save money’). On average, respondents indicated that they had enough income to get by without difficulties (score: 3.26). About 38.2 per cent reported that they could even save money. Only 10.8 per cent indicated that they did not have enough, and experienced some (or huge) difficulties getting by. Finally, respondents’ perceptions of injustice were operationalized as their member group being treated unfairly as compared to other groups, and measured through the concept of collective (relative) deprivation (De Weerdt and De Witte 2004). Respondents had to rate three items on a five-point scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). A principal components analysis showed the presence of a single factor. A factor score was therefore calculated for the entire dataset.1 The results show that the respondents felt somewhat deprived. About 57 per cent stated that they did not get the appreciation they deserve and only 40.5 per cent felt that they had the power needed to defend their interests. Finally, only 40 per cent of respondents reported being sufficiently rewarded for the work they do. Do certain categories experience more (or less) socio-economic change? In order to find out whether there were differences within our sample regarding the experience of socio-economic change, a series of univariate analyses of variance were performed, taking into account the main background variables. The results of these analyses are presented in Table 3.4 at the end of this chapter. Gender differences were rather limited, with men scoring slightly better concerning the current income of the household. They also experienced a slight increase in income compared to women and felt slightly more deprived. Age turned out to be the most relevant variable affecting changes in autonomy, social atmosphere and job security. Older workers reported a decrease in job autonomy, job security and family income, as well as a worsening of the social atmosphere at work. The evaluation of the current situation was affected by age, 1 Factor scores express a deviation from the overall mean of the sample. This mean is transformed into zero. As a consequence, factor scores are relative scores (expressing the position of the respondent compared to all others), rather than absolute scores, indicating the absolute level of e.g. collective deprivation.

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however, indicating that age was especially important in the experience of change in socio-economic conditions during the last five years. Our results thus suggest a negative evolution of the labour-market position of older workers. This is in line with the conclusions of a recent study of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (2003). The level of education of our respondents affected almost all variables, but especially those related to the income of the family. A higher educational level was associated with a more positive evaluation of the current income and with a positive change in family income. However, the amount of workload also increased among the highly educated. The occupational position revealed similar differences: senior managers and high-rank civil servants especially expressed a positive evaluation of their income and had experienced a positive evolution in family income over the last five years. Additionally, this category (and the professionals) had also experienced an increase in job autonomy. The latter was also associated with an increase in workload, however. Blue-collar workers had experienced more job insecurity, a finding not uncommon across Europe (Näswall and De Witte 2003). Taken together, these findings suggest rather classic ‘social class’ cleavages, with blue-collar workers occupying a less privileged position, reflected in their higher levels of collective (relative) deprivation. The sector in which the respondents worked also proved relevant to a certain degree. Two findings were most striking. Respondents from the public sector had experienced the strongest increase in workload over the last five years. However, the perception of job insecurity was lower among the respondents from the public sector compared to those working in other sectors (and especially the secondary sector). Evaluation of right-wing extremism Receptiveness to right-wing extremism In relevant research literature, five main attitudes are reported as describing ‘receptiveness’ to right-wing extremism: prejudice against immigrants, nationalism, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation and political powerlessness (for overviews see Billiet and De Witte 1995; Lubbers 2001; Pratto 1999). These attitudes increase the propensity to sympathise with (or vote for) right-wing extremist or populist parties. As such, these attitudes may be considered as indicators of respondents’ ‘receptiveness’ to right-wing extremism. The five attitudes were measured using existing attitude scales, consisting of several (from three to five) items each. All items were scored on a five-point scale, ranging from 1 (‘strongly disagree’) to 5 (‘strongly agree’). A principal component analysis demonstrated that the five attitudes can indeed be distinguished among our respondents.2 For each attitudinal dimension, factor scores were computed, which will be used in the analyses presented below. In this section we will start by 2 Note that the amount of items for some dimensions needed to be reduced somewhat, in order to obtain a similar structure in each country. Further on in this text, the exact amount of items is mentioned that was used to measure each component.

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illustrating the five receptiveness attitudes, presenting respondents’ answers to some of the items measuring them. Prejudice against immigrants or ‘everyday racism’ (De Witte 1999b) refers to negative attitudes towards foreigners because they are perceived as an economic or cultural threat. These negative attitudes play a crucial role in ethnic competition theory (Coenders 2001). This theory combines realistic conflict theory (Campbell 1967) and social-identification theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979). Realistic-conflict theory states that social groups have conflicting interests because relevant material goods (employment, housing, social security) are scarce. This scarcity promotes competition. Consequently, autochthonous respondents lacking essential resources develop negative attitudes towards immigrants, which make them susceptible to the appeal of extreme right-wing parties. Social-identification theory adds to this view. This theory highlights identification processes through which people build a positive ingroup identity by contrasting their identity to a negative outgroup. The five items used in this survey to measure this attitude were taken from previous research (Cambré, De Witte and Billiet 2001). On average, our respondents showed a rather positive attitude towards immigrants. This is witnessed by the rather low agreement with items such as ‘Immigrants take away our jobs’ (16.9 per cent agree) and ‘Immigrants are a threat to our culture and customs’ (14.9 per cent agree). The attitude of our respondents became less positive, however, when crime was discussed. About 42.3 per cent agreed with the statement ‘Immigrants increase crime rates in our country’. A positive attitude towards the autochthonous group (‘ingroup’) refers to nationalism. Nationalism plays a crucial role in the theory of social disintegration, stressing the effects of disintegration caused by processes such as modernization and social exclusion (e.g. Falter and Klein 1994). This theory assumes that individuals who – because of the important and rapid socio-economic changes of the last ten years – feel they are experiencing social disintegration are more likely to be receptive to nationalism, because nationalism constitutes a substitute for social integration. Nationalism offers new group bounds and an identity, and thereby offers a substitute form of (social) integration. Because this integration is highly symbolic, this theory is sometimes referred to as the theory of symbolic interests (e.g. Lubbers and Scheepers 2000). Nationalism can be measured in different ways. In this study, the concept of ‘chauvinism’ was chosen, with three items taken from Coenders (2001). Chauvinism refers to general national pride, a view of uniqueness and superiority of one’s own country and national ingroup to which one is (uncritically) attached. Chauvinism also implies a downward comparison of other countries and national groups. Our respondents, on average, showed a moderate level of chauvinism. About 40 per cent agreed that ‘Generally speaking, my country is a better country than most other countries’. One item was rather strongly endorsed: 65.5 per cent agreed with ‘I would rather be citizen of my country than of any other country in the world’. Chauvinist feelings were not extreme, however, as witnessed by the fact that ‘only’ 22.7 per cent agreed with the statement ‘The world would be a better place if people from other countries were more like the citizens of my country’.

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The theory of psychological interests, stemming from the psychological tradition of the Frankfurt School, highlights the importance of authoritarianism (Adorno et al. 1950). Adorno et al. considered authoritarianism as a personality trait, predicting ethnocentric attitudes and increasing the susceptibility of the individual to right-wing extremism. At present, authoritarianism is conceived of as an attitude dimension with three basic components (Altemeyer 1988): conventionalism (rigid conformism to conventional norms and strict moral codes), authoritarian submission (uncritical and full submission to ingroup authorities) and authoritarian aggression (fierce rejection and punishment of violators of conventional norms). In this study, authoritarian attitudes were measured with five items (see Meloen, van der Linden and De Witte 1994; Altemeyer 1998). On average, our respondents showed a moderate level of authoritarianism. 57.2 per cent agreed with the statement ‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn’ and even 62.3 per cent endorsed the item ‘What we need most, more than laws and political programmes, is a few courageous and devoted leaders in whom the people can put their faith’. Agreement was lower for other statements, however. About 43.1 per cent agreed that ‘Sex crimes such as rape and abuse of children deserve more than just imprisonment, such criminals ought to be publicly whipped or worse’, and ‘only’ 32.1 per cent endorsed the statement ‘We need strong leaders who tell us what to do’. Next to authoritarianism, a rather recent theoretical approach was included as well: the concept of social dominance orientation (SDO). SDO is ‘a general attitudinal orientation toward intergroup relations, reflecting whether one generally prefers such relations to be equal versus hierarchical’ (Pratto et al. 1994). SDO thus reflects an individual tendency to classify social groups along a superiority versus inferiority dimension, stressing ingroup superiority and favouring policies that maintain social inequality. This motivation to dominate over others was originally conceived as part of the concept of authoritarianism. Recent research, however, has shown these concepts to be virtually unrelated (Altemeyer 1998; Duriez and Van Hiel 2002). SDO independently contributes to the prediction of attitudes such as ethnic prejudice, nationalism and the support of punitive policies, and to the preference for extreme right-wing parties (Pratto et al. 1994; Pratto 1999). Therefore, it is sometimes referred to as a new (and modern) form of authoritarianism (Duriez and Van Hiel 2002). Social dominance orientation was measured with three items, adopted from Pratto et al. (1994). On average, our respondents showed a moderate level of SDO. About 58 per cent endorsed the item ‘I find it normal that some people have more of a chance in life than others’, and 49.5 per cent agreed with the idea that ‘Some people are just inferior to others’. Finally, 41.4 per cent approved the item ‘To get ahead in life, it is sometimes necessary to step on others’. Finally, also the theory of political dissatisfaction and protest voting was included in our research design. This theory suggests that people who are adversely affected by socio-economic change become dissatisfied with politics. They experience political powerlessness and develop distrust in politics and politicians as a response to these changes. Consequently, they vote for an extreme right-wing party, as an expression of protest against the political ‘establishment’ (‘protest vote’, see e.g. Billiet and De

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Witte 1995; Van den Brug, Fennema and Tillie 2000). Political powerlessness refers to a feeling of lack of both political efficacy and political trust. Political efficacy concerns an individual’s sense of personal competence in influencing the political system. Political trust includes the perception that the political system and authorities are responsive to the public’s interests and demands. Political powerlessness was measured with three items, based on Campbell, Gurin and Miller (1954), Olsen (1969) and Watts (1973). On average, our respondents exhibited a rather high level of powerlessness and dissatisfaction. About 59.7 per cent of the respondents agreed with the statement ‘It seems that whatever party people vote for, things go on pretty much the same’, and 57.6 per cent endorsed the statement ‘People like me have no influence on what the government does’. The most pronounced negative view is witnessed by 71.4 per cent agreeing with ‘The people we elect as members of parliament very quickly lose touch with their voters’. Affinity to extreme right-wing parties The respondents were finally asked to evaluate the most representative extreme rightwing party in their country (including its political stands), on a scale ranging from +2 (‘I am strongly in favour of it’) to -2 (‘I am strongly against it’). Respondents were also asked to compare their current evaluation of that party with the one they had five years before and to state whether they were more in favour of it, less in favour of it, or whether they had the same evaluation. Representative extreme right-wing parties chosen in each country were the following: Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs for Austria; Vlaams Blok for Belgium; Dansk Folkeparti for Denmark; Front National for France; MIÉP (Hungarian Justice and Life Party) for Hungary; Alleanza Nazionale for Italy; Union Democratique du Centre, Schweizerische Volkspartei, and Unione Democratica di Centro for Switzerland. In Germany, no data were gathered on party affinity, due to the lack of a nationwide and well-known extreme right-wing party. This means that Germany is never included in the following analyses of extreme right-wing party affinity. The results showed that extreme right-wing parties do indeed have a following. About 18.6 per cent of the interviewees supported the local extreme right-wing party (of which 2.4 per cent were strongly in favour). About half of the respondents (47.4 per cent) were against, of which 23.3 per cent were strongly against. The proportion of those strongly against an extreme right-wing party is therefore roughly ten times larger than those strongly in favour. Note that 34.1 per cent of the respondents were ‘neither in favour, nor against’. When comparing the current evaluation with the evaluation one had five years previously, 18.2 per cent said that they were more in favour nowadays than five years before, whereas 18 per cent indicated that they had become less in favour. The rest of the sample (63.8 per cent) had not changed their evaluation during this period. The results on the evolution thus suggest that adherence to an extreme right-wing party seems to be somewhat variable.

Table 3.2

Association of background variables with receptiveness and affinity (results of a regression analysis, standardized regression coefficients)

Gender (-> female) Age Educational level Occupational position Blue-collar or farm worker White-collar worker, low-ranking civil servant Middle manager, teacher, middle-ranking civil servant Senior manager, executive staff, high-ranking civil servant Entrepreneur Professional (doctor, lawyer, etc.) Trader, farmer, craftsman Sector Primary/secondary Tertiary Public Other DF F R R2

Prejudice against immigrants 0.06*** 0.05*** -0.13***

Chauvinism -0.03ns 0.07*** -0.05**

-0.02ns 0.03* -0.19***

Social dominance orientation -0.04** -0.00ns -0.09***

Authoritarianism

Political powerlessness 0.06*** -0.01ns -0.17***

Extreme rightwing party affinity -0.04* -0.02ns -0.21***

0.13***

0.06*

0.16***

0.01ns

0.09***

0.05ns

0.06*

0.01ns

0.07**

-0.03ns

0.06**

0.03ns

0.05*

0.03ns

0.02ns

-0.02ns

0.02ns

-0.01ns

ref.

ref.

ref.

ref.

ref.

ns

0.06** -0.01ns 0.03*

-0.00 -0.01ns 0.04*

0.05** -0.01ns 0.05**

ref. 0.01ns -0.05** -0.01ns (12,4727) 20.21*** 0.22 0.05

ref. 0.01ns -0.02ns -0.01ns (12,4727) 5.90*** 0.11 0.01

ref. 0.03ns -0.03ns -0.03ns (12,4727) 36.84*** 0.29 0.09

Note: ns = not significant; *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001. Source: SIREN survey.

0.04** 0.04** 0.09***

0.06*** -0.02ns 0.02ns

ref. 0.00ns 0.03ns 0.06***

ref. 0.03ns -0.03ns 0.02ns (12,4727) 17.06*** 0.18 0.04

ref. -0.01ns -0.03ns 0.02ns (12,4727) 23.72*** 0.23 0.06

ref. 0.04* -0.06** -0.01ns (12,4629) 33.20*** 0.28 0.08

Perceived Socio-Economic Change and Right-Wing Extremism

73

Are certain categories more receptive to and more attracted by right-wing extremism? In order to analyse the differences in receptiveness and affinity, a series of multiple regression analyses was performed with the various receptiveness attitudes and the affinity variable as dependent variables and five background characteristics as independent variables. Table 3.2 contains the results of these analyses. First, standardized regression coefficients are shown, expressing the unique association of a given background characteristic on the dependent variable after controlling for all other variables. At the bottom of the table, the R and R² are shown, indicating the explanatory power of the analysis. R² is particularly relevant, expressing the proportion of variance of the dependent variable explained by the analysis. The analyses in Table 3.2 show that gender, age, and sector are far less important than occupational position and the level of education in determining the five receptiveness attitudes. Women show a bit more prejudice against immigrants and slightly more political powerlessness than men do, whereas men are slightly more in favour of SDO. However, these differences are very small. Age also contributes to the explanation of the receptiveness attitudes, with older respondents expressing slightly more prejudice, authoritarianism and chauvinism. Again, however, these differences are very limited. The impact of the sector is even more restricted: the only significant effect is a somewhat lower level of prejudice against immigrants in the public sector. The effect of the educational level and the occupational position are generally more pronounced. A higher level of education is especially associated with lower authoritarian attitudes, lower political powerlessness and less prejudice against immigrants. Blue-collar workers (and to a lesser extent low-ranking whitecollar workers) are more authoritarian, more prejudiced and feel more political powerlessness. A small effect on prejudice, authoritarianism and powerlessness is also noted for the entrepreneurs and the self-employed (traders, craftsmen, etc). The latter also seem to stress SDO slightly more than all other categories. The explanatory power of the analyses, however, is rather limited, as witnessed by the low proportions of variance explained by the five background variables (see R² below Table 3.2). The analysis of extreme right-wing party affinity (column 6 of Table 3.2) shows that the level of education exerts the most important influence: a higher level is associated with a less favourable evaluation of the local extreme right-wing party. Here again, the explanatory power of the analysis is rather limited: only 8 per cent of all differences can be explained by introducing the five background characteristics. Does receptiveness lead to affinity? As a final step in our analysis, we examine whether the five receptiveness attitudes are indeed associated with an affinity to an extreme right-wing party: do people vote for an extreme right-wing party because of prejudice, chauvinism, authoritarianism, SDO or political powerlessness? We analysed this link by performing a regression analysis with affinity as dependent variable and the five background characteristics together with the five receptiveness attitudes as independent variables. Results are

74

Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right

reported in Table 3.3 (the coefficients of the background variables are not shown in this table). The first column of Table 3.3 shows that all five receptiveness attitudes are indeed associated with an affinity to an extreme right-wing party. Not all attitudes are of equal importance, however. Prejudice against immigrants clearly stands out as the most important factor leading to a preference for an extreme right-wing party (beta: .30, p < .001). Secondly, authoritarian attitudes play an additional moderate role (beta: .14, p < .001). All other attitudes only play a minor role: chauvinism (beta: .07, p < .001), SDO (beta: .07, p < .001) and political powerlessness (beta: .05, p < .01). Note that the coefficients of the last three attitudes are rather small. Together, these five attitudes explain about a fifth of the variance in rightwing affinity, which clearly is an improvement on the analysis in which only the background variables were included (see Table 3.2). Interestingly, the coefficient of education (not shown in Table 3.2) drops strikingly after the introduction of the five receptiveness attitudes (beta drops from -.21 to -.12), suggesting that an important part of the impact of education on affinity is due to the attitudes related to the level of education. Table 3.3 contains additional information. All regression analyses were also performed for each country separately (with the exception of Germany). This allows us to verify whether the general trend is present in each separate country. The general trend that prejudice against foreigners is the dominant motive, with authoritarianism as second important factor, is also found in four out of seven countries (Denmark, France, Switzerland and Belgium). In these four countries, between 29 and 36 per cent of the variance in extreme right-wing affinity can be explained with the attitudes and background variables included in the analysis. Austria and Italy show a slightly different profile, since prejudice and authoritarianism seem equally important, with SDO as an additional important factor in Italy (and more so than in other countries) and political powerlessness in Austria (and Belgium). Chauvinism is also more important in Belgium (Flanders) and Switzerland than in most other countries. Finally, this separate analysis reveals Hungary to be an ‘outlier’. In Hungary, only 10 per cent of the variance in extreme right-wing affinity can be explained. Here, only two attitudes play a (rather reduced) role: prejudice against immigrants and chauvinism. All other attitudes seem irrelevant in this country. This suggests that the motives for voting for an extreme right-wing party may be different in this easternEuropean country than they are in western-European countries. Socio-economic change and right-wing extremism: The mediating role of social identity The final aim of our research was to analyse the link between perceptions of change within the job domain and affinity with extreme right-wing parties, highlighting the psychosocial processes that may underlie this link. We moved from the assumption that, under given conditions, experiencing change at work may mean experiencing uncertainty and threat. People need to feel certain about their world and their place within it (e.g. Hogg 2000). Contextual

Table 3.3

Association of receptiveness attitudes with extreme right-wing party affinity, overall and per country (results of a regression analysis, standardized regression coefficients)

Overall (1) Austria Belgium Denmark France Hungary Italy Prejudice against immigrants 0.30*** 0.17*** 0.48*** 0.51*** 0.37*** 0.15** 0.21*** Chauvinism 0.07*** 0.02ns 0.14*** 0.03ns -0.02ns 0.11* 0.09* Authoritarianism 0.14*** 0.19*** 0.21*** 0.24*** 0.25*** 0.07ns 0.22*** ns ns ns ns Social dominance orientation 0.07*** 0.07 0.01 -0.01 0.05 -0.02ns 0.16*** Political powerlessness 0.05** 0.16*** 0.20*** 0.06ns 0.12** -0.07ns 0.03ns DF (17,3774) (17,522) (17,513) (17,532) (17,501) (17,439) (17,508) F 52.65*** 5.26*** 18.77*** 14.50*** 16.56*** 3.86*** 6.37*** R 0.44 0.34 0.60 0.54 0.58 0.31 0.38 R2 0.19 0.12 0.36 0.29 0.34 0.10 0.15 Note: ns = not significant; *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001. All background characteristics are kept under control. The coefficients of these variables are not shown in this table, however. Source: SIREN survey.

Switzerland 0.36*** 0.16*** 0.25*** 0.07* 0.10** (16,652) 21.10*** 0.57 0.33

76

Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right

factors, for example socio-economic crises and rapid changes, may reduce people’s certainty about their cognitions, perceptions, feelings, and behaviours. In particular, rapid changes may induce people to believe that their personal identity is threatened. They may experience fragmentation, lack of control over themselves and their future. Unpleasant feelings of uncertainty may be enhanced if people feel that their social identity (Tajfel 1969; Turner et al. 1987) is also threatened, if they do not have a psychologically salient and stable group (e.g. in the work context, a group of colleagues) to identify with. The need for belonging and being committed to a group or a social category plays a relevant role in making people feel that they have a safe place in the world (e.g. Brewer 1995). To reduce uncertainty, people usually look for clear-cut (i.e. secure) categories of social belongingness (for example, the nation). They tend to stress similarities between members of the same social category and differences between members of their social category and members of other categories. This leads to a strong favouritism towards the ingroup and a strong discrimination towards the outgroup (Jetten, Hogg and Mullin 2000; McGregor et al. 2001). Several psychosocial studies have actually shown that people in uncertainty conditions are especially likely to develop chauvinist and ethnocentric attitudes on the one hand, and prejudicial and xenophobic attitudes on the other (inter alia Sales 1972; Feldman and Stenner 1997). Interestingly, ingroup favouritism and outgroup discrimination due to uncertainty may be found both in people who belong to high-status, powerful social categories and in people who belong to low-status, powerless social categories (Ellemers et al. 1992; Ellemers and Bos 1998; Doosje, Ellemers and Spears 1995). On the one hand, people in a high-status but uncertain condition tend to be afraid of the outgroup threatening their privileged position, and defend their position through stating that it is fully fair and legitimate. They are likely to develop supremacy ideologies, rationalizing their ingroup superiority and the outgroup inferiority. On the other hand, people in a low-status and uncertain condition tend to perceive the outgroup as depriving them of what they deserve. They are inclined to state that their position is deeply unfair and illegitimate. Thus, both categories of people may become receptive to fundamentalism, ethnocentrism and, more generally, the kind of issues dealt with by right-wing extremist or anti-system political groups. Consistently, in the present study we expected that both participants who had experienced a positive change in their work conditions – who may be grouped with people in a high-status and uncertain condition – and participants who had experienced a negative change in their work conditions – who may be grouped with people in a low-status and uncertain condition – might develop affinity with extreme right-wing parties. We speculated that the link between socio-economic change and right-wing affinity would be more likely to happen when people, in addition to experiencing change at work, experience a crisis in their identification with meaningful social categories at work. For this reason, measures of social identification at work were introduced in the questionnaire, including both identifications with a limited and very concrete social category such as the workgroup, and identifications with wider and more abstract social categories such as the organization or the professional

Perceived Socio-Economic Change and Right-Wing Extremism

77

category (inter alia Jetten, O’Brien and Trindall 2002; Ashforth and Johnson 2001; Van Knippenberg et al. 2002). We hypothesized that a lack of social identifications at work, but also an enhanced tendency to identify with a clear-cut and somewhat abstract category such as the organization, would be among the factors favouring transformation of perception of change at work into increased receptiveness towards right-wing extremism. We therefore envisaged the existence of a causal chain developing from perception of change in one’s job conditions to identification at work, and from identification at work to attitudinal antecedents of right-wing party affinity. In order to test our model, we carried out a path analysis,3 that is, a series of multiple regression analyses involving all the relevant variables. For most variables, factor scores were employed derived from principal component analyses on the different measures of each variable included in the questionnaire (see details in De Weerdt et al. 2004). The list of variables follows below: •

• • • • • • • • • •

Perceived change in job conditions. Factor score based on a one-factor solution saturated by three items regarding perceived change in social atmosphere at work, job autonomy, and job security. Identification with the workgroup or the colleagues the person works with. Identification with the organization, company or institution the person works in. Identification with the occupational or professional category. Social dominance orientation. Factor score. Measures are described above. Collective relative deprivation. Factor score. Measures are described above. Chauvinism. Factor score. Measures are described above. Prejudice against immigrants. Factor score. Measures are described above. Authoritarianism. Factor score. Measures are described above. Political powerlessness. Factor score. Measures are described above. Right-wing party affinity. Evaluation of the most representative extreme rightwing party in one’s country (see above).

As a first step, a multiple regression analysis was carried out, with right-wing party affinity as the criterion and all the other psychological variables as predictors. Then each variable shown to be a significant predictor in the first analysis was employed as criterion in subsequent regression analyses, and so on until all significant predictors of endogenous variables were identified. Except for the ‘identification with the organization’ and ‘identification with the occupational category’ variables, all the other variables turned out to play a significant role in the path analysis. Most significant paths (p<.001) emerged from the whole series of multiple regression analyses are shown in the causal model depicted in Figure 3.2. In the model, the partial correlations coefficients on the paths show the relative effects of the predictor variables on the endogenous variables, with all other variables that have paths influencing them (directly or indirectly) held statistically constant.

3

The analysis sample was made up by 3,559 people and did not include Germany.

Chauvinism .17

Social dominance orientation

Prejudice against immigrants

.13

.13

.11 .09

Identification with organisation

.32

.13 Perceived change in job conditions

.21 -.10 -.18

Collective relative deprivation

.11

Authoritarianism

.19

Right-wing party affinity

.10

.24 Political powerlessness

Figure 3.2 Note:

Path analytic model on the relationships between perceived change in the job domain, social identity, receptiveness attitudes, and right-wing party affinity

Only most significant path coefficients (p<.001) are reported.

Perceived Socio-Economic Change and Right-Wing Extremism

79

The analysis showed the presence of two different pathways leading from perception of change in job conditions to extreme right-wing party affinity. In both pathways, identification with one’s own organization played a significant mediating role. We might label the first pathway as the ‘winners’ pathway. Perceived changes in one’s own working conditions are positively related to identification with one’s own organization (beta: .13, p<.001). Given that a high score in the ‘perceived change variable’ corresponds to a perceived positive change in working conditions, we may say that people perceiving an improvement at work are also more inclined to identify with their organization. This identification may in turn favour a social dominance orientation (beta: .13, p<.001), that is, an orientation of these people to legitimate inequality and dominance of some groups over others. The same people will be more likely to express chauvinism (beta: .17, p<.001), prejudice against immigrants (beta: .13, p<.001), and authoritarian attitudes (beta: .21, p<.001) and, ultimately, to favour extreme right-wing parties. Thus, the belief that the individual may successfully face any change and that people who may be an obstacle to this process should be brushed aside seems to prevail in this first psychological route to right-wing extremism. We might label the second pathway as the ‘losers’ pathway. Perceived change in working conditions is negatively related to collective relative deprivation, both directly (beta: -.18, p<.001) and through the mediation of identification with one’s organization (beta: -.10, p<.001). This means that people perceiving negative changes in their job condition, and who are weakly identified with the organization they work in, are more likely to perceive that they are treated in an unfair way compared to others. Collective relative deprivation, in turn, may foster prejudice against immigrants (beta: .11, p<.001) and authoritarian attitudes (beta: .11, p<.001). People following this path may also develop political powerlessness (beta: .24, p<.001), that is, the perception that any collective reaction to injustice may be ineffective, because politics is not reliable, too far from real citizen’s needs and difficult to deal with. The outcome is attraction towards the extreme right, very likely attraction towards a strong leader, someone to whom individuals may delegate the solution of their own problems. As already mentioned, neither identification with one’s workgroup nor identification with the occupational category played a role in either pathway. Actually, identification with one’s workgroup was positively related to perceived change in job conditions (beta: .11, p<.001), but not to the other variables included in the model. This result suggests that identification with relatively small groups within the job domain, unlike an exclusive identification with a higher-order and abstract entity such as one’s organization, may be a way of coping with change in job conditions without developing attitudes that may lead to affinity towards the extreme right. Which categories of people are most likely to follow either route to rightwing extremism? A first answer to this question may be found by looking back at the tables commented on in previous sections of this chapter, in which the links between background characteristics of our sample and each psychosocial variable investigated in the questionnaire are shown, including variables featuring the two

80

Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right

pathways described above.4 However, this data has the limit of referring to one single variable of either route at a time. A further analysis was therefore carried out aimed at investigating the most frequent background characteristics of two extreme subgroups of the sample, made up of the individuals scoring high on all the variables typical of either the ‘winners’ or the ‘losers’ pathway (see details in De Weerdt et al. 2004). According to this analysis, the categories of people who are more inclined to follow the ‘winners’ pathway are young people (i.e. under 35) with secondary education, self-employed, and working in sectors such as commerce, professional services, or consultancy. The categories of people who are instead more likely to follow the ‘losers’ pathway are middle-age (between 35 and 54 years old) bluecollar workers with secondary education working in the sectors of industry or social services. Conclusion The main results of our survey on socio-economic change and right-wing extremism in eight European countries are discussed below, focusing first on each of the two dimensions and then on the observed link between the two. Socio-economic change? The results on the perception of socio-economic change were rather mixed. On average, the workloads of our respondents had increased over the last five years and their job security had decreased somewhat. Feelings of deprivation seem to prevail among a (small) majority of our interviewees. These negative aspects are counterbalanced, however, by an increase in job autonomy and in the financial situation of the household. When the survey was carried out, a large majority was not experiencing financial hardship, and only a minority felt insecure about their jobs. No clear trend was apparent regarding the social atmosphere at work. Gender differences in socio-economic change were rather limited. Older workers in particular reported negative changes (e.g. in job autonomy, job security, family income, and social atmosphere). The findings regarding occupational position and level of education suggest rather classic ‘social class’ cleavages, with blue-collar workers occupying a less privileged position (e.g. a lower income, less autonomy, and more job insecurity), leading to higher levels of feelings of collective (relative) deprivation. Respondents from the public sector had experienced the strongest increase in workload over the last five years but reported the lowest level of job insecurity.

4 Analyses regarding socio-economic change were carried out on the whole sample, including Germany. However, when the same analyses were carried out without Germany the significant effects described here were still present, and are therefore also relevant for the present analysis.

Perceived Socio-Economic Change and Right-Wing Extremism

81

Receptiveness and affinity towards right-wing extremism? In the research literature, five attitudes are reported that are relevant in the description of ‘receptiveness’ to right-wing extremism: prejudice against immigrants, nationalism, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and political powerlessness. The results of our survey show that these five attitudes are clearly present among our respondents, though in varying magnitude. Our results also showed that extreme right-wing parties do have a following: about 18.6 per cent of the interviewees were in favour of the local extreme right-wing party, whereas 47.4 per cent were against (party affinity). When comparing the current evaluation with the evaluation one had five years ago, 18.2 per cent said they were now more in favour than five years ago, whereas 18 per cent indicated they had become less in favour. The results on the evolution thus suggest that the adherence to an extreme right-wing party seems to be somewhat variable. Gender, age, and sector were not very important as determinants of receptiveness or affinity. The effect of the educational level and the occupational position were generally more pronounced. A higher level of education is especially associated with lower authoritarian attitudes, lower political powerlessness, less prejudice against immigrants and a less favourable evaluation of the local extreme right-wing party. Blue-collar workers (and to a lesser extent low-ranking white-collar workers) are more authoritarian, more prejudiced and feel more political powerlessness. A small effect on prejudice, authoritarianism and powerlessness is also noted for entrepreneurs and self-employed (traders, craftsmen, etc.). A final analysis showed that all five receptiveness attitudes are indeed associated with an affinity to an extreme right-wing party. Prejudice against immigrants clearly stands out as the most important factor leading to a preference for an extreme rightwing party, and authoritarian attitudes played an additional moderate role. All other attitudes (chauvinism, social dominance orientation, and political powerlessness) only played a minor role. On the link between change and affinity: Two psychological routes to extreme right-wing affinity Our analysis showed the presence of two different psychological routes leading from perceived change in job conditions to right-wing extremism (see also above). In what we have called the ‘winners’ route, people tend to believe that people who may be an obstacle to the process of change at work should be brushed aside. The same people are also likely to fully share the typical organizational goal of keeping competitive on the socio-economic market and defeating as many competitors as possible. In what we have defined as the ‘losers’ route, people are deeply aware of their discomfort due to negative change at work, but also believe they are not competent or strong enough to cope with it. The outcome is attraction towards the extreme right, very likely attraction towards a strong leader, someone to whom individuals may delegate the solution of their own problems. Our results thus suggest that both positive and negative change at work may increase perceived uncertainty. A dominant principle in the current working

82

Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right

environment is change and the opportunity for all workers to adapt to the everchanging requirements of working life. But to what extent can people cope with continuous change, which also implies strong uncertainty and lack of control on the world around them? Two opposite reactions seem likely to arise, and they both seem somewhat ‘pathological’. The first is the one we have found in the winners’ group. This is sort of a manic reaction. Workers tend to feel that they are omnipotent, that they can ‘run the wave’, practically without limits. The second is the one we have found in the losers’ group. It is sort of a depressive reaction. People loose selfesteem, feel powerless in the face of a working reality that appears completely out of control. Prejudice against immigrants has been shown to play a highly significant role in both psychological routes from perceived change at work to affinity with right-wing extremism, suggesting that uncertain workers may easily focus on a clear-cut and easy to identify outgroup, such as the one made up of foreigners, in order to reduce uncertainty. Foreigners may be taken as scapegoats, held as responsible of what is wrong in the working environment, and the process of uncertainty ends up leading to misplaced aggressiveness. Even if our research was mainly focused on highlighting conditions that may favour attraction towards extreme right, our data offers some insights into the conditions under which people may cope with positive or negative changes at work without developing extreme right-wing attitudes. For example, we have observed that a strong identification with the workgroup may be positively related with perception of change at work, without leading to extreme right-wing attitudes. Identification with a lower-order category, such as the workgroup, is the most likely to adequately fulfil people’s basic need for belonging (Ashforth and Johnson 2001). In a context of change, such a need may become very urgent, because people may look for psychological protection as well as for models of how to think and behave under conditions they have never coped with before (Hogg 2000). Hence it is conceivable that workers who may count on a strong identification with a lower-order group may be more psychologically equipped to face uncertainty related to change, and thus be less likely to develop ethnocentric and authoritarian attitudes. Future research might explicitly address the issue of which psychological processes may be more effective in helping people to cope with change at work. What the present research has already clearly demonstrated is the presence of a meaningful link between psychological reactions to change in job conditions and right-wing extremism. Although the existence of such a link has been often hypothesized in the past, an empirical demonstration of it through a large scale European survey had been so far lacking.

Table 3.4

Do certain categories experience more (or less) socio-economic change?

Mean(1) Gender(2) Age(2) Educational level(2) Occupational position(2) Blue-collar or farm worker White-collar worker, low-rank civil servant Middle manager, teacher, middle-rank civil servant Senior manager, exec. staff, high-rank civil servant Entrepreneur Professional (doctor, lawyer, etc.) Trader, farmer, craftsman Sector(2) Primary/secondary Tertiary Public Other

Change in amount of work

Change in job autonomy

Change in social atmosphere

Change in job security

3.67 0.03** ns 0.12*** 0.19*** 3.46 3.67

3.45 ns -0.17*** 0.07*** 0.11*** 3.32 3.47

3.00 0.03* -0.12*** ns 0.06** 3.02 3.05

2.90 ns -0.08*** -0.03* 0.06** 2.95 2.87

Change in financial situation family 3.20 0.07*** -0.12*** 0.16*** 0.14*** 3.04 3.16

Actual job insecurity

Evaluation of actual income

Collective deprivation

1.91 ns -0.04*** -0.09*** 0.16*** 2.12 1.96

3.26 0.05*** ns 0.20*** 0.22*** 3.05 3.22

0.00 0.08*** 0.00ns -0.04** 0.14*** 0.15 -0.03

3.91

3.47

2.96

2.92

3.33

1.72

3.36

0.08

3.82

3.65

2.98

2.87

3.42

1.67

3.55

-0.33

3.39 3.44 3.23 0.12*** 3.54 3.60 3.83 3.59

3.44 3.51 3.35 0.05*** 3.45 3.52 3.40 3.46

3.21 3.01 3.08 0.05** 3.01 3.08 2.97 3.03

2.74 2.97 2.98 0.05** 2.86 2.89 2.96 2.89

3.17 3.24 2.99 0.06*** 3.12 3.28 3.20 3.22

1.96 1.78 2.20 0.16*** 2.08 2.00 1.68 1.99

3.29 3.37 3.16 0.05** 3.20 3.29 3.27 3.26

0.05 -0.10 -0.02 0.09*** 0.01 -0.13 0.10 -0.04

(1) Change in amount of work, job autonomy, job security and financial situation of the family: 1=clearly decreased, 3=same, 5=clearly increased. Change in social atmosphere: 1=much worse, 3=same, 5=much improved. Job insecurity: 1= very small, 3= neither large nor small, 5=very large. Evaluation of actual income: 1= not enough, huge difficulties to get by, 4=more than enough, can even save money. Collective deprivation: factor score. (2) The magnitude of the association is illustrated by a (Pearson) correlation coefficient. These coefficients are printed in bold. Note: ns = not significant; *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001. Source: SIREN survey.

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PART 2 National Varieties of Attraction

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Chapter 4

Variants of Right-Wing Populist Attraction in Austria Jörg Flecker, Sabine Kirschenhofer, Manfred Krenn and Ulrike Papouschek

Introduction In the last 15 years the changes on the labour market in Austria have been farreaching. In the mid 1980s, nationalized industries and banks, a large public sector and big foreign-owned enterprises dominated the labour market and provided longterm, sometimes guaranteed employment. The penetration of neo-liberal ideas into policy-making in the 1980s coincided with a crisis in the nationalized industries’ core companies. A policy of privatization was adopted, which reached its high point in the mid 1990s. Austria’s accession to the EU in 1995 marked a further milestone in the liberalization of previously protected economic sectors and a sharpening of competition. The rise in the unemployment rate, from some 2 per cent in the early 1980s to over 7 per cent at the end of the 1990s, was accompanied by the abandonment of the political aim of full employment and the progressive restriction of social security. The promises of security had given way to a rhetoric and policy of increasing insecurity. This phase of socio-economic upheaval took place during the period of the grand coalition between the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), and the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP), which in 1986 replaced the coalition between the SPÖ and the Freedom Party (FPÖ) when Jörg Haider took over the FPÖ leadership. It also coincided with a fall in the importance of the social partnership – that is, the concerted action by the government and employers’, workers’ and farmers’ associations in almost all areas of policy. As a party that was tied neither to the government nor the social partnership, the now right-wing populist FPÖ was able to operate an energetic opposition policy and, from under five per cent in the mid 1980s, increased its vote sharply at each election from 1986 onwards, when it already had nine per cent of the vote, until finally in autumn 1999 it achieved 27 per cent and was brought into government by the ÖVP at the beginning of 2000. In the meantime, the FPÖ’s electoral success has slumped – at least at the federal level.1 In autumn 2002 the ÖVP-FPÖ governing coalition was dissolved prematurely 1 In Carinthia, where Jörg Haider is provincial governor, the situation is somewhat different: in the last provincial elections in March 2004, Jörg Haider’s FPÖ managed to achieve 42.5 per cent of the votes and thus remains in power.

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due to party conflicts within the FPÖ. As part of the government, the FPÖ raised taxes and national insurance contributions, and together with the ÖVP, who were now no longer slowed down by the Social Democrats, followed a straight neo-liberal course. ‘Zero deficit’ was the much invoked slogan of the austerity policy, and the message that it was necessary ‘to tighten belts so that things would go well again in our affluent island of Austria’ found an echo among large sections of the population. However, there was dissatisfaction over the additional financial burden, and the FPÖ’s credibility as a party opposed to political privileges suffered as a result of black sheep in its own ranks. Because of its involvement in government, the FPÖ’s internal contradiction between a neo-liberal position (represented by the FPÖ’s government team) and the right-wing populist standing up for the ‘ordinary people’ (still Jörg Haider’s role) became particularly virulent in the break-up of the government in early September 2002 which followed a power struggle between Haider (and his followers) and the FPÖ government members.2 The political events of these months obviously put off a large section of the FPÖ voters and sympathizers, which is why support for the FPÖ in the elections of 24 November 2002 slumped to just 10 per cent (from 26.9 per cent in 1999). However, in February 2003 another coalition between the ÖVP and FPÖ was formed and carried on ruling. In 2005 the FPÖ split and Haider’s faction, under the new party name BZÖ (Movement [for the] Future of Austria), remained in the government coalition while the FPÖ went into opposition and, after a fierce anti-immigrant campaign, made a stronger than expected showing in Vienna’s latest municipal elections. In explaining the rise of right-wing populism in Austria, academic literature frequently points to socio-economic developments. The thesis of the attraction of the ‘losers of modernization’ has become very popular, yet the empirical basis for this thesis has thus far been very weak. At the same time, the causes were mostly or primarily sought in the political system, that is, in the grand coalition’s system of Proporz, i.e. the proportional allocation of jobs by political party, and the lack of transparency in the social partnership (cf. Becker 2000; Betz 2001 and 2002a; Pelinka 1993). The SIREN project took up this empirical gap by trying to understand and analyse how the workers affected perceive changes in working life, how they interpret and assimilate disappointments, threats or new prospects, and what the consequences may be regarding their political orientations. In 2002, 32 in-depth interviews were carried out in Austria with people living and working in Vienna, rural Lower Austria and an industrial region in Styria. The interviewees were chosen with regard to their position in working life and on the labour market: (threatened by) decline, precarious employment, and advancement.3 These three categories were constructed 2 The political situation thus changed drastically during the period of the qualitative research (March to September 2002), which is also reflected in the interviews: In spring, the ÖVP-FPÖ government was still firmly in the saddle and many interviewees attested to its good work; the last interviews took place in the period when the FPÖ was disintegrating and in these talk was more often of a ‘Punch and Judy show’ and the FPÖ was heavily criticized as a party. 3 For definitions see Chapter 2 of this volume.

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in order to pursue not only the thesis of ‘modernization losers’ but also the thesis that the ‘winners’ of socio-economic change might be attracted to right-wing populist ideologies for different reasons. The employment sectors chosen were the liberalized and privatized public services, industrial sectors and personal services. Socio-economic change and right-wing populism While focusing on the relationship between socio-economic change and attraction to right-wing populism, we do not suggest that problems in working life are the main cause of political reactions favouring right-wing populism and extremism. Rather, our intention is to understand how people’s experiences in work and on the labour market may have contributed to such political developments. Arguments over the one real reason for right-wing populism are fruitless. This is already suggested by the observation that right-wing populist parties put forward a large variety of often contradictory political demands addressing a multitude of highly diverse societal groups. In our attempt to sketch the variety of attractions to right-wing populism in Austria that were discovered in our sample, we therefore have to be open to various explanations. These may focus on interest politics on the one hand and identity politics on the other, or may range from an appeal to resentments and prejudice to a strategic protest vote. Before presenting our findings regarding the variety of attraction – by means of a typology based on the interpretation of the qualitative interviews – we want to refer briefly to some theoretical arguments that contribute to the understanding of the relationship between socio-economic change and the appeal of right-wing populism. One explanation addresses aspects of globalization and argues that ‘competitive nationalism’ has become a mainstream ideology to which right-wing extremism can easily link up (Butterwegge 1999). Competitive nationalism means a consciousness that implies a confrontation with enemies on international markets, which leads to the need to secure the position of one’s ‘own’ people through ingenuity, industriousness and sacrifices. In a similar vein, Heitmeyer (2001) sees the emergence of an ‘authoritarian capitalism’ on a global scale as a threat to democracy. The unfettered market tends to occupy all areas of society and to transform it into a market society. This increases the tensions between the competitive economy – with its law of the survival of the fittest and with inequality as driving force – and democracy, which is based on equality. Owing to its mobility, capital has a strong threatening potential with massive consequences for nation state politics and societal relationships. The ensuing loss of control at political-institutional, collective-political, social and individual levels leads to a hollowing-out of democracy. A law-and-order policy is pursued in order to divert attention from societal disintegration (Heitmeyer 2001, 519). Other explanations of the rise of right-wing populism and extremism focus on the demand side and refer more or less directly to violated material and symbolic interests of citizens. Precarious employment or unemployment, the threat to living standards and social position for many workers or for the self-employed are not sufficiently recognized by mainstream parties, which make it possible for right-wing

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populism to take advantage of a political void. In his study of extreme right-wing youth, Zilian (1998) argues that both the political climate and the situation on the labour market have changed: not only have resentments against ‘welfare scroungers’ and foreigners increased, but immigrants actually do exert a certain pressure on labour supply, which should not be ignored. Right-wing youth gangs (under the influence of the general political climate) interpret globalization as favouring ‘cosmopolitans’ and discriminating against ‘locals’, the members of the lower classes. Thus locals seek shelter within their community and put up resistance against its devaluation. For Zilian (2002), socio-economic and political reasons for the rise of right-wing populism are therefore closely linked: recent changes in working life have deepened divisions within society. At the same time, anti-egalitarian positions have become hegemonic, replacing the political aim of equality with one of equal opportunities and blurring the distinction between political parties. Hence there is a danger that the losers of socio-economic change in fact have no political alternative to right-wing populism. In addition to the ‘displacement of problems’ (Bourdieu 1997; Bohle et al. 1997), actual disadvantages and inconveniences caused by immigration have to be taken into account. It is argued that those who see immigrants as competitors on the labour market tend to vote for right-wing extremist or populist parties, because these put forward the demand for national preference. This seems to be a solution guaranteeing employment and other social rights (Camus 2000). In their appeal to the ‘decent and hard-working people’ who ‘are not getting what they deserve’, rightwing populist parties address material and symbolic problems. Yet issues of interests and distribution politics are addressed in a distorted way disregarding class relations. Usually, the industrious and deserving people are construed as being exploited by political and intellectual elites on the one hand and by the underclass of beneficiaries of social security transfers on the other. In this view, the main reason for the rise of right-wing populist and extremist parties is a crisis of representation: the centre-left parties have ceased to address the violation of material and symbolic interests of workers, but have on the contrary advanced and defended the neoliberal agenda. At the same time, mainstream party politicians have lost interest in the working class (Balazs et al. 2002). It is often argued that not only increasing employment insecurity or changing working conditions but also more general aspects of socio-economic change directly or indirectly impact on people’s political orientations. Loss of security also stems from the process of ‘individualization’, in which traditional societal institutions such as the family or the occupation lose their former security and protective functions (Beck 1986). According to Beck, the dissolution of social milieus leaves an ideological void and thereby creates the preconditions for allegedly natural categories such as race, gender and age to gain importance and become more ideology-laden. This does not mean that the erosion of traditional milieus in itself leads to the reception of right-wing extremist orientations; rather, patterns of interpretation of the social world previously provided by social milieus are now missing. It is maintained, for example, that individualization may lead to social isolation, insecurity of action and to feelings of powerlessness – anomic conditions that can be targeted by right-wing extremist ideology (Heitmeyer et al. 1989). In addition, the complexity of contemporary

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society, its contradictions and existential insecurities, leads to a lack of orientation. Extreme right-wing ideological elements, such as anti-outgroup positions or authoritarianism, may help individuals to create a subjective sense of consistency (Zoll 1984). The same goes for the erosion of norms and values that leaves people with outdated normative orientation and tensions between their values and their actions. The ensuing uneasiness may be addressed with nostalgic accounts of the past and demands for the re-establishment of vanishing traditions and communities. It is also argued that the very dissolution of traditional social milieus and the recourse to allegedly natural categories such as race, gender and age form the prerequisites for the resurgence of right-wing extremism (Heitmeyer 2004). Regarding our aim to analyse the variety of possible forms of attraction to rightwing populism, it is also important to raise the question as to where in society rightwing extremist and populist views can mainly be found. In the debate on right-wing extremism and populism there has been a tendency to locate authoritarian reactions in lower strata of society (Lipset 1960). In contrast, on the basis of empirical findings, Vester (2001b) argues that various factions can be found within every layer of vertical social inequality: he classifies the upper, middle and the lower classes into subdivisions of social groups that show reactionary, authoritarian, liberal or radical democratic orientations. Recent socio-economic change has diminished the proportion of socially and economically secure positions in many milieus, while the proportion represented by the winners of modernization, the insecure and the modernization losers has grown. This results in a ‘heterogeneous field of disadvantaged groups in the lower and the middle section of society’ (Vester 2001b, 317). In focusing on the link between socio-economic change and right-wing populism and extremism, we are not suggesting that there is an automatic connection between the two. It is important to note that people react differently to socio-economic change and that the same experiences may arouse or strengthen diametrically opposite political views – from authoritarian-exclusivist to solidaristic-democratic ones. This is supported by our empirical findings, which also show how socialist world views and political orientations can be strengthened as a consequence of negative changes in working life. In the following, however, we limit ourselves to describing and illustrating the various ways in which people can become attracted to right-wing populism and extremism. Variants of right-wing populist attraction – a typology The starting point for the construction of our types were right-wing populist orientations against the background of the perception of recent changes in the world of work. The empirical material provided a variety of constellations leading to the identification of five types, which – with regard to their attraction to right-wing populism – can be differentiated on the basis of the following elements: different ideological elements, social milieus (family and social background as well as current life situation); concrete experiences of changes in the world of work, and gender and the differing life contexts and experiences of discrimination arising from it.

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Type 1: Self-employed with a right-wing conservative and German nationalist ideological background – the breaking of the monopoly of power of the conservative People’s Party [ÖVP) in rural areas Within our sample this type is illustrated by a businessman and a manager in the construction sector in two rural areas dominated by the ÖVP. The political socialization of these people took place in the context of nationalist student fraternities (with their origins in 19th century German nationalism), which gave rise to a right-wing conservative and German nationalist orientation. Comradeship, decency and honesty are the proclaimed value orientations of the nationalist student fraternities, values that are still meaningful for our respondents. A further element of their value system is their self-definition as an elite, which is not explicitly expressed but in the course of analysis was discovered to implicitly shape their perception of society. The social background of the interviewees differed: Mr Zellhofer,4 was from a poor, small-farming family and, by getting his Matura [A-levels] at technical college, managed to make the social advance to become technical manager and Prokurist [authorized signatory] for a construction company with 100 employees. Mr Xelzmann, likewise a technical-college graduate, took over his father’s construction company. These two men also dealt with socio-economic change very differently. Whereas Mr Zellhofer sees socio-economic change as a challenge and has so far been very successful in dealing with it, Mr Xelzmann has had to deal with the stagnation and shrinkage of the family business (from approximately 60 to 30 employees). Their diverging patterns of interpretation and coping might also be related to a differing social background and working biography: working one’s way up the social ladder as an individual who can only rely on his abilities as opposed to following in the father’s footsteps. In 1986, when Jörg Haider took over the FPÖ, both of these interviewees switched their votes from the ÖVP to the FPÖ. In addition, they became politically active for the FPÖ at municipality level; this was perceived as a chance to break the power monopoly of the ÖVP and get in on things oneself. The background to this motive was the abuses in relation to the interweaving of ÖVP politics and business, in the course of which they saw free competition undermined and felt discriminated against as businessmen. This became virulent at a time when large enterprises branching out in their market segments led to an increase in competition, and an involvement within the FPÖ was seen as a chance to influence these circumstances. The FPÖ was seen as the only party that came out against corruption and abuse of power. Alongside the ideological proximity, the FPÖ was the party which they felt best represented their professional interests. At first sight this form of attraction to right-wing populism has a lot to do with the political system and not so much with socio-economic change. We are confronted with the predominance of one political party in a municipality or region and the undemocratic form of exercising power this predominance entails. Sympathies for the FPÖ and joining the party can be understood as rebellion and as a wish to break up undemocratic structures because of the economic disadvantages one is suffering. 4

All names of interviewees given in this article are fictitious for reasons of anonymity.

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These connections were addressed in a series of interviews, but in only a few could they be pinned down as being such a substantial motive for an attraction to right-wing populism as in this type. Additionally, associations with socio-economic change can be made: In a context of aggravated competition and the decrease in distributional scope, an interweaving between politics and economics that results in the exclusion of people in the ‘wrong party’ from economic advantages (and sometimes also those who belong to the ‘right party’ but are not as influential as competitors), can become the cause for rebellion. In such a situation those without political protection are left out completely, whereas previously all protagonists received at least a piece of the cake. At the same time, there is an ideological proximity to the FPÖ, in which the composition of the ideological elements varies. Thus we find that, as a manager, Mr Zellhofer feels obliged to act in a socially responsible way: moral responsibility and mutual obligation inform his professional behaviour, which is why he is critical of neo-liberalism ‘because social peace is only achievable with reasonably full employment’ (A26:32). There is a paternalist-caring attitude with regard to the staff, and the needs of the ‘ordinary people’ play a major role for him. On the basis of this value position, there is likewise a close relationship to the FPÖ, which sees itself as the lawyer of the ‘ordinary people’. Here it is interesting that the FPÖ’s contradictory programme, which for a long time successfully did the splits between being a capitaloriented economically liberal party and the self-proclaimed better workers’ party, appeals to him: as an employer he likes the promise to create better conditions for free competition; because of his moral position, he likes the FPÖ’s consideration for the ‘ordinary people’. In contrast there is Mr Xelzmann, for whom the mixture of the neoliberal economic programme of the FPÖ and German nationalist elements are essential, namely tougher laws on foreigners (with exceptions for business interests – he, too, largely employs commuting Czechs and Slovaks), opposition to the eastwards enlargement of the EU, and harsher action against the long-term unemployed (for example through forced labour). Type 2: Disappointed workers changing from the Social Democrats to the ‘better workers’ party’, the FPÖ For the two interview partners who illustrate this type, during far-reaching economic upheaval in the post office, which they both work for, the FPÖ became an attractive representative of workers’ interests at a time when they were disappointed by the SPÖ. They think that the changes in the world of work that have affected them directly are the product of the company policy pursued by the management: the development within the company is interpreted in a very individualistic manner as being a weakness and failure of management. Here the anger is often not so much ignited by material losses, as long as these remain within more or less bearable limits. Much rather, it is the lack of recognition and the depreciation of their position as workers resulting from the heightened economization of inner-company relations they complained of: ‘The worker himself, at least here at the post office, is more or less just the pits now. No one pays any attention to him at all or anything’ (A9:6). When contacts are perceived in such a manner, namely as a reduction to the purely

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instrumental, employees show themselves as being injured in their identity as workers, which can lead to offence and feelings of being regarded with contempt (see also Type 3). They complain of harassment because of their commitment to employees’ protection and rights as well as of indifference and the depreciation of skills and work performance by management. Mr Gruntner, a postman, expresses his feelings of being hurt by the non-recognition of the postman’s burden of work; the job is described as being hard and Mr Gruntner makes emotional outbursts against those ‘behind the desk’, i.e. his superiors and the company management, none of whom, in his opinion, have any idea what it means to work ‘out there’: . . . a postman, a parcels driver . . . the two are outside all day. I was out there at 6.50 and there wasn’t a single day when I got home before 7 in the evening. . . . Summer or winter, it’s the same . . . While those sitting inside, he can, he’s got no idea what’s going on. It’s true, isn’t it? (A7:20)

In the opinion of these post office workers the indifference and contempt shown by superiors and bosses are also demonstrated by the SPÖ-dominated employees’ representatives. It was not the FPÖ’s policies aimed at ‘stopping foreigners’ or ‘social scroungers’ that were the main points of attraction for these workers, but injuries and frustrations in the occupational field. They felt that these difficulties were recognized by the FPÖ and their own interests were better represented by this ‘workers’ party’. As a victim of harassment in his struggle against forced early retirement, Mr Gruntner, a former delivery worker in Vienna, felt himself better represented by the FPÖ’s employees’ representatives than by the SPÖ’s, whose support he experienced as ‘an act of mercy’. Eventually he went to the employees’ representatives of the FPÖ where he felt he was taken seriously and supported. The 33-year-old postman Mr Imberger became an FPÖ member six years ago. He describes the attitude of the Social-Democratic employees’ representatives as being the trigger for joining the FPÖ: at a works’ meeting of the SPÖ employees’ representatives he left with the impression that making demands was not legitimate and that democratic involvement was not desired. Mr Imberger says that before his involvement with the FPÖ he had a rather non-political relationship with the SPÖ. He comes from a Viennese working-class family – before he joined the FPÖ, the fact that his grandfather had been a SPÖ district councillor used to be something abstract and remote. He sees the FPÖ as an alternative to the SPÖ, as a party for ‘the ordinary people’ and the workers. His act of joining of the party is recounted as a significant moment – his appearance communicated his social status as a worker, and as such he was admitted to the party: They first looked at me, because of what I looked like, dirty, greasy, black from top to bottom. Then I just filled it in and I was a member. (A9:20)

In addition, strategic moments also appear to be relevant in these cases. At the time of the interview Mr Gruntner was a member of the SPÖ as well as the FPÖ, as he still needed the Social Democrats’ support for an industrial lawsuit. For Mr Imberger joining the FPÖ opened up possibilities of a political ‘career’: ‘then really it continually went uphill’ (A9:20); within the company he became active as an

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FPÖ employees’ representative, in the meantime he also has become a FPÖ district councillor; his vision for the future is a political trajectory. Mr Imberger reflects on how the FPÖ gave him the chance of social advancement or status, which – as he formulates it – ‘for a simple postman without education’ (A9:21) – would not have been possible anywhere else. Type 3: Male workers experiencing the depreciation of their subjection to societal norms of the ‘hard-working and decent community’ The essential elements that make up this type lie in a social positioning within the worker’s milieu plus a self-image as a worker, a high performance drive connected with this self-image, feelings of resentment against ‘those up there’ and ‘those further down’. Furthermore, we also find authoritarian attitudes with regard to the resolving of societal problems. The interviewees within this type were three men. Before looking more closely at the specific combinations of these elements, some ideas regarding the self-image and self-esteem as a worker will be outlined, which are not only meaningful for this type; they are, for instance, also to be found with Type 4, which could be seen as a female variant of Type 3. An important key to understanding how socio-economic change is perceived and assessed by workers lies in their identity constructions. Actually, all the workers interviewed are conscious of their social status as workers and draw important aspects from this both for their personal identity and their image of society. Work and performance are at the centre of their self-image and self-esteem and at the same time function as a measure for evaluating social processes. Work and performance are thus the intersection where personal identity and social integration meet. This is important, since a considerable part of self-esteem is formed through what one does at work. An intrinsic job motivation and an identification with the job are apparent among skilled and semi-skilled workers. This is also the case with Mr Obnig, who as a skilled fitter has been working in the same job in the steelworks for 19 years, doing heavy work under hard conditions (monotony, dust, dirt, etc.). With Mr Obnig this does not lead to an indifferent, purely instrumental attitude to his work, but leads him to wring sense even out of this form of work. He emphasized several times during the interview that he liked working and always attempted to do his work properly, by which he means the striving for quality: ‘... but it interested me nevertheless, and otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed for 19 years. If you don’t like it at all you don’t stay. You chuck it in’ (A15:12). Mr Örtner, who recently retired, emphasizes his work ethic and discipline in the assessment of his working life: ‘... in the 46 years, six months off sick, and that was an accident’ (A27:16). At the same time, work is also of major importance for integration in society. In their subjective evaluation, as became repeatedly clear in the interviews, it is the only opportunity for them to maintain an acceptable living standard and thus to live a life in dignity. Work and performance, however, thereby become the main basis for value judgements, which makes a diverging life-style difficult or barely acceptable. The feelings of injustice expressed in the interviews are very closely related to the non-recognition and disregard of the impositions and burdens at work to which the workers are subject, to their interest in the work and thereby their place in society

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as well as the increasing lack of adequate reward. As long as the general social exchange to some extent functions – subordination to the imposition of alienated labour (while simultaneously seeing its positive, meaningful side) in return for achieving a particular level of wealth and security as well as the company’s and society’s recognition of these burdens – then there is a certain degree of tolerance of perceived injustices. If this long-term exchange is broken down in the company, e.g. through stricter economization of social relations, and also at societal level, then feelings of offence and depreciation arise. The perception that the ‘lower’ strata of society, including their performance, efforts and subjection to societal norms, are ignored and that other groups – who in their views do not deserve it – are accorded greater recognition, allows feelings of injustice and resentment to emerge. These can be directed both against ‘those up there’ (politicians and management with their privileges and high levels of income) as well as against ‘those further down’ (the long-term unemployed, immigrants, refugees, etc.). In Mr Klammer’s example, perceived injustices – related above all to his orientation to work and the work ethic – consolidate themselves both upwards and downwards: they are directed on the one hand against politicians as the group who protect themselves from the strong wind of economization that affects him, who get themselves out of the firing line and can fix things to suit themselves. On the other hand, however, these feelings are also directed against the ‘work-shy’, who, in his eyes, are paying too low a price for not having to submit to the values and rules of play. In the example of his friend, who, according to Mr Klammer, uses every trick possible to manoeuvre himself through the controls of the labour-market society, this emotional-aggressive feeling of injustice is concentrated and magnified, as is vividly expressed in the following quotation: Those are exactly the things, because you’re directly affected by it. He comes in, I come home from the shift. He comes home from [swimming in] the gravel pit, sweating. Great! Got so hot, sat down there, drank a beer, pretty women. You come home filthy, sweating from grafting. ‘No ... I don’t need to go to the retraining course, and not that, and I’d never do that, because it doesn’t suit me ...’ – then you just think, what am I going to work for? He doesn’t live badly. I say he hasn’t got any debts, and he’s got a flat and manages to buy his ten or twelve beers every day and as long as he can buy that with social security he’s getting too much. No wonder he doesn’t go to work any more. (A11:30)

This key point in the interview acquires great symbolic significance: one comes home filthy and sweating from the shift – the friend is indeed also sweating, but from going swimming and sunbathing; those who do not submit to work performance criteria should not be able to lead a good life, even if Mr Klammer admits that his friend has to live modestly. But as long as his friend is able to feel good at this low level, Mr Klammer’s subjection to the demands of the system might be devalued. One’s own constraints, which one is subject to both on the basis of objective conditions and one’s internalized work ethic, are drawn on as a measure for the judgement of others. For Mr Örtner, the value of a person is measured by the performance principle, according to his/her usefulness for society – when comparing nationals and foreigners he comes to the conclusion that ‘there are also people here with us who aren’t worth

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anything’ (A27:19). The Austrian welfare state and its safety net for those unwilling to achieve are assessed as ‘over-social’. There is a desire for tougher measures to discipline the neglected youth, who lack ‘leadership’, or ‘social scroungers’ like the long-term unemployed. However, Mr Örtner does not believe this to be feasible in the current political system. Authoritarian attitudes become apparent in his narrations: You cannot really and properly control that with a democracy like we’ve got right now. How should you control that? For a start you have to apply a somehow somewhat hard method, a little bit. (A27:16)

A nostalgic longing for ‘the good old days’ is tied to feelings of resentment against politicians. The politicians had different attitudes than they do today. Then politicians did something for more, for people in general, more for Austria. Today it seems to me anyone only goes into politics because he’s after the money. (A27:23)

Mr Örtner wants personalities who will instil respect and authority: charismatic personalities and Führer figures like Jörg Haider here assume an ambivalent role – on the one hand they are appreciated for their qualities as strong men who take tough action, on the other hand their frequently ‘embarrassing’ or ‘inappropriate’ statements mean that they do not necessarily constitute serious and responsible personalities whom one can respect. The men in this type see the FPÖ as attractive because it acts as rebellious power against the ‘big-wigs’ and orients itself on the ‘little man’. However, for them the FPÖ is not necessarily the party to vote for. Rather, they regard themselves as floating voters: depending on the region they live in this means alternating between whichever party is dominant (SPÖ in the industrial Styrian region versus ÖVP in the rural Lower Austrian region) and the FPÖ – other political forces or parties do not appear as alternatives. Type 4: Women workers in precarious employment – double disadvantage, experiencing depreciation in the midst of a struggle for survival, and resentment against ‘foreigners’ who are ‘pampered’ by the state The dominant feature in this type is the hardnosed struggle for survival as well as the experience of discrimination, on the one hand as a woman, on the other as a worker. The current labour situation is characterized by great insecurity and precariousness; they are not earning a living wage. The four women in this type are all middle-aged (between 40 and 55 years). Their employment biographies are marked by breaks in employment, turbulence and changes in sector; employment as semi-skilled workers in factories or as waitresses in catering predominates. Their life experiences have led them to the belief that one can only rely on oneself, ‘because no one else is going to help you’ (A5:26). Their material independence from men is of central importance to their self-image as women. As a result of their current precarious situation, they are to a certain extent reliant on the support of their husbands or partners, which for

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the 52-year-old Ms Ülbrecht, who is working as a part-time waitress in a cafe, is a source of annoyance. For these interview partners, too, the unilateral termination of social exchange relations – as already described in Type 3 – decidedly contributes to feelings of unjust treatment. But something else becomes clear: the women interviewed experience a double injustice, namely as workers and as women. This is most pronounced for women who as single mothers – after divorce – pay a high price for their independence: enormous burdens, feelings of guilt because they are spending too little time with the children, material limitations and, last but not least, also because they have given up career perspectives. Ms Frank, an unemployed blue-collar worker, for instance, on the one hand highlights her experience of not really being taken seriously as a woman in this society – ‘I mean, mostly women are viewed as handicapped’ (A6:12) – listing unequal payment and experiences as a single mother as examples. On the other hand she provides an abundance of examples of perceived injustices that took place in the course of the relocation of production to Hungary and the later closure of her company. Having to actively participate in the destruction and loss of her workplace by training the Hungarian women workers was quite a painful insult for her. First she had to train the Hungarian workers and pass on her knowledge, and second she even had to correct the ‘sloppy’ work results of the Hungarian workers, who finally took her and her colleagues’ jobs. The interviewees within this type feel abandoned by the company and also by politics: ‘But I actually felt I was being punished for the fact that I had worked properly there’ (A6:11). Similar to the men in Type 3, feelings of resentment are directed towards ‘those up there’ and those ‘further down’. The ones ‘further down’ are primarily ‘foreigners’ and refugees and not the unemployed, probably because they themselves have been unemployed at various stages of their life. These women feel that a higher degree of material support is given to ‘foreigners’ and refugees. The ‘privileges’ of ‘foreigners’ are set in relation to one’s own precarious situation. Also the examples given are primarily of a material nature: I have to buy my potatoes and cook my potato soup at home. And they, I see they all buy ready-cooked packets, then of course I start thinking. Then I think, how can they afford that. (A5:29)

These women believe that their own situation and sacrifices are hardly recognized. The care for refugees, in contrast, seems too generous and is therefore seen as a provocation. As is apparent, the right-wing populist ‘Austria First’ slogan is attractive to this group of women because of the lack of recognition of the in part existential threat they are facing, and the feeling of being let down by politics. According to these interview partners, too, the politicians ‘up there’ only look after themselves, they fix things to suit themselves and are not interested in the ‘ordinary people’. Politicians also earn too much, as a result of which they have no idea what it is like to live on a low income. The women of this type see themselves as being politically interested, although they have a disillusioned attitude to politics. A substantial element of their self-portrayal is resistance: they see themselves as self-confident and

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combative and do not put up with everything. This is followed by their complaint about people’s selfishness – the impossibility of acting in solidarity – and about most people’s cowardice. Their sympathies for the FPÖ are based on the following right-wing populist elements: In their opinion the FPÖ fights for the ‘ordinary people’ and would also make sure that the work of the ‘decent and hard-working Austrians’ would again receive due recognition. The strict FPÖ policy towards ‘foreigners’ would also serve their occupational interests, as these are seen as forcing down wages as well as being in competition for jobs and resources. The FPÖ’s rhetoric against political privileges and activity in the exposure of political scandals and abuses is seen in a positive light. Jörg Haider’s self-promotion, as a ‘big mouth’ who does not mince his words and does not let people walk all over him, also instils respect because people can identify with this rebellious attitude – it is seen as effective, in contrast to their personal lack of power to change economic and political conditions. Type 5: Middle-class status under threat – insecurity, endangered (social and cultural) identity and rural nostalgia This type of right-wing populist attraction was constructed on the basis of interviews with four women and one man. The female interview partners can be characterized by a high level of social advancement and performance orientation. For those who are employees, this is expressed in a strong identification with readiness to work and a commitment to the company. Two women in this type continue the family tradition of identification with a company. Like their parents (and grandparents) they also work at the national post and telecom companies (or their subsidiaries). Promotion has been achieved inside the company and the women now find themselves in a supervisory position in lower management; within our three categories of affectedness by socio-economic change, we placed them in the advancement category. Yet this advancement inside the company is felt to be insecure. The women feel it is difficult to maintain their position. On the one hand, the performance bar is increasingly being raised because of the changes the companies have undergone (pressure of flexibility, increasing competition, intensification of work). On the other hand, they are finding it tough to live a life combining family and career. This – above all – was felt to be extremely unjust and was blamed both on the employers and on politics. Thus the women have had a high price to pay for career advancement, and they report side effects on health such heart problems, depression, sleeplessness and eating disorders. At the societal level, this struggle for a place in the middle and the reconciliation of employment and motherhood correlates with the fear that the middle class is under threat: There will always be some who have more and some who have less; the gap is just much much too wide in Austria. The middle class practically doesn’t exist any more. And that, I think, is a big problem. There isn’t that three-class society anymore, but actually only two. Either you belong to the upper class or to the lower. The middle class in Austria has rather disappeared. (A20:18)

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What is interesting here is that there is a clear receptiveness to right-wing populism, but the allegiance to the traditional political camp is so strong that they would not vote FPÖ. Ms Tumschitz describes her family background as ‘red’; she has a ‘red mentality’ and a ‘social streak’ and for these reasons would always vote for the Social Democrats. Ms Veitschnig is rooted in a rural region with an ÖVP tradition and dominance, and thus continues to vote ÖVP. She cannot imagine voting FPÖ, because Jörg Haider seems too dangerous a person to her. Well, as for Haider ... he seems somehow dangerous to me sometimes. Even if he sometimes makes quite good statements, about the ordinary people ... when you think, ah, that could change something ... but to vote for him only for that, it’s just then, to be honest, too dangerous, that somehow ... as it’s often said, you get a little Hitler there. (A22:20)

However, both women feel addressed and understood by the FPÖ, because it represents and expresses the interests and thoughts of the ‘ordinary people’ (i.e. the middle class), which other politicians do not dare (e.g. clear anti-‘foreigner’ positions). It is precisely the FPÖ positions on the ‘foreigners problem’ that they support. There I’ll admit the Freiheitlichen [FPÖ] are even right in some points. I’m certainly not a racist; quite the opposite. But there needs to be a certain direction, a certain control over it. ... That we’re simply overflowing, and that we have no structures on that score. Yes, we’ve just let everything in, haven’t we? (A20:19)

While their use of the ‘overflowing’ metaphor shows a desire for control in the midst of what they see as a threatening situation, immigrants are degraded to a dehumanized object status, namely ‘everything’ (instead of everybody). The discursive strategy of pointing out that one is not racist before launching statements that clearly communicate a xenophobic hostility towards immigrants is one we encountered frequently and it is also illustrated in the above quotation. The other two women representing this variant of right-wing populism are freelancers in the IT sector (one runs a small shop selling and repairing computers together with her husband; the other works as a web designer on a project basis). They just about succeed in making a living and are very aware of the precariousness of their situation. One of these two, Ms Carusan, is a committed FPÖ voter. She is impressed by and admires Jörg Haider who ‘opens his mouth and speaks; he exposes the abuses and such’ (A3:34). With the exception of the web designer, who shows herself rather neutral on the subject of immigrants, these women see ‘foreigners’ as a problem above all because of their presence in the social vicinity (in a small rural town, in one’s own block, as neighbours and as one’s children’s classmates). In the school context, they fear a drop in educational quality; in housing, the fact that one has to work hard to afford a flat, in contrast to refugees, who are – apparently – accommodated for years, paid for by the state and who even receive help with furnishings and rent, is seen as discrimination. In general, ‘foreigners’ seem to devalue the quality of one’s own life circumstances. In contrast to the women from Type 4, who have experienced migrants as their immediate competitors for the same jobs, the topic of ‘foreigners’

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taking away our jobs or being somehow a threat in working life is only of marginal significance here. However, for them, ‘foreigners’ in a symbolic way represent a threat of social decline and are proof of their threatened middle-class status when they become neighbours or the children’s classmates. Not only one’s social identity (as belonging to the middle class) but also one’s Austrian identity is seen being endangered. For Ms Carusan this threat is embodied in foreigners: ‘Because otherwise, sooner or later, we, the non-foreigners, oh yes, we’ll be the foreigners in our own country’ (A3:33). Ms Tumschitz on the other hand criticizes Austrian EU membership as well as tendencies to consumption and indebtedness in society, and likewise she fears for the Austrian identity: So, I’m an Austrian, body and soul, and so [my] patriotism is perhaps a bit higher. And I think with the euro we’ve lost a part of our identity. If they now take our neutrality away, we’ve actually lost almost everything. (A20:18)

There is a variant within this type that is best summed up in the term nostalgia; interestingly is found exclusively in those from rural, farming regions near the border with an eastern European neighbour. They feel uneasy because of the current economic and political changes and to some extent feel that their cultural identity is threatened. ‘Foreigners’ represent an issue to which this feeling of threat can attach itself. Ms Veitschnig, for example, who lives in a rural region, sees ‘foreigners’ as being problematic firstly because, in a tight labour market, they take jobs away from Austrians. Thus, in the course of an excursion to the new postal sorting centre, she was shocked that so many ‘foreigners’ were working there. Secondly, she believes that Austria’s social security budget cannot cope with so many ‘foreigners’ or that there will not be enough for everyone. Thirdly, she sees migrants, who she perceives as ‘clannishly’ hanging around in the small town where she works, as a cultural threat: ‘Here, you think you are somewhere, just from the smell, somewhere in Greece. Really, sometimes it’s terrible’ (A22:24). Further, her interpretation of current general societal developments is marked by a backward glance and comparisons with the past, the tenor being ‘it was all better before’, with the present being seen gloomily. This view also relates to politics. In the past, politicians used to be respected people, with qualities of uprightness and honesty. Now the political sphere is occupied by unscrupulous, power- and moneyhungry politicians who are remote from ‘the people’. This orientation on the past is evident in people who are approaching retirement age (compare also Type 3). But this view can also be found among younger people, such as Ms Veitschnig, who is in her late thirties: ‘I think, like earlier, when Mock5 was visiting ... He was just someone I could relate to’ (A22:21). What is complained about is that values according to which they have been socialized and have always lived by, such as honesty in the world of work and in politics, no longer count. Mr Yzenfurt, who was sacked after 36 years in the firm, when the owner’s son took over the business he worked for, which caused a 5 Alois Mock, former influential Conservative politician and Austrian foreign minister from 1989–1995.

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deep identity crisis for him, can be given as an example. His personal world view and value system based on the pillars of decency, justice and social responsibility were shattered. His loyalty and work were not recognized and rewarded. He feels discharged as unfit for service, which as the main experience of injustice shattered his life and led to social withdrawal from the village community. Mr Yzenfurt sees the biggest problem in the decline of traditional village culture, the dissolution of social contacts in the village and the resulting social isolation: he projects these developments onto the ‘young people’, but at the same time he describes his own development over recent years. Mr Yzenfurt sees hardly any chances of political influence for the individual. The only means remaining to him is going to the polls. He describes himself as a floating voter, which for him means an alternation between the ÖVP and the FPÖ. After his dismissal some eight years ago, he voted for the FPÖ. Conclusions It is a defining feature of right-wing populism that it does not represent a cohesive ideology and that its political programme is changeable or contradictory, even if, as in the case of the FPÖ, there are clear overlaps with the main points of extreme right-wing ideology (Preglau 2001; Flecker et al. 2002). The motives and reasons for being attracted towards right-wing populism that were ascertained in the interpretations of the qualitative interview material of the SIREN project in Austria were also correspondingly diverse and can be put down both to interest-group and to identity politics. Manifest ideology was not always in play when people approved of rightwing populism. Some are more attracted by the political style of the FPÖ and are so despite the party’s xenophobia. These people primarily wanted to bring about a change in the political system or hoped for career opportunities by becoming politically active in a rising party. However, for these cases too it should be pointed out that the tolerance and acceptance of a racist political programme – not objecting to a racist agenda enough to make it impossible to support such a party – not only implies a normality of racism at a societal level, but also means that the electoral potential for right-wing populist parties is massive. Conversely, the circle of those who are attracted by the ideological elements offered by right-wing populism goes far beyond those who voted for the FPÖ in its heyday; there are also those who are still anchored in the political camps of the SPÖ and the ÖVP who show themselves to be just as authoritarian, patriotic and hostile towards immigrants as the model FPÖ voter pictured by political scientists. It can be suspected that even at the time when the FPÖ was most successful, a great deal of right-wing populist potential was tied to other party camps. The attraction variant of a ‘pragmatic change’ from the SPÖ to the FPÖ, where little hostility towards ‘foreigners’ was to be found, points at the importance of clientèlism or party patronage in Austrian politics. For many citizens, access to training, jobs and housing was dependent on the patronage of one of the two big parties, the ÖVP or the SPÖ. This kept a majority of the population in dependency

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and timidity and led to relative deprivation when those parties could no longer distribute those privileges to the same extent (Egger de Campo 2000, 189ff). The rise of the FPÖ can in part be interpreted as a rebellion against this system of clientèlism and at the same time can be traced back to the party gaining access to the system of distributing positions and privileges. The connection with the effects of socio-economic change is clear, even if the results show that disadvantageous developments in the world of work by no means automatically lead to receptiveness to right-wing populism. Therefore the connection – according to the concept of ‘problem displacement’ (Bohle et al. 1997; Bourdieu 1997) – can be seen as problems of social inequality or exploitation for which no legitimate possibilities of expression are found venting themselves on unrelated topics, such as immigration or political asylum. However, it should be added that for some workers, for example in the industrial, construction or tourism sectors, migrants do indeed constitute immediate competition. Thus right-wing populists also address actual problems resulting from migration or the relocation of jobs. Another explanation deals with the injury to social identity in the process of social change: emphasizing ethnic boundaries and the demand for the preferential treatment for nationals (Austrians) are interpreted as support for identity (Dörre 2001). Likewise, Ottomeyer (2000) has described xenophobia as an easily available drug for selfesteem. We addressed these hypotheses in our research because the consequences of individualization, the violation of values, threats to personal and social identity or forms of anomy were crucial elements in the interviewees’ narrations of life plans, working biographies and views of the social world. A general finding from our research sample is that the more concrete interrelations between socio-economic change and receptiveness to right-wing populism or extremism seem to be much more salient than general tendencies such as the loss of orientation, values or social ties. Therefore, anomy theory seems to provide only additional explanations, in particular relating to rural regions in Austria or particular social groups where the erosion of traditional communities, characterized by specific relations of reciprocity and social identities, is only a more recent phenomenon. We have drawn up a typology of ‘receptiveness’ to illustrate the aspects of right-wing populism that seem to make it attractive, and the multiple life situations and social and mental dispositions that make such attractiveness probable. Typical patterns, as the interpretation of our qualitative material shows, range from rightwing Burschenschaft [nationalist student duelling fraternity] dispositions combined with the economically motivated desire to break the municipal monopoly of power of the ÖVP to a combination of the fear of déclassement and the threat to cultural identity with nostalgic longings for lost communities. The relationship between the experiences in the world of work and political reactions varies greatly according to family background and political camp as well as to gender. Thus the struggle for survival that women in precarious employment are engaged in, and the double discrimination they experience, makes it understandable why they see the apparently generous provision for refugees as a provocation. It would be wrong to assume that the ‘Austria First’ slogan, which is rightly considered to be proof of the ethnocentrism of right-wing populism, appeals to many people primarily (or just)

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because they are latently racist. Our analyses show that it appeals because of the absence of recognition of to some extent existential threats and the feeling of having been let down by politics. The fact that the perceived threat is quite relative and may consist in the fears of decline in social status by those who are materially well off, makes it understandable why receptiveness to right-wing populism is not just found in precarious life situations. What seems to be of particular significance according to our research results in Austria, and what has thus far hardly been referred to in the literature, are the physical, psychological and social costs of the subjection to the impositions and constraints of working life (of the ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ of socio-economic change), that is, the pains of work, for which rewards in the form of income, security and social integration become increasingly uncertain. The diversity of occupational positions and social milieus of the interview partners shows that not only and necessarily ‘absolute’ and material, but rather ‘relative’ and also symbolic deterioration, risk and threat are of crucial importance. Disappointments and fear emerge from experiences such as getting fired after many years of loyal work or feeling threatened by social exclusion or decline because of continually rising levels of demands on performance and achievement hard to reach even when giving one’s best – at the end of the day one goes home feeling like ‘a squeezed out rag’ (A22:6). The work ethic no longer seems to be meaningful, as in the workers’ view adhering to it no longer earns any appreciation nor does it guarantee existential security and stability (cf. Altvater and Mahnkopf 2002). Even if the era of combining wage labour and relative security (Castel 2001, 15) was very brief in a historic perspective, the expectations of the interview partners have to be compared with societal achievements. As a consequence, the harsher economization of social relations, in the company as well as within society at large, create feelings of offence and depreciation. These can be seen as potentials for political subjectivity, one specific manifestation of which we have tried to understand and analyse, namely variants of right-wing populist attraction, in the framework of our empirical material.

Chapter 5

Two Psychological Routes to Right-Wing Extremism: How Italian Workers Cope with Change Patrizia Catellani and Patrizia Milesi

Introduction Perception of either a positive or a negative change in one’s working conditions may be related to the development of extreme right-wing attitudes. In the presentation of the survey results (Chapter 3) we have already shown the existence of such a relationship, highlighting some of the variables that play a significant mediating role in both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ routes to right-wing extremism. A further, more indepth examination of these two routes is presented in this chapter, which is focused on the qualitative analysis of interviews carried out on a sample of Italian workers. We will examine how the explanation and interpretation of change in one’s own working reality may lead people to develop or consolidate extreme right-wing attitudes. Some studies have shown how people tend to exhibit heightened authoritarian attitudes and behaviour during periods marked by social, economic and political threat (e.g. high unemployment, high crime rate, civil disorders or war). For example, Sales (1973) found that during periods of high threat (1930s, 1967-70), compared with periods of low threat (1920s, 1959-1964), there was an increase in indicators of authoritarianism, such as concern for power, authoritarian aggression, submission, cynicism and superstition (see also Billig 1991; Esses et al. 1999; Feldman and Stenner 1997; Staub 1989). The studies by Adorno et al. (1950), Fromm (1941) and Rokeach (1960) also postulated a relationship between insecurity, anxiety and perceived threat on the one hand, and authoritarianism and dogmatism on the other. Explanations of this phenomenon have been offered from various psychological perspectives. For example, in a developmental perspective, the compensatory theories of Rogers (1951) and Kelly (1955) assume that extremism and attitudinal rigidity help people to know who they are and what they stand for. In a clinical perspective, Fromm (1941) assumes that when people have a poorly developed sense of self, they cleave to authority and majority norms as a substitute for personal identity and a reliable intrinsic guide for choice. These people also derogate minority and disadvantaged groups because they represent value orientations alternative to their own. More recently, psychosocial research has reconsidered the issue from a new perspective, using social identity theory as a frame of reference (Tajfel 1969;

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Turner et al. 1987). Jetten, Hogg and Mullin (2000) have shown that when people are uncertain about subjectively important dimensions, they defensively stick to their own groups and rigidly oppose external ones. This would happen because rigid intergroup processes help uncertain people to know who they are, what to think and how to behave (see also Hogg 2000; Duckitt 1989). In turn, sticking to one’s group (ingroup favouritism) and opposing external ones (outgroup discrimination) would be likely to foster authoritarianism and prejudice against minorities. As already mentioned in Chapter 3, ingroup favouritism and outgroup discrimination due to high levels of uncertainty may be observed not only in people who find themselves in a low-status, disadvantaged condition, but also in people who find themselves in a high-status, advantaged condition (Ellemers et al. 1992; Ellemers and Bos 1998; Doosje, Ellemers and Spears 1995). Accordingly, in this research we have taken two different categories of people into account: workers who perceive a negative change in their job conditions and workers who perceive a positive change in their job conditions. Based on these different perceptions, we labelled the two categories as ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ respectively. Our assumption was that both categories of workers may experience high levels of uncertainty, though in a different way. The ‘losers’ are likely to experience both material and psychosocial uncertainty. By material uncertainty we mean the instrumental side of life, mainly scarcity of material resources, unreliable income, insecure job, lack of social security and social protection. By psychosocial uncertainty, we mean the perception that a given social order or social hierarchy is unstable and is crumbling. The ‘winners’ may be less subject to material uncertainty but are certainly exposed to psychosocial uncertainty, because a positive and rewarding job condition may be also perceived as unstable or threatened by someone else. Thus both categories of workers may experience uncertainty and this may favour the development of ethnocentric, authoritarian and, more generally, extreme right-wing attitudes. Such expectancy is consistent not only with recent results of psychosocial research (see above) but also with recent theoretical speculations of political science (Gentile 1995; Ignazi 1992 and 2000). It has been suggested that the distinctive feature of today’s right-wing extremism is its origin, to be found not only in material disadvantaged conditions but also, and sometimes uniquely, in socially and psychologically disadvantaged conditions. Contemporary right-wing extremism would give voice to social categories that are suffering from identity loss or threat, and it would answer the desire for a homogeneous and stable society, with impermeable and fixed boundaries, and a well-defined and ‘fair’ hierarchy of social ranks. The research context The analysis presented here is based on semi-structured interviews carried out with 20 Italian workers of extreme right-wing political orientation (for more details on sample selection see Chapter 2). All of them worked in sectors characterized by significant and rapid changes over recent years, in Italy as in other European countries: telecommunications, manufacturing as well as information and communication technology (ICT). Half of the interviewees – the ‘winners’ – had experienced a

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significant improvement at work (in terms of contract position, wage or task) over the previous five years. The other half – the ‘losers’ – had experienced a deterioration or were temporary workers, that is, had a job that could not assure them a living in the long run. Interviews were carried out from April to September 2002, according to the procedure described in Chapter 2 of this book. Workers were invited to tell the story of their working life, to describe the changes they had experienced in their job conditions and to provide an explanation for them. They were then invited to talk about socio-political issues and to express their socio-political views. The mean length of transcribed interviews was 9269 words. Before going into the contents of our interviews, a short description of the Italian economic context at the time the interviews were carried out, as well as of the main transformations occurring in the working sectors of our interviewees, may be in order. The year 2002 was a critical one for the Italian economy. On the one hand, falling investment and reduced foreign exchange led to a fall in industrial production, in particular in manufacturing, which went down by 1.2 per cent in 2002. On the other hand, in 2002 the variation in the annual growth rate of highly specialized professional services and individual entrepreneurial activities was 7.1 per cent. Accordingly, the Italian labour market evolved towards a polarization between highly specialized professional profiles and non-qualified profiles. Furthermore, in 2002 flexible labour increased by 6.2 per cent and the employment turnover rate (i.e. the ratio between job changes and the total number of employed people) increased from 11.5 per cent in 1998 to 13.5 per cent in 2002, mainly due to the increased number of temporary workers. Overall, such a context did not favour employment conditions: Italy is the European country where wages have grown least since 1996. This picture, along with high inflation and high public debt, cannot help but convey uncertainty and pessimism towards the future in large categories of workers (Istat 2003). Some of our interviewees were employed in the phone company Telecom and in the associated mobile phone company Tim. In 1994, the public phone company SIP was transformed into Telecom Italia, which was established as the holding company of a group that included both service providers and manufacturing activities. The entire corporate restructuring was completed in 1997 and Telecom Italia was privatized in October of the same year. In the meantime, Tim had become the mobile-phone company that merged with the former public phone company (1995). Because of privatization, employment in Telecom decreased by 20 per cent: in 1994, Telecom Italia employed about 97,000 workers, whereas at the end of June 1999 there were less than 78,500. Workers were given incentives for voluntary redundancy and early retirement, or they were transferred to Tim, where they were employed in customercare activities and in marketing departments. Other interviewees worked in manufacturing, a sector that has been characterized by a significant negative trend in recent years. After growing between 1993 and 1997, annual growth rates from 1998 to 2000 decreased: the food, tobacco, leather tanning and textile industries suffered most from this recession. The fall in annual growth rates continued in 2001-2003. Already suffering industries experienced a further crisis and even industries that had been in the lead in previous years (i.e. electric appliances and transport industries) slowed down. In 2001-2003, few manufacturing

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industries (i.e. some wood and mechanical industries) were able to withstand this negative trend (Istat 2003). Yet others of our interviewees worked in the ICT sector. In 2002, the Italian ICT market, following a global trend, shrunk 0.5 per cent. However, prospects for the sector remained high because new products and services continued to be in demand from business, households and government. The sector was propelled by rapid technological change, as product life cycles became shorter and new markets opened up for new products and services. Accordingly, the sector was expected to grow 2.6 per cent in 2003 and 5 per cent in 2004 (OECD 2002). In all the above-mentioned sectors, the main changes in work organization had occurred or were occurring at the time our interviews were carried out. These changes concerned: a) increased physical mobility, often as a consequence of company restructuring (e.g. workers were transferred from a worksite to another of the same company but located in a different town); b) increased flexibility in working hours, mainly in terms of shift systems and working days extended to Sundays; c) increased automation; d) task re-organization; e) outsourcing. A common start: The vanished perspective of a job for life We will now examine how our interviewees reconstructed the changes they were involved in at work. In the first place, we will focus on some common points between our interviewees. We will then take into account peculiarities of interviewees experiencing either a positive or a negative change at work (‘winners’ and ‘losers’). Both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ emphasize that flexibility at work needs to be accepted as a constant condition rather than as an exception, and that the perspective of a job for life has definitely vanished. Here is a ‘winner’ speaking: Many people are not prepared ... they still want ... they aim at standard-type employment, at public employment ... this is a completely wrong mentality. That state of things is definitely over. One must ... one must not expect a life-long, open-ended job. (Sandro, entrepreneur, 62)

Here is a ‘loser’ speaking: Initially, when I started working, I told myself: ‘Here I begin and here I’ll finish’. Nowadays, this is no longer the case. I do not have that certainty any more. (Antonio, Tim worker, 40)

Flexibility means being ready to change working hours, places, tasks and sometimes even the job itself. Consistently, all interviewees stress that nowadays the capacity to adapt to new circumstances rapidly is an essential requirement to be successful. They also agree that flexibility meaningfully influences their personal and social life. Time flexibility requires workers to change their habits, both as isolated individuals and as family members. For example, ‘losers’ often complain the about shift-working changes:

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This change, which has also brought about flexible shifts, so ... has unsettled me. It is one of the reasons why I’d surely be ready to change ... because I’m sorry they should take away time from one’s family. ... I mean, you can live family life only at certain times of the day. You cannot live it at 11.00 at night or at 8.00 in the morning when your wife is at work. In my opinion, some balance is necessary. I’m starting to realize that nowadays not only in Telecom, but everywhere they demand time flexibility. Yes, they demand it, and anyhow one’s family is not a top priority. (Emilio, Telecom worker, 30)

‘Winners’, too, stress that they put up with long working hours. They usually start working early in the morning and finish very late in the evening, going well beyond the eight working hours per day. An ICT worker admits: What I would like most ... if I were to choose ... maybe I’d like to earn the same as now or even a little bit less, as long as I’m given three more hours of life every day. (Riccardo, ICT worker, 35)

Location flexibility also affects workers’ habits and has an influence on their social relations. The consequences of commuting are well described by Antonio, a Tim worker who has been moved to a workplace in a different town from where he lives: So, I leave early in the morning, get back late in the evening, and I have no time left ... all the habits I used to have ... I’ve forgotten them, I simply haven’t got time anymore. In the evening, I’m too tired to do anything. ... You just go home and stay up a little while with your kids, till they say good night and go to bed. (Antonio, Tim worker, 40)

For ‘winners’, location flexibility has also an exciting side. They describe working in a different city and often going on business trips around Italy or abroad as good opportunities to visit different places, stay at luxury hotels and eat at first-class restaurants. However, location flexibility has some costs even for ‘winners’. It often means experiencing some loneliness. Well, I worked in Turin [150 km from the interviewee’s hometown] ... For some time I was not well ... I was also engaged, so I would have liked to spend some more time… instead than living in Turin ... living in Turin, I can assure you, was great fun. Working late, going out and eating in restaurants alone, you may go wherever you like ... I mean ... there were no price limits. I mean … if I’d wanted to go and eat out and spend 150.000 lire [i.e., about 80 euros], they wouldn’t have said a word. However, like all nice things, it would have been good to share them ... whereas if you’re alone in Turin ... well ... (Riccardo, ICT worker, 35)

In the end, people are likely to get used to time and place flexibility and to develop new habits. Similarly, old social networks are likely to be replaced by new ones. However, the transition from one condition to the other is critical: in addition to being vulnerable to loneliness, workers are likely to perceive that an entire life system, which has worked well until recently, is dissolving without a new one to replace it. Flexibility at work also means being ready to change one’s job and to accept roles or jobs that are completely different from the ones carried out so far. Many interviewees stress that they have always to learn and develop new skills, to use new instruments and new technologies. At the same time, they have to be willing to get rid

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of their old knowledge, which no longer seems to be useful. Accepting these changes may be extremely difficult for people who explicitly state that they like their job as it is and feel very much committed to it. Most interviewees also make clear that work does not just have an instrumental meaning for them and say that work is (or should be) an opportunity for self-fulfilment. Commitment to one’s job may partly be due to contextual factors, that is, enhanced flexibility and perceived precariousness of the job itself. Nothing seems as precious as what one risks losing. In any case, all interviewees appear to have a clear perception that the change they are experiencing at work is something that may have consequences relevant to their whole lives. Thus, the different aspects of job flexibility are widely referred to by both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Apart from this, the two groups reconstruct their experience in very different ways. The ‘winners’ route Justification of current changes The ‘winners’’ attitude towards current changes at work is clearly summarized by one of the interviewees’ words. All these changes are positive ... If we want to stay on a worldwide market, we must adjust to the others. ... So, there is a cause, a reason for competitiveness. (Sandro, entrepreneur, 62)

Thus, ‘winners’ seem to think that not only the changes they are experiencing but also the wider changes occurring on the labour market are positive. Many of them claim that fixed-term contracts are preferable to open-ended contracts and describe fixed-term contracts as the best way of achieving fast and successful careers. In the ‘winners’ eyes, workers who encounter difficulties in their careers should blame above all their own old-fashioned views. Actually, ‘winners’ often stress that advancement in changing contexts requires individual will and a new mentality, able to adjust to unstable markets: You must be mentally flexible, because if you are rigid, you risk ... of not learning everything new the market can offer, all the opportunities, all the developments, the new technologies that pop up on the market. (Simona, manufacturing, 25)

According to ‘winners’, current changes have been brought about by increased connections among national markets and constant market fluctuation. Changes in the Italian labour market are just an example of the overall necessity to stay competitive on European and international markets. Thus, ‘winners’ explain current changes by referring to market rules and interpret them as an unavoidable and somewhat natural way of running the economy: This ... in my opinion…this is the human nature. When man started accumulating goods ... at first, he was a hunter and ... he collected what he needed for winter. After he gave up nomadic life and started building cities, he could not help but getting to this. This is nothing else than the extreme acceleration [of this process]. (Riccardo, ICT worker, 35)

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Psychological uncertainty Such justification or rationalization of current changes does not protect ‘winners’ from psychological uncertainty. All of them highlight that a considerable amount of risk and uncertainty is implied even in successful careers. Actually, ‘winners’ often emphasize the role played by chance in their careers, both in the past and in the future. For example, when telling how he got his current job, an ICT worker who is employed at a website agency says: As far as I’m concerned, being the first one to get to this agency when they had just started looking for someone with my characteristics was a matter of luck. Maybe one month later would have been too late and they would have employed someone else. So ... I was really lucky. (Federico, ICT worker, 28)

When reflecting about job security, the same interviewee says: Well ... the safe side of this job is that, when you have a client who wants to invest in their company’s image, they will always give you some work to do, so it is something that is likely to remain. Once you’ve acquired a client, if the client is satisfied, they’ll keep working with you. Uncertainty comes when the client decides to cut down on expenses, the first one to be cut down ... because production expenses are necessary, expenses are such and such, so the first cut will be the people who look after the company image ... this is the uncertain side. (Federico, ICT worker, 28)

Nowadays the market poses continuous challenges. On the one hand, enhanced competitiveness spurs one to do one’s best; on the other, it implies risky decisions in an uncertain context: The spur comes from competition, because there are many people doing this job, and you must be competitive as regards economic, qualitative and time aspects. They often call you and tell you: ‘I have a conference in a week, so I need a brochure or a website update’. And you have to decide: either you do it, or you do not do it. You have to be honest: if a task is impossible to do, you have to say so, otherwise you lose your client, or you make a fool of yourself, you burn yourself on the market, and you will not be able to get on your feet again. (Federico, ICT worker, 28)

The ‘ride-the-wave’ philosophy In order to cope with such psychological uncertainty, ‘winners’ embrace a philosophy of contingency. The impact of chance plays a central role in this, as well as an almost exclusive focus on the present and the individual. Borrowing the words of an interviewee, such a worldview might be labelled as a ‘ride-the-wave’ philosophy. ‘Life is entertainment and survival is a game’ ... That is, you must invent it. Guys ... put the coin in the slot machine…new turn, new ride ... provided that you are healthy… you can gamble in this way. ... You have ... of course there’s the possibility of a backlash, something may bring you up and down like a surf wave. ... Things happen. That’s the reason why I believe that the individual’s part is pre-eminent. I mean ... having a culture … having something that enables you to be independent, reversible and adaptable … I may

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Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right be a little bit slower, I may earn something less, I may earn something more, why not? I’d like to highlight that ... anyhow, the world changes… things are this way. Luckily enough, I am healthy, and I am 34, 35. If I’m afraid now, what will I do when I am 50? (Riccardo, ICT worker, 35)

Obviously, ‘winners’ want to and struggle to ride the wave as long as they can. As the previous quotation implies, the ‘ride-the-wave’ philosophy does not produce monolithic optimism. Rather, it implies mixed positive and negative feelings. Competitiveness is without conditions, because survival on the labour market is at stake. Inevitably, enhanced competitiveness and the impact of chance are strongly associated with increased perceptions that any achievement is contingent and unstable: if today you are on the top of the wave, tomorrow it could be somebody else. As the above quotation shows, surviving in such a context requires some boldness. Consistently, the most frequent strategy that ‘winners’ employ to ride the wave is reliance on the self. ‘You are your best product’, Riccardo says. Being prepared enough, and ready to face the job market successfully in case of dismissal or failure, is up to the individual. Perceived individual expertise The feeling of having (or of having the possibility to develop) the necessary capacities and expertise to be successful is decisive to cope with such a challenging context. Those skills are often described in metaphors referring to arts and crafts. This is an ICT worker speaking, whose job is software development for business: In short, I define myself as a tailor. That is, when you buy a suit, it seldom fits you perfectly, that is, it fits you because you like the colour, you like the style, you like the way ... but the sleeves may be too long or it may not fit your back ... So, I start thinking about it and in the end we give it to them [i.e. the clients] … if not a tailor-made dress, something just as good ... either you straighten your back or I make your sleeves longer. (Riccardo, ICT worker, 35)

To envisage the future, as far as it is possible in an uncertain context, one also needs something that cannot be learnt: You need passion. It is like a painter. You must close your eyes and you should see ... your picture, as a snapshot, you should see your picture finished. ... If you see it, then take your palette and start painting. Otherwise, leave it alone. (Sandro, entrepreneur, 62)

Thus, in the ‘winners’’ opinion, imagination, creativity, individual insight, personal will and passion are the necessary skills to survive and stay competitive on the market. Perceived control The perception of having these skills persuades ‘winners’ that they can exert some control on their working conditions and status, even in such an uncertain and unstable context, and that consequently they can actively manage current changes, rather

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than passively suffer them. However, once again this does not generate unshakeable certainty. Many ‘winners’ feel that their skills are a means of coping with change, but they are also convinced that they cannot be a stable basis upon which to stand safely. Furthermore, such perception of control is twofold: if success is perceived to depend on individual capacities, the other side of the coin is that failure is also attributed almost exclusively to the individual, their incapacity or their lack of will. What I say is online, and what I say is done. And this is not bad. Of course, it has its pros and cons, because if you make a blunder, it’s your responsibility. (Riccardo, ICT worker, 35) I’ll give you an example: if you and I play draughts and I lose, it’s not the draughts’ fault. It’s just up to me ... I have made the wrong moves. (Sandro, entrepreneur, 62)

Accordingly, pride in success goes hand in hand with the perception of being acrobats performing without a safety net. This is reconstructed as a thrilling experience, a challenge that ‘winners’ appear to face practically alone. Actually, most ‘winners’ show strong individualistic attitudes. They are all focused on the self and on the entrepreneurial activities they have created by their own work and sacrifice. Merit rules govern the job domain Finally, what is the general principle that ‘winners’ seem to draw from the changes they have experienced? ‘Winners’ work under conditions of high psychological uncertainty, they actively endorse ongoing changes thanks to a philosophy of contingency, they rely almost exclusively on their own individual skills, they feel they are exerting some control but they also bear the responsibility for risky decisions. The outcome is successful careers and rewarding jobs. Therefore, ‘winners’ can conclude that: My opinion is that anyway ... good will and capacity are rewarded. When one has the will to do his job well, they’ll be rewarded. I don’t think that there are advantaged or disadvantaged persons. If a person is good, in my opinion, his merits are recognized, whatever his work position is. (Riccardo, ICT worker, 35)

In fact, the need to defend one’s advanced position constantly requires thorough commitment. ‘Winners’ invest a lot of time and energy in their job, make personal sacrifices for it and often take personal risks when big sums of money as well as their professional reputation are at stake. It is therefore no surprise if they reconstruct their success as a well-deserved prize. In the ‘winners’ eyes, their advantaged position is only the fair consequence of the big efforts they put in their job. So, according to the ‘winners’ perspective, people who are willing to do their job well do not have any problem, whatever the wider context may be. In other words, merit rules apply to the job domain and one always gets what s/he deserves.

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The ‘losers’’ route Condemnation of current changes When asked about the origin of current changes in their job, many ‘losers’ focus on the greed for money. It is money. In my opinion, in the past you worked for the product, for the quality of the product ... There was more stability ... thus you worked for quality, you felt safe. On the contrary, for me now everything has changed, completely. You aim exclusively at money, and what matters most is the balance sheet. Nothing else matters. In the end, if you’ve made profit, everything is all right; if not, everything is bad. (Emilio, Telecom worker, 30)

Losers do not understand the companies’ strategies and they construe them as merely cynical. Just for the sake of monetary gains, companies do not hesitate to implement changes that are bad for everyone: for the workers, who suffer because of them, for the clients, who are offered poor-quality products, and for society, because such a profit philosophy fosters consumerism and a decay of moral values. Accordingly, ‘losers’ often express a kind of moral condemnation of current changes for the absolute priority given to economic profit at the expense of other important values. Moral condemnation of the present is often combined with regret for a golden and idealized past: I am old-fashioned. I see that as long as fathers were involved, companies went on well. Since sons have taken over, everything has blown up. It must be something at managerial level, I don’t know, something has gone wrong. Maybe, it all comes down to daddy’s boys who are not able to be good managers. (Stefania, temporary worker, 30)

Such a comparison with a golden past enhances perceived negativity of current changes. The comparison between the past and the present is construed so that the past is described as definitely positive, while the present is described only in terms of drawbacks. The fact of having had that job for many years ... I liked it very much […] I had many proposals to change, but I always refused. ... But everything has changed now. Moving from the international division to the customer information department has been traumatic for me. I have lived it badly. ... For thirteen years I lived well, very well. Then, there was a breakdown ... a breakdown. (Antonio, Tim worker, 40)

Material and psychological uncertainty In a context that is constantly changing and chasing a profit, ‘losers’ experience both material and psychological uncertainty. Material uncertainty is exacerbated in temporary workers, who often complain of the impossibility of planning their future due to the instability of their income. In fact, if temporary work represents an improvement as compared with irregular work, it still does not guarantee a living in the long run and does not enable workers to make any plans, even the simplest ones. Fixed-term contracts are considered as a source of instability and precariousness.

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If you want to change your car, no bank will lend you the money. ... You have no future ... Really, you cannot make any project, you cannot do anything. (Stefania, temporary worker, 30)

Psychological uncertainty is ubiquitous. Even workers employed in large companies, who could feel rather protected, at least as regards their wages, express serious concerns about their future. For example, a worker who experienced the changes brought about by company privatization and restructuring says: Today I know I’m here, but maybe next week, things may change … both at the political level and at the company level ... Thus certainties, especially for us older workers, are becoming weaker and weaker, and this is what we’re more and more … afraid of. I feel that my job is threatened, and since I feel threatened, I’m afraid because ... I don’t know what I will end up doing ... As they’ve come round to flexibility, they might also come round to lay-offs. (Antonio, Tim worker, 40)

Enhanced material and psychological uncertainty make ‘losers’ focus almost exclusively on the present. However, unlike ‘winners’, ‘losers’ perceive their focusing on the present as a frustration of the basic human need to have projects for the future, and they live it in quite a depressed and passive mood. Five years from now? I am not able to see myself ... I have stopped thinking about the future, about what will happen ... I think about it once in a while, but I can’t see anything. I will wait for some phone calls from work agencies. So, five years from now, I hope to find a regular job, but I have no certainties at all. Consequently, I cannot see beyond. (Stefania, temporary worker, 30)

The ‘mere cipher’ philosophy The perceived negativity of the situation is worsened by the perception of being at the lowest rank. Drawing once again on interviewees’ own words, many ‘losers’ endorse the ‘mere cipher’ philosophy: We really feel like a mere cipher ... We’re ... how can I put it ... the interface of the company, which wants us to behave in a certain way. But we’ve that great pressure on our shoulders ... both from the company and from the clients, who want ... who want quick, immediate answers ... We’re between two fires, unfortunately we’re in the last row. (Antonio, Tim worker, 40)

Thus, while some powerful others are surely making a profit from the changes, this is not at all the case for the ‘losers’, who perceive themselves as the victims of an unequal situation. Lack of perceived individual expertise In addition to perceiving that they are in a disadvantaged condition, ‘losers’ perceive that they have no means to escape from such a condition because they do not have the skills that are most required nowadays.

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Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right I’ve always done this job. I would not be able to do anything else ... New technologies, market development … I mean … many factors require you to keep constantly up-to-date, and you have to do it all the time, as fast as possible. ... I admit that from time to time I find it difficult to keep up-to-date, about many things … Here, every day you have to learn, to remember ... my memory is not so ... but it’s one of the most important requirements, I think. I often happen not to remember many things. (Antonio, Tim worker, 40)

‘Losers’ often complain that their own professional expertise, which they have acquired thanks to many years of hard work, is not useful anymore. Even worse, they feel that it is almost impossible for them to acquire the skills that are now necessary to make successful careers. In the ‘losers’ accounts, perceived lack of individual expertise is often combined with the perception that workers are faced with a false choice. You can either accept changes or resign, which is seen as blackmail. Most workers cannot afford to leave their job and search for a new one because their job is necessary for the upkeep of their families. Lack of perceived control The natural consequence is that ‘losers’ feel that they have lost all control over the changes. They have definitely lost the possibility of controlling their job both as regards the task they are asked to carry out and as regards their role within the company. As regards their jobs, ‘losers’ often complain that job re-organization has brought about task fragmentation and that, because of job automation, their job is less professional and more standardized than before: They give you some inputs and you must follow those inputs and nothing else ... You know … you don’t have the possibility to start a task and then finish it. It’s a much more superficial work than it used to be. (Emilio, Telecom worker, 30)

As regards their role within the company, workers feel just like pawns moved from one place to another because of the interests of powerful others: Then for some years now things have been changing as to company strategies ... they moved us young people, they moved us all to the marketing department and there was no choice, they told us: ‘you are here’ and that’s it ... They don’t fire you but they make you go to a department where they need more personnel. (Emilio, Telecom worker, 30)

Thus, ‘losers’ have often made the painful experience that change is imposed from outside without any consideration of individual expertise or merit. In the ‘losers’ view changes have not brought about any work rationalization. Rather, they have caused a levelling down of individual merits and an overall lowering in professional expertise. In a word, ‘losers’ feel that their company has abandoned them. It is only natural that workers for their part abandon the company, at least psychologically, though with some bitterness: I take this issue to heart because, quite frankly, seeing a company like Telecom losing some points, losing its value it hurts me ... Because I’m the kind of person who works for

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the company and wants to do his job well ... Before, I had never thought of changing my job because I liked it; now I wouldn’t feel bad about changing it, looking for another job. (Emilio, Telecom worker, 30)

Merit rules should govern the job domain To sum up the ‘losers’ psychological condition, we might say that ‘losers’ experience negative changes and related material and psychological uncertainty. They also feel that they have no means of escape from their disadvantaged situation nor any ability to control the process of change that they are the victims of. On the other hand, they feel they are very committed to their work and to their company. Accordingly, ‘losers’ perceive an imbalance between the efforts they put into their job and their actual bad conditions at work. In order to make sense of such an imbalance, they often refer to the lack of respect for merit rules at work, because of which people do not get what they deserve. I’m the kind of guy who likes to do his job well. Also I don’t mind making efforts and sacrifices. If I do my job well and try to achieve good results, I make all the effort I can, but I don’t like to work with dark glasses on, so to speak. That is, today things are so but tomorrow they may change them altogether, they may upset everything. All that you’ve done so far it’s worth nothing. I don’t like it. I feel I have no gear. That is, I don’t know how long I’ll do my current job, may be in a week or so they’ll tell me: ‘Alright, you’ve got to change it completely’ ... In my opinion, people who do their job well shouldn’t have any problem. (Emilio, Telecom worker, 30)

Thus, when explaining their disadvantaged condition, ‘losers’ put particular stress on the underestimation of their individual merits. As it is, such an explanation mirrors the one given by ‘winners’, and discussed above, according to which their advantaged condition is mainly attributable to their individual merits. From the job domain to the political domain The merit principle: Legitimating social inequality Considering what we have seen so far, the explanation our interviewees give of their either advantaged or disadvantaged condition at work may be summed up as follows. Some individuals deserve more than others do. Crises, changes and other problems that may arise at work are likely to be solved if individual merits are adequately respected. Neither ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ mention other possible ways of solving problems at work that may lie outside the role of the individual, for example solidarity among workers or structural changes in the working system. The only reference to structural changes may be found among the ‘losers’ and concerns the generic necessity of going back to a value and merit system that is no longer applied. Both categories of interviewees often show this frame of mind in a simple and direct way. According to them, people who respect the ‘rules of the game’, that is, people who are able and work hard, must be rewarded. In contrast, people who do not respect

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the ‘rules of the game’, that is, lazy or incompetent workers, must be punished. Both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ call for a strong hand that enforces this basic principle. For example, a ‘winner’ says: Here what matters is giving people who don’t do their job a good kick in the ass, people who don’t do their job as they should but just do what they want. ... There are also some people who take advantage, so you must pull the reins on them. (Valentina, Tim worker, 30)

Similarly, a ‘loser’ says: If only one felt that his chair might be taken away from him ... For example, it’s happened to me recently, one of those guys you find in public offices, an employee with his openended public contract, he nearly throws the papers on his desk in your face and he plainly tells you that he doesn’t feel like working that day ... Well, that employee, if he feels that his chair might be taken away from him, he might get down to some work for a change and things might go better ... I think that giving some people a good shake would do them good. (Stefania, temporary worker, 30)

Authoritarianism Such a frame of mind may still be found when interviewees shift from the job domain to the political domain. According to the interviewees, people who break social norms must be punished and are entirely responsible at an individual level. No hint is made at social responsibility or the possibility of implementing political or economic measures that might reduce or prevent the violation of norms. In a ‘winner’’s words: I am not a supporter of guarantees and forgiveness. If you rob, you must be punished. ... Mussolini ... you may call it dictatorship, as you like ... It was an example of good government. (Riccardo, ICT worker, 35)

In a ‘loser’’s words: Really…there is lack of values in today’s society ... Some values should be almost imposed upon ... In my opinion, this also comes from a lack of teaching in the family ... I can remember my father saying: ‘lunch time is lunch time: don’t be late’, because anyway some things must be guaranteed, they must be respected. (Emilio, Telecom worker, 30)

In both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ we may therefore find a distinctive feature of right-wing authoritarianism, namely a high level of aggressiveness against outgroup members who are perceived as a threat against the established social norms (Altemeyer 1998). Prejudice against immigrants The way ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ speak about immigrants may be a good example of the frame of mind described above. Our interviewees come up with several examples

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referring to various social contexts in which immigrants are seen as breaking established norms or deviating from accepted values of our society. I do not like when those people [i.e. immigrants] come here without papers. They must have papers. You know ... I mean ... when we went to America, we worked bloody hard, they checked whether we had lice, they checked our documents, what we were going to do, the families we came from, whether there were any links with mafia. ... Women had not to be pregnant. If they were…I came across an immigrant woman at the hospital [at the time when the interviewee was at the hospital waiting to give birth to her child] ... well ... I would have kicked her. She stayed in the bed next to mine, she was convinced that they would give her some clothes for the child, they would give her the cradle, they would give her all the necessary, all free. ... And that woman said: ‘I made the baby because in this way… my husband hasn’t got a job yet ... in this way they will renew his residence permit for one more year’. I can’t stand it! You come here and say this to my face? ... Why should we keep all those immigrants? I mean… those who take advantage of the situation, I’d throw them out ... I don’t find it fair. (Valentina, Tim worker, 30) If they [i.e. immigrants] come here to integrate, they’re welcome. ... A thing that I can’t stand is the fact that anyone, Jewish, Lutheran, animist, Muslim and so on comes here and tells me that at the school my son goes to ... they must take away the crucifix because that little corpse hanging from the cross scares their child…I mean, go to hell ... If you don’t like the crucifix at school, go back where you came from. (Riccardo, ICT worker, 35)

Speaking about immigrants, interviewees often do not explicitly condemn them or refer to their individual responsibility. They express their judgement in softer tones and in ways that are more implicit. In today’s society, overt expression of prejudice against ethnic minorities is often moderated by social desirability concerns, and shown in socially accepted forms (Altemeyer 1998; Katz and Hass 1988). This means that prejudiced behaviour against ethnic minorities is most likely to emerge when that behaviour can be justified in non-racial terms (Gaertner and Dovidio 1986). Consistently, one of the arguments often used by interviewees is a consideration of the link between immigration and criminality as practically unavoidable, considering that people who do not work and are extremely poor are very likely to commit crimes. According to me, what do they do? They come here and, in the end, what do they do? They don’t have a job, they don’t have a residence permit, and they don’t have anything. What should they do? They must rob. (Pietro, temporary worker, 26) Immigrants who come to Italy hope to find a job and earn some money. Now the fact that either you don’t find a job or you’re not willing to find one, may lead to criminality, for sure. (Sandro, entrepreneur, 62)

The consequence the interviewees seem to draw from such arguments is quite clear: immigrants should not come to our country. When you’re hungry, you’re ready to do anything even if you’re the most honest person in the world. If I see my son dying, I can kill somebody to get some money ... The real

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problem is not to let them come here ... we have to find a filter. (Stefania, temporary worker, 30) I’m not a racist, but I don’t agree with so many people coming here ... you know ... I can understand those miserable people, but whenever I see those ships overloaded with people ... You should not sink them, of course, for God’s sake, but why do they come to Italy only? ... Can’t they also go to another country? (Pietro, temporary worker, 26)

The arguments used by both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ about immigrants may be related to the dominant theme of their own view of the working as well as the socio-political life, which may be summed up as follows: Some individuals deserve more than others, hierarchies based upon merit have to be respected and, consequently, social inequality is necessary and unavoidable (cf. Benabu 2000; Lewin-Epstein, Kaplan and Levanon 2003; Miller 1999). This ideological support for meritocracy and social inequality appears to be functional to both the ‘winners’ and the ‘losers’ needs. On the one hand, it silences the ‘winners’’ conscience because it corroborates the view that their own privileged condition is fair and legitimate. On the other, it facilitates the ‘losers’’ acceptance of disadvantage because it provides them with the hope that, once a strong authority really enforced merit rules, they would get the privileged positions they feel entitled to (cf. Jost and Hunyady 2002). Conclusion The qualitative analysis presented in this chapter has allowed us a close examination of the link between people’s explanation of a positive versus negative change in their job condition and the development of extreme right-wing attitudes. In this link, the merit principle, according to which everyone has or should have what they deserve (cf. Kluegel and Smith 1986; Major 1994), has been shown to play a crucial role. Our two groups of interviewees often refer to this principle when offering an interpretation of the positive or negative change they have experienced at work. Workers experiencing a positive change (the ‘winners’) see change as a challenge that has to be accepted, as an opportunity to exert their capacities in terms of professional creativity and control over their life. Even if sometimes they highlight the role of chance in their life and the perception of ‘walking on a tightrope’, the main stress is on the role of the individual and their present privileged condition is mainly attributed to their individual merits. Workers experiencing a negative change (the ‘losers’) see change as precariousness and the lack of the possibility to exert any form of control over one’s work. Lack of control ranges from the most immediate sphere of everyday working activity (tasks, procedures, practicalities) to the wider sphere of long-term planning of working careers. The unpredictability of working life is attributed to several causes, but particular stress is laid on a widespread underestimation of actual capacities and merits. Accordingly, ‘losers’ mainly attribute their present disadvantaged condition at work to the fact that their individual merits are not properly acknowledged. To sum up, ‘winners’ refer to the merit principle as a principle that actually regulates the work market and as a justification of the advantaged situation in which they find themselves (‘people

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who work well do not have problems’). On the contrary, ‘losers’ refer to the merit principle as an unobserved rule that, if respected, would allow them to escape their disadvantaged situation (‘people who work well should not have problems’). Such a marked reference to individual merits and a corresponding lack of reference to any forms of social responsibility or solidarity in the work domain are clearly mirrored in the political attitudes of both groups of interviewees. These attitudes are typical of extreme right-wing parties and are centred on the inevitability of social inequality, on the devaluation of minority social categories such as immigrants, on the opportunity of resorting to authoritarian and punitive measures in order to maintain or re-establish the status quo. Several authors have investigated the psychological origins of such extreme right-wing views, and most of them have traced them back to the socialization process during infancy or adolescence. Early socialization in an emotionally cold and repressive family environment would result in people being much more likely to develop repressed hostility that they in turn project onto lowstatus outgroups, and ultimately in their endorsing right-wing ideologies (inter alia Adorno et al. 1950; Fromm 1941; Rokeach 1960; Tetlock and Mitchell 1993). In addition, our analysis has shown that experiences that people live in later stages of their life, for example during their working life, may also contribute to developing or strengthening individualism and views about social inequality that are typical of extreme right-wing ideology.

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Chapter 6

Public Safety – Private Right: The Public-Private Divide and Receptiveness of Employees to Right-Wing Extremism in Flanders (Belgium) Yves De Weerdt and Hans De Witte

Introduction For this Flemish chapter we have tried to make full use of the possibilities the SIREN research design offered. We generated hypotheses based on the results and conclusions of the qualitative material and tried to test these hypotheses on the quantitative material from the SIREN survey. We chose to deal with a specific problematic that arose from the Flemish interviews, namely the differences between the reactions of public-sector and private-sector employees to the socio-economic changes they had experienced, as well as the changes themselves and the association of these changes with attitudes towards the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block). The main points were (1) that employees from the private sector seemed to be more used to a changing environment, although unlike public-sector employees they had almost no room left for work intensification; and (2) because of the sector they were working in, public-sector workers seemed to relate the changes they had experienced more directly to government and politics, which therefore led to different evaluations of the message of the Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang). Though this perspective is new to Flemish political research, research and theory on the public-private divide in relation to politics already exists. The public-private sectoral divide has been theorized as the difference between a market logic and a politics logic regarding the effects on political attitudes or behaviour (Langford 1996). For the private sector, this logic involves a ‘code of service’ that implies explicit loyalty to the employing organization. For the public sector, the ‘service logic’ involves an ambiguous combination of loyalty to the public and loyalty to the employing government or government-financed company. The fact that in the public sector money is advanced in order to meet (general social) needs further sustains the loyalty to the public (Carchedi 1975 and 1977; Furaker 1987, 86). In contrast, in the private (or for-profit) sector money is advanced in order to make a profit. The general

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hypothesis behind the analyses we will present here is that these different sectoral logics will to some extent penetrate into the political attitudes of people working in these sectors and influence the processes by which they come about. The relevance of this issue is twofold. From a research point of view, differences between the public and private sectors have not yet been examined in relation to rightwing extremism, though, as mentioned above, there are many elements that might suggest such a relation. Secondly, possible differences between public- and privatesector employees concerning socio-political attitudes have a bearing on the publicsector transformations Europe is currently facing, and on the attempts to dismantle the protective shield (e.g. the Bolkestein directive) that the public sector is still trying to maintain in many countries. Self-evidently, reflections on the transitions going on in the former Eastern-bloc countries can be made from these results as well. In this chapter, after briefly sketching the country background, we will first outline the main results of the Flemish qualitative phase and formulate some hypotheses to be tested with the quantitative material. We will then turn to the quantitative part and present the results of our analyses of the Flemish survey data. We will show that there is evidence from the data that different processes determine the receptiveness of publicand private-sector employees to the extreme right-wing. We conclude by discussing the possible impact of these findings on policy and on further research in this area. Background information: Flanders in a nutshell Right-wing extremism in Flanders: One party Right-wing extremism in Flanders is centred around just one political party, namely the Vlaams Blok (which meanwhile has become Vlaams Belang) and some related organizations. The Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block) has been on the rise since 1987. Starting with about two per cent of the Flemish votes, the Blok grew steadily throughout the 1990s. In 2004, with 24.5 per cent of the Flemish votes, the Vlaams Blok was the second-largest party in Flanders, and the distance from the three biggest parties is steadily narrowing. Recent polls even predict that almost a third of the Flemish votes could go to the Vlaams Belang if elections were held today. There are no other noticeable extreme right-wing movements besides the Vlaams Belang and its related organizations. Socio-economic change: Important transitions The same period has been marked economically by a pronounced transition from classical heavy industry to a more service-orientated economy, with consequent problems for the labour market, which was not always able to keep up with the rapidity of these changes. Besides this, the state-owned companies have been forced from near monopoly situations, e.g. the post office, to being actors in a very competitive European (and even global) market, leading to significant job-losses in the public sector. Over the last few years the economy has also been hit by some major closures, the most important probably being Renault Vilvoorde and Sabena (the

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national airline), making thousands of jobs redundant. Fighting unemployment has evidently not been an easy task during this period. But although these changes – just like the events of 9/11 – did of course affect the Flemish economy, it did not perform too badly on the whole in the period preceding this research. Main trends in former state-owned companies and the consequences of liberalization and privatization The first companies we selected for interviews either were or had recently been state owned: the telecommunications company Belgacom, the national railways and the post office. This was because liberalization and privatization of these state-owned companies has had severe socio-economic consequences for their employees. The following section briefly describes the changes and their consequences in the period preceding the survey.1 The liberalization of the telecommunication market, for instance, had resulted in Belgacom becoming the first state company to be privatized. By then over 10,000 jobs at Belgacom had already disappeared and restructuring was still continuing. But even more jobs would be lost, and only a small number of these would be taken over by other operators on the Belgian market. At the time of the SIREN survey the privatization process was also continuing for the post office, with thousands of jobs already lost, and was hanging over the railways as well. Moreover, these changes have had serious effects on the contractual agreements and working conditions of the employees in these companies. Previously, all workers at state-owned companies had fixed statutory contracts with the virtual certainty of life-long employment and a good pension. Now, more and more people are being hired on mostly temporary work contracts. In Belgacom, for example, contracts were renegotiated during the transition to a private company, forcing people to agree, for instance, to any demands for mobility. Flexibility is clearly a key issue that is imposed on the employees in various domains. Because of all the people who have disappeared through the various restructurings, the pressure on those who have stayed is sometimes intense. In these three companies we therefore selected current and former state-owned companies in different stages of privatization, restructuring and transformation. Belgacom is as good as completely privatized, the post office is somewhere in the middle and NMBS, the railways, still has some way to go. a. Belgacom The number of jobs at Belgacom has been reduced by more than half over the last ten years. First, a quarter of the then 45,000 employees had to leave in early 1996. The next big wave of redundancies took place in 1998, with over 6,000 employees leaving the company. This was a result of a European guideline for the liberalization of the telecom sector. Three more waves followed: one in February 2001, another in June 2002 and a last one (for now) in December 2002, all together accounting for a further 1 We are aware of the fact that there have been major new changes in some of these companies since our survey. However, they have no bearing on the results presented in this chapter.

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4,000-plus job losses. Even though this has reduced the number of employees to about 23,000, this does not yet seem to be the end of the restructuring. b. De Post (post office) In March 2000 the post office officially became a private company, though the market only fully opened in 2003. From the former RTT (Directorate for Telegraphy and Telephones), it evolved into an autonomous state-owned company, then towards a future as a private player in a competitive, open market for postal services. The minister nowadays no longer speaks of postmen and post offices but calls them ‘sales managers’ and ‘sales offices’, illustrating the new approach since privatization and reflecting the new attitude expected from the former public employees. In the last few years before the survey, some 200 post offices were closed, particularly the smaller ones. This led to negative reactions from the public, who already had a poor image of state-owned companies. A new system for measuring the work of the postal workers was to be introduced, which had already caused a major row. Informatization and automation were pursued wherever possible. The impact on the employees’ working conditions was extensive. The cost in terms of labour-market effects of past and future restructurings that were then known would probably be more than 10,000 jobs. c. NMBS (national railway) The railways still had about 40,000 employees at the time of the survey because they had continued to take on new employees as older workers retired. As far job loss is concerned, the NMBS had therefore not been confronted with the same changes as for example Belgacom and the post office. Nevertheless, there had been initial attempts to change the protected contracts of the railway personnel, which caused considerable unrest. Moreover, many people were worried about the poor financial situation of the railways, fearing they might be forced into bankruptcy, like Sabena the year before. Others thought this situation was part of a legitimation of a future privatization. In any case, despite the fact that the situation for railway workers had not until then been so bad as for those in other state-owned companies, the future was unclear and further restructurings (whether through privatization or not) seemed unavoidable. There was therefore certainly a feeling of threat amongst the employees. Main trends in other selected sectors We selected the other two sectors, textile manufacturing and the automobile industry, for two reasons. First, both sectors were in clear decline in Flanders at the time of our research, both largely because of delocalization of one sort or another. The second reason was the low status of textile employees, certainly in knitting factories, and the image of boring repetitiveness for people working at the assembly lines. a. Manufacturing: Textiles The production volume of the Belgian textile and clothing manufacturing sector is always a reflection of global economic developments, albeit slightly more extreme. This means that the peak of the last economic cycle was in the first quarter of 2000, although growth stayed reasonably positive for the whole

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year. Economic growth then started to slow down. Combined with the events of September 11th, there was little doubt that this unfavourable economic development would have a negative effect on employment in the sector. b. Manufacturing: The automobile industry The automobile sector was and still is very important for Flanders. It employs 30,000 people directly and creates work for some 120,000 more indirectly. After a relative stabilization of employment in the technological industry sector, including automobile manufacturing, severe job losses were to be expected in the near future. Estimates were that at least 8,000 jobs would be lost, a great deal of them in automobile manufacturing (Opel (GM), Ford, Volkswagen). Of course, this reflected the general worldwide crisis in the sector at that time, which had already shown itself in Belgium through the closure of Renault Vilvoorde – a shadow that still hung over this sector in Belgium in 2002, since the automobile sector here has been under continuous pressure. The public-private divide: Indications from the qualitative data The qualitative phase In the qualitative phase of the SIREN research, we interviewed a sample of 42 Flemish employees. Both the sample and the method of transcription and interpretation have been described in full in the synthesis report of the qualitative research phase and were quite similar for all countries (Hentges et al. 2003). A particular feature of the Flemish case was that the sample contained a considerable number of trade union activists. There were two reasons for this, the first being that the trade unions were our main point of entry to the companies. Activists then seem to be the people most easy to approach for such research. But even in cases where the management provided us with a list of employees, they too gave a sample that included many trade union activists. There was probably a second reason for this, namely that union activists are legally given a certain period of time off work to perform their union duties. Thus management (and production) does not experience any trouble if a trade union activist goes for an interview during their legal ‘syndical leave’. As soon as we noticed this, we asked to speak to roughly equal numbers of trade union people and ‘normal’ employees. Nevertheless, ‘normal’ employees turned out to be a slight minority in the final sample. We also noticed that the sample contained many older employees. For some companies, such as the post office, one reason for this could that part-time employees, who were often the younger employees in the companies we visited, are difficult to get hold of for an interview. On the other hand, the higher mean age in the sample does fit the image we gathered after visiting the companies whose employees we were interviewing. We always asked to be shown around the company we visited in order to get a genuine picture of the employee population and their working environment. The stories of the interviewed people pointed in the same direction. We often heard people say that younger people only got temporary contracts or that they had fled in the face of the economic threat of the sectors we

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were visiting. It seems that young people do not sit around waiting for the end of the company (and of their jobs), but this is only an impression. All the interviews took place in the period between August and November 2002. The public-private divide throughout the qualitative material The stories of the Flemish employees led to an interesting line of thought. This emerged after we went back to the Flemish material a second time. The first time, the analyses were focused on delivering the material for the European synthesis report (Hentges et al. 2003) and were subsequently framed in a different theoretical logic. This time, within the perspective of this chapter, we went back to the Flemish qualitative material looking for a specific and interesting approach that could add to the overall European synthesis of the qualitative material. The line of thought that developed after re-analysis of the Flemish interviews concerns the process of privatization of state enterprises and the different relationships of public- and privatesector employees to politics and government. But first let us present the evidence from the interview material, which forms the basis of our later assumptions. Change in content and pace of work Although the experience of increased pressure of work seems to be a general one, there is still a difference in the way employees in state-owned enterprises and employees in private companies assess this. In stateowned enterprises, the restructuring and rationalization campaigns that have caused the increasing pressure of work are seen as rational, logical and even much-needed measures. Among the respondents from state enterprises there is quite a general consensus that something had to be done to bring them up to date, never mind making them competitive in an open market such as the one Europe is creating for them. The employees were clearly aware that they were lagging behind in terms of the organization of work, equipment, management, etc. This awareness therefore seems to have tempered their resistance to change and to any increase in the pressure of work. In private companies, where there was less room for manoeuvre, the increase in the pressure of work has caused far more difficulty. The constant waves of restructuring and reorganization that have swept through the various companies during the past ten years are therefore increasingly intolerable and are sometimes branded as inhuman. It is difficult to draw clear dividing lines, however, since there is also considerable variability within sectors. The majority of employees in the textile industry indicated that the nature of their work had changed significantly during the past few years: in order to raise productivity the quality of work is ‘allowed’ to fall – a comment that was also heard in the automobile sector. This ‘guideline’ has been implemented through increased job flexibility (people have to be able to do more jobs but the quality of work declines) or by driving up the pace of work (as a result of which the quality also falls). Employees had different opinions about these changes: some of them, who have difficulty with change generally, consider it too difficult to learn a number of different tasks all at once, while others appreciate this broadening of their work. Some 2 It was our particular aim to visit companies in sectors under economic threat because we were interested in people’s reaction to such a threat.

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people, on the other hand, are frustrated by the fact that only the quantity of their work counts, not the quality. It is clear that these changes are accompanied by shifts in the orientation of work: since quantity rather than quality is demanded, employees are deprived of any pride in their work. As a result they lose their identification with their job and their work is reduced to being not much more than simply earning a living. Those interviewed from the automobile sector were unanimous about the major impact of successive restructuring campaigns on the nature of their work. In particular they referred to new work systems involving additional time-and-motion studies. These Fordist-type studies are intended to achieve extreme efficiency in the activities of each blue-collar worker on the production line, which also has to be divided into packets of work in the most efficient way. According to the employees, the main effect of all this is a reduction in their freedom of movement and even their general freedom in the workplace. It is therefore suggested that ‘the line’ has taken control over the pace of their work: blue-collar workers are less able to determine their ‘working time’ themselves. Next, both heavier and lighter jobs have disappeared from the range. Robots have taken on a lot of the heavier work and many of the lighter tasks have been outsourced to other companies. The difficulty at present is therefore in the monotony and also the rapid pace of work. The rotation system, which was introduced as a reaction to this and as a result of which a person is given a different job every hour, does not alleviate this problem. The difference between state enterprises and private companies was thus particularly obvious. The employees from private companies, it seems, have been confronted more starkly with the negative consequences of socio-economic changes. What is more, these people have a much stronger feeling of being subject to what some interviewees called ‘the dehumanizing logic of capital’ and others ‘the overpowering profit logic’. The logic of capital is a phrase often heard with trade union representatives. Other workers will more likely use terms like ‘blaming the all-for-profit logic’ of big companies as a way to describe the global economic processes they perceive. Although most blue-collar workers in state enterprises are very cautious about restructuring – referring to the public image of inefficient, money-wasting state enterprises in this domain – they understand at the same time that changes are necessary if the enterprise is going to be competitive within an open European and global market. For them, however, the restructuring that has already taken place has so far been tolerable. There is a lot of fear, however, about possible attacks on or even the loss of their firmly established status as state employees. Work and social identity The interviews gave the impression that in every case employees link their status partly to what they produce and partly to the work that they do. In both cases, however, it seemed that a difference still remains between employees in state enterprises and employees in private companies. The state enterprises, and certainly the services that they provide are often the subject of an extensive social debate, or, via the media, regularly become the focus of public debate. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about the failings of De Post, most people pay telephone bills and use other services provided by Belgacom, and even if people do not take the train themselves, they will still have an opinion about the latest rail strike which ‘has

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not affected the bosses but has hurt ordinary people, which-of-course-is-scandalous’. This is simply to indicate that employees in state enterprises sometimes seem to suffer because of the prevailing public image of state enterprises. The persistent stereotype of the ‘lazy civil servant with a job for life and a fat pension’ plays a part here. The image of state enterprises as inflexible, money-wasting machines is also a contributory factor. Regardless of all the innovation and reorganization within the state enterprises that were studied, this leads to an apparent conflict between the perception of a new dynamism, of working to build a modern and competitive business, and on the other hand the inertia of the prevailing prejudices in public opinion. In private companies the situation is rather different. The employees from these companies who were interviewed work on a product with a much more limited target group and with less visibility in society. This does not reduce their concerns about delivering a good product, on the contrary, employees clearly take a pride in their work. The problems they have with status thus generally have less to do with what public opinion thinks about their product and more with its appreciation by society, or rather the lack of it. Certainly the knitters we interviewed indicated that they considered themselves to be low down on the status ladder. This did not arise so frequently among the automobile workers. Although they felt good if the model of car they were producing was popular and got good reviews, it is also true that a ‘failed’ model and disappointing sales figures can severely limit their job satisfaction. Nevertheless, the impact of this does not seem to be as great as it is in state enterprises. Coping with change The way in which people cope with change is largely determined by how these changes are presented to them. In other words, people seem to have fewer problems with change when they understand the whys and wherefores behind it. Hence we see powerlessness arising mainly at times when changes are imposed from above but not explained, when people do not see the point of the change or even consider it a backward step. If we then look at the sectors separately, it becomes evident that state enterprises are on one side and private companies are on the other. This is in the sense that the need for the change that has taken place seems to be much better understood and accepted in the state enterprises, although they have certainly been just as radical as those in the private companies in the survey. Nevertheless, because the need for change was recognized and the aim is to be competitive, people accept it – even if this is just because people in state enterprises still believe that it is possible to be competitive. In private companies the situation is very different. The relaxed attitude in the textiles sector, for example, is a consequence of the understanding that it is almost impossible to compete against low-pay countries. The problems of delocalization and poorly trained labour are prominent here. Blue-collar workers in textiles feel powerless in the face of this development. In the automobile sector the phenomenon of multinationals and national interests again appears to be, to use the employees’ words, the logic of capital. This is the greatest difference between them and the state enterprises. In the state enterprises there is criticism of the constant cuts due to reorganizations and automation, because people often see money being wasted, which leads to feelings of injustice. No one, however, feels they are at the mercy of capital. No one says that the bosses are only concerned about money, while

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in private companies this is the most vociferous complaint: money is all that counts, people are not important. The interesting thing about this is that the interviews showed that Belgacom is currently bringing the two sides together. Belgacom may be seen as the one of the three state enterprises that has gone furthest in the transition from state enterprise to a company that is run in a modern way and is a real player in the new, open telecommunications market. It therefore has a foot in both camps: it has inherited its past as a state enterprise and it also has a management applying private-sector techniques and principles. Employees’ stories therefore show an understanding of the necessary changes and the motivation to become a competitive business, but at the same time there are complaints that money is all that matters now. This is because absurdly tiny cuts in equipment are sometimes made, so that some employees have the feeling that cost-awareness is taking precedence over the ability to do their job properly and provide a decent service and good quality. Sometimes we fall between two stools. People impose the same demands on us as in the private sector, but we don’t get the resources they have in the private sector. Above all, our equipment has to be cheap. Not good, just cheap. In the end working is simply no fun any more. And then there is the throwaway mentality. In the past you could repair equipment. Now they just replace the whole thing. You can’t even open up a telephone receiver any more. If it’s broken you just replace the receiver. It’s as simple as that. But you don’t need to be a technician to do that, do you? There is no satisfaction in that. And customers see it too, you know. They can see that you are not solving problems, just replacing things. So when you send them the bill, they ask you: can’t you just repair it? And what are we supposed to say then? (Mr Bollens, 45, telecoms technician)

Statements like this illustrate how the transition from state-run to private company can put employees in difficult positions as long as the transition is still in progress. The past clashes with changes that need to be carried out for the future, and they are often incompatible. This can lead to frustration and demotivation among staff, certainly when they feel they lack guidance and clear communication from the top. Socio-economic change and attitudes towards politics in private companies: The social burden of flexibility and taxation A large proportion of the respondents from the private companies in the interviews referred to the role of ‘multinationals’ and the ‘logic of maximization of profits’ as an explanation for socio-economic changes. In general there is therefore little understanding for policymakers – the assessment of them is mainly negative. It is suggested that restructuring operations take precious little account of social aspects: all the changes are focused on the maximization of profits. People feel exposed to the capricious demands of the market. The higher the profits, the better for him, isn’t it; at the expense of everything else; that’s multinationals for you; multinationals consist of shareholders and they only have one aim; the money they put into it: they have to make a profit. (Mr Karels, 37, textile worker)3

The extent to which the assessment of general socio-economic changes influences political orientation remain unclear, however, as only limited references are made to 3

All names of interviewees have been fictionalized for purposes of anonymity.

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the political system in the evaluation of these changes. A number of people do hold politicians partly responsible for changing working conditions. ... because the bosses have to pay a lot of social security costs; that they can get them made more cheaply abroad ... so it’s an easy choice; that is the only reason ... I can’t blame the boss ... the government shouldn’t have allowed it to happen ... (Ms Tongelaars, 27, automobile worker)

This is just one example of respondents suggesting that politicians are failing to create a favourable climate for employers. While a negative assessment of socioeconomic change may well result in a negative evaluation of the political system, the material does not offer really solid support for such an argument. Nevertheless, the sense of powerlessness as a result of being subject to the market cannot simply be ignored for these employees. Although they perhaps do not know of any explicit or direct link to political orientation, it is certainly not unthinkable that this kind of powerlessness, when combined with other factors such as feelings of insecurity, can push their political orientation into a particular direction. Whether this is true or not, will, of course, become clear from further analyses of the survey material. One often heard explanation for the economic decline is that the companies’ social security costs are much too high. Respondents frequently claim that companies relocate abroad because of the burden of high wages – in the textiles sector, in particular, there is a lot of talk about delocalization to low-pay countries – and, above all, that they are constantly becoming more computerized. Some therefore suggest that employers should be ‘taxed’ on robots as well as on employees. Certainly, within the automobile factory there is a strong perception that robotization is having a very negative impact on employment. All you need to do a job now is an electrician and one robot ... yes, yes, the work is much lighter, you don’t have to do anything now, you’re on the dole; the proof is there: from 12,000 to 6,000 people ... and those at the top: they try to keep the numbers as low as possible ... taking on new people: you can’t – they are cutting jobs! It has to happen because people are expensive ... the politicians, the multinationals are at the top and they pull the strings and you just have to jump when they want you to; I don’t think it can be any different ... (Mr Roels, 40, team leader in automobile manufacturing)

The Belgian fiscal system is also regarded negatively from the perspective of blue-collar workers. The fact that the increased demand for flexibility (economic unemployment,4 seasonal work, day flexibility) is not being properly rewarded is an often-mentioned problem. 4 Belgian labour legislation provides for a flexible option for temporary unemployment due to economic reasons (e.g. drop in orders, replacement products entering the market, ...), i.e. the employer may suspend the labour contract entirely or partly. While the maximum duration of a full suspension is limited to four weeks, part-time suspension can last for up to three months if work is continued for less than three days/week or less than one week every two weeks. If work is continued for at least three days/week or at least one week every two weeks, the duration of the suspension is not limited. Once the maximum duration has been reached, a new period of suspension may start after work has been resumed for a full (normal

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So we are going onto economic unemployment.... we do have some say in that as trade unions but we have to suffer it ... we can almost never find volunteers for overtime ... you pay three quarters of it back! so there’s no benefit for you ... but the fiscal system does not work ... and you can only be flexible if there is money available for it ... and the social inconvenience ... so the pay doesn’t motivate us at all – our people also say: the extras that we do, they only cause inconvenience; that’s no good, is it ... so we know it too ... we inform our people ... but then we can never find enough volunteers to make the whole system run ... we are not rewarded for it. (Mr Vervoort, 44, team leader in the metal industry)

Employees who cooperate with the increasing demand for flexibility have tax problems the following year: overtime is heavily taxed and the economic unemployment is allocated to them by the state the following year. This makes it clear that all this can result in a negative assessment of the government and criticism of the policy being pursued. This in itself, however, does not create a link with political orientations. Those employees who do express criticism do not necessarily turn away from the parties in government, let alone give their allegiance to an extreme right-wing party such as the Vlaams Blok. The negative assessment of the government can, however, lead to political mistrust or lack of credibility, thus indirectly creating a breeding-ground for the emergence of extreme right wing affinity. State enterprises, socio-economic change and attitudes towards politics: Between politicians and politics as unreliable shareholders and the comfort of the state The interview material gives grounds to suspect that employees in state enterprises consider the relationship between socio-economic change and politics to be much more visible and more strongly felt. In any case it is much more strongly present in their statements. There are major differences, however, both in the way in which the relationship between the two worlds is perceived and in the extent to which the link is made explicit. At first sight, the specific link between politics and socio-economic changes in state enterprises is quite negative. Here criticism is expressed of features of government policy which, because of the way in which they are described, are perceived as typical of state enterprises. If the level of service is good, then everything is OK here; that we work according to a level of service – so we work ... the product comes in and it has to be out within three days – this is different from productivity ... then the pressure of work will be a bit higher, but I don’t know whether you are going to change someone who has worked for about 20 years at a pace based on the level of service ... I think that will be difficult – they work much too slowly. (Mr De Man, 34, planning manager, railways)

Mr De Man is disgusted by the government-driven policy of the Belgian railways. He holds this policy – which according to him devoted no attention to productivity – responsible for increasing competition with the private sector, which has jeopardized both his job security and his status. The way in which he responds to the threat is working) week. Both the employees and the federal employment office (RVA) have to be informed at least seven days in advance of the suspension. Employees who are temporarily unemployed for economic reasons are eligible to receive unemployment allowance.

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an excellent illustration of a possible response to the experience of socio-economic change. What makes Mr De Man’s argument so interesting is that it comes from a man whose wife used to work for the national airline and lost her job when the airline went bankrupt. This man has therefore experienced for himself that working in a state enterprise with the state as a shareholder does not necessarily offer any guarantees of safety or security in economically troubled times. It seems very much that, among the stories collected, Mr De Man’s experience gives rise to a relatively greater fear of further decline in the railways, where he works. His reaction therefore goes beyond his disgust with a government-driven policy, which many respondents criticize. Here, disgust also turns against co-workers and colleagues. Mr De Man is very harsh on people who cannot cope with the pace of work. People work much too slowly, then you can see two of them working there on a job that could be done by one ... they adapt to the pace of work – yes it’s nice, isn’t it – but if they don’t adapt – well, sorry – that is an indication that they can’t cope with the work. (Mr De Man, 34, planning manager, railways)

Clearly the fact that he feels so threatened leads to quite an authoritarian reflex in relation to his colleagues, in a strong condemnation of ‘slackers’, people who, in his eyes, do not work hard enough and are therefore jeopardizing the future of his employer and thus also of his own job and, through the threat to his pension scheme, also his own future. Mr De Man indicates that he does not excuse politicians, stating that the Vlaams Blok must be taken into account because the party has a message that should be listened to more closely and which should be represented more strongly in the government. His disdain for ‘politics’ is also evident from the scornful way in which he talks about some recent disturbances in the senior management of the railways, as well as from the way in which he describes the attitude of politicians towards the railway company as a state enterprise. This is at least reminiscent of the populist discourse that the Vlaams Blok sometimes ventures on this subject. I’ll give you an example: when things are going badly in the private sector, the railway company has to take on as many people as possible to keep unemployment as low as possible ... Everyone gets their pay – what you do is not important ... (Mr De Man, 34, planning manager, railways)

Mr De Man’s views on wrong government policy, his opinion that politicians are responsible for conscious manipulation at the expense of ordinary people on the railways and his scorn for political mistakes are all strong signs of his anti-political attitude. As we have said, Mr De Man’s statement was an exceptional response among the group of public-sector workers we interviewed. At the same time, it was also a reaction to the strongest feelings of being under threat that we encountered there. It was above all the breadth of the reaction, not only towards the system but also towards his colleagues, that make this case so interesting. Links between restructuring programmes in state enterprises and a dismissive response to politicians do emerge. It begins with questioning the logic behind a whole range of decisions, one of which can be picked out here:

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... a machine which you know is inefficient, with a maintenance contract for 10,000,000 per year; while our technicians can easily deal with it themselves – they don’t cost a franc extra – they can cope with it very well themselves without having to take on an extra man. (Mr Vandeurzen, 25, technician, national post)

The ‘absurd changes’ mentioned by Mr Vandeurzen are immediately linked to fraudulent practices at ministerial level, because ultimately who benefits from these changes? Oh, someone somewhere in Brussels, but don’t ask me who was behind it; but it is usually at the highest level – or even at ministerial level ... Politics is controlled by the people who have the money. So it’s not politics any more, it has become economics – it’s: how can I get rich, stay rich and get even richer – and I don’t have to take the rest of the population into account because their job is to make sure that I get richer. (Mr Vandeurzen, 25, technician, national post)

The only way Mr Vandeurzen can make sense of what he sees happening around him is to undermine the credibility of politicians. As a result, he has lost faith in mainstream politics and started voting for the Vlaams Blok. For employees in state enterprises, politics therefore seems to be made a scapegoat more readily at times when things are going badly economically and when people are facing changes that do not benefit them and which make no sense to them. Nevertheless, at the same time there is another side to the specific nature of state enterprises which is much more positive. Some employees do seem to believe that politicians have a protective function towards state enterprises. Although there are some exceptions, as discussed above, a proportion of employees nevertheless clearly indicate that precisely because the state is involved, their jobs and the state enterprises in general will not follow the same course as those in the private sector. They can therefore see the possible impact of the threatened negative socio-economic changes in relative terms and thus also cope with them more easily: The NMBS [railways] cannot go bankrupt, because it is supported by the state. (Mr Spoors, 45, service technician, railways)

It is therefore clear that, in contrast to the private sector, the fact that a person works for a state enterprise does in some cases still offer some ‘mental protection’ against the constant socio-economic threat whose consequences they see and experience on a daily basis at the workplace. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that the first cracks in state protection are becoming visible in the employees’ stories. On the possible link between socio-economic change and political views, it therefore seems that above all a negative evaluation of the socio-economic changes that have been experienced seems to have an impact on political orientation. A generally negative attitude towards changing working conditions might therefore go hand in hand with a generalized negative attitude towards all forms of policy making and therefore also towards politics. Hence there is the story of Mr Vanhaard, who was neither very much in touch with the general socio-economic reality nor willing to talk about ‘big political problems’. Nevertheless, on the basis of the changes in the

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occupational domain, which were perceived as very negative, he later generalizes this negativity and applies it to social reality as a whole. ... you don’t have to look at big politicians, look at the politics in the municipality, look at the politics at work, look at the politics where you work, look at the delegates, those militants – why are they militants? Self-interest! You just have to look at politics where you work – that’s as dirty as it gets ... (Mr Vanhaard, 53, railway worker)

Here he gives a clear example of an anti-system attitude, which is certainly in part the result of an individual experience of socio-economic change. Mr Vanhaard later states that he votes for the Vlaams Blok. Other examples, however, have already shown that when politicians are held responsible for what is going wrong and this is mainly attributed to cheating and absurd games by powerful politicians, sympathy for the Vlaams Blok is never far away. Summary and conclusions of the qualitative material In terms of socio-economic change, a first important conclusion from the qualitative material concerns the experience of increasing workload and work pressure. This increase is present in stories both from the public and the private sector, but the experience of it differs. Employees from private companies seem to have been confronted more starkly with the negative consequences of socio-economic changes during the past ten years. It seems that for them the screw has been turned rather more tightly, while state-enterprises employees had more ‘in reserve’. People from private companies also had a much stronger feeling of being subject to ‘the dehumanizing logic of capital.’ The boss keeps pushing back his limits ... he is constantly making the line go slightly faster ... it is all about money. (Ms Vogels, 52, automobile worker)

In state enterprises there seems to be more of an understanding that the changes are necessary in order to make the enterprise competitive within an open European and global market. I think that is a logical development and I don’t have anything against it. (Mr Vandeurzen, 25, technician, national post)

Assessments of reorganization are therefore generally more favourable among state employees, unless an attempt is made to infringe their status and, above all, their pension. Feelings of injustice arise in these cases and fears for the future quickly emerge. The respondents reported major changes in the content of work, terms of employment and working conditions. ‘Constant’work makes their jobs psychologically more demanding. The computer has become a fact of life, giving rise to different reactions: Some people were able to live with it, after a brief period of adjustment, and consider it an improvement. Others are dismissive of computerization, believing it leads to rigidity and reduces efficiency. They feel completely or partly excluded

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by it and often think it reduces them to mere numbers. In the automobile sector in particular, highly standardized work is sometimes described in very negative terms. The pressure is tremendous, you know ... you are running all day, from the moment you arrive until you go home, between those two lines ... it is just as if you are nothing but a robot here, which is exactly the feeling they are trying to create. (Mr Roels, 40, team leader in automobile manufacturing)

In the private sector, increasing flexibility is demanded of employees in terms of working hours. Fewer permanent contracts are being awarded, both in state enterprises and in private companies. It is above all the ‘permanent’ employees who have problems with this, since they increasingly have to work with temporary employees and agency personnel, who are often less experienced and less well motivated. All things considered, this again causes changes in employees’ attitudes towards their work and their commitment to their professional life. Due to the link between age and the (possibility of) permanent contracts, these observations seem to be partly age-related. As far as views on politics are concerned, we further observed that there is a clear difference between private companies and state enterprises in terms of the relationship between the world of work and the world of politics and politicians. It seems that politicians more readily become scapegoats for employees in state enterprises, due to their ‘political share ownership’. On the other hand, this indirect bond to state coffers does, in some cases, create a feeling of greater security. Employees believe that the state cannot go bankrupt, which means their position is relatively safe compared to the position of employees in the private sector. Some employees also pointed out that state enterprises were always open and tolerant towards disabled employees. State enterprises therefore exercised an important social function and seemed to create a place that was still safeguarded from the cold and inhuman logic of global capitalism. However, this image is being eroded somewhat through the privatization process of the Belgian state enterprises. Looking at the attitudes of the employees in the public sector, we nonetheless had the impression that these people still have a more open, tolerant view of society. The picture is somewhat different for private-sector employees. When those working in the private sector feel their jobs are threatened, it is mainly the result of a feeling of a threat generated by global economic changes and processes. Through the media the employees receive information on any major changes in various sectors of the economy, including their own. Whenever they perceive that the sector they work in is in crisis or decline and companies are being closed, with subsequent collective redundancies, their reactions are quite resigned. Global economic change, or global economy, seems to be considered as a great power, beyond anyone’s control, management included. Moreover the world economy seems to be morally neutral in the views of the employees. Economic changes just happen, it seems, and no one is really to blame. At no time during the interviews was the economy held responsible for the feelings of threat employees experienced. It looks as if scapegoat mechanisms evolve from this lack of a clear subject to which blame can be attached. Employees’ fear of personal decline and subsequent feelings of injustice sometimes seem to be

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expressed in prejudice against immigrants and attitudes resembling economic and cultural racism. Job insecurity often goes together with a more general feeling of insecurity, migrants being a plausible cause for both these problems in the views of many private-sector employees. In short, comparing the lines of thought developed by employees from the private and public sectors, there are different pathways in each sector leading to receptiveness to extreme right-wing ideas. One main difference is found in the particular relationship that public-sector employees have with the state and with politics. A second important difference lies in the attribution of blame. Public-sector employees perceive the threat of decline for as unjust, as it disrupts a trust relationship with the state and disturbs their idea of security, which for many was an important reason for choosing a public-sector job, despite the moderate pay. Still, they do not, in the first instance, blame the state or politics. The primary target of the blame is the new management, imported from the private sector, who introduced a series of restructurings and rationalizations that have been imposed on the employees without, they feel, much consideration for the human aspect of what these changes mean for them. In addition, feelings of blame are generally not as pronounced in the public sector. Public-sector employees often say they realized something needed to change. So they do not seem to resent the changes that much, they just have a problem with how these changes were implemented. For the employees in the private sector, it is quite clear that global economic changes are at the root of the threat to their jobs, but global economic processes seem too abstract to attribute the blame for their insecurity to them. Immigrants therefore seem to function as a scapegoat for feelings of injustice that stem from a threat that is in fact generated by the global economic changes that also affect employees’ jobs. The qualitative findings subject to a quantitative test Research questions There were two main conclusions from the qualitative material that could, to some extent, be tested with the quantitative data. Both pertain to the differences between public- and private-sector employees. A first conclusion was that the working environment of employees in the public sector appeared to differ from that of those in the private sector, mainly in terms of pressure of work and feelings of security. While pressure of work was mounting in the public sector, employees felt there still was ‘room’ for this intensification. In contrast, pressure of work on private-sector employees seemed to have reached its limits. In addition, insecurity for them not only came from within the company, but often also from news in the mass media about major changes and restructurings in the sectors they worked in. A second conclusion was that the receptiveness to extreme right-wing ideas came about in seemingly different ways for the public-sector and private-sector employees. In their reaction to the experienced threat of decline and the experiences of actual socio-economic change, their different relation to the government seemed to lead them to certain political attitudes through somewhat different paths. Differences in

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political behaviour or attitudes between public- and private-sector employees have already been theorized as being the politics (public sector) versus market (private sector) axis (Langford 1996). As stated in the introduction, the SIREN research offered us a unique chance to put these assumptions to an empirical test. We will firstly map differences between employees in the public sector and employees in the private sector on relevant variables, such as changes in work, and socio-political attitudes. This will tell us whether there has indeed been a distinct experience of socio-economic change in these sectors over the last few years; it will also show whether on average public- and private-sector employees assume different socio-political positions regarding rightwing extremism. Secondly, the data allows us to analyse how the former and the latter are related. In other words we will answer the question whether the dissimilar experiences of work-related change have led to different socio-political attitudes. Methods Sample For the analyses in this chapter we excluded the self-employed, because the public-private divide is only relevant within the group of directly employed workers. This means that the analyses are carried out for a group of 645 Flemish employees, of whom 31.6 per cent were working in the public sector and 68.4 per cent in the private sector. There are no differences in the employees’ age structure from either sector. There is however a slight difference in terms of gender structure: the proportion of men is slightly higher in the private sector (59.9 per cent) than in the public sector (51.4 per cent). As far as educational level is concerned, the two groups differ significantly. Proportions of intermediate-level education are quite similar, but there is a larger proportion (20 per cent versus 12 per cent) of low-skilled employees in the private sector and a larger proportion (46 per cent versus 35 per cent) of high-skilled employees in the public sector. A significant difference is found for the occupational position as well. The proportion of both blue-collar workers and low-ranking whitecollar workers and civil servants is much higher in the private sector (about a third in each category), while the majority in the public sector are mid-level employees (64.6 per cent). Part-time and full-time work is equally spread over both sectors, with about one in five working in part-time jobs in both sectors. Survey design The 645 Flemish employees were questioned by telephone in May 2003, using standardized questionnaires and computer-aided interviewing. The questionnaire comprised 71 questions covering seven different areas. Where possible, questions were used that had already been employed in cross-national surveys and had proved to be reliable. The duration of an average interview was 15 minutes. Operationalization of concepts a) Background characteristics • Educational level: This was measured asking participants about the highest level of education they had achieved using response categories specific for

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Belgium. Responses were recoded according to the ISCED list, which organizes educational levels of different countries into a common grid (OECD 1999). Employment Sector: Respondents were asked to state whether they worked in the private sector, public sector or whether they were self-employed.

b) Perceived changes in one’s working environment A series of questions were aimed at assessing perceived changes in respondents’ working conditions. •

•

Changes in the amount of work, in the possibility of making their own decisions at work (autonomy) and in job security as compared with five years before were rated on scales ranging from 1 (Clearly decreased) to 5 (Clearly increased). Changes in social atmosphere at work were also rated, on a scale ranging from 1 (Clearly got worse) to 5 (Clearly improved). Perceived job insecurity: Participants were asked to rate the probability of their becoming unemployed in the near future, on a scale ranging from 1 (Very small or impossible) to 5 (Very large) (see De Witte 1999a).

c) Receptiveness to right-wing extremism The questions investigating respondents’ receptiveness to right-wing extremism aimed to measure social dominance orientation, nationalism, prejudice against immigrants, authoritarianism and political powerlessness. Agreement with statements measuring all these dimensions was rated using a scale ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 5 (Strongly agree). •

•

•

•

Chauvinism: Respondents rated their agreement with five items such as: I would rather be citizen of (name of the country) than of any other country in the world, or The world would be a better place if people from other countries were more like the (citizens of the country) (Coenders 2001). Prejudice against immigrants: Respondents rated their agreement with five items such as: Immigrants take jobs away from (citizens of the country), or Immigrants increase crime rates (European Social Survey; Cambré, De Witte and Billiet 2001). Authoritarianism: Respondents rated their agreement with five items such as: Most of our social problems would be solved if we could somehow get rid of immoral and anti-social people, and Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn (see Meloen, van der Linden and De Witte 1994; Altemeyer 1998). Political powerlessness: Respondents rated their agreement with six items such as: It seems that whatever party people vote for, things stay pretty much the same, and Politics sometimes seems so complicated that I can’t understand what’s going on (see Campbell, Gurin and Miller 1954; Olsen 1969; Watts 1973).

d) Political orientation The questionnaire included questions aimed at assessing three different dimensions. •

Interest in politics: Respondents were asked to rate their interest in politics on a scale ranging from 1 (Very low) to 5 (Very high).

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Table 6.1

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Differences between public- and private-sector employees on work change and work-life situation (LS means, analyses of variance)

Public Private R(3) Perceived socio-economic change(1) 0.99 0.77 0.09* (Increase in) amount of work (Increase in) autonomy 0.32 0.47 ns (Better) atmosphere 0.05 -0.04 ns 0.27 0.00 0.15*** (More) job security Perception of current situation(2) 1.29 1.79 0.22*** Job insecurity 1. Values can range from -2 (strong decrease) through 0 (no change) to +2 (strong increase). 2. Values can range from 1 (Very small chance or impossibility of becoming unemployed in the next year) to 5 (Very large chance of becoming unemployed in the next year). 3. ns = not significant; * = p<0.5; ** = p<0.01; *** = p<0.001. Source: SIREN survey.

•

•

Political self-location: Respondents were asked to state their present personal position on the political spectrum on a scale ranging from 1 (Extreme left) to 7 (Extreme right). Extreme right-wing party affinity (ERPA): Respondents were invited to give their evaluation of the Vlaams Blok on a scale ranging from +2 (I am strongly in favour of it) to -2 (I am strongly against it).

Results5 Work-related differences between private- and public-sector employees As shown in Table 6.1, we first found a slight but significant difference between public- and private-sector employees in the perception of the changes in amount of work over the last five years. Public-sector employees on average perceive a greater increase in workload over the last five years than those in the private sector. Employees in the public sector have also experienced a greater increase in job security over the last five years than private-sector employees. No differences regarding changes in autonomy, social atmosphere were observed. When looking at the perception of their current situation, we find a significant difference between public- and private-sector employees concerning job insecurity: employees in the private sector on average show a significantly higher level of job insecurity. Political orientations and receptiveness to right-wing extremism A sharper divide between public- and private-sector employees was found regarding their attitudes, as shown in Table 6.2. Employees in the public sector are on average significantly more interested in politics, place themselves more to the left on the political left-right axis, feel less powerless politically and are less authoritarian. 5

Unless otherwise indicated, analyses are based on 645 interviews.

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Table 6.2

Differences between public- and private-sector employees in political orientations and receptiveness to the extreme right-wing

Public Private 3.17 2.87 Interest in politics(1) 3.77 4.05 Left-right self-placement(2) -0.16 0.07 Political powerlessness(3) -0.15 0.07 Prejudice against immigrants(3) -0.19 0.08 Authoritarianism(3) Chauvinism(3) -0.06 0.05 1. 1= very low, 5= very high 2. 1= extreme left, 4= centre, 7 =extreme right 3. Factor score, deviation from overall mean, overall mean=0 4. ns = not significant; * = p<0.5; ** = p<0.01; *** = p<0.001. Source: SIREN survey.

R(4) 0.12** 0.10* 0.11** 0.10** 0.12** ns

Of the attitudes measured, only chauvinism turned out not to differ significantly between the two groups. This result for chauvinism is in line with earlier research, though this was limited to the middle classes (Langford 1996). Conclusions The results seem to confirm our assumption that both groups experience socio-economic change differently and that their respective ideas about politics and receptiveness to extreme right-wing ideas are not alike. Nevertheless, these were bivariate analyses, not taking into account possible effects of important background variables such as education. Neither did these analyses look at the association of experiences of socio-economic change in the realm of work and several socio-political attitudes. We will deal with this issue in the next paragraph. Different kinds of reaction? Bivariate exploration of the relation between work-related change and extreme right-wing party affinity (ERPA) in each sector The results in Table 6.3 regarding the associations of the work-related change variables and extreme right-wing attitudes are striking. Earlier we concluded that, as far as work-related change is concerned, the two groups only differ in respect to changes in workload and changes in job security. However, these variables are not related to the receptiveness attitudes. Neither were changes in workload nor in job security significantly associated with any of the attitudes. All significant correlations with the receptiveness attitudes are generated by work-change variables on which neither group differed significantly. Equal experiences are thus related to different attitudinal positions when comparing both sectors. The qualitative material suggested that characteristics of the employment environment (such as for example the relationship with the state and politics, here indicated by the difference between employment in the public sector and employment in the private sector), the pace of change, the ‘psychological room’ left for more change, etc. could act as mediator variables in these reaction processes and could thus serve as a possible explanation for these findings.

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Table 6.3

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Bivariate correlations of work-related changes with elements of extreme right-wing receptiveness (by sector)

Political powerlessness Sector Public Private Public Private Public Private Public Private Change n=204 n=441 n=204 n=441 n=204 n=441 n=204 n=441 Increased workload ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns Increased autonomy ns -0.11* ns -0.15* ns -0.21** -0.15* ns Better atmosphere ns -0.13** ns -0.17* ns ns -0.17* ns More job security ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns = not significant; * = p< 0.05; ** = p< 0.01. Note: Source: SIREN survey. Authoritarianism

Chauvinism

Prejudice

Next, there is a noticeable difference between public- and private-sector employees in the effects of work-related change on attitudes. One can see from Table 3 that significant associations for private-sector employees do not appear in relation to political powerlessness, but exclusively in relation to authoritarianism, chauvinism and prejudice against immigrants. An increase in autonomy is negatively related to all three attitudes: private-sector employees whose autonomy had increased over the last five years are less authoritarian, less chauvinist and less prejudiced against immigrants. People who had experienced an improvement in the atmosphere at work in that period were also less authoritarian and less chauvinist. If we then turn to the public-sector employees, we can see that none of the workrelated changes is associated with these attitudes, except for political powerlessness. Public sector employees who had seen their autonomy decrease over the last five years, or who perceive a worse atmosphere in the workplace compared to five years before, feel significantly more powerless politically. These results lead to two provisional conclusions. Firstly, they suggest that there might indeed be different reactions to the experience of socio-economic change for private-sector and public-sector employees. Consistent with the market versus politics logic already mentioned, employees in the public sector seem to have an explicit, politically oriented reaction to the changes that affect them. For employees in the private sector, the results give an impression of reactions that immediately turn against other people through a reinforced authoritarian stance, and the strengthening a logic of ingroup (chauvinism) versus outgroup (prejudice against immigrants) logic, which lies at the root of extreme-right wing (party) affinity. A second provisional conclusion is that there seems to be a noticeable difference between the changes employees experience in their work and the attititudinal reactions they produce. Again this is according to what we found in the qualitative material. The workload for public-sector employees seems to have increased more sharply than for those in the private sector, but because they suggested there was still room for this work-intensification process this had not led to extreme reactions. Private employees on the other hand were already reaching their capacity limits for change, but changes for them had also been smaller in the last few years. This could

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Table 6.4

Results of a regression analysis on ERPA in both public and private sector, controlled for gender, age and education

Standardized effects on ERPA of: Education Age Gender

Public ns ns ns

Authoritarianism 0.14* Political powerlessness 0.17** Prejudice against immigrants 0.51*** Chauvinism ns DF (7,187) F 28.34*** R² 0.51 R 0.71 ns = not significant; * = p<0.05; ** = p<0.01; *** = p<0.001. Note: Source: SIREN survey.

Private ns ns ns 0.10* 0.13** 0.39*** ns (7,401) 23.43*** 0.29 0.54

explain why the reactions of the two groups to these changes were not really that different, as the results of the survey analysis show. In sum, we do find a relation between experiences of socio-economic change and the attitudes which reflect a receptiveness to right-wing extremism. What we still need to check is whether these receptiveness attitudes are indeed linked with the affinity with the Vlaams Blok. This will be addressed in the next section. Multiple regression analyses In order to confirm that the attitudes affected by the experiences of socio-economic change are indeed relevant to extreme right-wing party affinity (ERPA), we performed multiple regression analyses on ERPA for both sectors separately. Results are shown in Table 6.4. As one can see from Table 6.4, both for the private and public sector there is indeed a relation between three out of four receptiveness attitudes and ERPA. Prejudice against immigrants has the greatest effect on ERPA in both sectors, but it is biggest in the public sector. The effect of political powerlessness is somewhat greater in the public sector, as is the effect of authoritarianism. All these attitudes have a positive effect on ERPA. Conclusion Bringing together the results of the previous two sections suggests that the processes under investigation look as depicted in Figure 6.1. The experience of socio-economic change does not influence the same receptiveness attitudes in both sectors. This perception, however, does influence attitudes that are important in relation to ERPA. Changes in work influence authoritarianism and prejudice against immigrants among employees in the private sector, which in turn relates to their affinity to the Vlaams Blok. A similar process is found in the public sector. In this sector, however, the ‘connection’ between workrelated changes and ERPA runs through political powerlessness.

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Prejudice against immigrants Authoritarianism PRIVATE




Adverse workchange

ERPA

PUBLIC

Political powerlessness

Figure 6.1

A public- and private-sector pathway to ERPA

General conclusion and discussion This study examined whether there is a public-sector/private-sector divide in employees’ experiences of work-related changes over the past few years, and the effect of these changes on their political attitudes and orientation. The SIREN research project offered the opportunity to generate two hypotheses based on the qualitative material of the SIREN research, which could be tested on data of the subsequent quantitative phase of the project, a large-scale survey of employees in Flanders (Belgium). The first hypothesis to emerge from our re-analysis of the Flemish interview material was that employees from the public sector had experienced different kinds of changes in their work. Our second hypothesis was that the relationship between work-related change and receptiveness to the extreme right-wing differed between the two groups of employees as well. Consequently, we also expected that the variables explaining extreme-right wing party affinity might differ for each sector. On the whole, the results of this study confirm these hypotheses. Analyses of the quantitative data showed that there are some significant differences in the perceived work-related changes between public and private employees. Employees from the public sector on average perceive a larger increase in workload and in job security. They also feel more secure about their jobs. There were no differences in perception between either group regarding changes in autonomy, atmosphere at work and income. The difference between both sectors was most prominent regarding receptiveness attitudes and political orientation. Employees in the public sector were on average significantly more interested in politics, placed themselves more to the left on the political left-right axis, felt less powerless politically and were less authoritarian. The groups did not differ on chauvinism. In general, the first hypothesis was thus confirmed by the quantitative analyses: there are noticeable differences both in workchange experiences and in political orientation and receptiveness attitudes. Next, results confirmed the idea that the pathway to extreme right-wing party affinity is different for employees in the private sector than it is in the public sector. This is consistent with the market-versus-politics logic we referred to earlier. From

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the analyses we learned that work-related changes in the public sector are related solely to political powerlessness. This pathway follows the ‘politics’ logic, which implies that because of a closer bond with the state and with politics, public-sector employees will tend to turn against politics when their trust relationship with the state is violated. In the private sector, work-related changes show significant correlations with authoritarianism and prejudice against immigrants. This was theorized as the ‘market’ logic. Employees in the private sector feel subject to the intangible forces of global economic change. Because these forces are intangible and dehumanized, these employees, when threatened or affected by socio-economic change, have no one specific to turn against. It seems likely then that they will look for scapegoats, whom they can blame for these negative changes. Immigrants are an available and easily targeted victim, certainly when arguments to do so are constantly being provided by the propaganda of the extreme right-wing Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang). Equally important was the finding that the receptiveness variables that were related to work changes in both sectors do affect extreme right-wing party affinity. Our results thus support the hypothesis that reactions to work-related changes lead to extreme right-wing party affinity in the public and private sector. This process is different in each sector however. The importance of these findings is at least twofold. First, from a policy perspective, these findings draw attention to the political implications of neglecting the quality of work and the care for a good, stable and secure working environment. After all, there were clear differences between public- and private-sector employees when looking at their political attitudes and their receptiveness attitudes in the quantitative analyses. The analyses further showed that this could be related to the more secure and relatively stable environment in the public sector. This sector is also characterized by a humane and social orientation: delivering services that everyone needs, whatever the cost. This is contrary to the private-sector logic, often experienced as inhumane: the logic of ‘profit over people’. This implies that further privatization and dismantling of the public sector by means of a further liberalization of the service markets (cf. the commotion surrounding the EC’s Bolkestein directive) could have consequences for the democratic functioning of the states applying privatization policies. These findings have theoretical implications as well. The four variables used to measure employees’ receptiveness to the extreme right represent important theoretical approaches from the vast tradition of research into explanations of extreme rightwing voting behaviour. The concept of prejudice against immigrants or competition was derived from the theory of psychological interests, as was the concept of authoritarianism. We derived our concept of nationalism from social disintegration theory. Political powerlessness came into the picture through the theories of political dissatisfaction and protest voting (Lubbers 2001). These theories have often been considered to be competing, and research has therefore often focused on arguments excluding one approach in favour of another, or on proving that one theory fits all. The findings presented here make a case for the complementary nature of (some of) these theoretical approaches. The results show that the impact of certain experiences on extreme right-wing party affinity partly depends on characteristics of people’s working environment. These are fundamentally related to stability and security. Differences regarding these variables for public-sector and private-sector employees, offer a

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(partial) explanation for extreme right-wing party affinity in both sectors. It might be useful to re-examine some earlier research findings comparing these theoretical approaches using empirical, quantitative data. The competitive view on the theories presented favoured evaluations of the quality of these theories without paying attention to the fit of the theory within a specific research context. Theories that did not perform well might have been dismissed too soon, whereas they may simply have been unfitted for that particular context or for those particular research questions. This chapter adds a new perspective to politically oriented research in Flanders, which, unlike for example Canadian and British political research (e.g. Edgell and Duke 1986; Furaker 1987), has so far paid very little attention to the importance of this particular divide (public- versus private-sector) in explaining political choices and preferences. In the light of the changes that still seem to await the European (and other) public sectors, and of the findings presented in this study, the role of this divide deserves further attention and exploration in similar future research. Table 6.5

Q25-6 Q25-8 Q25-9 Q25-11 Q25-12 Q25-13 Q25-14 Q25-15 Q25-16 Q25-17 Q25-18 Q25-19 Q25-20 Q26-1 Q26-2 Q26-4 Q26-5

Note:

Results of factor analyses, after varimax rotation

Rather be citizen World better place Better country Increase crime rates Enriches culture Take jobs away Threat to culture Contribute to welfare Obedience and respect Social problems solved Sex crimes Few courageous leaders Need strong leaders Things go on No influence Represent the general Lose touch

Etno Alpha .74 -0.02 0.16 0.02 0.70 -0.53 0.63 0.71 -0.72 0.22 0.18 0.30 0.08 0.10 0.07 0.11 -0.18 0.20

Autorit Alpha .73 0.13 0.20 0.10 0.10 -0.15 0.15 0.20 -0.15 0.65 0.48 0.58 0.74 0.73 0.17 0.27 0.25 0.17

Polpow Alpha .60 0.01 0.09 -0.14 0.16 -0.15 0.11 0.09 -0.06 0.12 0.01 0.26 0.10 0.00 0.73 0.63 -0.54 0.56

Chauvin Alpha .61 0.66 0.63 0.75 0.17 0.14 0.15 0.18 0.14 0.09 0.21 0.08 0.09 0.11 0.02 0.08 -0.02 -0.18

Factor loadings >.40 marked in bold. Consequent promax rotation left the structure of the solution unchanged but because of the supposed inter-correlation of the concepts, factor scores were calculated based on the promax rotated factor solution. Source: SIREN survey.

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Table 6.6

Pearson correlations between four variables measuring extreme right-wing receptiveness Prejudice against immigrants

Prejudice against immigrants Authoritarianism Political powerlessness Chauvinism

Note: *** = p<0.001. Source: SIREN survey.

1 0.39*** 0.35*** 0.19***

Authoritarianism

Political powerlessness

Chauvinism

–

–

–

1 0.32*** 0.33***

– 1 0.15***

– – 1

Chapter 7

The Welfare State Under Pressure: The Danish Case Eva Thoft and Edvin Grinderslev

Introduction Politics in Denmark has seen wide-ranging changes over the past twenty years or so. In 1983, with the Danish parliament debating issues related to immigration and immigrants, the nation was polarized, with conflicting standpoints clashing head on. The right-wing Progressive Party (Fremskridtspartiet) saw an opportunity to promote its radical policies on the issue. By the next general election, significant parts of these policies had been adopted by other parties. Then, in 1995, the Progressive Party split. A break-away group founded the Danish People’s Party, which took a 12-percent slice of the vote in the November 2001 election. For the first time it then became a significant player, after the Liberal Party (Venstre) and the Conservative Party (Konservative Folkeparti) formed a coalition government reliant on DPP support for a parliamentary majority. In the February 2005 elections it gained 24 seats in parliament, an increase of two, with 13.2 per cent of the vote. The macro socio-economic changes over the past decades include a growing economy and lower unemployment. Needless to say, however, not all groups in Denmark have fared equally well despite the period of prolonged economic growth. Rural areas have high unemployment rates, comparatively more senior citizens, a skills shortage and more people on social benefits. Locally, many are having to deal with the restructuring initiatives in the shape of privatization, mergers, acquisitions and the adoption of new management philosophies, all of which can increase the sense of insecurity for some. Public opinion has moved to the right on the immigration issue, and antiimmigrant statements or articles in the media have acquired a degree of political acceptability they previously lacked. This article is concerned with the ways in which the changes in working life and in everyday life are experienced and understood. What correlations can be found between changes and political attitudes to various institutions such as trade unions, public authorities and the workplace? What help do people receive when they are exposed to the negative consequences of change? In the Danish case we can describe how interviewees see changes in working life such as outsourcing, rationalization, flexibility, abstract thinking and teamwork. Many of them feel threatened by the changes. At the same time, some of the

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interviewees who have been excluded from the labour market feel a lack of support from society, unions or employers. They have worked for their entire lives but they can no longer manage due to pressure of work and exhaustion. Furthermore, the changes in working conditions, the concerns and anxiety for the changes in the welfare state are affecting the interviewees’ perceptions. Many of them associate cuts in public expenditure in schools, the health-care system and care for the elderly with the cost of social benefits paid to unemployed immigrants. Some also fear for their own future, predicting that the system cannot afford pensions and assistance should they need it when they become old or unfit for work. Some also feel the Danish system is threatened by the different cultures, which some of them connect with increased criminality and perhaps even terrorism. Empirically, the article is based on 31 interviews carried out during 2001–2002, with almost half of the interviewees saying they were considering voting for the Danish People’s Party. Our main focus is on people who are politically attracted by xenophobic, populist opinions. We outline how they experience the changes and whether they relate the changes to their political opinions. We begin by outlining the societal context – i.e. the changes in the welfare state, the issue of immigration in Denmark and the technological changes in the private and public sectors. This is followed an outline of the interviewees’ experience of the changes in their own working lives. Finally, we present the interviewees’ experience of the changes in the welfare state. We use quotes from the interviews to illustrate their experiences, giving details of the interviewee’s age, occupation and the parties they have voted for in recent years.1 Background: Socio-economic change in Denmark The Changes in the Welfare State Unemployment in Denmark fell to record low levels in the period of our research, more than halving compared to 1993. There was a slight growth in employment in the period since 1993, which explains the slight fall in the number of people on public assistance. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a fall in the number of young people drawing benefits but a rise in the numbers of elderly people doing so. So while there are substantially fewer people out of work, there are more recipients of early retirement pensions, anticipatory pensions, cash assistance, sickness benefit and rehabilitation support. This points to the fact that the labour market has become more competitive and that workers are becoming unfit for work at an earlier age (CASA and Danish Council of Social Welfare 2002). The outcome is a polarization of the population, where we find increasing numbers of people who can support themselves and an increasing number of recipients of long-term benefits, who cannot. This might mean that labour-market exclusion persists regardless of economic trends (CASA and Danish Council of Social Welfare

1

Interviewees’ names have been changed for reasons of anonymity.

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2002). It may also be due to the fact that the labour market’s demands on workers have increased substantially, resulting in extensive exclusion. There have been several reductions in benefits related to voluntary retirement, the most important being the changes in early-retirement benefits. The welfare state has stopped offering early retirement for all and it has now become an insurance scheme requiring contributions for a period of at least 10 years’ gainful employment. Furthermore, people who remain on the labour market longer are rewarded, as they receive a higher rate than those retiring at 60 (and sometimes even a bonus). Immigration – integration – transfer income In 2002, Denmark had 415,331 immigrants, who made up 7.7 per cent of the population (Danmarks Statistik 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 2002a, 2002b). Immigrants have a lower employment rate than ethnic Danes – and immigrants from non-Western countries have the lowest. In 2001, the employment rate for immigrants was 44 per cent as against 76 per cent for ethnic Danes. Jobs and the lack of them are dominant issues in the discourse on immigrants, because their relation to employment impinges on the wider integration of immigrants into society. According to an OECD survey, Denmark is the worst country for integrating immigrants into the labour market. Unemployment among firstgeneration immigrants is extremely high – about 20 per cent among immigrants from developing countries – the rate for ethnic Danes is five per cent. Second-generation immigrants are in a better situation. However, while general unemployment rates fell dramatically from 1994 to 2001, they did not fall as sharply among the population of first- and second-generation immigrants. We should also note that there was a continual period of economic growth from 1993 (CASA and Danish Council of Social Welfare 2002). Immigrants from developing countries mainly work in jobs that do not require higher qualifications. If they are self-employed it is generally in a grocery store, a newsagents’ or a restaurant (Danmarks Statistik 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 2002a, 2002b). One of the barriers immigrants face in their efforts to find work is the disparity between the skills they have to offer and the qualifications required for the jobs available. A poor educational background and poor Danish are increasingly typical of many immigrants. A 1999 study showed that competence in Danish among the unemployed improved more on average among those who subsequently found work than for those who remained outside the labour market. This indicates that poor skills and language abilities continue to hinder the integration of immigrants into the Danish employment market. There are other possible explanations. One is based on the weak economic incentives, another on discrimination. But a study has shown that while there is a connection between these two factors and unemployment, they are not the most serious factors. As mentioned above, immigrant unemployment rates have fallen in this period; it is clear therefore that many want to find work despite the limited economic rewards involved (Danmarks Statistik 1994, 1996a. 1996b, 2002a, 2002b). 37 per cent of immigrants looking for work feel discriminated against on grounds of ethnic background. A further six per cent say they are discriminated against

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because of age or other factors (Danmarks Statistik 1994, 1996a. 1996b, 2002a, 2002b). Ethnic discrimination is clearly a real problem for immigrants and their offspring in finding work. Finally, the way the Danish labour market is organized and jobs are publicized may well represent further barriers. Immigrants have the same rights to most social benefits as ethnic Danes. There are a few exceptions relating to state and early retirement pensions, which require a person to have lived in the country for at least ten years. Refugees with residence permits are not included in this stipulation, however. The proportion of non-Western immigrants who receive permanent benefits such as a state pension, early retirement pension, anticipatory pension or transitional benefit is lower than that for ethnic Danes. The proportion of second-generation immigrants receiving permanent benefits is lower still. They are, of course, generally younger. However, the opposite is the case when it comes to short-term assistance, such as unemployment benefit and cash assistance. Immigrants from non-Western countries – and to some extent their offspring – receive these types of benefit much more often than ethnic Danes. The reason, of course, lies in their lower participation in the labour market (Nielsen 2002). Privatization and rationalization in the public sector and the manufacturing industry: The employees’ perspective Telecommunications and public transport At the beginning of the 1990s Denmark saw a series of privatizations and rationalizations of major public companies within telecommunications and transport. In order to meet increased competition there were a number of mergers, reorganizations and rationalizations, resulting in a massive reduction of in telecommunications staff (Post & Telemuseum 2000). Deregulation led to increased competition in public transport, resulting in fewer but larger bus companies dominating the sector. The main company is now owned by a foreign corporation (Transportrådet 2000). Intensive rationalization measures in the companies also affected drivers’ working conditions. Timetables were tightened – i.e. the time allotted to drive between stops was cut. Drivers who previously worked for public transport companies were particularly affected because they also had to accept new pay levels and working conditions with the private company, one result of which was fewer breaks. Driving buses has almost always been a hard job, and rationalization and streamlining measures have made it harder. Work as a bus driver is now one of Denmark’s ten most hazardous occupations according to the Ministry of Labour (FOA 2002, 37). The bus companies have been finding it increasingly difficult to fill vacancies, and this is probably one reason they agreed to a government offer of wage subsidies providing they took on unemployed immigrants. In the Copenhagen area, 60 per cent of the drivers are now from an immigrant background.2

2

Information provided by Hovedstadens Trafikselskab.

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Public care services – care for the elderly Although outsourcing is not widespread, the care sector is undergoing major organizational changes to rationalize and streamline the service. This has led to a number of projects initiated by the Ministry of Social Affairs, projects managed by teams with a ‘shared language’ who are to monitor the use of resources and ensure quality (Center for forskning og udvikling af ældreplejen 2004). The restructuring process has also involved cuts. The intention was to make savings by introducing greater flexibility with enhanced staff responsibility and better qualifications. At the end of the 1980s, working methods came under the purview of the restructuring operation. An increasing proportion of older people in society required closer management of resources and documentation. The work of home helps was split into its component parts and the individual tasks were reallocated according to neoTaylorist principles, with the time spent on each task being increasingly monitored. Training standards were changed too. The training course for home helps was expanded from eight weeks to a course lasting one or two-and-a-half years. The result is the recruitment of a totally new age-group to the home care service. Home helps used to be older women with some experience of life. Today, the tendency is to recruit young women, who naturally have quite limited experience. In the early and mid-1990s the amount and standard of the help given to the elderly for personal care and hygiene became the subject of intense media scrutiny. The press strategy was generally to publicize the worst cases they could find. One paper reported the story of a pensioner whose nappy had been turned over rather than changed. This indicated an increased need to monitor and record the quality of work. Over the past decade, mounting numbers of immigrants have begun to require care. A cultural dimension has thus entered the equation: care staff must now relate to wider cultural diversity among their clients. Streamlining and task separation also mean that home helps cannot plan their work with the same degree of efficiency as they did before. Many say that they have practically no time at all to speak to their clients, and if they do they have to work all the harder to make up for lost time. The difficult working conditions and public criticism have contributed to the increasing difficulties for employers in recruiting qualified staff. A corollary of these difficulties is that many home helps now feel burned out and exhausted by the time they reach their early fifties. So job security is relatively good – if one can avoid exhaustion and burn-out. Many local councils have schemes to recruit unemployed immigrants and more focused efforts have been made to persuade immigrants to enrol on training courses in home care. Today the job is among the top 10 toughest jobs in Denmark. Manufacturing Over the past 15–20 years, tasks have been outsourced and entire manufacturing plants relocated to other countries, especially to Eastern Europe and Asia. Many of the traditional, large Danish companies built new factories abroad when they wanted to expand production facilities. As a result, there are fewer manufacturing companies, with lower turnover and fewer jobs. Many manufacturers have put new work-organization schemes in place. These give greater responsibility and require better qualifications for workers to plan their own or their team’s work. The strategy is also known as the anti-Taylorist approach.

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The spotlight is on human resources. Søren Grunge, who has given an account of the process (Gunge 1996), says the informal aspects of work are being increasingly formalized. For example, formal networks are taking the place of informal ones; efforts are being made to codify tacit knowledge and articulate it in procedural terms, and values are being converted into control mechanisms, ousting the traditional role of rules and regulations. Workers’ creativity is being systematized and technical systems now organize the work of self-managing groups. All this is possible thanks to the extremely advanced, computer-driven systems such as the SAP system, which can be seen as an attempt to give conceptual and linguistic expression to the informal and invisible aspects of work. The workforce is increasingly required to show an ability to adapt and to think in abstract terms. Workers must negotiate new knowledge and new tasks, deal with disruptions, with new concepts and terms and new frames of reference. This may result in redundancy for those who lack the wherewithal to meet the new demands, with older workers and the unskilled being particularly at risk here. The abandoned worker’s experience of changes in working life All our interviewees have been exposed to changes in their working lives, changes involving the pace of work and, in general, an intensified working day. Some have even faced quite drastic changes resulting in either job-related injuries or exclusion. Another group feel that it is harder to cope with their jobs as a result of the growing need for book-learning or the continuous upgrading of qualifications. However, the changes are not perceived in exactly the same way. Some welcome the changes and focus on the fact that they have a greater say and more responsibility. But there is a tendency for those attracted by right-wing populist opinions to feel most threatened by the changes. These often feel that work trends are leaving them out in the cold and that they are unfair. Our particular focus in this section is outlining these experiences. Outsourcing, rationalization and new cultures of work in the public sector A more stressful working day is evident in the elderly-care sector. This sector has a major replacement problem resulting in mounting pressure on the permanent staff, who frequently respond by going sick. The result is a vicious circle, with a high level of staff turnover. One of our home helps just started again on a part-time basis. She’s been in hospital having a new knee put in. ... All those years working as a home help ruined it. ... And there’s another colleague. She had to leave because she’d had three slipped discs. She’s just been operated for them. So it’s like – there is no end to it. As soon as somebody starts again, somebody else disappears. (Mrs Madsen, home help, 24, People’s Party)

In care for the elderly, the individual tasks and the time allocated for each one have been described and laid down in detail; everything to be done is carefully planned. The work has been divided into a personal module and a cleaning module. The cleaning module stipulates that the old person can have four functional rooms

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cleaned: living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. This means that the home helps cannot plan their work according to the needs they see. We have to start from scratch every time now – we used to be able to make our own plans before. It’s hard to find time for extra chores like washing tiles or getting rid of layers of grease in the kitchen even though it’s obvious it needs doing. You fly in and fly out like a white tornado because you have so many to get round to. (Mrs Jakobsen, home help, 34, Social Democratic Party)

Within the public sector – in this case, care for the elderly and childcare – immigration has also meant new conditions of work. Some employees feel that the workplace has been subject to cultural change. This requires the ability to handle diverse cultures in the workplace, which is evidently a problem for some people. A home help explains that once she had to care for a sick Turkish woman, but the family wanted her to be nursed according to a specific set of rules. The home helps were not allowed to remove her scarf when washing her nor to communicate with her directly, only through her sons. She thinks that direct communication is essential, although in this case it would have had to have been through eye contact and gestures since the Turkish woman spoke little Danish. The family needs to be told why we do what we do. It’s understandable that it’s difficult for them, but she is the important one – she’s the one we’re supposed to be caring for. (Mrs Jakobsen, home help, 34, Social Democratic Party)

A child minder says that she finds that it may be hard to make the parents understand that they have to pick up their children before 4.30 pm. This is particularly hard when the parents are immigrants. Sometimes they do get a bit irritated, and tell you off in no uncertain terms. They just lose their temper because we can’t – that is, it’s mostly if we’re dealing with people with a different – how should we put it? – a different colour – that’s the worst situation. They just don’t like being told they have to get here in time. (Mrs Møller, child minder, Danish People’s Party)

Increasing requirements in manufacturing Work in manufacturing has also been streamlined. Changes have been made in the organization of work, with increased responsibility and authority for autonomous teams, among other things to plan distribution of shifts, holidays and day-to-day planning in case of sickness and other matters. Some find the trend and the changes in work tasks challenging. Others feel it is in itself a good thing if you have greater influence and a wider area of responsibility and autonomy. I think there’s more leeway to make decisions – as a middle manager – when you don’t have those rigid guidelines. That was 20 years ago. If anybody told you to do something in a particular way, you did it. And you didn’t bat an eyelid. You did what you’d been doing

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But quite a few among those attracted to right-wing populist opinions feel insecure in their jobs because of these changes. Increased responsibility and leeway for planning, etc. have, for example, intensified the demands on the individual’s ability to solve conflicts on the shop floor. This may be seen as being very hard and awkward. We are supposed to be much more independent at work. We’re expected to resolve all sorts of conflicts which the foremen used to sort out before. But there aren’t any foremen left either. (Mr Skov, blue-collar worker, 49, Danish People’s Party)

Workers have to conform to a specific code of conduct and if they object to this their jobs could be in jeopardy. A blue-collar worker explains that he was alone in opposing the others in his group when he favoured a kind of work-rotation system that the others rejected. I felt totally defeated. Then the process manager rang and said I would have to toe the line. So I said OK. And you opt for the easy way out. He said yes, but it’s easier to give one person the sack than three. So I said OK, I’ll shut up. That hurt. (Mr Jensen, blue-collar worker, 42, Liberal Party)

Yet others experience greater pressure at work: I’ve become more stressed over the past five years. We have to work so quickly that when I get home in the evening I’m so tired I fall asleep around 6 o’clock and wake after a couple of hours, get undressed and go back to sleep. It’s incomprehensible how some people manage to go to meetings in the evenings or follow a sport. Where they find the strength is beyond me. (Mr Skov, blue-collar worker, 49, Danish People’s Party)

A series of changes deal with the qualifications of the employees and their ability to learn. The requirements for flexibility and abstract thinking as well as book-learning are proliferating – requirements that for some may seem onerous. The way things are now, everybody needs theoretical training. But it’s not necessary at all – there’s no place for ordinary people with other skills. In a few years it’ll be impossible for ordinary people like me. You have to be so intelligent, so intelligent. It’s not fair. (Mrs Jørgensen, blue-collar worker, 39, Danish People’s Party)

This woman working in a printing office also says that those who make the decisions do not know what is going on in real life. She has a great deal of mistrust in and contempt for politicians, managers and the elite in society. She calls politicians and managers ‘chickens’ because they do not dare to make the right decisions. She thinks workers’ participation in decisions is a good thing but she worries about the demands for more book-learning. There are people sitting at the top, and they don’t have a clue about what’s going on in the factories and the community. They’re just busy making as much money as possible. If they find out things have to be done this way or that, the whole machinery starts up.

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You know, those directors, bosses and people high up in society. They think they can just press a few buttons and the changes will come of their own accord – but they don’t. (Mrs Jørgensen, blue-collar worker, 39, Danish People’s Party)

Rapid development in the IT sector The IT sector has experienced rapid growth with a constant flow of new technological solutions. This means that those working in this sector need continuous education to stay abreast of developments. All the interviewees feel that in order to keep up with the pace of work they have to take on personal responsibility by educating themselves and thus keeping their qualifications up to date. The educational demands are particularly gruelling for those who are accredited specialists in certain interfaces. They have to pass an annual test and if they fail they lose the following year’s educational bonus as well. For instance, every October I have to take this exam in the platform to retain my specialist accreditation in that area. If I flunk, the computer group wouldn’t be able to use me in that platform until I’d managed to pass the test again. (Mr Svenden, IBM specialist, 30, Danish People’s Party)

This pressure and the fact that they have to be rational and focused on quality of output all the time may contribute to worries about being able to keep up with the pace of development. It’s pretty awful. I don’t even know if I’m going to manage to hang on in this race till I’m forty. When I get back home in the evening, for instance, it’s practically impossible to stop ruminating over all of the things I’m involved in. (Mr Svenden, IBM specialist, 30, Danish People’s Party)

The employees who have lost their jobs For some, the most important change in working life is the fact that they have been made redundant. These are often people whom working life has not treated well. They suffer poor health and psychological problems, they are out of work and have to subsist on transfer income, but they keep referring to their former workplace with great respect. Some people in this group feel seriously let down by the bodies who were expected to support them, namely the trade unions or the public welfare system. Having workmates and a job where they were important seems to have been essential not only to their livelihood but also to their self-esteem and social standing. This much is evident from the way they keep coming back to talking about their working life. Indeed, having a job was so important to them that they were prepared to stay on as long as possible regardless of the working conditions. People are afraid of getting older and losing their job, no matter who they are. That was why I carried on driving after three muggings. (Mrs Jeppesen, former bus driver on early retirement pension, 55, Danish People’s Party)

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In the case of this woman, there seems to be a direct correlation between her present political persuasion and the changes she has faced. She was a bus driver and used to be member of the Social Democratic Party. After the bus services were outsourced she was the victim of several muggings. When her job was transferred to a private company, she had to change her union from the one organizing public-sector bus drivers to the one organizing the privately employed ones. She received no support from her union or the bus company in this matter. At the same time she feels that it is unfair that there is a subsidy for hiring immigrant drivers. She feels she has had no say in her union since she switched to the drivers’ union in connection with the outsourcing, and she thinks that particular attention is being given to immigrants. On top of this, she sees that some of the benefits of the welfare state are threatened – care for the elderly, early retirement, etc. She expresses a great deal of hatred and bitterness against the establishment, the employers, the trade unions and the Social Democrats: It’s the fault of that disgusting social democratic union – the General Workers’ Union. They couldn’t care less about people on the shop floor. They accept any deal, even if it means destroying us. They just want the agreement in place. Four or five years ago I was a member of the Transport Workers’ Union. They had one agreement while the General Workers’ Union have at least five-and-a-half [different agreements] just in the bus transport sector in the Copenhagen area. It comes down to the company you’re working for. (Mrs Jeppesen, former bus driver on early retirement pension, 55, Danish People’s Party) I switched to the Danish People’s Party in 1998 because they [the Social Democrats] changed their policies – I haven’t. The Social Democrats have forgotten people on the factory floor. (Mrs Jeppesen, former bus driver on early retirement pension, 55, Danish People’s Party)

Another woman likewise feels that she has been dumped after many years of hard work. She has developed a serious allergy and can no longer work as a cleaner. She was assisted by a dermatologist and after several years of toing and froing she was awarded an industrial injury compensation. She has the following to say about her former employers at the municipality: You’ve slaved for them for 21 years, and what do you get for it? Dumped. That’s how I felt. They had nothing to offer. I’d been looking after patients for 21 years even though I didn’t have proper training. I worked tons of evenings when they needed someone. Night shifts – I’ve been doing three shifts in a row for years when there were staff shortages – because I lived in the vicinity, when somebody was ill or there was a blizzard I used to cross the fields to do a night shift. And I didn’t mind. But I was disappointed the day they dumped me. (Mrs Frederiksen, former cleaner, 72, Liberal Party)

Of Pia Kjærsgård, whom she may vote for next time, she says: I like listening to her when she speaks. She doesn’t use all big words nor does she give election promises. If she had her way I’m quite sure in spite of everything that many things would be better for people on the shop floor. (Mrs Frederiksen, former cleaner, 72, Liberal Party)

The term abandoned worker describes the predicament and experience of these people. Many of them voice feelings of injustice – these may be demands for

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readjustment or having to cope with other cultures and additional qualification requirements, which individually or altogether are felt to be unjust or hard to live up to. Finally, the injustice may be experienced through redundancies or the fact that they have been forced into early retirement. They say more or less explicitly that they no longer feel appreciated or have any status in the jobs they do. The implicit agreement between worker and employer promising rewards such as work, pay and appreciation in exchange for loyalty and work well carried out, has been broken. Changes in the welfare state: The citizen’s perspective One group of interviewees have yet another compelling reason for their support for right-wing populist opinions. When we look at the changes in society from a wider perspective, several interviewees make a connection between the changes they perceive and the opinions they have. They fear that the welfare state will not be able to take care of its weakest citizens, especially the elderly, who are regarded as having created the present welfare state. This fact is compared to the expenditure on immigrants and refugees on transfer assistance, who are seen as a threat. Their attitude is that the welfare state cannot afford this or the many who in their view are not entitled receive benefits. At the same time, several believe that immigrants and refugees have a free ride – they do not have to try too hard to get jobs or to adapt to Danish culture and little is done to deal with immigrant crime rates. They do not think that previous governments have dealt with these issues, but the Danish People’s Party is expected to do so. Few have personal experiences of immigrant fraud and crime – their information on these issues comes from the media. Most are oriented towards the local community and do not really trust politicians and the political system as such. In general, many express dislike for globalization and the EU – both of which are perceived as a threat. Cuts and expenditure in the welfare society Mrs Jørgensen, the printing-shop worker mentioned above, voices her opinion on cuts in welfare spending compared to the expenditure on immigrants and refugees in harsh terms: I can’t see any reason for cutting back on schools, the elderly and hospitals. They could send all the blacks back – or shoot them – no, you are not allowed to say that. As far as I’m concerned they can stay here, but lots of them just scrounge on society. There are Danes who scrounge as well. But there are lots of them in town, I see them in the shops. And I have to say I can’t stand them – even though some of them are nice. For instance, when you’re a customer in one of their pizza shops – I’ve nothing against them. (Mrs Jørgensen, blue-collar worker, 39, Danish People’s Party)

Mrs Jørgensen expressed the most extreme attitude to immigrants of all those interviewed. Others however, make the same comparison between cuts in welfare spending and expenditure on immigrants, refugees and aid to developing countries.

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A general attitude is that the older generation built society through their taxes, and therefore they deserve to be treated decently in old age. Many think that they are not being treated the way they deserve. Thus, Mr Sørensen says: You just can’t treat [the elderly] the way you sometimes hear about. Some places they turn their nappies over and that sort of thing, because the council wants to save money. And at the same time they’re letting all these immigrants into the country and giving them new bikes and what not – I just think it’s wrong. It shouldn’t be like that. (Mr Sørensen, line manager, 49, Danish People’s Party)

This often leads people to argue that expenditure on immigrants and refugees should be cut, a general point of view being that it would be better for people to receive aid where they live rather than in Denmark. However, the same people may say that aid to developing countries should be cut, as one of the home helps already mentioned says: Without wanting to sound like a racist, I think we ought to stop giving so much to the Third World countries. They [the authorities] look at places like Bolivia, the Sudan – and feel they ought to help – but you’ve got to look after your own country as well. It’s all at the expense of the young and the old, and it’s the old people who worked hard, who went through the war, which left its mark on them. (Mrs Jakobsen, home help, 34, Social Democratic Party)

The experience of injustice Apart from the perception that the expenditure on immigrants, refugees and development aid may be a strain on the welfare state, some feel they are being discriminated against: Now, it may be a bike and – if you’re Danish you won’t get one, you have to work for it yourself. ... It causes unnecessary friction between everybody. It may well be that sort of thing that starts those fights – that’s what I think anyway. (Mrs Møller, child minder, Danish People’s Party)

Interestingly, the story about bicycles handed out to immigrants referred to by Mrs M Møller here and also mentioned by Mr Sørensen above keeps cropping up in numerous accounts; it seems to function like an icon for the state’s discrimination. The same goes for the story about the nappy in the old people’s home. Mrs Jakobsen talks about one of her friends, whose son was to be apprenticed at a garage. But then along came the council and said – let’s call him Mustafa – and said that Mustafa had to be integrated, so we’re giving him your training place. The council favoured him over Peter. The training place was subsidized by the council and they paid an apprenticeship wage. If Peter had been the apprentice they would have had to pay a full wage, but since it was Mustafa, they only had to pay half. Hardly surprising that people start hating foreigners. (Mrs Jakobsen, home help, 34, Social Democratic Party)

At the same time she does understand the priorities of the council as she realizes how important it is for immigrants to work in a Danish workplace and to learn Danish.

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But she does not believe in positive discrimination, claiming it is unfair to other people. Another woman is more marked in her description of discrimination – her statement covers everybody who she thinks scrounges on society. Well, it is not only the blacks – Danes do it too. Some are waited on hand and foot. If we turned up one day we’d get nothing. (Mrs Jørgensen, blue-collar worker, 39, Danish People’s Party)

She does not base her opinions on her own experience but on information from the media – primarily local radio and local newspapers. We look after ourselves Many believe that immigrants and refugees demand a wide range of benefits. This again is information derived from the media, not based on personal experience. Some target their criticism at immigrants, while others target the system and the previous governments, who are accused of having done too little and promised too much. Some think that immigrants do not want to work. However, those who express this view have practically never been unemployed themselves, which is possibly why they think that anyone who really wants to work can find a job. I think they’re just whining: ‘You don’t like us, I’m a foreigner, so nobody likes me’. An attitude like that won’t work any more because they’ve been here for so many years. It may have been like that, early on, when not many wanted to employ people like that, but not any more. (Mrs Madsen, home help, 24, People’s Party)

For many of the interviewees it is very important that they have been able to take care of after themselves and their families throughout their working lives. Most point out that they have never had to rely on welfare and that they have looked after themselves. If we’ve learned anything it’s that we had to work for everything. It’s too easy today for people to get hold of things. It’s not that I begrudge them their washing machines and cars. But they should work for them. They should work and save. That’s what I had to do. I’ve never been out of work, and never taken a penny from the state. I don’t know what it’s like. I have never been unemployed. (Mrs Frederiksen, former cleaner, 72, Liberal Party)

Worries about a multicultural Denmark Several people are worried about the mixing of cultures and feel that this is a threat to peace-loving Denmark. Others find that the immigrants should face rigorous requirements to integrate into Danish society. Few have personal experience of immigrants, a fact they ascribe to cultural differences. This concerns experiences they have had from meeting immigrants as colleagues or clients. A home help has learned that it may be hard for home-care services to suit the needs of some immigrant families, because they have their own values which they would like the home-care services to recognize. In her experience they expect her to adapt.

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She finds it is a problem that some immigrant home helps cannot eat with the elderly people if there is pork in the dish. She thinks it is essential that the staff should have their meals with the old people to get them to eat more. On the other hand, she has a story about a pious colleague who adapted her religion to her working life by praying an extra couple of times when she came home. Some believe that if immigrants were willing to adapt and work for a living there would not be a problem. The other interviewee working in the home-care services says: Well, I’m not a racist in any shape or form, but I don’t like people who make a fuss – I don’t. I just don’t like it. I’ve nothing against them – they can work here if they want, we’ve even had some coming out with us in work-training with headscarves on – that’s OK, they want to work – that’s fine. (Mrs Madsen, home help, 24, People’s Party)

The line manager has had colleagues who were immigrants or refugees, but these were only in work-training and none of these stayed on in the company. He explains that they are not good enough at Danish to meet the requirements on the production line. He thinks there would be production problems if the company hired Muslims who had to pray during the working day. However, if they adapted their prayers so they did not interfere with production it would be no problem. So if it’s that – that flexible I mean – we could say that if it can be done to fit in during the breaks, I can’t really see that it would make any difference or cause any trouble. (Mr Sørensen, line manager, 49, Danish People’s Party)

Some of the interviewees moderate their views on immigrants and refugees by saying that their stories do not apply to all of them. Many connect immigration and crime and some even fear terrorism. Others think the issue is cultural differences. For example, in the Vollsmose area [a district of Odense] they fool the police into coming round by ringing in with a bogus complaint, and then they attack them. We all know what the next thing will be. The worst lot are those second-generation immigrants, who’ve been manipulated by someone or other. It’s a matter of honour for them – you just can’t mix such dissimilar cultures. You can tell an ordinary Danish person off and still be on good terms afterwards, but if you say anything to one of those second-generation immigrants, you’re jeopardizing their honour, and that means they’ll be out for revenge. (Mr Jensen, blue-collar worker, 42, Liberal Party)

The fear of terrorism is something that has been heightened by September 11 but also feeds on the fact that some immigrants behave in ways that substantially differ from Danish norms. During the interview one of the interviewees presented a picture from the newsletter of the Danish People’s Party – a picture of a Palestinian demonstration

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against Israel, showing a little boy dressed as a suicide bomber with a fake bomb in his belt. I’m livid about it, I really am. It’s their approach – he [the boy] hasn’t got a clue about it. If the boy is to have any life in Denmark he [his father] should be deported. If he wants to parade that sort of system he’d have done better staying put and done something to help to get his country back on its feet, that would be doing something useful – he can’t do so here. I hope not at least. (Mr Sørensen, line manager, 49, Danish People’s Party)

Another fears that a state of lawlessness is going to develop in Denmark: I may sound mental, but I’m worried we might end up with another Beirut again. It really unnerves me. Because that lot don’t have an ounce of respect for our police force. (Mr Jensen, blue-collar worker, 42, Liberal Party)

The desire for immigration restrictions Immigration is a central issue, and the interviewees who are attracted to right-wing populist ideas want to restrict immigration. Not everybody expresses this demand, but it is sometimes put forward as a supposed precondition for improved integration. The line manager explains what he likes best about the new government. As far as immigration policy is concerned, I feel that it’s being addressed, that we’re doing something about it – it can’t be good for anybody just letting more and more people into the country. We have to have a plan of action. ... There’s room for lots of people, but if it’s going to work, people have to be given a chance to make it work. (Mr Sørensen, line manager, 49, Danish People’s Party)

There is a widespread desire for immigrants and refugees to be made to adapt to Danish culture. Such demands, they believe, are now being made through the new government supported by the Danish People’s Party. One person says that immigrants must not be given the idea that they can just claim benefits with no strings attached. We have to make sure they don’t think that it’s all right to come here and then just stay in their homes and enjoy themselves. It’s obviously necessary to take action – don’t you think? Otherwise the whole caboodle’s going to grind to a halt if we all sit around doing nothing. We’re going to need money for our pensioners too – we’ll be pensioners ourselves one day – God willing. (Mrs Møller, child minder, Danish People’s Party)

Local people against global people Finally, some of the interviewees with right-wing populist opinions focus on the local community. They express great animosity towards globalization and the EU. They come up with phrases such as ‘the ones high up set the agenda’ and that Danish politicians are too law-abiding and too obedient to the EU. There’s no justice any more. They can’t push us around. The big ones are browbeating the little ones, and we are one of the little ones. (Mrs Jørgensen, blue-collar worker, 39, Danish People’s Party)

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Some of the abandoned workers not only experience injustice in their working lives, they also fear that the welfare society that they grew up with is changing. As they see it, the welfare society is being burdened with rising costs, which may cause welfare cuts – in particular, cuts that would harm the elderly so they do not get the care they are entitled to, although they were the ones who helped build the welfare state. However, it may also be that expenditure cuts might adversely affect them too, for example in the form lower quality schools and health care as well as lack of assistance should they ever end up in a situation where they needed support. Conclusions The Danish interviews point in particular to two trends or connections between social changes and the attraction to right-wing populism. The first is the abandoned worker, who perceives that society has let them down and that the values they stand for are no longer useful. They say more or less explicitly that they no longer feel appreciated or have any status in the jobs they do. The implicit agreement between worker and employer promising rewards such as work, pay and appreciation in exchange for loyalty and work well carried out, has been broken. The second trend is the concern for the welfare state, which the interviewees feel is threatened especially by the expenses to people receiving social benefits. They see that they or the older generation have worked all their lives and paid their taxes, but they fear that the welfare state will not be in a position to help them when they get old or need help in any way. They associate the cuts in welfare spending with expenditure on immigrants, refugees and aid to developing countries.

Chapter 8

Widespread Competition and Political Conversions Gabrielle Balazs, Jean-Pierre Faguer and Pierre Rimbert

Introduction How does social and economic insecurity affect the political views and electoral choices of people who are subject to it? If job cuts, abrogation of social victories, short-term contracts and widespread competition have, little by little, gained ground in all sectors of French industry, the opportunities ‘to pull out of it’, to ‘adapt’ or to switch career paths are very unevenly distributed. Occupational and social disillusionment is not reflected in people’s views or their forms of political expression in a uniform manner. In France during the last quarter of the 20th century, progressive imbalance and finally the collapse of the socio-economic order established after the Second World War has left its mark. Significant changes affected the economic, intellectual and political fields and trade unionism, and this is reflected as much in the order of things as in electoral representation. Havoc was to be wrought on the relations that sustained these different social groups. In political terms, the Socialist Party’s victory at the May 1981 presidential elections of May 1981 was to confirm the loss of influence of a Communist Party that had dominated the left since 1945. The Socialist Party introduced a policy to boost the economy (salary increases, nationalization of specific sectors of industry and finance) together with social measures (a fifth week’s paid holiday, freedom of expression in the workplace, etc.). But in 1983, confronted with poor growth and a significant trade deficit, the government switched to a ‘free-market’ course: it adopted a rigorous monetary and budgetary policy and increased ‘industrial restructuring’ on the back of mass unemployment, which first and foremost hit the working classes (6.7 per cent of workers in 1980, 14.7 per cent in 1998). Economic cutbacks and unemployment – but also an increased workload – have destabilized the framework of wage earners’ lives. The 1980s were marked by the fragmentation of workers’ collectives, the reduction of collective struggle, notably by the trade unions. By the middle of the 1990s France had more than three million unemployed, one million in receipt of minimum welfare benefits, more and more employees in temporary employment and a multitude of poor people not taken into account in

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the statistics. Between 1983 and 2000, the ‘long road towards the Euro’1 was to end in a shift of more than 10 value-added points from labour to capital and a growth in inequality. European treaties were to contribute to standardizing the economic policies of member states as much as those of national governments. In France, in spite of a number political power changes between 1986 and the turn of the century, these policies were not fundamentally to alter; for example between 1997 and 2002, the left continued the privatizations introduced by the right between 1986 and 1988 and between 1993 and 1997. During the 1970s the dominant fraction of the administrative and intellectual elite had implemented a conversion from Keynesianism or Marxism to the free market (Jobert 1994). These changes were to contribute to imposing a new interpretation of society based upon such opposing views as archaism/modernity, status quo/ adaptation, social benefits/individual initiative, public service/corporate, etc. These topics, revived and exploited to the limit by the press, were to return the working classes and the welfare state to a past form of existence, not to say into reverse mode (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1998). ‘Workers exist, but you no longer see them. Why?’, ask Michel Pialoux and Stéphane Beaud: The process of adaptation of the workplace, introduced at the beginning of the 1980s, closely coinciding with the ‘Adieu au prolétariat’ of numerous ‘Marxist’ intellectuals, made workers appear as obstacles to the modernization of industry, as heirs of a bygone era, leading unavoidably to rearguard action. Progressively and imperceptibly, they have been lost from view to the opinion makers (intellectuals, journalists, politicians, etc.), and exactly when, due to weakening of forms of collective resistance, workloads were increasing in the factories, where social interaction in the workplace had deteriorated, where workers had been, so to say, transformed into strategic pawns, reduced to cogs in the wheel of the employed masses, to be ever more constricted. During the course of these last fifteen years, the ‘workers’ issue has been veritably suppressed. (Pialoux and Beaud 1999, 15–16)

Conversely, various confrontations, aimed at finding alternative solutions to the social question, attracted the attention of intellectuals and polarized the political field around the notions of ‘exclusion’ (rather than ‘exploitation’) and of ‘insecurity’ (civil rather than social), soon to be associated with the immigrant question. Their core position in the public debate was to become more prominent as their media exposure, particularly on television, increased. Social insecurity wreaks havoc on all aspects of life, housing, aspirations for the future (and the children’s future), family life and, in the end, political views and electoral choices. But the forms of political expression and the effects of this insecurity on politics in general differ. In order to get to grips with the scale of the problem, within the SIREN project we have compared a steel-industry region hit by crisis in the 1970s/1980s to a region where high-technology industries provide redeployment opportunities through centres of academic education and a diversified employment market. Some 70 years after their observations we have been able to 1 Conseil emploi, revenus et cohésion sociale (2002), La longue route vers l’euro (Paris: La Documentation Française).

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see situations in France, similar to those described by Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel (1981) concerning The Unemployed of Marienthal: all aspects of social life called into question, a feeling of abandonment and of economic fatalism, a mistrust of politics. There is one slight difference, however: on the one hand the victims of the crisis find themselves out of work, on the other, those deemed to be the ‘privileged’ have too much work to do before their number is up with job cuts. The anxiety of an uncertain existence experienced by the unemployed and by temporary casual workers is mirrored in the stress and uncertainty about the future that is engendered in overworked employees. This research was undertaken between December 2001 and September 2002 in a context where right-wing or even openly racist political parties were to gain ground or strengthen their influence in several European countries (Austria, Germany, Belgium, Italy, France, Holland, etc.). In France, the April/May 2002 presidential elections delivered an unprecedented result: eliminating the socialist candidate in the first round, the leader of the extreme right got through to the second round before conceding defeat to the representative of the traditional right wing. On the evidence of the poll’s enquiries2 the prevailing perspective of political science attributes responsibility for this ‘monumental upheaval’ to the working-class ‘protest vote’. These opinion polls detail the characteristic make-up of National Front voters and quantify the electoral behaviour of the people interviewed. But they remain focused upon the predominant question concerning the casting of votes (who voted for whom and why?), paying precious little attention to those who did not vote (28.4 per cent in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, 36 per cent in the first round of the 2002 general elections), those who were not on the electoral roll, those who no longer chose to vote or those who had never voted. In the same way, the repression of the workers’ world in the consciousness of the government parties and of its interests arising out of the political field did not attract analysts’ attention. If there is hardly any doubt that the process of collective demobilization was to the extreme right’s advantage, as was already the case in Western Europe as a whole, then the mainstream interpretation of these events, centred on the supposed slide of the working class towards the extreme right, seemed to us to produce a deceptive outcome. A sociological enquiry based not only on voting practices but on overall political views and standards of living of the groups hit by the ‘crisis’ appeared to be required. Through a series of interviews, on the one hand with the technicians and computer engineers of Grenoble and, on the other, with the workers of the former Lorraine steel valleys,3 we attempted to understand how the interviewees politically commuted 2 For example, Perrineau and Ysmal (2003) and Mayer (2003). These two studies are based on the ‘French electoral panel 2002’ (approximately 4,000 people interviewed before and after the elections). This pool stands out due to an exceptional margin of error in the votes returned for the National Front. For example, before the first round, only 8 per cent of people interviewed said they would vote for Le Pen. After the election, only 9.5 per cent of the people interviewed said they had voted for Le Pen in the first round and 8 per cent in the second (against actual results of 17.2 per cent and 18 per cent of the recorded vote). For a persuasive refutation of the cliché characteristic National Front voter, cf. Lehingue (2003). 3 Contact with the interviewees was helped by an in-depth knowledge of the two grounds of enquiry acquired over a long period: regular visits which in one case started in 1989 and

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the insecurity of their existence. Explaining the socio-economic foundations of the interviewees’ political stances necessitated both an analysis of the changes to their objective expectations within the social group they belonged to (career development) as well as a study of the nature of the links between competitive social groups. Political effects of widespread competition In an industry in decline, as well as in the IT sector, changes in the dominant factors prevalent in the period between the 1960s and the time of the enquiry have torn apart bonds within groups (technicians, workers), intensified competition between fractions of classes and expanded ‘untenable’ social positions – untenable as much through the difficulty of maintaining the status quo without being subjected to a fall in status, as well as in the slim chance of coming out of it ‘on top’. We hypothesized that a prolonged period in such circumstances of social ‘imbalance’ influenced the political stance of those who found themselves relegated and, in the present context, contributed to introducing conditions where an attraction for certain issues promoted by the extreme right was a possibility. The enquiry brings to light the competitive relationships and struggles for domination between or within three fractions of the dominated classes: the ‘middle class’ (in this case, technicians in the ‘high tech’ industry or ‘corporate-trained management’), the firmly entrenched (‘established’) working class and, last to arrive on the scene, the working-class immigrant population. Each one of these groups is subjected to a stigmatizing ‘distancing’ on the part of the group immediately above it in the social hierarchy. On the one hand, in climbing the social ladder the middle classes distance themselves from the working classes by sneering at the ‘lack of culture’ and ‘coarseness’ of the ‘plebs’ (i.e. ‘white trash’) who may very often also be their parents. On the other hand, the dominant fraction of the working classes, the ‘established’ workers distance themselves from the weakest fraction, towards which they fear they may fall: the immigrant workers’ group, the most recent arrivals, the social visibility of which is assured by the ‘young males’ of North African origin. In this context, racism is not a notion to which one subscribes but a social scourge to which one is subjected. It is ‘the means of contact which different sectors of the workforce have been coerced to adopt in a particular economic framework’ (Wallerstein 1996, 76), an unusual form of social rivalry which intensifies as keenly contested resources become scarce. The enquiry shows that competition between employees in the high-technology sector appears organized and regulated, inside and by the company, especially because the context of the University of Grenoble allows redeployment strategies for the middle classes. On the other hand, in the former industrial sector it fans out into all aspects of everyday life.4 in the other in 1995, allowed a relationship of confidence to be built up and a network of information providers to be established. 4 Understanding what is different in the political choices of white-collar workers today and white-collar workers of the 1930s, for instance in Germany, one has to consider Siegfried Kracauer’s famous analyses. If the 1930s crisis tended to narrow living conditions and wages

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For over a century the former industrialized world has been characterized by the predominance and the prominence of a qualified, male-dominated working class, whose social advancement was assured by the dynamism of the steel industry (referred to here as the ‘established’ workers’ group). They monopolized production work while the majority of women were housewives. The strategies employed by management to create divisions in the workers’ groups established a social distancing between this group and that of the latest arrivals, the immigrants. Restricted to non-qualified jobs, these latter made it their vocation to ‘establish themselves’ at the first or secondgeneration stage of integration. Forty years of economic and social restructuring have brought this process of ‘integration’ to a halt. At the time of the enquiry, the children of the North African immigrants of the 1950s and 1960s, the most recent additions to the workers’ group ‘on the bottom rung of the ladder’ and the first to be hit by economic recession, still find themselves the underdogs in relation to the traditional workforce. Equally hit by crisis, the ‘established’ workers have seen their living conditions deteriorate: for example, steel workers are now a declining minority of the active population. The pressure of unemployment has thus brought these two fractions of the class closer together in the social arena. In addition, in a context of retrenchment, women entering the service sector and an increase in the variety of women’s job functions has profoundly changed the male/female division of labour within the working-class workforce. Lastly, the labour pool’s nucleus has moved away from the industrial valleys to larger towns and cities and into Luxembourg. A series of factors contributes to disguising the existence of a hard-working working class from the outside world and reinforcing the political and media repression of the workers’ issue: statistical reclassification of former industrial trades as service jobs, the sub-contracting of a growing number of industrial activities, the physical transfer of industrial production to a string of small units pushed out to peripheral industrial estates, the sub-division of labour and the scattered, piecemeal service industry. But since one out of every two male interviewees and six out of ten women in the employment market studied was working class, and because living and working conditions, remuneration, and socialization of working-class families and their conditioning to be supervised differentiate them clearly from the middle classes and the upper classes, it would be wrong to see economic cutbacks as entailing the end of the worker’s world. Resignation in the face of social order, upsurge against social inequalities We have concentrated on to the sociological foundations of political views by studying the biographical effects of this economic upheaval on Lorraine’s former ‘valleys of iron’. Most of the workers or former workers interviewed denounced the economic deterioration and the inequalities it has engendered: devaluation of employment and retirement pensions, economic and social insecurity, and regional decline, which drastically cuts off future prosperity. Considered as wholly unjust, these of the both classes, the relation to the legitimate culture was, in fact, the main distinctive frontier between them.

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developments are dreaded with a mixture of disgust (‘It’s not normal’) and fatalism (‘We can’t do anything’, ‘we’re too insignificant’). For many pensioners and people in early retirement, the battle with employers, perceived as inflexible and invincible since the defeat of the trade unions, is much less the order of the day, since it no longer affects their immediate material needs. Nor does their disillusionment extend to insurgent reaction against the guardians of economic order. Instead, it is vented against a population which is at the same time socially closer to them, more visible in their immediate environment and more likely to ‘eat into’ common interests. While social insecurity and juvenile delinquency are generally condemned in the same breath, it is the nuisance caused by delinquency associated with immigration that arouses the fiercest indignation and the staunchest demands for ‘change’ (‘It must change’, ‘They must be punished! We must clamp down!’). How does a shift from a sentiment of economic injustice to the stigmatization of the immigrant population take place? The enquiry suggests that a significant number of the racist comments heard give voice to two types of objective tension that divide the very close groups: 1) competition in various ‘markets’ (employment, education, housing, social benefits, etc.), exacerbated by unemployment and 2) symbolic struggles aimed at warding off the threat of relegation to the group on the rung of the ladder immediately below them in the social hierarchy. Under the effect of the economic crisis, the framework of the fractions of class with limited economic and cultural capital has been squeezed internally. And this social constriction of environmentally proximate groups increases and vociferates the competitive conditions in all facets of daily life. These divisions can be defined by focusing upon the relationships linking the early retired or retired former steelworkers and the group spearheaded by immigrants and second-generation immigrants of the 1950s and 1960s North African immigration. These two groups of the same class, while in many ways poles apart, co-exist in the district’s limited space, and this proximity gives substance to the stakes at risk in the conflict between them. For certain retired workers, the ‘youth’ of the neighbouring district represents at the same time a threat (to property, to the reputation of the town and to their children’s future), competition (access to municipal funding and their children’s employment) and a nuisance factor (trouble, damage to property, etc.) Struggles against relegation Over and above the most organized efforts to access the labour market and educational qualifications, antagonism proliferates in a wide range of issues on a daily basis. These struggles arise in daily conflicts which are not perceptible to political observers. For example, we observed how at the end of the 1990s the widespread emergence of fast-food kiosks operated by Turks or North Africans was viewed as a threat by existing food outlets, restaurants, snack-bars, sandwich bars and pizza parlours, set up by former ‘established’ but now redeployed workers. For these small traders with limited means, the financial balance is often very precarious and depends on their own hard work and tenacity. The sudden emergence of kebab vendors, dedicated and relentless workers and good businessmen, fuelled competition: the new arrivals attracted an increasing clientele, notably among young people. Interviewed about the

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circumstances of his start-up, a former steel worker turned travelling sandwich vendor remembers: ‘For the first two years, it was great because there were very few kebab stalls. There weren’t too many snack bars.’ Even if he did not at any point mention commercial rivalry as a determining factor for his political stance, this small trader expresses commercial rivalry in political terms when approving of speeches that allude to keeping ‘immigrants’ at a distance, to closing borders and to ‘national preference’. A similar rivalry has been established with regard to access to housing and against the devaluation of mortgaged property values. The appearance of North African families (statistically poorer and harder hit by unemployment) in a residential area is often a prelude to depreciation in property values. It is in the interests of the residents of these working-class housing estates, who took out mortgages to buy their homes in the 1980s and consider this asset to be both a status symbol and the only capital to leave to their children, to keep at a distance this population who, simply by being neighbours, cause downgrading and a fall in the value of property. So one sees collective strategies aimed at preventing house buying by North Africans. By becoming home owners of property attributed to the ‘established’ fraction of workers, the ‘foreigners’ in the town studied are threatening to break through a social barrier that revolves principally around the difference between council housing and private home ownership. The allocation of municipal loans and social benefits are similarly at stake in the struggle between the two groups. Where council-housing areas and the most needy populations benefit from the injection of municipal funding to provide cultural facilities, aid community associations and further urban development, certain former ‘established’ workers accuse the authorities of favouring the immigrants to their own detriment. A struggle for access to leisure facilities develops, pitting ‘the district’s young people’ against the retired population, whose diminishing leisure activities were directly linked to the workplace (1st May, etc.). ‘They’ve stopped everything here. There’s nothing left ... Nowadays, they hold all the leisure activities and celebrations over there [the council-housing area], where the Arabs live’, explained the wife of a retired steel worker, who would prefer to give up a pastime that interests her rather than cross the spacio-temporal (and social) barrier separating the workers’ housing estate from the council-housing blocks a hundred metres away. The symbolic competitive struggles are no less acute than their tangible counterparts, as is suggested by the case of a 68-year-old hotelier, a former worker who started in the factory at the age of 14. Opened in the heart of a flourishing steel town in the 1970s, his hotel and restaurant trade has declined in parallel with the rate of site closures. This ‘bad’ investment has wiped out the social advantages linked to his rise in social status. Remaining a ‘small businessman’ and reckoned among the local ‘respected gentlemen’, not only is he affected by the decline of his small business and his life’s work (he has a total of 54 years’ contributions), but his status has also been reduced by the downgraded status of his clientele. In order to fill his bedrooms, he has effectively been forced to come to terms with ‘accepting welfare cases’. I work with the family allowance office. I’m stuck with welfare cases. There is a young Arab woman with a baby. There are young people who no longer have a roof over their heads, a disagreement with their parents, they ask me for a room and I give them one. I

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In this ‘thankless job’, where ‘you always have to be of service to people’, this small businessman judges his self-exploitation to be all the more ‘thankless’ as he despises his poor clients who drag him down socially. His political views are drawn from a balancing exercise, seeking to reconcile the interests of the business (‘When you’re in business, you have to be on the same side’), working-class values (‘you’ve got to achieve something’) and above all the reinstatement of his social status. An Italian immigrant and himself a victim of racism in his youth, he ‘kowtowed’ to achieve ‘integration’, that is to say ‘to have the same rights as the French’, and thinks that henceforth ‘the indigenous population should come first’. He is outraged that the neighbouring fast food outlet run by Turks is whittling away his restaurant’s turnover. This hotelier voted for Le Pen in the presidential election: ‘He doesn’t frighten me. I’ll be even tougher’. While both communities are equally eligible to claim benefits intended for the poorest, certain insecure retired people in the ‘established’ group still seek to distance themselves by attributing a lazy and underhand attitude to their immigrant rivals, which justifies putting them ‘out of the game’: They give those others money but they don’t pay their dues. (Retired railway worker) They take advantage of the system. Welfare benefits from all over the place, they take advantage of everything. (Employee in a small business) They’re downright rude ... Every time they come to the station to get a train ticket, they want a reduction and they have a family discount railcard. They get a 75 per cent reduction for being a large family; so they only pay for a quarter of a seat. And then they want: ‘Isn’t there another reduction?’ ... They want everything. (Cleaning lady in a railway station) The parents, what do they do? All they do is cash in their family allowances and the father stays at home so he doesn’t have to work? ... The cars they have, we can’t afford to buy cars like that. Not us. (Housewife, wife of a retired steel worker)

It can be seen that these grievances do not target a strictly ethnic group, but, in reality, a social standing. ‘Them’ or ‘the other lot’ are not so much ‘the North Africans’, or ‘the Arabs’, as the closest rivals. And it is precisely this status of legitimate competitor (who has access to a full range of available benefits) that the interviewees endeavour to deny to their rivals. In describing them as ‘profiteers’ because they claim social security benefits, as ‘swindlers’ because they do not pay their contributions to the same organizations, as ‘rude’ because they optimize their

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rights to fare reductions, or as ‘lazy’ because they are on unemployment benefit, the members of the ‘established’ fraction of the working class take it upon themselves to denigrate the latest arrivals in the group and to delegitimize their right to compete for benefits essential to both groups. In effect, it is the stress of unemployment, low wages, inadequate pensions and the difficulty of financing their children’s education which push a growing number of immigrant families but also families of former ‘established’ workers to turn for help and welfare benefits without which neither would be able to make ends meet. The vehemence of certain ‘anti-immigrant’ talk and the exaggerated nature of the accusations sometimes made against them should not obscure the fact that the demands for a ‘return to order’, albeit aggressive (‘I want to see them removed’), also convey the desire of the former ‘established’ workers to reinstate the previous social order, which protected the present and the future of the ‘men of iron’ and which at the same time kept ‘the immigrants’ at a safe distance. ‘Management’ of the competition In the IT sector, it is above all the company that controls competition, notably by the establishment of specific mechanisms for staff evaluation. In contrast to the regions hit by industrial restructuring, where the struggle to maintain status spreads into all aspects of everyday life, here it is almost entirely limited to the workplace. Its intensity, however, is all the more evident since employees have come to terms with competition as a normal means of progression, in the same way as they regard competitive sport or academic achievement (daily reminders of the company’s stock market value, sales successes, the emphasis placed on the respective successes of different departments, sites or products, etc.). The company employs performancerelated language, speaks of promotion and career development. Career instability is not always accompanied by resentment in the sense that other aspects of social life – at least until employees are fired – are unaffected by the disintegrating effects of the crisis. To some extent, this is limited to the company, to the chances of occupational redeployment and, more largely, to the chances of employees’ families’ social standing escaping relegation. Even though jobs are threatened, employees do not, however, experience a fall in their social status. They maintain their way of life (housing, access to a high and diversified level of schooling for their children, ‘middle class’ leisure activities, etc.), factors which, for them, preserve their chances of career redeployment and do not affect their children’s social status. This is what sets the IT workforce apart from the working-class worker, both in terms of their chances of redeployment in the event of redundancy and the differences in their means of advancing their careers. Staff-assessment criteria are not based solely on technical ability but also on the ‘belief’ in the value of the ‘product’ and more largely in the IT industry itself, similar to the beliefs expected of those who work in cultural circles. At the same time, increased workload, diversification, speed of production runs, the life of the ‘products’ and finally their introduction as commonplace leads to intensified competition between companies, products and employees. In this sector, the widespread distribution of manufactured products, their uses and the quality of their

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‘IT spec’ results in the devaluation of workers’ and technicians’ professional capital, as much from an economic as a symbolic point of view. In the main, the IT workforce is made up of very highly qualified employees, with a large proportion of engineers, female staff and technicians. Characterized by exceptional academic achievement (or in the case of those who have worked their way up from the grass roots, by an unprecedented opportunity to redress the balance) and being part of the high-technology sector, their social career paths only encourage them to adhere to the elitist and individualistic values and lifestyles of the educationally motivated, socially ascending middle classes. This point of view is reinforced by being part of a world which over the last twenty years has been sheltered from employment market erosion, which, in a ‘dynamic’ region such as that of Grenoble, essentially only affected employees entering the job market with no more than a school-leaving certificate –‘young people’ with no technical or higher education diplomas – and in the sectors in decline. Recruited on a national and even international employment market – recruitment that is simplified by direct links between company and university – the employees have few family or social ties with the local population and are not indigenous to the region. The social qualities of a workforce that has been specifically chosen for its ‘apolitical’ tendencies and its ‘distance’ from the working-class world (even if some of them come from working-class or small-farming backgrounds) leads employees who face job insecurity to hold ambivalent views. The people interviewed, including left-wing sympathizers or staff representatives, often viewed their own circumstances within the analytical framework provided by the hierarchy they found themselves in. The ideology of this professional world, which is based on the valorization of the competition between employees, led them to see the problems with their job as problems of the individual and to hold themselves responsible. If they have not achieved the ‘objectives’ defined during the evaluation with the hierarchy they are suspected of failure, being incompetent or unfaithful. Less than 5 per cent of the employees belong to a trade union and ways of resisting managerial decisions usually take individual forms. Very often the conflicts with the hierarchy are perceived as the behaviour of people with relational problems. A permanent threat paralyses any will to collective resistance. ‘They are people,’ one of the oldest employees tells us, ‘whose creed in company values is so great that, when you tell them, “You’ve been dropped”, they can’t believe it.’ Management politics in the IT sector has succeeded in depoliticizing professional life (‘business is business’) and finally separating working life and private life completely. As an example that takes account of all the qualities of an ambiguous perception of oneself leading to self-neutralization if not devaluation, we can take the case of a secretary threatened with redundancy. She explains her political stance as one of personal choice, out of line with her (non-executive) status and the interests of her job. She is sceptical with regard to trade union action (‘It’s too late’). She describes herself as right wing ‘I’m going to vote for Jacques Chirac. I’ve always voted rightwing.’ She is opposed to the 35-hour week and does not think that unemployment is a social problem: ‘I think that if you want to work you will find work.’ She has always stood up for herself; her view of politics is individualistic, with a sense of

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belonging to an elite of the ‘old school’ who grew up with the traditional corporate culture (‘There’s an opportunity for everybody. It comes about through recognition of effort, of human values, of respect for others, of recognition of the differences in others. ... It is necessary to extract the positive from the person ... [to] find work that will elevate that person’). She confronts the company’s new economic policy from an individual moralistic point of view: ‘I stand on my own two feet.’ Like many inhabitants of Grenoble, this employee’s family is ‘of immigrant origins on both sides’ (her paternal grandparents originate from Central Europe, her maternal grandparents are from Austria and Italy). With more that 20 years’ service, she has ‘lived through all the changes’. Born in 1958 in Cameroon, where her father worked as an electrical department section head (her mother was a health-centre nurse), she did not come to France until she was seven years old. All her schooling was in the private sector, first in a convent then in a private secretarial college. After her baccalaureate – linguistic option (English German, Italian) – and higher technical diploma, she immediately sought work. Following a series of part-time jobs (bank clerk, a job in a municipal library, a secretarial job with a firm of lawyers), she was offered part-time job with this IT company, which she applied for ‘without much conviction’. Her career is a text-book model of a typical ‘non executive’ career path rooted in ‘potential’, spirit of initiative, sense of teamwork, not being a clock-watcher, etc., but which, with the passage of time and ‘boredom’ came to a standstill. She is nostalgic about the early 1980s, when ‘people helped each other, we did everything, there were no barriers ... in an atmosphere of mutual cooperation, we wanted to get things moving.’ She misses the time when she was appointed as PA to a manager. When he came, ‘he decided to keep me on’. She was responsible for keeping his diary, taking the minutes of section-head staff meetings, first in French, and then, as her English improved, in English. Her problems started when the division she was working for was disbanded. Like her 160 colleagues, she had to find herself an ‘inhouse’ job, learn how to ‘sell herself’: interviews, staff evaluations, etc.: ‘I did what I could’. After four months of searching, she was offered a training course to learn ‘how not to feel too affected by occupational changes in the workplace’: three-day sessions with specialists from Paris, ‘lots of soul searching’, ‘of self-discovery’. ‘Then I had my baby’. Six months later, on her return to work, was the time ‘where I found myself “PRBI”’, i.e. with the lowest staff evaluation, or: in other words among the inefficient members of staff. Having had four managers in the year, not one of them interested in looking after my interests. The manager left. A German chap replaced him, who was there for four months to fill a gap. The third walked out. He was replaced by a fourth – I saw straight away what he wanted: he hassled me all day, was constantly aggressive. I said to myself, you my lad, you’re up to something, you’re up to mischief. At the time, they had already announced plans to lay off 5 per cent of the staff. Someone must have said to him, ‘You should lay her off ... Drop her grade.’

She criticized her boss, an engineer, for not respecting her, for ‘treating her like a dog’. ‘He said, “You don’t listen, you don’t understand anything.” I said to him, “Listen, perhaps I am deaf, but I know I’m just as intelligent as certain individuals.”’ She decided to meet a staff representative even before knowing the result of the evaluation. She was given three months to ‘put the situation to rights’ while continuing

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to report to the same manager. ‘I didn’t have the choice. I did it; I didn’t let myself be had. I fought. At times, I said to him, “You don’t respect me.”’ These are ‘people who look after their own jobs, only themselves, that’s all. It’s the current mentality’. She concludes: ‘I’ve always stood on my own two feet ... I’ve never doubted myself. One should never doubt oneself. These are methods of intimidation.’ As a single mother (the father of her child is head of a company and lives in another town) who, for a long time, sacrificed her family life to advance her career, she explains that now, disillusioned and having health problems, her private life comes before her job: ‘My career, I don’t care: my child, I wanted it, I’ve done what was required.’ She now benefits from working flexitime. The threat, which weighs heavily on the staff, has spoiled the atmosphere and the solidarity that existed in the old days: People no longer want to work. They’re not motivated. ... They’re waiting for the next train. ... As far as work is concerned, I feel very indifferent. I’m on stand-by. ... I have health problems that I’m going to resolve. I have friends ... that keeps me going.

In 2005, three years after our research began, the company announced another 1,000 lay-offs, for the first time without any redeployment. Shortly afterwards there was a strike at the facility in Grenoble and a demonstration by the employees. The management agreed to halt the lay-offs if working hours were lengthened with no increase in salaries. We were able to see a turning point in the history of the company: employee disillusionment, the dashing of hopes as a result of a normalization of the form of domination – a ‘soft’ domination used to achieve employees’ acquiescence in the face of blackmailing over jobs. Different forms of redeployment The numerous studies carried out on the subject of the National Front and its electorate demonstrate that the opportunities to convert people’s political views to the extreme right appear to be linked to the deterioration in the means of social reproduction of the three groups in decline: small businessmen (and, in a larger sense, the lower middle classes with family capital), the upper middle class with traditional values (predominantly Catholic) and finally a fraction of the working classes (principally made up of the declining trades). This disintegration is rooted in the changes which, over the last thirty years, have affected the principal institutions of social reproduction: family, school and the workplace (Balazs et al. 2002). If one takes these findings as read, the results of the reconversion strategies employed by the groups concerned in order to escape relegation are directly linked to the appeals of the extreme right. In consequence, it is important to identify the factors or elements for each of the fractions of class researched that encourage or impede people’s conversions. To what extent do members of a declining group have access to cultural, social and economic resources that can be transferred to sectors of the employment market other than the one that is falling apart around them? In the following sections we will highlight the significance of ‘political capital’ and ‘cultural capital’ and the common links that sustain these two resources.

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Access to a variety of redeployment ‘markets’ partially allows the brakes to be put on the effects caused by job losses and the risk of social decline. We see here what it means to belong to a social class with all the forms of support that reach out to protect its members from a decline in social status and anomie. Traditional working-class regions hit by crisis in all aspects of their social environment over a long period have seen the relegation of large numbers of working-class people over several generations. In contrast to this, the crisis in the more ‘developed’ regions with ‘state-of-the-art’ high-tech industries and a generally high level of education has so far only affected the youngest, then progressively the oldest workers, and more recently medium-sized companies often exclusively devoted to sub-contracting work. Long-standing solidarity and the institutions that play a large part in mobility or at least in arresting social decline have thus far been spared the disintegration of social ties. If devaluation of skills leads to a crisis of values on which meritocracy is founded, the crisis is not (yet) synonymous with a narrowing of the field of occupational opportunities. By focusing on differing forms of family capital, the groups most vulnerable to the crisis are presented with redeployment opportunities rarely available in other regions. This could explain the differing effect on political views in the two regions studied. The political ambivalence of the technicians The fact that the appeal of the extreme right’s political doctrine receives little sanction from the world of new technology could be due to the fact that the crisis in this sector is still a recent phenomenon, the consequences of which are still far from having produced all their biographical effects. All the same, employees whose professional and social futures appear to be most at risk – the oldest, the least qualified, often having profited from career advancement relatively disproportionate to their cultural capital (leading them, in certain cases, to being in charge of younger, more competent and more qualified employees) – have been forced to accept early retirement packages. This in turn has an effect on certain aspects of their political stances. The interview with a technician, the oldest employee at the Grenoble site (by virtue of which he was to be given the honour of making a presentation to one of the two founders on a visit to the factory), who also accepted redundancy at the beginning of 2002, is a particularly interesting illustration of the ambivalence that loss of status represents for this corporate-trained employee – a status that was only made possible by a career in this company. This ambivalence is at the centre of what could be termed a euphemistic expression of political commitment: his support for a political party or movement is only expressed in an indirect fashion, particularly during the latter part of the interview, even when the tape recorder is switched off. It was also apparent in what can be termed ‘emotional expression’ – emphatic tone, ‘inappropriate’ vocabulary, ‘out of context’ small talk, etc. The ambiguity of topics raised reflected issues that adversely affected all political points of view during the two electoral campaigns of 2002 (Klemperer 1996) indirectly manifested a political violence which, in the end, was only discernable in brief but seriously consequential ‘outflanking’. This leads one to ponder the title of the article by Michael Pollack: there are ‘words that kill’ (Pollack 1982). At no point would the interviewee openly

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declare his political affiliation. He would say that he did not remember exactly whom he voted for in 1995 (‘For Chirac, I believe’) and said that he did not yet know whom he would vote for in the 2002 presidential election. But at the end of the interview he intimated that in France there is a lack of candidates ready to take on board the unpopular measures that are needed: ‘Real political technocrats are needed, not politicians who change their opinions several times a day. Madelin or Bayrou [French free-market right-wing supporter and Christian-democrat French politician], but they haven’t got a chance. Pasqua is too old. The real problems are not being addressed.’ At the age of 54, with 32 years of service, this employee finds himself with the status of a young pensioner who will receive the equivalent of almost his full final salary until he is 60. He has no illusions: ‘It’s a plan that must have cost the company a fortune.’ But he sees this measure as a: redundancy plan disguised as an early retirement programme. ... For me, in making my decision, the contents of the plan mattered a lot less than the prospects for the future ... that’s now been corroborated ... they plan to reduce the workforce by between 500 and 800 in the coming months.

His problem is not a financial one, even less a problem concerning the professional future of his two children, today students in selective education and in all probability assured of finding good jobs. His main problem is linked to his change in status, seen as a humiliation, which has rendered him, a person in early retirement, a useless individual. He passes his time listening to the radio, collecting stamps and returns several times a week to the company offices to have lunch and talk with his colleagues, a place which had been the centre of his life for more than thirty years. The whole professional and family life of this soldier’s son, born in the Paris suburbs, is in effect written in the history of the company. It was at his place of work that he met his wife, a former shop-floor worker recruited after the closure of a local lingerie manufacturing business. Never having taken a leading role (‘I have never had to plan for myself ... I always just said yes’) or participated in union activities, he was able to profit from all the benefits of a career in an expanding sector. He was involved in the organization of training programmes, several of which were held in the United States, and he was responsible for training the technicians who built the first generation of Grenoble-manufactured computers. For 15 years he was to be a supervisor. Less qualified than the majority of the employees who worked under him, he sometimes felt out of place. (If he was successful in becoming supervisor by virtue of the fact that he was ‘the best technician’, he nevertheless admits that he was ‘not a good supervisor’.) But more than anything, over the years he witnessed the decline of a company that had gone from being an in-house computer manufacturer to a research and development management company. He himself is the personification of the disappearance of skills: ‘Nowadays there’s no longer the technical knowledge in the trades. ... People are no longer specialists ... today everybody calls himself an engineer.’ With the changes in management, the hierarchy was privileged at the expense of technical competence: ‘All of a sudden, you lost a good technician and gained a bad supervisor.’ Its implementation coincided with the change of

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management and with the directive to grade 15 per cent of the staff at level one (on a scale of one to five). After having been responsible for the worldwide control of the multinational’s software management programmes associated with the transition to the year 2000 – an assignment for which he was solely responsible, accountable to only one superior based at head office in Palo Alto – the following year he found himself with a poor staff report and was encouraged to resign: Because I was far away, I was out of sight, I was inefficient and I ended my career ‘with a poor report’ whereas formerly I had been classified as a good worker. My manager realized what he had done. For more than a year he was more sickened than I was at having been forced to take that step.5 ... I was classified as ‘poor’ because I’d been ill for three weeks in the year 2000. My boss told me officially. He was someone I respected. I didn’t really want to hear it from him. He didn’t realize what he’d done. He started out by saying, ‘Well, last year was a bad year for you. You were ill. You had a death in your family.’ I said to him, ‘OK, that’s enough. I know where you’re coming from.’

The interview was relatively short. Political issues were not addressed until the end of the interview, and then only briefly. The interviewee sidestepped direct questions but through a series of out-of-context remarks expressed his views about the crisis – ‘out of sight, out of mind’. At that moment, for the first time, he livened up. His speech became more animated and tangible. His tone was melodramatic. For me, politics, I have always considered it middle of the road, between drugs and prostitution ... Usually I vote. This time, I haven’t yet decided. And in 95, whom did you vote for? For Chirac, I think. And this time, what are the important issues? I haven’t thought about it yet. For example, the crisis, unemployment? It’s not debates that count. They talk of looking after pensioners, saying there’s going to be a problem there. What have they done? What have they promised? Nothing. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t know. As a minimum, they’ve got to have the balls to risk upsetting people, the means to take action on many fronts: the economy, the judiciary ... Did you have the impression that your contribution was fully appreciated by your company? Until five years ago, yes. Without a doubt! The first 20 to 25 years, I had a really good time. I had a great life. I put my heart and soul into it. However, it’s not good to grow old in this type of business. That’s where there’s a lot of ambiguity, which is worth 5 It explains that the most negative staff reports which have the effect of infringing upon good relations between colleagues in the same team can be the subject of exchanges between supervisors in terms of meeting quotas as a means of achieving expected global percentages, irrespective of the views which supervisors may have of the occupational values of the employees they supervise. Moreover, as is recalled by one of the interviewees, the grading has direct consequences upon annual salary reviews: ‘I went through it all from ‘very good’ to ‘very poor’. My second to last boss took a sudden dislike to me for some reason or another. He didn’t like my face. My staff evaluation was poor. After the event, we discussed it, he regretted his misjudgement, but once the evaluation’s done, you have to wait another year for a salary increase.’

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Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right discussing. Companies don’t want to pay retirement packages; they want to pay them later and later. The trend is to increase the retirement age. But on the other hand they want to rid themselves of people, earlier and earlier. What do you do with people aged 45 to 65? They don’t want them any more and they don’t want to pay them right up to retirement age. Are they going to beg for their living? Well, that doesn’t hold water. If something is proposed, an appropriate solution should also be put forward. Are we going to have to pay higher taxes? They don’t say what they’re going to put in its place. Talking of people’s usefulness, they are going to get the best out of them from the moment they complete their studies and then for the 10 most productive years of their lives until the age of 45. But what happens then? But that, that’s a political issue. Don’t you think it’s being addressed in the campaign? I’ve heard nothing about it, and yet I spend quite a bit of time at home. I listen to lots of debates, speeches, and all. Yes, the only thing they’ve done recently, they voted in Barcelona, with the rest, promising to reduce the retirement age. On the other hand, to the French voters they say, ‘Yes, yes, the retirement age is still 60.’ But they’ve signed to say that they are in agreement that it should be reduced. Well then, where’s the funding coming from to meet it? And moreover, they [Chirac and Jospin] were both present [he laughs]. And did they ask the French people how they wanted to reply to this question? They didn’t ask them. Of course everyone benefits from a retirement age of 60. We all benefit from the 35-hour week. You’re given a pile of money, you’re not treated like a thief, you take it. But morally, is it the right thing to do?

Different meanings of ‘politics’ For the inhabitants of the ‘valleys of iron’, whose careers advanced during the ‘30 glorieuses’ (1944-1974), politics went hand in hand with the factory. Consequently, their political views were thrown into disarray by the economic cutbacks. As far as most of the people interviewed in 2002 were concerned, we were able to observe a series of opposing views which placed political stances between two poles: local politics/national politics; factory politics/party politics; demonstrations/meetings; action/words; collective or trade-union militancy/political militancy, etc. In other words, on the one hand, politics that the interviewees viewed as being accessible and capable of looking after their interests and, on the other, the traditional political game connected to public opinion and personified by politicians, associated with affairs, socially and (geographically) remote. The belief that bound these political views together in the past had its roots in the previously integrated steel industry. Steel production encouraged a distinctly political socialization, looking after the political interests of the workers’ group and at the same time acting as the political lever of the working classes. The disintegration of the steel industry world broke this double-edged sword of the working classes. And if the most legitimate view of politics (Parisian and national, party and electoral) is often regarded with indifference, it is in political matters as elsewhere that ‘indifference is only a manifestation of impotence’ (Bourdieu 1977). If our enquiry does not allow the variable forces affecting an electoral swing to the extreme right to be fully determined, it enables us to understand how conditions of a possible attraction to the issues promoted by the extreme right come about and how certain conditions are liable to hinder support for these issues. It explains how

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the destabilizing effects of competition are transferred into political stances or even political conversions. To take account of the multiplicity of these conversions, we looked at the career paths of two workers who clearly demonstrate the division of opinion with regard to the future: a retired railway worker and a working-class woman with a university education, now redeployed in the administration of community projects. Neither are representative of the blue-collar workers, but each of them assembles usually distinct social characteristics and represent a sort of ideal type. Fall in social status, political conversion and the vote for the extreme right The career path of Mr Bouler, a former worker subject to a fall in status, represents a typical example of electoral conversion to the extreme right. Mr Bouler was born into a working-class family in occupied Alsace in 1942. Without qualifications, he joined a printing company as an apprentice at the age of 15 and subsequently went to live in Lorraine where he joined the French railways (SNCF). He remembers having been subjected to what he terms ‘racist behaviour’ by the people of Lorraine against the people of Alsace and is overjoyed about a recent law which has reintroduced the teaching of regional languages: ‘Before, they treated you like the “Boche”. You couldn’t say anything. Whereas nowadays, it’s considered to be racist, it’s come to that.’ But at the same time, he is outraged at being unable to make racist comments about the North Africans: You can’t say anything to them, because if you do you’re accused of racism. If you don’t want to be up in front of a tribunal, you’ve got to keep your mouth shut. The problem, that’s where it is: you haven’t got the right to say what you want.

Now retired, his job, with tenuous working conditions, was connected to the steel industry. For a long time he was paid very low wages, significantly inferior to those of the steel workers. His career culminated in a job as a shunting-team boss. His retirement income is low. I’ve got just about the guaranteed minimum wage (SMIC). If you don’t have that, you can’t live. If you calculate everything that needs to be taken out each month, you know, you don’t do silly things. That allows you to buy a TV on credit. And then, that’s it.

This insecurity makes him regret not pursuing a career in the military. Mr Bouler looks on his retirement status as some kind of victory. On several occasions he recalls his colleagues’ teasing: ‘You’ll snuff it soon, you know,’ or ‘You’ll never make retirement.’ He remarks in a self-satisfied manner: ‘In my case, I’ve already got there. There are some who died before reaching retirement age.’ In contrast to many retired steelworkers, Mr Bouler does not own his own home. His wife worked in Luxembourg as a temporary contract cleaner and still does the same job at the town’s railway station. She was seriously injured in a car accident while going to collect her pay from the city of Luxembourg. The experience of the tribunal, when the Boulers tried to make a claim for damages and interest, was traumatizing: ‘We were badly advised. When an accident happens, people are traumatized. If we’d had free legal advice, like the other litigants, we’d have a new

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house now. You see the difference.’ Mr and Mrs Bouler have three children, two sons, who are policemen and a daughter, a saleswoman in a small business. One of their sons was shot and injured by a North African during the course of his duties. Mr Bouler was a militant trade unionist with the CFDT (French Democratic Workers’ Confederation) (a dues collector). He clashed with the CGT (General Confederation of Workers), which he likened to the Communist Party and to ‘totalitarianism’: I’m for freedom of expression; freedom of choice. I’m not totalitarian. ... If I go to a conference, a meeting, I’ve got the right to say what I think. Nobody is obliged to believe in what I say, but I’ve got the right to express myself. To say what I think. And afterwards, that’s what you vote on. And it’s the majority that wins.

This belief in democratic expression encouraged him to join the Socialist Party, before 1981, ‘... as a sympathizer. I had nothing to pay. They’re richer than we are’ and because it ‘was up to the left to change things, because workers had faith in them at that time.’ His views regularly evoke the image of the worker’, the ‘ordinary man in the street’, betrayed and deceived, by the powerful. (‘We’re too decent, too bloody stupid, too honest.’) He voted for Francois Mitterrand in 1981 and until recently, in the municipal elections, for the Socialist Party. Disillusioned, he claims to be sickened by the world of politics, which he condemns for lack of action, broken promises and corruption (‘The mayor of Paris, he cheated on the HLM’s (council flats), he pocketed the money. The other went off with the cancer research funds. But ... what would you have us believe?!’) During the course of the interviews, Mr Bouler denounced social injustice, low wages, disproportionate incomes, insufficient access to care and disparities in access to legal aid. But these standpoints were almost always associated with a denunciation of foreigners, in particular the ‘North African youth’, whom he holds responsible for all the problems. At the same time, he exonerates economic leaders. Concerning the latter, he explains: There was a guy who once said to me ‘It’s an unequal contest.’ He was right. Money goes to money. What I say is: it’s true that young people today haven’t got jobs; it’s unfortunate. That’s what’s killing the whole country. And these fixed-term contracts, the thingummy contracts [short term] ... Take a guy who works for six months, he is not guaranteed to have his job six months’ later... If you put yourself in these people’s shoes, you understand them sometimes, when they do stupid things. But, at the end of the day, if there were fewer immigrants, there would be a bit ... make the French work a bit harder. That might be better too. But then, all the same, we’re being invaded at the moment by the Rumanians, the Kosovars, in short, all that. They’re only interested in that: they’re only interested in the dough. Come to France, you’ve got money for nothing. There you are, that’s it.

This extract exposes the logical connection between two doctrines, one ‘social’ and the other ‘racist’, built around two central themes: in an unstable job market, these are increased competition between two fractions of class and, for the group made up of the children of ‘established’ workers, fear of a resultant loss of status. The transition from ‘social’ to ‘racist’ views happens, on the one hand, through the introduction of economic order – ‘the unequal contest’, which allays social struggles, and on the

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other by the incursion of a political discourse that proposes banning the immigrant population from access to the national employment market (‘national preference’). Here, as elsewhere, the principle of dividing ‘nationals’ from ‘immigrants’ conceals the objective division between fractions of the same class. This substitution of a racial question for a social one, reintroduced in the 1980s by the extreme right and since then taken up again across the board by the media-conscious political field, draws a part of its effectiveness from what is proposed and perceived as an ‘accessible’ ‘solution’ to a problem it helps to amplify if not create. For example, for Mr Bouler, the anti-immigrant talk broadcast by the media and politicians raises the spectre of increased competition with the North Africans in every facet of everyday life, whereas the political discourse of the extreme right counters this threat by proposing either the pure and simple removal of the cause (repatriation of immigrants) or the introduction of a legal ban on ‘immigrants’ competing against ‘nationals’ across the employment market, health care, social services, etc. (‘national preference’). But if the struggles between fractions of the relegated working classes, in this case the ‘established’ workers and the issue of North African immigration, can provide the former with conditions favouring an interest in the political doctrine of the extreme right, they explain neither the undeniable commitment to this political doctrine nor its electoral expression. In the case of Mr Bouler, who voted for Le Pen in both rounds of the 2002 presidential election, several determining elements should be taken into account. Firstly, the interviewee possessed scarcely any form of capital, notably cultural, that could be used to promote social advancement. A retired railway worker with no academic qualifications or any distinctive self-taught qualification, Mr Bouler spends the bulk of his spare time farming poultry (breeding and showing poultry and rabbits), a common pastime, now in decline, practised in this region principally by former miners and steelworkers. For this retired, downgraded worker, the chances of stabilizing his ‘untenable’ social position and ‘coming out on top’ are very slim. Yet the preoccupation with removing from the game the social group immediately below him in the social hierarchy varies in inverse proportion to the objective chances of an upgrade – and therefore of redeployment – to the social group immediately above. Secondly, Mr Bouler has an (admittedly waning) belief in the game of politics and ‘democratic opinion’. Yet there is a market in which the two fractions of class studied are not – or almost not – competitive: the electoral market. In fact, the children of North African immigrants rarely vote (moreover, they do not have any political representation) whereas those of their parents who have not acquired French nationality do not have the right to vote. For Mr Bouler the continuing restrictions on foreigners’ rights to vote is a decisive stake in the matter. On several occasions, in bringing up certain left-wing parties’ proposals to allow foreigners to take part in local elections he became indignant: ‘I’m sick of it: you’ll no longer have the right to open your mouth. That’s why I’m against the left.’ For their part, former steel industry employees, and to a lesser extent their children, can influence this market by voting for candidates most hostile to the social group that epitomizes the threat of relegation. During the national elections, the vote for the extreme right also followed a logic of ‘double demarcation’; on the one hand the ‘immigrants’, but on the other the groups who set the political stakes and dominate the electoral market:

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the ‘middle classes’, self-employed, managerial and intellectually advantaged professions, groups divided in terms of their interests, but united in a common horror of ‘extremism’. Double social demarcation and political incitement are at the centre of the allegorical definition to which Mr Bouler attributes his vote. Listen: if you want to frighten a neighbour, you buy yourself a big dog. ... The neighbour doesn’t come to give you shit. But if you do nothing and you let him do as he pleases, well, he’s going to take you for a bloody idiot. And well, that’s how I see my vote. And the big dog, he’s Le Pen? That’s it. Something which frightens the others, so that they don’t step out of line again.

Mr Bouler does not hold out any hope that an extreme right candidate will be able to directly improve his situation or the conditions of the working classes. In the hypothetical event of a victory for Le Pen, he explains: It would astonish me if that changed anything. They’re only electoral promises. Ah well, but Le Pen, he’d be right-wing, wouldn’t he. He’d be for the bosses. But the left-wing is also on the side of the bosses, only it’s less apparent.’

Even after the success of Le Pen in the first round, Mr Bouler sums up: On the social barometer, the working classes, they’ll be taken for a ride, as usual. Because it’ll be right wing, and the extreme right. In short it’s always right wing, isn’t it? Then perhaps it’ll be worse than it was. I don’t know. ... Whether it’s left, right, extreme right, all of them. Nothing changes. The worker will always be at the bottom of the heap.’

Nor does Mr Bouler credit the extreme right’s candidate with any special political or civic virtues. He puts him, just as much, in the same bracket as any other politician whose morality is, in his eyes, besmirched by the political financial scandals. (‘Whether it’s Le Pen or Chirac or whoever else. Not one of them is prepared to talk about it.’) A conjectured hypothesis of an ideological vote is again given a pounding since Mr Bouler does not consider Le Pen fit to represent the country: ‘He’s not articulate. He is not representative of a country. He’s good at criticizing, if you like. But he represents nothing. ... Le Pen, he’s not a guy to represent France.’6 No more a ‘protest’ voter than a traditional right-wing supporter, Mr Bouler simply regards his vote as the most effective means of protecting his own interests, albeit in an indirect manner, since in his view there is not a single candidate on the political stage capable of meeting the expectations and requirements of the retired ‘worker’. This kind of link to a vote for the extreme right was observed on several occasions during the course of the enquiry. 6 The political press often accuses the electors of extreme right-wing parties of being totally convinced, a condition which, in general, they do not attribute to the electorate of other parties, including that of the extreme left. Mr Juneau, a temporary security guard and a Le Pen voter, made this remark during the course of his interview: ‘I don’t say that I’m in agreement with every aspect of his policy. But those who vote for Chirac, you’re not going to tell me that they agree with every last detail of his policy. Or those who vote Jospin, they’re 100 per cent behind him.’

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Political capital, militant capital and investment in culture The majority of interviewees in similar socio-economic circumstances to those of Mr Bouler expressed no interest whatsoever in anti-immigrant propaganda, the rhetoric of the extreme right or a vote for the National Front. Retired workers giving up their spare time for charitable work or involved in local politics, young workers entering into union activity, early-retired former managerial staff participating in the organization of cultural activities or employees dedicating their spare time to their families have also been subject to a fall in status as a result of industrial restructuring and have, in certain markets, found themselves in competition with members on the borderline of a socially inferior group. This situation leads to questions being asked as to what resources such individuals have introduced to bring about their redeployment and to extract themselves from ‘untenable’ situations. In contrast to the knowledge and experience of technicians, engineers or administrative personnel, the practical skills of the rolling-mill worker or the steel maker are difficult to transfer. If one sets aside the social and economic capital, much of which is statistically underdeveloped amongst the workers interviewed, one observes that political and cultural resources (notably academic) can be put to good use to achieve redeployment. The abundance of ‘political capital’ amassed by trade unionists, former trade unionists and former miners during trade-union struggles or passed down to their children by the circumstances of their domestic upbringing (specific social consciousness, knowledge of workers’ movements, militant practices, group classification) is difficult to put to use in a locally downgraded political market. In the same way, weakened trade-union structures offer few openings for ‘militant capital’. Nevertheless, the self-assurance that comes from public speaking and a local reputation, expertise connected to the organization of demonstrations, comparative social ease developed through experience of negotiation with employers’ representatives or through association with journalists, the political awareness necessary for the organization of general assemblies, but also specific economic or managerial knowledge associated with union affairs, constitute resources that are equally suited to managerial posts and are therefore adaptable. Theoretically, a seasoned militant trade unionist has a greater variety of resources to effect their redeployment than their average steelworker colleague. The study of the career paths of redeployed trade unionists7 illustrates how the personal reputation of the activist, that of their union and, above all, that of their standing in the organization’s hierarchy, influences their objective chances of ‘upward’ redeployment. Hereditary political and activist resources may often be invested in the traditional political game, whether national or local, only if they are coupled with an academic 7 A former trade union delegate turned head of the communications department of a steel company, a senior steel industry trade unionist turned director-general of a contracting company, etc.: The archetypal perfect model of such a career path is embodied in Jacques Chérèque, a former head of the CFDT, who was appointed Special Prefect and later became Secretary of State for Industrial Redevelopment before taking up the presidency of an association dedicated to economic reconstruction.

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form of cultural capital that allows them to take legitimate shape (Bourdieu 1978). The ‘working class voice’, the proletarian ethos, or the plain acknowledgement of workers’ interests does not receive a hearing in the political world dominated by the educated classes. Made easier for many of today’s young people owing to their length of time in the education system, adaptation to political polite society is more difficult for employees who went into a factory or down a mine at the age of 14, or in the present day for employees who leave school at the age of 16. The career path of Mrs Girard reveals how possessing and being able to take advantage of certain resources increases the chances of ‘upward’ redeployment and can, in certain circumstances, lead to political views strenuously opposed to those of the extreme right. All the same, like Mr Bouler, who typifies the diametric opposite, Mrs Girard’s example should not be generalized. The daughter of an Italian miner, Mrs Girard was aged 40 when interviewed. Following a childhood spent living in primitive conditions (no hot water, no inside toilet), she continued her studies up to baccalaureate level. Married to a working-class man, himself also from a mining background, she worked for a time as an au pair, as a cleaner in Luxembourg, then as a production worker in the automobile industry. At the age of 22, Mrs Girard embarked upon further studies at university where she obtained a degree in law (DEUG – General Certificate of University Studies). A mother of four children, over a four-year period, she increased her temporary jobs and then took on fixed-term contract employment with the subsidiary of a multinational organization in the hotel and catering trade, where she is employed as a waitress: ‘They call us the “permanent temps” because we’re there, sometimes seven days a week.’ The working conditions are not easy (serving breakfasts) and the hours are restrictive. Mrs Girard gets up at 3.30 a.m. every morning – ‘with bags under the eyes’ – and has a one-hour-twenty-minute car journey to get to work. Her wages are equivalent to those of the Luxembourg SMIC (guaranteed minimum wage) to which is added family allowance, at a higher rate than is paid in France (‘We do well out of it’). Mr and Mrs Girard live in a town where the steelworks closed in 1991. They own a house in the centre of a district with a very bad reputation. Juvenile delinquency is omnipresent, drug trafficking abounds and noise nuisance is frequent, as are dustbin fires and joyriding. On several occasions Mrs Girard has been a victim of this climate (threats, a smashed front door, altercations with the local youth of the immigrant population). Her daughter was the victim of sexual violence. Mrs Girard has significant political resources. Her miner father, a former CGT trade unionist and socialist sympathizer ‘doesn’t understand why nobody rebels against laws that take away workers’ rights.’ Having grown up with the memory of the significant impact of the miners’ strikes, food rationing and the mobilization of workers, Mrs Girard has adopted her father’s political views (‘The right-wing, they’re not really for the working classes. And well we, we are the working classes’) and shows a well-developed interest in politics. During the 1983 municipal elections, at the age of 21, she set up a ‘young socialists’ group in her home town. She joined a trade union in Luxembourg despite the risks of non-renewal of her contract. At first sight Mrs Girard appears to be in one of those ‘untenable’ positions brought about by insecurity: her academic qualifications are not in keeping with her job in the

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service sector, and her environmental proximity to the group of the children of poor immigrant families places her in a position of social insecurity. But her university qualifications, which represent a higher academic capital than that of the group average, and her political capital have found their niche in a specific market where these two resources are both useful and complementary: community life and social work. In addition to her responsibilities as a mother and short-term contract employee, Mrs Girard is in fact involved in countless community activities: She is responsible for a local refuge, used to be involved in running the Restos du cœur soup kitchens, is a member of the secondary-school administration board and, for the past three years, has been president of the town’s community centre. A safety valve for a town with growing social problems, this centre occupies an important position in the local institutional environment, the running of which takes up a large amount of Mrs Girard’s spare time and brings her legal knowledge to the fore, a resource which is indispensable in successfully steering a course through the maze of associated bureaucracy. Mrs Girard’s educational capital, together with her inherited political capital, gives her the assets necessary to achieve socially beneficial fulfilment. In effect, her ongoing responsibilities for the town community centre provide Mrs Girard with a stable position allied to a certain local reputation (a spokesperson at meetings, presence at various official functions, regular contact with political dignitaries or institutions that fund the community centre). ‘It’s true that people begin to know who you are,’ she remarks. Mrs Girard is interested in national politics and followed the debates during the presidential election with interest. In general she was interested in issues that had a bearing on her association-linked commitments. Sensitive to the security measures adopted by the right-wing government, she did however denounce the repatriation of immigrants, who are both her neighbours, her colleagues at the community centre and her ‘clients’. She dreads the government abolishing young people’s job programmes, on which the community centre is very dependent. All the same, Mrs Girard only refers to the situation in the district in emphatically optimistic and positive terms: she emphasizes the urban developments rather than the nuisance factors; she minimizes the significance of incidents of which she or her children have been victims, but is alarmed by ‘people’s intolerance’; she repeats on several occasions, that she is ‘quite happy’ at home, that no-one bothers her and that she has no reason whatsoever to move. Conclusion Demobilization in the workplace translates into political demobilization. Insecurity acts as a catalyst for demoralization. These unbalanced situations in the employment market result in an imbalance in political stances. A time-consuming process, often evolving on a step-by-step basis, political conversions are the contradictory expression of economically untenable or symbolically insufferable conditions. They can equally well explain disengagement from trade unionism, abstention from and abandonment of militant action only by the casting of a vote for the extreme right. Their cause is the same: the loss of the credence that gives substance to everyday

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life and the disintegration of the material foundations that provide guarantees for the future. In the eyes of the interviewees, the rejection of the traditional political game rests principally upon the disappearance of the workers’ world from the media and national politics. Banished from the media stage or relegated to no more than the remnants of a supposedly ‘outmoded’ society, the workers’ group is disparaged by political parties seeking to win the votes of the ‘middle classes’. One of the significant results of this issue demonstrates that political conversions to the extreme right are neither commitments to a leader nor to a political doctrine. Most often they arise from political defection brought about through social neglect and an indifference, which is often only the manifestation of impotence. If one can confirm the role played by socio-economic foundations in relation to political views, there is however no mechanical explanation for the transition from loss of status to disillusionment, from economic crisis to a political stance on the extreme right. Finding themselves in similar insecure economic situations, as in an industry in decline, such as the steel industry, or as in an industry in a crisis of growth, such as the IT industry, certain individuals will be attracted to xenophobic views while others, conversely, avoid this specific aspect of social competition: racism. To posses cultural resources, particularly academic, superior to the group average, improves the opportunity of achieving redeployment from an undervalued occupational situation, extracting oneself from the competitive struggle of the ‘dropouts’. On the other hand, it is among those who cannot muster any form of capital that the extreme right finds a suitable breeding ground to reinforce its influence.

Chapter 9

Changes in the Work Environment and Germany’s Extreme Right Gudrun Hentges and Malte Meyer

Introduction ‘Five million Germans: We should have a Fuehrer again ...’ were in agreement in a Sinus study on extreme right-wing attitudes of the Germans, commissioned by the social democrat/liberal coalition at the end of the 1970s (Sinus 1981). According to the findings published by the public opinion research institute, thirteen per cent of German voters demonstrated a fixed extreme right-wing world view. The institute explained that this group of the population represented not only an authoritarian potential but also ‘persons whose political-ideological perception and value orientation have been influenced by basic extreme right-wing concepts.’ (Sinus 1981, 78). With regard to socio-structural characteristics, it was determined that members of this group – compared to the average voting population – have the tendency to consider their own economic situation as ‘less good’ or ‘bad’. Job security, evaluation of one’s standard of living, as well as general satisfaction with life – variables with which social disadvantage was measured – therefore played a decisive role in the development of potential extreme right-wing attitudes. Farmers, the self-employed, members of public services in lower and higher categories as well as unskilled labourers were over-represented occupational groups (Sinus 1981, 89). The results of the Sinus study were interpreted with reference to earlier sociological-research approaches to right-wing extremism. Under the impact of the electoral successes of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), Ernst K. Scheuch and Hans D. Klingemann, argued at the end of the 1960s that a potential for extreme right-wing movements existed in all western industrial societies and, therefore, right-wing extremism should be considered a ‘normal’ pathology of free industrial societies (Scheuch and Klingemann 1969, 12). While socio-economic change requires constant adaptation and functional changes within companies, public authorities and organizations, the values and behaviour of people, particularly within families, change only slowly. According to Scheuch and Klingemann, the conflicting tensions and contradictions were due to this lack of simultaneity or time lag. Extreme right-wing attitudes can thus be attributed to these tensions. Another attempt to explain this phenomenon points to the fact that, historically, fascist, i.e. extreme right-wing, movements were most often able to take root in ‘bourgeois hinterlands’. Political scientist Eike Hennig explained this ‘provincial

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lack of simultaneity’ as occurring when traditional ways of life collide with successive and ever-more non-transparent networks of dependence and relationships (Hennig 1980, 2). The thesis of ‘normal pathology’ presented by Scheuch and Klingemann at the end of the 1960s was revived two decades later, when parties of the extreme right managed to gain 9.4 per cent of the votes during the elections for the European Parliament in 1989. Konrad Schacht interpreted the electoral victories of the rightwing parties as a materialistic ‘protest of the lower classes who, by their electoral behaviour expressed feelings of disadvantage which had not been sufficiently addressed by the established parties’ (Schacht 1990). According to Schacht, until recently the phenomenon of a growing potential for frustration and massive feelings of disadvantage in the lower third of society had remained unrecognized by official policies and the social sciences. Wilhelm Heitmeyer pointed to the ‘losers’ in the process of modernization in the 1980s, as did Scheuch and Klingemann, the political scientist Eike Hennig and Konrad Schacht. Within the framework of his project on ‘Extreme right-wing orientation among the young’ (Heitmeyer 1988b; Heitmeyer et al. 1993; Heitmeyer 2002), Heitmeyer attempted to connect empirical findings on motivational structures and patterns of orientation of young followers of extreme right-wing ideologies with socialtheoretical presumptions. For his research on extreme right-wing tendencies, Heitmeyer used the category of ‘risk society’ – a society disassociating itself from traditional class structure – which had been developed by the sociologist Ulrich Beck in connection with the ‘theorem of individualization’ (Beck 1992). Heitmeyer agrees with Beck that a decisive characteristic of the society at risk is the process of individual socialization. This specific form of socialization takes place under conditions of permanent social inequality and occurs along with a radical change of living conditions, thus: ‘social class as a whole is taken up one level’, resulting in a ‘collective advancement in income, education, mobility, justice, science, and mass consumption’ (Beck 1992, 122). In the process of this development, the position of the social class loses its hold. Life-world relationships lose their bonding power; social milieus, sub-cultural class identities and relationships cease to assist in the interpretation of social changes or the determination of individual decisions. The process of liberating humanity from feudal bonds and circumstances of personal dependence thus continues into capitalism because it is driven by the demands of the labour market (segmentation processes, social mobility, high levels of education), its actual dynamic. Consequently, this means that today we have to consider phases of individualization that illustrate the dark as well as the bright side in terms of their outcome. The potentialities for the shaping of individuality (self discovery, reflection) are confronted by the danger of isolation, a disengagement from life-world connections and an intensification of competitive mechanisms. Thus it is necessary to recognize the ambivalence of the consequences of individualization. However, establishing a direct connection between individualization and the development of an extreme right-wing potential would be premature: Initially, Klaus Dörre claims, such a self-centred reference to politics favours neither left nor right nor does it necessarily weaken collective forms of politics or even promote ‘privatist’ attitudes. However, the new immediacy between the individual and society gives

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‘movement cycles, fashions, media publicities and media trends’ greater power over the individual. Behaviour formerly determined by the milieu is increasingly replaced by ‘socialization work’ carried out by political organizations. While, in his argumentation, Dörre (1989, 1224f) does indeed claim that a connection between risk society/individualization and right-wing extremism can be established, this connection is by no means as clear-cut as some the reception of Dörre’s work sometimes suggests. The use of the theorem of individualization for the research on right-wing extremism goes back to Beck’s reference to changing opportunities for activation and politicizing. Political alliances and coalitions are formed not primarily based on the social situation but based on the ‘quasi-naturalized’ social inequalities of ‘race’, ethnic belonging, skin colour, age, and gender (Beck 1986, 159; Heitmeyer 1988b, 67, 101). Based on concrete terms and immediate perception and owing to their permanence and inescapability, these inequalities, rooted in natural conditions, made identification processes possible and functioned as a means of orientation. The loss of social connection and its conveyed orientation and identification is, according to Heitmeyer, compensated by ‘surrogate collective identities’. These ‘natural’ means of orientation acquire particular significance because they are ‘historically’ loaded. ‘In this respect the result can be a volatile merger of what for social placement are increasingly more significant group-forming natural categories and the politically desired emphases on nationalizing points of view’ (Heitmeyer 1988b, 101). The development of these new orientations goes together with ‘requests directed in reverse to the history of race, nation, homeland, etc. ... which in Germany are closely linked traditionally and in a highly problematic manner’ (Heitmeyer 1988b, 102). The creation of extreme right-wing orientations, however, cannot be attributed exclusively to the social and economic crises of the particular social system but has its roots in the proposition of an ideology that fulfils the need for ‘secure patterns of orientation’. Thus it is necessary to record the spectrum of nationalizing models scientifically, from national identities all the way to extreme right-wing orientation patterns, because this is the area changes in which changes in attitude towards extreme right-wing ideologies can take place. Based on these initial theoretical deliberations, Heitmeyer concluded that while the firmly established extreme rightwing organizations are the focus of sociological and pedagogical research, it would perhaps be more useful to focus on socio-economic experiences in everyday life as the starting point of scientific study. As evidence of the irrelevance of organized right-wing extremism, Heitmeyer demonstrated that the youngsters he studied developed their extreme right-wing orientation while ignorant of extreme rightwing ideology and independent of the influence of extreme right-wing publications (Heitmeyer 1988a, 220). The social conditions that produce a mentality and conduct based on the ideology of inequality and acceptance of violence ‘point to trouble spots at the centre of society rather than at the fringe’ (Heitmeyer 1988a, 220). What is involved is the coming to a head of what is present and ‘normal’ in daily life (‘the stronger prevails’, ‘experiences of insecurity to act and its consequences’, ‘loss of social connection and its consequences’) (Heitmeyer 1988a, 221-227). In her critical intervention, social scientist Birgit Rommelspacher objected that various studies on youth behaviour – such as those conducted by Wilhelm Heitmeyer,

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Josef Held (1992) or Dieter Hoffmeister and Oliver Sill (Hoffmeister and Sill 1993) – were unable to prove empirically the connection that had been theoretically postulated between social integration (conveyed through work and family), general orientation difficulties and authoritarian-nationalist points of view. She concluded that in Heitmeyer’s study there is ‘only one significant result, and that demonstrates the connection of instrumentalist work orientation, meaning the primary interest in money, advancement and status, and extreme right-wing orientations among youth’ (Rommelspacher 1995, 81; cf. Rommelspacher 2000). Strength and superiority are the most important norms for adolescents with an extreme right-wing orientation; in judging other people, they primarily use cost-benefit analyses. Such an achievementbased assessment of others results in ‘hatred of all of those who do not fit into such a utilitarian logic’ (Rommelspacher 1995, 81). According to Rommelspacher, the central patterns of interpretation arrived at in the three empirical studies mentioned below as being characteristic of youth with extreme right-wing orientation, i.e. ‘instrumentalist work orientation’ (Heitmeyer), ‘prosperity chauvinism’ (Josef Held, amongst others), ‘idolatry of performance and warpath mentality’ (Hoffmeister and Sill), demonstrate that ‘identification with such values as performance, prosperity, career and money’ are starting points for a defence against the ‘non-performers’ who receive social-security benefits. In this respect, Rommelspacher views racism neither as ‘a primary nor an exclusive problem of those who have not received their fair share’. Instead it is a problem of ‘the established ones’ or better: it is a strategy of those of who expect to belong to the club of the lucky few (Rommelspacher 1995, 86). While the proponents of the concept of ‘western dominance culture’ refer to the fact that economic success in societies structured in this way is identified with cultural, political and human superiority, another contribution to the debate focuses more on the process of socio-economic changes and their implications for the development of ideological camps in the social arena. In his research on class positions in the social arena, political scientist Michael Vester points to a way out of the above dilemma, which, throughout the decades, has consisted of attempts by social scientists to place the social basis of the extreme right within a vertically organized social structure. A representative survey from the early 1990s identified four socio-political camps in West Germany: the ‘camp of the “avant-garde”’ (circa 24 per cent), the ‘modern centre: camp of the employed’ (circa 25 per cent), the ‘conservative centre: bourgeois camp’ (circa 24 per cent) as well as the ‘camp of the “declassed”’ (circa 27 per cent) (Vester 2001b, 329;.cf. Vester 2001a). Of these four camps only those who could be placed in the bourgeois camp were content. The other three were regarded as ‘politically querulous camps’. Thus Vester places the ‘avant-garde’ and ‘declassed’ camps, which had developed since the end of the 1960s, outside of the centre and only places the camp of the employed at the centre. While illustrating in more detail how the ‘milieus of the daily conduct of life’ relate to the ‘ideological camps in the social arena’ would be beyond the scope of this paper, several characteristics of the camp of the ‘declassed’ can be outlined here. The image of society and concepts of order of this group’s members are influenced by the passive perspective of two-thirds of society, through exclusion or dependence. Authoritarian resentments are a (possible) means for dealing with the

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changes in the social structure. By adapting assumptions made by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, Vester concludes: ‘The breakdown of social connections is not a symptom of modernization but – as always before – of those groups that cannot keep up with modernization’ (Vester 2001b, 335). The group of the declassed includes older employees from traditional vocations as well as inadequately trained young adults from disadvantaged environments. Both the older and the younger individuals living in ‘reduced social networks and standards’ react to their sense of exclusion by excluding others. While the ‘declassed’ demand social justice for themselves, they do not accept its universal principle. Vester refines the phenomenon of double segregation – upward and downward – for the ‘declassed’ group as follows: ‘They process their disappointment by cultivating resentment towards weaker individuals, towards foreigners and towards people with modern life styles, but also towards “the politicians”, who are not fulfilling the requirements of their role as patrons’ (Vester 2001b, 335). According to Vester, this milieu can be differentiated further: the group of the ‘disappointed-apathetic individuals’ (circa 13.4 per cent) emerges from the older milieus of unskilled workers and small-scale self-employed workers – this is where the habit of the underdog has been consolidated. The group of ‘disappointedaggressive individuals’ (circa 13.8 per cent) consists of recent downwardly mobile individuals of the centre whose anger over their downward spiral also leads to active protest from a right-wing position. Vester concludes that authoritarian and rightwing radical potentials should be placed neither at the top nor at the bottom nor in the centre of society: much rather, right wing populist attitudes, which can be found in a fifth of the population, have, according to Vester, a specific and limited place at each level of society, below and in the middle but above as well (Vester 2001b, 299). Their existence should not be blamed on economic conditions but on specific types of mentality. Robert Castel, the French social scientist, also questions the widespread notion that right-wing populist tendencies can be located in the lower ‘rungs’ of the social structure. In his study The Transformation of the Social Question, Castel differentiates between the following zones of social relationships: the ‘zone of isolation’, the ‘zone of social vulnerability’ and the ‘zone of integration.’ He characterizes the ‘zone of isolation’ as a zone distinguished by a double deficiency: the lack of productive activities as well as a lack in social relationships. People in the ‘zone of social vulnerability’, which he considers an intermediate zone, find themselves in a precarious situation and experience fragile support from their environment. Only in the ‘zone of integration’ does a stable work environment accompany solid integration into social relationships (Castel 2000).1 Looking at Robert Castel’s zone model, it could be concluded that the ‘destabilization of the stable’ has become socially significant, with considerable influence on current developments: ‘Undoubtedly, these intermediate classes – and not the upper or lower levels of the social pyramid – because of obstructed upper mobility, currently have little to expect, but have something to lose, wherever the balance of our social structure is decided’ (Castel 1 Castel’s zone model inspired various research projects on precarious work. Cf. FIAB’s report Dörre et al. 2003.

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2000, 357). In this respect, Castel regards populism as a political expression of the insecurity of the ‘intermediate classes’. The SIREN research: Open questions and research design Castel’s in-depth examinations of recent social transformations indicate that theoretical discussions merging class analysis and research on political orientations can indeed be very productive. Not only have they helped to acknowledge subjective consequences of neoliberal restructuring in working life, they have also provided valuable. A recapitulation of the influential theses regarding the origins of German right-wing extremism, however, permits two different conclusions. On the one hand there is the picture of an unbridgeable gap between those who criticize social disintegration and those who criticize dominant modes of social integration. Relating right-wing extremism to one of these trends does not just mean subscribing to different diagnoses of contemporary society, it also leads to very different political recommendations and consequences. This is why the battle cannot be decided by simple compromises. However important it may therefore be to stress basic differences, it is even more misleading to ignore precisely the premises that are shared by both sides in this academic controversy. Despite all the differences – and this is the second possible conclusion that can be drawn from the above overview there are some common themes in explaining right-wing extremism. Cas Mudde, for example, has pointed out that most examinations of right-wing extremism start by linking objective social transformations on the one hand with right-wing extremist currents on the other (Mudde 1996; Mudde 1999). Though these transformations would be characterized as post-industrialism by some and as post-Fordism by others, all points of view basically observe the obviously modified connection between structure and agency, social basis and political consciousness. In a sense, the SIREN project is no exception to this way of studying the causes and origins of right-wing extremism. We, too, tried to interpret this political current in relation to the important socio-economic trends that have radically transformed industrialized societies since the mid-1970s. Our point of reference was the way ‘regulation theory’ described tendencies of neo-liberal flexibilization in the world of work (Hirsch 1995). According to this school of thought, technological revolutions, weakened dynamics of capital accumulation and intense class conflicts in the course of the 1970s were responsible for a neo-liberal breach of the Fordist post-war consensus and in turn for an ongoing reorganization of the systems of production and reproduction. Pressed by global competitors and mass unemployment, the capitalist class tried to regain the political initiative at the expense of social security systems and democratic mechanisms of political participation. In a heavily condensed form, these processes also affected the formerly regulated key sectors of transport and telecommunications, which have been successively privatized since the mid-1980s. In the course of this process, labour-management relations were established on a completely new basis. Since socio-economic change has not only been drastic but in some respects also symptomatic of overall trends, we decided to focus particularly on the successor companies to the Deutsche Bundesbahn, Deutsche Bundespost and

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Deutsche Reichsbahn as well as on the relatively young enterprises in the field of information technology. Perceptions of change: ‘There’s an enormous amount of pressure coming from above’ The above-mentioned discussions within the social sciences led us to a closer examination of the link between socio-economic change and political orientations. Three hypotheses were of special importance for us in understanding the perception of socio-economic change, the existence and nature of right-wing extremist inclinations and the specific connection of social structure and political consciousness. After having explained these three assumptions in greater detail, we will try to make clear how they have had to be modified or corrected. After all, it seems to be necessary to recapitulate the contribution of our research to academic discussions on the origins of right-wing extremism. According to our first assumption, changes in working life were overwhelmingly perceived as problematic and crises-ridden. However simple this assumption may be, it is far from self-evident. Only some years ago, problems and contradictions in the ‘brave new world of work’ were not only neglected but almost completely denied. Deeply hostile to bureaucracy, the neo-liberal promise of liberation not only related to the wealthy customer, who regained initiative and sovereignty in the course of tax reductions – this promise also included the sphere of production. By becoming entrepreneurs of their own labour, workers were said to develop their productive abilities and talents individually or in teams, but no longer hindered by restrictive rigidities of all sorts, which had allegedly characterized Taylorist factory and even office regimes. This is why dominant trends in flexibilization were not portrayed as problematic in the course of such influential industrial relations PR, but on the contrary as promising and attractive. Even after the comparatively nonbureaucratic breakdown of the New Economy, the cultural ideal of being a dynamic, performance- and career-oriented individualist has not entirely disappeared. In the meantime, public discussion is at least ready to concede that even the rolemodels of neoliberal PR have had to struggle with some problems. These problems, however, stemmed mainly from the inflexibility of structurally conservative forces. The awareness of the existence of problems at the workplace and their possible relationship to the flexibilized conditions of work is still very slow to inform the public discourse. This is precisely the reason why we considered it as far from selfevident and obvious that the perspective of wage earners, which is almost absent or at least marginalized in the official political arena, first and foremost reflects elements of crisis consciousness. Apart from the depressing atmosphere of mass unemployment and public poverty, which has become a physical reality in Berlin and eastern Germany, the most important argument supporting our first hypothesis was the sober view on objective changes in the economic sectors that characterized almost everyone we interviewed. The rail, postal and telecommunications services in particular have experienced a massive reduction of personnel in the course of the privatization process. If there

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are now approximately 200,000 employees working for the formally privatized but still public rail company Deutsche Bahn, only 15 years ago almost as many worked just for East Germany’s state-owned rail authority, the Deutsche Reichsbahn. At the same time, 236,000 workers, employees and civil servants were employed by the Deutsche Bundesbahn in West Germany. Personnel reduction has been similarly drastic in the field of postal and telecommunications services, primarily in the form of early retirement, outsourcing and a freeze on further recruitment. This deep transformation went hand in hand with a dismantling of the social security schemes and privileges that were once characteristic of public services. Organized by privatesector measures, the restructuring of the postal and telecommunications sectors demanded that employees be much more flexible than before – both in terms of the responsibilities they assume as well as regarding working time and the distance staff can be required to commute to their workplace. In the case of Deutsche Telekom, the shape, organization and legal form of some departments of the company changed frequently in the boom period at the end of the 1990s. Changes like these gave us reason to assume that the pressures on employees to adapt, to be flexible and pressure-resistant must have been relatively high. And indeed, almost all the employees we interviewed in these sectors complained about two basic problems at work. On the one hand the workload had risen immensely. Such an increased workload not only meant that people were nowadays asked to do much more work in the same hours. In addition to this more quantitative aspect, many employees had also had to come to terms with a qualitatively enhanced job profile, including not only a willingness to completely reorient one’s career and to what is euphemistically known as life-long learning but also the willingness to relocate to another city, region or even country. This problem of heightened workload and increased pressures on personal flexibility contrasts with the problem of declining social security. Civil-servant status employees still working for Deutsche Post, Deutsche Telekom or Deutsche Bahn often experience this contradiction in terms of tightened standards of reasonableness. Younger colleagues, who usually do not have job guarantees comparable to those of civil servants, are afraid of losing their jobs, while workers in more industrial environments, such as the Deutsche Bahn repair workshops, are also concerned about flexibilized internal job-markets. And almost all of them complain of a seemingly never-ending process of rationalization and selfdestructive austerity measures. Employees of course find many different ways of coping with the striking contradiction of mounting expectations on the one hand and reduced material means of fulfilling them on the other. Young unmarried people and well-educated males, for whom occupational flexibility is much easier than, say, for single mothers, have suddenly been able to experience upward occupational mobility unheard of in the age of rather rigid civil-service careers. An older civil servant at Deutsche Post, however, said he was disgusted by such forms of careerism, which were obviously unknown in earlier decades. Together with the speed of digitalization, trends like these were a material threat to his occupational integrity. Despite differences such as these, employees in postal, rail and telecommunications services are overwhelmingly sceptical of the groundbreaking changes in their workplaces – and this is true not only for the ‘losers’, but also for the ‘winners’ of privatization and deregulation. In

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most of the interviews much more emphasis was put on the disadvantages than on any advantages or improvements the person may have experienced. Despite such harsh conditions, many interviewees, either alone or in groups, are trying very hard and with admirable energy to make the best out of their situation. Rightist orientations: ‘They can buy a house and everything. You really do start to hate them’ Our second assumption was related to the way people explain socio-economic change in their workplace or beyond. We thought that at least some of our interviewees would refer to right-wing populist ways of reasoning or slogans. In their view, foreigners, asylum seekers, ‘social scroungers’ and other minorities might be responsible for social stress. Such types of social stress, which arise in the process of privatization and which have been described above, can take the form of threats of relocation, more flexible working hours, an erosion of social securities, a dismantling of public infrastructure, wage depression and privatization of risks. As has been shown, phenomena like these are not only relevant for people who are in precarious situations or who are experiencing a downward career spiral, they also affect climbers and employees who are well integrated in their workplace. According to our hypothesis, social sacrifices like these require of some form of compensation, which may be achieved at the expense of ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘less performance-oriented’ groups mainly at the lower end of the social hierarchy. In the social sciences this second assumption is not uncontested. Researchers such as Hans-Georg Betz and others, for example, understand right-wing populism mainly in terms of a socio-cultural struggle for recognition, which has almost nothing to do with political economy but very much with questions of political culture. Betz writes: ‘Right-wing populist policy is part of a new postmodern cleavage, which centres less around questions of political economy and more around questions of political culture.’ According to this interpretation, the current debate about the headscarf is indeed an identity question on the headscarf itself (beyond left and right, so to say) and neither a diversionary manoeuvre nor a conflict standing in for a struggle for material resources, the legitimacy or illegitimacy of opportunities to participate, etc. Supposed privileges for foreigners on the job market, in housing as well as in social security, however, play an important role in the political and daily discourse, the importance of which can hardly be overestimated. We therefore expected that at least some of our interviewees would combine descriptions of their workplace or their social situation in general with right-wing populist denunciations of foreigners and slackers – just to sum up the image of the enemy in right-wing populism. At this point, qualitative research into the appeal of the extreme right usually has to deal with some very special problems. First, the symbolic setting of the interview differs in many respects from daily routines, which is why socially unwanted statements against foreigners tend to be more repressed. Second, even open sympathies for an authoritarian state or for racist campaigns do not necessarily have any explicit relationship to socio-economic restructuring. Complaints about

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moral corruption, lack of discipline or social disintegration may unconsciously reflect one’s own strategies for survival in the workplace – but this is not necessarily the case. And third, even explicating a link between some sort of socio-economic changes on the one hand and right-wing extremist opinions on the other is in itself not sufficient to understand the social genesis of right-wing extremist explanations. Additionally, a realistic estimation is needed of the extent to which such a statement rationalizes resentment. Apart from difficulties like these, we were able to conclude that sympathies for the extreme right are not only a matter of ‘losers’, but also of those who have benefited from modernization processes. Moreover, we were able to distinguish two very interesting sets of right-wing extremist opinions, which, while not identical with the distinction between winners and losers, show surprising similarities. One of the groups consists of more pro-market positions in the tradition of national liberalism and the other of more pro-labour positions in the tradition of social protectionism. The group of national liberals is mainly concerned with the German economy’s alleged lack of competitiveness. According to this perspective, politicians should concentrate on their original task of promoting the interests of small enterprises and ordinary taxpayers rather than joining big business on expensive and useless immigration issues. In contexts like these, resentment against financial compensation for slave labourers under the Nazis appears to be some sort of legitimate tax rebellion, and resentment towards immigrants, the unemployed or affirmative action even appears to be a form of civic virtue. Such advocates of national liberalism obviously want others to be as strictly subject to performance orientations at their workplace as they are. Those who cannot – or do not want to – follow these rules, can be legitimately discriminated against. The second type of sympathy for the extreme right appears at first to not be as pro-market as the first, but centres more around the protection of national labour. In many cases the basic idea is to restore the social protection of indigenous workers by returning to the privileges and constraints of the Fordist age. In more underprivileged contexts like these, references to the national community are evidence of a sense of belonging and can thus be interpreted as an ideology directed towards reintegration, as Klaus Dörre (Dörre 2003) has put it. Linking changes and orientations: ‘I’m a desperado for Germany’ Our third hypothesis should help in forming a more detailed image of this link between socio-economic change and political orientations. To address the precise nature of the relationship between structure and agency, we thus assumed that there was a close relationship between heightened levels of social stress at the workplace and the appeal of right-wing populist orientations. Such a hypothesis does not seek to confirm economistic explanations, which suggest that scapegoating is a more or less automatic reaction to economic decline or crisis. This interpretation is insufficient because of its inherent weakness in dealing with the empirical evidence that, while some economic losers are indeed attracted by right-wing populism, others are obviously not. Though this objection is certainly very convincing, we nevertheless mistrusted the conclusion that there was thus absolutely no evidence for any

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connection between socio-economic problems and right-wing populist orientations. To avoid this other extreme of anti-economism, we found it reasonable to assume that the ideology of ‘competitive nationalism’ might form a link between economy and ideology. In our interpretation, competitive nationalism not only means that austerity policies, exclusion and neoliberal restraints are officially legitimized with reference to the common wealth of the national economic platform but also that ideologies of competitive nationalism in the daily discourse do function as a pattern to direct aggression against real or supposed beneficiaries of national productivity. Competitive nationalism in this sense serves both as an ideological frame of reference to justify cuts in social benefits and as ideological frame of reference to reclaim modes of national preference. The main problem with testing this hypothesis has to do with difficulties in distinguishing the influence of experiences at the workplace from what people experience in their spare time, at home or in the sphere of reproduction. This totality of political socialization itself is the reason why it is no less difficult to draw precise distinctions between the influence of neoliberal flexibilization and the sustainability of Fordist structures. But since the concept of competitive nationalism reflects tensions between old and new models of national integration, we were nevertheless convinced that we could keep methodological difficulties under control. The assumption of an at least indirect connection between neoliberalism and the strength of right-wing extremism can be confirmed in at least some respects. The first confirmation refers to policies of competitive nationalism, which are indeed responsible for the heightened levels of social stress our interviewees complained about. The second confirmation relates to the fact that elite discourses do indeed inform right-wing populist orientations. Research, however, should not underestimate the fact that people not only wish to express conformity with the rules but also a certain amount of dissent with globalist establishment cultures. Conclusion: Inherent dangers of competitive nationalism All in all, the analysis of the qualitative interviews carried out in Germany for the SIREN project enabled us to describe part of employees’ experiences under conditions of globalization, privatization, flexibilization and deregulation. We were able to examine the way people come to terms with threatening developments such as growing competition and the reduction of social security standards and were also able to reconstruct the social genesis of seemingly individual strategies developed to cope with risks and opportunities. On the one hand, it became clear how the experience of social decline, exclusion or growing competition with other marginalized groups in society can be translated into a discourse determined by a certain ethnification of social questions and in this sense also by racist, nationalist or extreme-right ideologies. Qualitative interview analysis, however, made equally clear that fear of social decline or impoverishment as well as actual experiences of déclassement do not necessarily lead to right-wing extremist patterns of interpretation. Instead, scientific attention has to focus on the level that is largely responsible for an interpretation of social relationships in either ethnic or non-ethnic categories. Political engagement

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in union activities or works councils, for example, can contribute to a fight against ethnic interpretations of social relationships. Additionally, empirical data on those who have benefited from neoliberal restructuring in one way or another shows that even the winners of ‘modernization’ processes can interpret their situation in rightwing extremist categories. While people with overwhelmingly negative experiences often talk about feelings of neglect and disadvantage compared to asylum seekers or welfare recipients, interviews with winners show another pathway to the extreme right: principles of law and order are used to make claims for an authoritarian state that would be responsible for restoring competitiveness at the national level. Some of the interview partners argue for stronger competition on all levels and even selection according to the traditions of social Darwinism. Christoph Butterwegge summarizes statements like these as follows: ‘As an economic powerhouse and a political subject Germany can only re-enter the stage of world history if it is conceived of as a private company driven by pro-market expertise and led by the most modern management techniques’ (Butterwegge 1998, 139).

Chapter 10

Different Roads to the Siren Songs of the Extreme Right in Hungary András Tóth and István Grajczjar

Introduction This chapter examines the linkages between experiences within the world of work and the attraction to right-wing populist or extreme-right messages in Hungary. The article builds on the results of both the qualitative interviews and the quantitative survey taken within the framework of the SIREN Project. In the qualitative phase of the research, based on the interviews conducted with people identified as sympathetic to extreme-right political messages, we were able to find different patterns of interlinkages between specific types of life-history, including experience in the world of work and of political beliefs, such as high fliers, strugglers, precarious employees and losers. The identification of these groups, based on the patterns of interlinkages between socio-economic experiences and political attitudes, allowed us to hypothesize two different ways of developing extreme-right sympathy: welfare chauvinism and powerlessness. Welfare chauvinism was characteristic of interviewees who were the winners in processes of socio-economic change, while powerlessness and protest characterized those who were the losers in the same processes. The quantitative part of the research allowed us to test whether these two attitudes explain extreme rightwing sympathy in a representative sample, what attitudes are interlinked with them, and whether there is any interlinkage between these ways, attitudes and experiences in the lives of the respondents that we could identify through the interviews. The chapter is organized as follows. The introductory section outlines the history of the recent emergence of right-wing movements in Hungary (2001–2003). The second section discusses research questions and hypotheses based on the interviews carried out during the qualitative phase of the SIREN project. The third section discusses the testing based on the SIREN questionnaire. Introduction to the Hungarian controversy: Despite the high level of frustration, a weak extreme-right appeal in the context of the high level of economic insecurity The main objective of the SIREN project was to contribute to the understanding of the political reverberations of recent transformations of the labour market and work organization. Focusing on subjective perceptions of and individual reactions to

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socio-economic change, the project aimed to provide an empirical assessment of the extent to which changes in working life can be said to make people receptive to right-wing extremism and populism – and in particular to xenophobia, nationalism and racism – through qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey. The SIREN survey measured a series of attitudes – chauvinism, prejudice against immigrants, authoritarianism, political powerlessness and social dominance orientation – which indicate a propensity to sympathize with or even vote for right-wing extremist or populist parties. In particular, it was speculated that social identification processes within the job domain would play a mediating role between perceived socioeconomic change and right-wing affinity. As far as Hungary is concerned, the situation of the extreme right is, to a certain extent, unique in the group of countries covered by the SIREN project. As opposed to the relatively peaceful and prosperous post-war development of western European countries, the post-war development of Hungary was characterized by communist dictatorship and a failed economic development model. The communist regime installed in the late forties brought about radical changes in every aspect of life, a break in historical trajectories and in the lives of millions of people. The terror of the fifties and early sixties left wounds in many families, even though the liberalization of the regime and the rapid increase in the standard of living in the late sixties and seventies brought some legitimacy to the regime in the context of frozen boundaries of the Soviet sphere of influence in Europe The economic stagnation of the eighties, however, undermined the thin legitimacy of the regime, and when the Soviet Union abandoned its pretension to maintain its presence in the region, the regime collapsed. The first free elections, held in April 1990, signalled the end of the transition process to a democratic political regime. The political transition was accompanied by the decomposition of the failed state-socialist economic model and the transformation into a free-market economy. This dual process resulted in a deep social crisis, manifested in the demolition of job and income securities provided by the state socialist model as a result of the profound economic restructuring and privatization of the former state-owned sector, which provided 98 per cent of jobs. The scale of decline and crisis was comparable to the great economic crisis of 19291933, and the emergence of unemployment and the decline of living standards in the early nineties was a shock for many. On the other hand the emergence of a new economy characterized by the increasing influx of foreign investors and resurgence of entrepreneurialism offered new opportunities. This economic revival, accompanied by the return to democracy, presented a completely different dynamic than the one people had experienced between 1929 and 1933. As a consequence, while people experienced the rapid decay and collapse of the old model, millions of possibilities opened up to participate in and to adapt to the new conditions of an open and liberal market economy. Thus, the coexistence of decay and advancement, precariousness and new opportunities can be observed both at macro-economic and personal level. In the context of a profound restructuring this is the characteristic of the Hungarian situation, which is not found to such an extent in any other country in the SIREN project. Furthermore, the advancement of the winners of these changes is relative and, at the general level, the standard of living is still far from the western European standard in absolute terms, which represents an additional source of frustration.

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This deep economic and social crisis could have been a fairly advantageous time for the emergence of a major extreme right-wing movement. However, the early nineties only saw the emergence of a series of minor extreme-right movements and parties. Of these, Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja (the Hungarian Justice and Life Party, MIÉP), founded in 1993, became the most important. The 1994 elections were won by the Magyar Szocialista Párt (Hungarian Socialist Party, MSZP), the reformed wing of the former communist party, in coalition with the liberal Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége (Alliance of Free Democrats, SZDSZ). The return to power of the party, which for many represented the elites of the former regime in coalition with free-market liberals, represented an opportunity for the extreme right to sharpen their political message and reap the protest mood against the government, which had introduced a strict economic package and speeded up privatization. The 1998 parliamentary elections, won by a coalition of right-wing parties led by Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége (Alliance of Young Democrats, FIDESZ), also brought a landmark success for the MIÉP. Its votes exceeded the five per cent threshold required under Hungarian law to win seats in parliament. The MIÉP’s presence in parliament represented a new phase for the extreme right. The FIDESZ-led government aimed aggressively to uproot the influence of left-wing parties and employed a rather aggressive anti-communist and nationalistic tone to consolidate the Christian-conservative right-wing pillar of society. In order to gain control of the state-owned media, FIDESZ built up a tacit coalition with the MIÉP. It was made possible for journalists representing extreme right-wing opinions to appear in the state-owned media. The seemingly ever-increasing acceptance of the extreme right-wing discourse in important segments of the media, especially in the stateowned one, and the tacit cooperation between FIDESZ and the MIÉP resulted in a resurgence of the interest of political scientists in the extreme right. The fear of return to the past mobilized left-wing voters, and the 2002 elections were again won by the coalition of the MSZP and SZDSZ. In the 2002 elections the MIÉP only received four per cent of the vote and thus lost its place in parliament. Following the elections the MIÉP suffered an internal crisis. In opposition the FIDESZ adopted a left-wing populist style, and the question of the extreme right and issues related to right-wing populism practically disappeared from political or media discourse. In the 2006 elections, the MIÉP received only somewhat more than two per cent of the vote, a disappointing result for a party that hoped to get back into parliament. It is a characteristic of the MIÉP that its main messages are very different from those of contemporary extreme right-wing parties in the ‘old’ EU member states. The MIÉP is primarily an anti-communist and nationalistic radical right-wing party. A special character of its nationalism is addressing the problem of territories that once belonged to Hungary and the problems of the Hungarian population in these territories. It is also an ethno-centric party that is against globalization and the alleged ‘increasing Jewish influence’ in Hungary. According to the MIÉP’s argument, the coalition of liberal and former communist parties is the agent of globalization forces, which would turn Hungarians into the Palestinians of Hungary. Hungarian academic literature on the causes of attraction to extreme right-wing ideas supports the view that there was a strong link between socio-economic change and right-wing extremism. The hardships caused by the transitional crisis, the

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restructuring of the economy, the growing insecurity and frustration, the difficulties of younger generations in adapting to the new economy, globalization, the rise of inequality and unemployment are listed among the factors considered important in the rise of extreme-right movements and parties (Bozóki 1994; Enyedi and Körösényi 2001).1 Another line in the literature argues that an increasing number of successful young entrepreneurs and professionals supported the MIÉP in order to stabilize their position in a closed ethnocentric market economy. The literature also quoted case studies and anecdotes as evidence that supporters of right-wing ideas can be found both among the losers and the winners of the transition (Tamás 2001). However, scholars argued that major factors affecting voting behaviour are related to the peculiarities of party formation and the nature of the transition to democracy (Márkus 1992; Körösényi 1991; Ágh 1994). Nevertheless, there has been no research into the linkage between the rise of right-wing extremism and socioeconomic change to underpin any of these arguments. Results of the qualitative phase: The intertwining of cleavages in work and various types of attraction to extreme right-wing populist issues 42 guided qualitative interviews were undertaken in the first phase of the SIREN research.2 These showed that people, just as much as the economy, are in transition, experiencing inconsistency: simultaneous decline, precariousness and advancement. Personal trajectories, workplace experiences, personal attitudes and political views were interlinked and formed dynamic casual relations in the personal life histories. Based on the interviews, we have found that the family socialization is of primary importance for one’s place in the left-right continuum and for being open to rightwing extremist views. Acceptance/non acceptance of the previous regimes (the prewar autocratic Horthy regime – which allied with Nazi Germany in World War II – or the communist regime), religious/non religious and nationalistic/non-nationalistic education by the family seem to determine whether the particular interviewee is sympathetic to extreme-right messages or not. It was also found that one of the decisive factors influencing this sympathy with extreme-right views is whether the family questioned suffered from the terror and injustices of the communist regime. In our non-representative sample of interviewees, those whose wider family had been subject to such injustice and repression or who had experienced a break in the 1 See also the interview with László Kéri in Népszabadság, 2001.10.12. 2 Interviewees were selected by occupational status, workplace status, labour-market sector and propensity to right-wing attitudes. First, individuals with work contracts for an indefinite period were selected in sectors and at companies that had recently undergone significant restructuring. Second, individuals working with on short-term contracts or as entrepreneurs were interviewed as well as ones with markedly uncertain labour market conditions (illegal labour, seasonal or occasional jobs etc.). The sample was also varied by educational level, gender, age and regions. As the constituency of the MIÉP is concentrated in Budapest and county of Pest, these two administrative regions featured heavily. However, control interviews were taken in eastern Hungary and in the regions between the Danube and the Tisza.

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family trajectory during the communist decades were the most frustrated with the nature of transition. We learned that they basically cannot accept that the peaceful transition also opened the opportunity for the economic, political and cultural elite of the socialist regime to successfully transfer their political, economic and cultural capital into the new regime, and that there has not been any punishment for injustices by the officials of the previous regime. They see transition as incomplete as long as those they see as the communist elite are not removed from their position in politics, business and the media. It seems that frustration rooted in the family history is one of the major factors of sympathizing with an extremist message, which promises the removal of those who are considered responsible for the unfortunate post-war history of Hungary. This group of interviewees is basically unable to accept the MSZP as a legitimate part of the new democratic order. For some of our interview partners, the electoral coalition between the MSZP and the liberal SZDSZ is a further element of frustration. For these people, SZDSZ represents the ‘international conspiracy of Jewish forces’ promoting globalization and chaotic capitalism to undermine local cultures and local securities. Hence, they are likely to want a charismatic ‘Hungarian’ strongman to put the country in order and re-establish traditional values. Apart from family socialization, a very important influence on political beliefs and sympathy for extreme-right views is played by personal life history, career path, and the perception of the current social and employment status. Nationalistic attitudes were mostly results of family socialization processes, but recent developments in politics and in the world of work – such as globalization, EU pessimism, the evergrowing presence of multinational companies and new working practices related to increased competition – have reinforced these nationalistic and ethnocentric attitudes in many interview partners. Negatively perceived experiences in the world of work may accelerate the process of radicalization of attitudes and the right political appeal may turn these mostly passive attitudes into an active voting behaviour. Some of our interview partners, faced with insecurity and failures in the world of work, have become radical opponents of the liberal market economy and globalization. They see globalization and subsequent economic insecurity as a result of a Jewish conspiracy. But we have also seen that winners of change have developed attitudes sympathetic to extreme-right views. Many of those who had Christian, authoritarian and anticommunist family socialization, also had welfare-chauvinist attitudes and a rigidly hierarchical and meritocratic view of society, which made them receptive to the ethnocentric and chauvinistic views of the extreme right. In particular, they think that despite their relative success their opportunities are constrained by multinational companies. They want a more meritocratic social order that would do more justice to their efforts and would control the competition posed by globalization and foreign forces in the Hungarian economy. Absolute failure is felt by losers in the changes; relative failure is felt by those who are doing well but they are dissatisfied as they feel that they are in fierce competition with the overwhelming forces of international capital. Based on the interviews, it seemed to us that there is an interpretative model that explains the attraction to right-wing extremism arising from the interlinkage of historical aspects related to family trajectories and family socialization and the influence of current socio-economic changes related to the experiences of the

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particular individual in the world of work. The interviews showed us that to establish sympathy for the political messages of an extreme-right party one has to have a dual frustration: one resulting from the family history and passed on through family socialization processes, and another one stemming from one’s individual career path, rooted in one’s absolute or relative failure in the current, rapidly changing economic environment. It is peculiar to Hungary that both frustrations are connected with the sentiment of anti-communism. In this dual frustration, frustrations suffered in everyday life tend to reinforce and mobilize prejudices and beliefs acquired through family socialization and may lead to attraction to right-wing extremism and voting for an extreme right-wing party. The interviews also indicate that certain attitudes, such as authoritarian and nationalistic views, can exist well before the changes in the world of work are experienced. These pre-existing attitudes, however, can be reinforced or even radicalized as a consequence of a negative perception of experiences in the world of work. Based on the premise of the interpretative model outlined above, we tried to group our interview partners to see whether it is possible to discern different types of co-existence of typical family socialization patterns, life- and work-situations and attitudinal behaviour. Based on the interviews, four different groups of interviewees were established, with different life experiences and distinct attitudes. Based on their characteristics we called these four groups: the ‘high fliers’, the ‘strugglers’, the ‘precarious employees’ and the ‘losers’. Their characteristics are as follows. 1. High fliers are young (aged 35-45) and successful managers – working in ‘new’ industries or at multinational companies. They are the winners of the globalization process. They are well off, they see their future as secure. They have considerable job security and they feel attached to their workplaces. On the other hand they see the world as a hierarchic place. They believe in a meritocratic society. For them, meritocracy has a double meaning: on the one hand, it means equal chances in competition with multinational companies, and sometimes with foreign employees. On the other hand, they also blame those who are not successful, as they see them as being responsible for their own failings. Despite their success, they showed certain uneasiness with the current state of the Hungarian economy, as it is dominated by multinational companies. They showed strong chauvinistic attitudes and some of them were also anti-Semitic. We could characterize them as welfare chauvinists. Among them, those who have a strong chauvinistic attitude, typically had Christian, nationalistic, authoritarian and anti-communist family socialization, and are open to extreme-right populist messages. 2. Strugglers are skilled employees (mostly skilled manual workers) who engage in diverse activities and combine full-time work with entrepreneurship. They are typically lower middle class and feel that they are blocked from rising to the higher levels of the society but are sufficiently well off and successful to distance themselves from the ‘lower’ classes. None the less, they have a pessimistic view as far as their future is concerned, which reflects their sentiment of blocked opportunities in the world of work. It is important to note

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that most of our interview partners in this group had substantial job security and were part of a tightly knit network of colleagues at their workplaces. Nevertheless, their low primary income forced them into moonlighting as self-employed. This material frustration, originating in the world of work, intertwines with their feeling of political powerlessness. Those of them who had a nationalistic, Christian and anti-communist upbringing and whose families had suffered under communism tended to be open to right-wing populist messages. 3. Precarious employees are those with low educational levels, which also shapes the nature of their work and workplaces. They are typically unskilled or semiskilled employees in manufacturing or in the service sector. They feel that they could not get a job that would ensure their stability. They often change employer and feel a high degree of job insecurity. Thus, they are not part of workplace groups and they are loosely attached to their workplace. They work long hours for little money and have little responsibility. Their work is of low prestige. They are not irreplaceable, and they know it. Psychologically, their typical situation is one in which their basic attitude is that they have no power whatsoever over the world and thus over their own lives. Consequently, they are extremely uninterested; decisions are not made through conscious thinking. In this situation, politics is the last thing they bother about and they feel political powerlessness. Those of them who had a nationalistic, Christian and anticommunist upbringing and whose families suffered under communism tended to be open to right-wing populist messages. 4. Losers are young people who cannot find a place for themselves in the world of work. They do not have a secure job and they hate their work. They are very pessimistic concerning their future. They feel they are lost in society. They are apolitical and in many cases antisocial rebels, and at the same time seekers of self-justification and attachments. They are attracted by the catchwords of nationalism and of meritocratic double standards. Meritocracy is a double standard for them in that they feel themselves to be meritorious but exploited and see others as non-meritorious, lazy people and they want a hierarchical society in which their merits are recognized. The ability to classify the interviews into these four groups suggested to us that it is possible to establish distinct patterns of life histories, occupational situations and work experiences. A distinct combination of attitudes could be observed in interview partners corresponding to distinct patterns of life-situations and work experiences connected to the emergence or reinforcement of different attitudes. But for each of our interview partners a distinct combination of different attitudes influenced their political beliefs. None the less, it was obvious that frustration related to blocked careers, lack of integration into the world of work and low salaries was interlinked with the attitude of powerlessness and distrust of politics on the one hand, while dissatisfaction with relative success, on the other hand, was linked to welfare chauvinism. Based on the interview experiences, it seemed to us that a chauvinist attitude is probably the factor that was most often characteristic of our interview partners

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who had been identified by others as being sympathetic to extreme-right ideas, despite their very different experiences as far as their life situation was concerned and their perception of socio-economic changes. Thus, first, using the representative questionnaire, we wanted to test whether chauvinism is really the most important attitude to explain the sympathy towards the extreme right in Hungary (Hypothesis 1). On the basis of the experiences learned through the interviews – given the limitations set by the nature of the survey questionnaire3 – we wanted to test whether we could distinguish the two different sets of attitudes – chauvinism and powerlessness – related to sympathy towards extreme right-wing views, and whether we could prove that behind these attitudes there are diametrically opposed perceptions of changes in the world of work. We wanted to test whether we could find the two distinct sets of interlinkages – namely: 1) chauvinism related to dissatisfaction with relative success and 2) powerlessness related to failure in the world of work – as ways towards developing sympathy with right-wing extremist views on a nationally representative sample of interviewees (Hypothesis 2). Testing: People with different attitudes attracted by different siren songs of the extreme right – survey methodology, variables and methods of analyses In the course of the questionnaire survey, 704 telephone interviews were conducted in Hungary. The interviews were organized by Marketing Centrum in accordance with the project’s requirements on the breakdown by regions and size of community. This sampling method ensures the comparability of the survey results of the eight participating countries and also the representativeness of the main background factors. International comparability, however, had a price: in the course of the quantitative phase, researchers responsible for the comparative analysis of data could only partially weight the complex data file. As for the Hungarian data, the major problem was the relatively small share of young people and the relatively large proportion of the highly educated in the original data file. Therefore, the data file including only Hungarian data was re-weighted to provide approximately representative data on age, gender, region, size of community and educational level; the proportions of attributes of these variables more or less correspond to the relevant proportions of the last Hungarian Labour-Force Survey (2002). The analysis of data was carried out stepwise both from the methodological and the theoretical point of view. After the usual practical re-coding, a number of aggregate variables were created. High measurement-level factor scores for chauvinism, authoritarianism, political powerlessness, anti-migration views followed the schemes of variables employed by De Weerdt et al. (2004). Factor scores cover 3 The nature of the questionnaire did allow us to test the existence of the five attitudinal scales (chauvinism, prejudice against immigrants, authoritarianism, political powerlessness and social dominance orientation) and attraction to the right wing. Nevertheless, it did not allow the testing of some of the issues that seemed to be crucial in the Hungarian case, such as anti-communism and the trajectory of the family over the last decades. Also, it did not allow the testing of the impact of family socialization.

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a scale in which each respondent is given a number characterizing their attitude in the given dimension. Nevertheless, we were not able to create planed factor scores (attitudes): e.g. social dominance orientation, collective relative deprivation or socio-economic change (we implemented the variables of these attitudes individually in the models). The composition of most important high-measurement variables that we used for testing can be seen in the annex. The various models were established through linear regression (thus variables involved in the model were mutually adjusted). Of course, it should be understood that these variables were identified through mutual adjustment that significantly influences certain of the above-mentioned dependent variables. Models were created with the help of linear regression using a stepwise method in the course of expanding the model. Furthermore, the degree of multi-co-linearity, autocorrelation and homoscedasticity were examined. The results of all three control tests were reassuring for the final model. In these regression analyses we have included all attitudinal, societal position, demographic and labour-market variables that would logically have a role in shaping the value of the independent variables and/or showed a bivariate correlation with each other. The first steps of the analysis, of course, concentrated on identifying the variables that had the most influence, and how extensively, in the formation (or to be more accurate: the existence) of these attitudes. Testing hypothesis 1 First, we wanted use a regression model to test whether chauvinism is really the most important attitude in Hungary in explaining sympathy with the extreme right. We incorporated all logically relevant (and/or correlating) variables of the survey in this. Given the limitation of the survey questionnaire, partly due to the international nature of the research and partly to the length of the questionnaire, we decided that the ‘nationalistic-chauvinistic’ attitude of our interview partners (which itself had so many connotations) is best approximated by the aggregate variable of chauvinism. Sympathy with the extreme right4 is influenced most strongly by age, and younger people are clearly the greatest sympathizers. Then comes the view that they do not give more to society than they receive. This ranking of variables suggests that here we may be seeing the impact of young people who have developed anti-social attitudes, and we identified them as losers in the interview phase. Sympathizing with right-wing radicalism is inversely related to the size of the community. This means that the smaller the community the more likely are rightist ideas to be welcome. The next factor is the pessimistic view of the family’s financial future, an attitude which in our interview experience is especially characteristic among those who feel themselves to be the losers of socio-economic changes. The next indicator is the belief in superiority and inferiority, which is probably explained by the traditional anti-Gypsy attitudes in Hungary. The next variable is that there is no need to increase economic equality. This view also could be linked to the traditional and widespread 4

Regression model R²=0.3, see Table 10.1 in the annex.

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anti-Gypsy attitudes, and represent a protest against welfare measures given to those who are considered to be welfare scroungers. The next variable is the dissatisfaction with work, an opinion characteristic of interviewees who could be considered as losers of socio-economic changes. There is only one high measurement-level variable – the chauvinist attitude significantly influenced the sympathy towards right wing extremism, although it had the weakest explaining factor in the model. It appears that attraction to right-wing extremism is not directly influenced by authoritarian, powerlessness, and anti-migration attitudes. On the one hand, the result underpinned our first hypothesis: chauvinism is the most important attitudinal characteristic of sympathizers with extreme rightwing views. On the other hand, to our surprise the attitude of powerlessness did not play any significant role in influencing extreme-right sympathy. Although we did find a number of significant variables (such as age, dissatisfaction with work and a pessimistic view on the family’s financial future) that were characteristic of those who, according to the interviews, typically had the attitude of powerlessness. Nevertheless, we wanted to test whether different variables influence the attitudes of chauvinism and powerlessness, and whether the two attitudes are distinct in relation to sympathy to extreme right. Testing hypothesis 2 The chauvinistic attitude5 is most markedly influenced by integration into the world of work. The next most important factor is that workplace security has definitely improved over the past five years. The next variables to influence the chauvinistic attitude are authoritarianism, which is likely to be the result of family socialization, the belief in economic equality and belief in hierarchy (some people are just inferior to others). According to the data, the older one is the more likely one is to have a chauvinistic attitude. We found these explanatory factors in the interview partners we had classified as being high fliers in the qualitative phase of the research. They had been influenced by an authoritarian style of family education and/or a hierarchical view of society. They felt themselves to be fairly secure in their workplaces and were integrated into their workplace communities. They had also welfare chauvinist attitudes. Of course, the testing method only makes it possible to say that the factors influencing chauvinistic attitudes are similar to those we identified in the interviewees we characterized as being welfare chauvinists. None the less, we could also say that authoritarian views and elements of social dominance orientation influence the existence of chauvinistic attitudes in the Hungarian sample. In the next model we investigated which variables influence the powerlessness attitude. The model shows that political powerlessness6 is most strongly influenced by educational level, i.e. the politically weakness attitude is inverse to educational levels. The lower the educational level, the more likely is the existence of feelings of powerlessness. Next comes the influence of the view that even those who do 5 6

Regression model R²=0.21 – see Table 10.2 in the annex. Regression model R²=0.2 – see Table 10.3 in annex.

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their best are not rewarded with the desired position. Then comes the pessimistic attitude in relation to the family’s financial future. Economic equality is an important influencing factor, because for the respondents it would involve their own economic ascent. Finally, the lack of integration clearly influences the feeling of political powerlessness. According to the experiences of the interview phase, these variables were characteristic of the losers in the socio-economic changes, who we classified as being strugglers or precarious, and to a certain extent of the losers who were most typically young people with anti-social attitudes. The two regression models show that the factors influencing chauvinism and powerlessness are completely different. In relation to the world of work and to socioeconomic changes, they are diametrically opposed attitudes. Chauvinism is influenced by variables suggesting positive labour market situations, and powerlessness by variables suggestive negative ones. It seems we could say that political powerlessness and chauvinism represent two different cleavages. We made several tests to control this statement. Nonetheless, the two attitudes did not have a bivariate correlation with each other and in various regression models they did not influence each other’s standard deviation. Finally we wanted to be sure that people with the powerlessness attitude did not have the chauvinistic attitude. We ran k-means and hierarchical clusters, which also included the variable sympathy with right-wing extremism.7 The cluster analyses proved that chauvinism and powerlessness form different clusters. The results also showed that in one cluster chauvinism was together with sympathy, but powerlessness was a standalone variable and represented a different group of people. Discussion: Different roads to the extreme right and its importance for understanding the relative failure of extreme right parties in Hungary Our goal was to examine the linkages between experiences within the world of work and the attraction to right-wing populist or extreme-right messages in Hungary. Based on the interviews in the qualitative phase of the research with those who were identified by someone as sympathizers with extreme-right views we have found that family socialization is key to understand sympathy to extreme right views: chauvinistic and anti-communist family socialization seemed to be a key background factor in openness to extreme-right populist messages. Nonetheless, personal life history, career path, and the perception of the current social and employment status also have a very important influence on sympathy for extreme-right views. Negatively perceived experiences in the world of work may accelerate the process of radicalization of attitudes, and the right political appeal may turn these mostly passive attitudes into active voting behaviour. But we have also seen that winners from the process of change have developed attitudes sympathetic to extremeright views. Many of those who had Christian, authoritarian and anti-communist family socialization also had a welfare-chauvinist attitude and a rigidly hierarchical 7

See Table 10.4 at the end of the chapter.

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and meritocratic view of society, which made them receptive to extreme-right, ethnocentric and chauvinistic views. Relative failure is felt by those who are doing well but are dissatisfied because they feel that they are in fierce competition with overwhelming forces of international capital. The interviews also suggested that frustration related to blocked workplace career, lack of integration into the world of work and a low salary was interlinked with an attitude of powerlessness and distrust of politics, while dissatisfaction with relative success was linked to welfare chauvinism. Based on the interview experiences, first, using the representative questionnaire, we wanted to test whether chauvinism really was the most important attitude in Hungary to explain sympathy towards the extreme right. Secondly, we wanted to test whether we could distinguish the two different sets of attitudes – chauvinism and powerlessness – related to sympathy towards extreme right views, and whether we could prove that there are diametrically opposed perceptions of changes in the world of work behind these attitudes. The testing of our two hypothesises produced both satisfaction and surprises. On one hand, the result underpinned our first hypothesis: chauvinism is the most important attitudinal characteristic of those who sympathize with extreme-right views. On the other hand, to our surprise, the attitude of powerlessness did not play any significant role in influencing sympathy for the extreme right. This was a great surprise to us. We thought, based on the interview phase, that we would be able to show a significant influence of the attitude of powerlessness on sympathy with extreme right-wing views. Nevertheless, among the significant variables we did find a number of variables (such as age, dissatisfaction with work and pessimistic view on the family’s financial future) that influenced extreme-right sympathy, which were characteristic of those who, according to the interviews, typically had the attitude of powerlessness. In the next step, we were able to prove that chauvinism and the attitude of powerlessness are influenced by diametrically opposed variables as far as socioeconomic changes are concerned. Chauvinism is influenced by variables suggesting positive labour-market conditions and powerlessness by variables suggesting negative ones. The cluster analyses proved that chauvinism and powerlessness form different clusters. Also, the results showed that in one cluster chauvinism went together with sympathy for the extreme right, but powerlessness was a standalone variable and represented a different group of people. Still, we remained perplexed that the interviews suggested different patterns of factors influencing sympathy to extreme-right views than the survey. While powerlessness seemed to be one of the key underlying attitudes closely connected to negative experiences in the world of work in explaining sympathy to the extreme right, the survey analyses did not prove this. The difference between the results of the two phases calls for explanation. One of the possible explanations of the difference between the results of the interview phase and the survey results could be methodological differences. The interview partners in the qualitative phase were selected by looking for people who were winners or losers in the socio-economic changes at the same time being known by somebody as having right-wing sympathies. Thus, in the interview sample, we analysed interviews with those who were known

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for their sympathy to the extreme right, and winners and losers were more or less equally represented. This method helped us to understand the inter-linkages among a complex web of factors and dynamics of development of political attitudes in a rapidly changing socio-economic environment in each individual case. The cases selected suggested that there is a different path leading to extreme-right sympathy for those who experienced failure in recent years due to socio-economic changes compared to those who were relatively successful, but have felt dissatisfied. The survey questioned a nationally representative sample of people. It showed that only chauvinism is related to extreme-right sympathy, although attitudes of chauvinism and powerlessness are influenced by variables suggesting opposition to socioeconomic changes. In our opinion, in a nationally representative sample, the indifference to extreme right-wing views among those who could be considered to be losers of socio-economic change could be explained by the nature of messages put out by the MIÉP. The MIÉP typically expresses a message that could primarily be considered as chauvinistic and ethno-centric. It rarely seeks to appeal to the losers of changes by promising a broad range of measures to improve their situation. In practice, the losers are thus attracted by the moderate left and right wing major parties base their political appeal on left-wing populism in economic terms. Anti-immigration as an issue is rarely spelled out by MIÉP, because there is practically no immigration from the third world into Hungary. On the other hand, there is an immigration wave into Hungary, which effectively threatens the labour-market position of ‘losers of socio-economic changes’ – but these immigrants are native Hungarians from neighbouring countries such as Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. Nonetheless, the MIÉP’s nationalistic position means that it hardly ever criticizes this type of immigration. During the 2002 election campaign, it was the MSZP, the Hungarian socialist party, that opposed measures that would possibly open up the labour market for immigrants from neighbouring countries. The interview phase effectively suggested that there might be a place in the Hungarian politics for a major extreme right-wing party if it were to combine the nationalistic siren song with a left-wing populist message. Such a message would attract those who feel themselves powerless as a result of being losers in the socioeconomic changes. The survey result, nevertheless showed that the MIÉP had not succeeded in attracting the losers of socio-economic changes. It is likely that this is because it sticks to an outdated political message which attracts only a small segment of people with strong chauvinistic attitudes. Such people, as was amply shown in the interviews, had either personally through close relatives suffered a major injustice during the communist regime and, despite their relative success in coping with socioeconomic changes, they feel threatened by multinational companies. It is likely that the anti-globalization and anti-Semitic messages of the MIÉP are important for this segment of sympathizers. From election results, however, we know that this segment of sympathizers represents only a small fraction of eligible voters in Hungary.

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Annex The composition of most important high measurement level variables we used in the quantitative phase: Integration to the world of work: Factor score based on a one-factor solution (explained variance: 52.2 per cent) saturated by the following items: I feel strong ties with my workgroup, I feel strong ties with my company, I feel strong ties with my occupational category, and I feel strong ties with my social class. Chauvinism: Factor score based on a one-factor solution (explained variance: 52.3 per cent) saturated by the following items: I would rather be citizen of Hungary than of any other country in the world, The world would be a better place if people from other countries were more like Hungarians, Generally speaking Hungary is a better country than most other countries. Authoritarianism: Factor score based on a one-factor solution (explained variance: 53.7 per cent) saturated by the following items: Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn, Most of our social problems would be solved, if we could somehow get rid of immoral and anti-social people, What we need most, more than laws and political programmes, is a few courageous and devoted leaders in whom the people can put their faith, We need strong leaders who tell us what to do. Political powerlessness: Factor score based on a one-factor solution (explained variance: 58.4 per cent) saturated by the following items: It seems that whatever party people vote for, things go on pretty much the same, Politics sometimes seems so complicated that I can’t understand what is going on, The people we elect as members of parliament very quickly lose touch with their voters. Sympathy with right wing radicalism: Factor score based on a one-factor solution (explained variance: 55.6 per cent) saturated by the following items: Self positioning on the scale between extreme left and extreme right, Which party would vote the respondent (scale from Munkáspárt to MIÉP), Opinion on the political program of MIÉP (scale 1–5). Prejudice against immigrants: Factor score based on a one-factor solution (explained variance: 50.9 per cent) saturated by the following items: Immigrants increase crime rates in Hungary, Immigrants take jobs away from Hungarians, Immigrants are a threat to our culture and customs, The presence of immigrants enriches the culture of our society, Immigrants contribute to the welfare of this country.

Different Roads to the Siren Songs of the Extreme Right in Hungary

Table 10.1

Sympathy with extreme right

Regression model (sympathy with extreme right) R²=0.3 Age Size of community (Budapest=1) Some people are just inferior to others Satisfaction with work Give more to society View of family financial future Economic equality Chauvinism Source: SIREN survey.

Table 10.2

Chauvinism

Regression model (chauvinism) R²=0.21 Integration Authoritarianism Workplace security Economic equality Age Some people are just inferior to others Human equality Source: SIREN survey.

Table 10.3

Beta 0.17 0.13 0.16 0.09 0.13 0.11 0.11

Powerlessness

Regression model (powerlessness) R²=0.2 Educational level In work, even people who make every possible effort do not always get a position Financial future Economic equality Integration Source: SIREN survey.

Table 10.4

Beta -0.26 0.17 0.15 -0.14 -0.18 -0.16 -0.15 0.13

Beta -0.25 0.22 -0.17 0.11 -0.09

Final cluster centres (k-means cluster)

Sympathy with extreme right Chauvinism Powerlessness Source: SIREN survey.

1 -,39754 -,25149 ,54059

Cluster 2 1,17460 ,48575 -,17542

3 -,61561 ,03143 -1,23473

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Chapter 11

Individual Expressions of Right-Wing Extremism – Understanding the Affinity to Radical Populism in Observing the Changes in the Work Field: The Case of Switzerland Fabrice Plomb and Francesca Poglia Mileti

Introduction The objective of this article is to understand the social conditions that render the ‘national-populist’ (Papadopoulos 2000) vote possible in Switzerland. It can no longer be ignored, in fact, that since the 1990s this country has witnessed a striking rise of the SVP (Schweizerische Volkspartei – Swiss Peoples’ Party) – a party that was formerly a conservative one but that, through the leadership of Christoph Blocher, presents itself as the party that is changing the political balance. In a little over 10 years, the SVP has emerged from the shadow of its bourgeois origins to take first place in the federal parliament. It appears to have attracted major protest votes in all regions of Switzerland.1 Numerous observers have analysed this development in connection with the crisis in political representation or the crisis of confidence in the political sphere. These authors have endeavoured to explain the behaviour of the electorate, to define the contours of the social groups concerned and their motivations (Mazzoleni 2003; Kriesi 1993). Although we do not reject this type of explanation, here we would like to re-situate the acts of voting in the larger context of socio-economic change. We are basing our approach on the assumption that the rapid changes that affected the world of work in the 1990s through incessant restructuring operations, mergers, decentralization and delocalization processes, the privatization of the public sector and the application of new public management methods facilitated the activation of populist dispositions by deregulating the social framework of work. These dispositions go beyond the act of voting and can give rise to uses of the vote that are quite different from voting for the SVP (and abstention in particular). 1 In recent years, the breakthrough of the SVP even spread to regions where the party traditionally had little or no foothold (in certain French-speaking cantons of Switzerland and its Italian-speaking canton in particular).

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By populist dispositions we mean – in line with Christopher Lasch – schemes for readings of society that reject the ‘progressivist scheme of history’ (Lasch 2002, 481). The socio-economic changes that have taken place over the past 15 years, presented as necessary and imbued with a certain fatality, have led to ‘mass dequalification’ (Castel 2003, 49). The perceived loss of control over change favours stances oriented towards the past, which are suspicious of the call for modernization. In this article we show how this general analysis is revealed in the lives and statements of the individuals themselves, and how these individuals construct their political subjectivity in connection with the conditions of their attachment to work. The world of work thus presents itself as a solid means of analysing the activation of these populist dispositions. Social uses of the vote Between the 1991 and 2003 parliamentary elections, the number of seats held by the SVP rose from 11.9 per cent (25 seats) to 26.6 per cent (55 seats), thus making it Switzerland’s leading party. In the last election, a second SVP member, Christoph Blocher himself, was elected to the seven-person Federal Council (Bundesrat). In just a few years, therefore, the SVP – traditionally considered a party representing the interests of small farmers, craftsmen and the self-employed – has, through the influence of its radical Zurich wing led by Christoph Blocher, rapidly risen to the position of the country’s leading party. The first question that arises from this is: who are the voters? A substantial number of publications have been devoted to this question in all European countries that have also witnessed the rise of ‘national populist’ parties (Papadopoulos 2000). In each case, the issue at stake is to define the social groups that are most inclined to vote for these parties and to explain their motivations. Two initial observations make it possible to reveal the limits of this type of analysis: Firstly, this approach is based on the pre-supposition that there is a clear separation between the political sector and the population, or the ‘electorate’. Such analyses tend to reify the political sector, making it appear as a closed world, separate from the rest of society and from all those individuals who, at specific moments (i.e. at elections) make their choice regarding their representatives in this separate world. The SVP proposals are not, however, constructed within a social void. They are the result of force relations among particular social groups in Switzerland. Moreover, the weak level of professionalization of politics within Switzerland creates a greater continuity between elected politicians and the social milieus to which they belong. Secondly, several results from the SIREN project’s quantitative survey lead us to believe that focusing solely on the moments that elections are held does not make it possible to grasp all the dimensions of political subjectivity. Despite the considerable rise of the SVP the position that Swiss workers ascribe to themselves in the left-right spectrum varied little between 1998 and 2003. There was only a slight shift towards the centre (see Table 11.1). Furthermore, even if a neutralization effect as a result of the survey cannot be excluded, in 2003 the percentage of Swiss workers claiming they had less affinity with the SVP than they had five years previously was higher (23 per cent) than it was for those who had become more attracted to the party (11

Individual Expressions of Right-Wing Extremism

Table 11.1

219

Left-right self-identification in 2003 and 1998 in Switzerland

Centre left, left, extreme-left Centre Centre right, right, extreme right Source: De Weerdt et al. 2004.

1998 47.4% 22.7% 29.9%

2003 45.6% 24.3% 30.0%

per cent). The vote indicator thus masks changes that are difficult to quantify and that relate to the evolution of individuals’ world views and to the way in which they perceive the changes to their lives at work and in the public sphere. The vote is thus only the visible indicator, dictated by circumstances, of the changes that have taken place over a long period and that affect the entire social sphere. The considerable electoral growth of the SVP is thus not the result of a one-to-one relation between symbolic proposals and the frustrated expectations of members of the electorate who suddenly recognize themselves in a party’s programme. Studies aimed at identifying the social groups inclined to vote for the SVP or other national-populist parties in Europe often tend to over-estimate the importance of the working classes, the ‘petits gens’ or the ‘losers of modernization’. In this way, these studies homogenize a population that does not form genuine, observable groups – as numerous authors stress (Kitschelt and McGann 2003; Betz 2004) – while contributing to a ‘political disqualification of the people’ as being incompetent in their judgement when it comes to voting and guided by frustration or resentment (Collovald 2004). Beyond the interest of electoral studies that focus on the social diversity of the electorate, it is also important to shift the perspective of the ‘social customs’ of voting (Collovald 2004), which go well beyond the results emerging from the polling stations. Abstention, withdrawal or mobilization regarding elections on crucial matters are methods of participation in political life that it is just as important to take into account as the election of SVP candidates alone. This is all the more true since the Swiss political institutions, thanks to their system of direct democracy, favour these one-off means of taking a stance, which from a political identity point of view are less of a commitment than elections. These practices thus only have a sociological meaning – and can thus only be explained – if we examine what they reveal and what their direct political implications may be. It is therefore in this sense that we will address the way in this ‘political subjectivity’ is constructed for individuals who are particularly affected by the changes that are affecting the world of work. Visions of self in a world of change: How to become attached to the social ensemble Conditions for attachment to work For individuals, socio-economic changes take place above all in the daily framework of their work. Pressure regarding working hours, the advent of information technology, the removal of certain prerogatives, the euphemization of hierarchy, the disappearance of forms of sociability linked to work, the arrival of young

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managers, etc. are micro-changes following the restructuring or reorganization of work in companies. The major movement towards mergers, decentralization, and delocalization are experienced by the individuals concerned through these small events that make up their working environment. Admittedly, the way these changes are viewed differs depending on the post occupied in a company’s organization. A manager who is in charge of and directs the work of others will be more sensitive to changes relating to the philosophy and to methods of managing business and staff. A worker accustomed to following directives will be more concerned by the implications of variations to this process on the tasks they must accomplish. Everyone, however, throughout their professional life constructs a certain form of attachment to their work. And these changes affect the conditions that created this attachment in the first place. The ‘conditions for attachment to work’ are the multiple, daily points of reference that exist within the individuals’ commitment to their work and that provide them with reasons for identifying with their professional activity. These conditions are connected to affective investments (libido, in the sense used by Bourdieu); to the desires and aspirations of the individuals in their work. It can be know-how, values of solidarity in a working group, a certain conception of a profession or even a collective history or a company spirit that reflect a form of belonging to a professional sector. It is the ‘universe of beliefs’ (Demazière and Dubar 1997) linked to the activity of work as such that is necessary to give meaning to occupational commitment. This concept takes into account elements in working life that are implicit and a priori not objectifiable but that only begin to form part of individuals’ stories at the moment when they perceive a point of no return in the flow of daily changes (intensification of work, increasing flexibility of working hours, displacement of workplaces, retirement, etc.). It is when they realize that nothing will remain as it was that they become aware of what made them attached to their professional activity. Expression of political subjectivity in a rupture situation The Swiss qualitative research, which corroborates the qualitative results found in the other countries, thus arrives at the following assumptions: a transformation of the way of perceiving one’s place in society and, more widely, changes to schemes of perception and comprehension of the order that governs community life, correspond to the ruptures experienced in the occupational sphere. In other words, when the former social framework supplied by the workplace is at risk, the social world’s references that were attached to it also disappear. Society is losing its readability at the same time as this is happening to the occupational world. In fact, when encouraged to speak about the changes they have lived through at work, the interviewees rapidly move beyond this limited framework in an attempt to restore order to everything they understand in the word ‘change’. They thus address issues such as violence in young people, insecurity, foreigners, rules for living in the public sphere, political and economic scandals, etc. What they say about change crosses every sphere of daily life. In a situation of rupture, individuals find themselves making a genuine effort to contextualize all these issues in their search for a logic, i.e. to find a way of explaining how society functions. They express a model of ‘living together’ that

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they have interiorized during their social existence and that they try to defend when speaking about subjects related to their everyday life or about topical subjects (health insurance, immigration, etc.). We have called this attempt to create a meaningful context and this redefining of the social world and one’s situation/position in it ‘political subjectivity’.2 But what makes it possible to understand the connection made by the individuals between the sphere of work (the rupture of the conditions for being attached to work) and political subjectivity? Two elements emerge from our survey in answer to this question. The first concerns the individualization of working relations arising from restructuring and reorganization processes in private and public companies. On the one hand, collective bodies of workers are constantly reconstituted as a result of dismissals, the shifting of workplaces, retirement, etc. Beyond immediate colleagues, a certain number of people who form part of the familiar environment of various individuals disappear. Around any individual, the number of people sharing the same experience of change within the company thus decreases. It becomes more and more difficult to identify with working groups who share a common experience. On the other hand, the implementation of new organizational models favouring personal evaluation, the introduction of salaries based on merit, premiums or stock options and individualized relations between the company and the employees mean that it is the employees who bear the brunt of the responsibility for their suffering in the face of change. Salaried workers therefore no longer have a legitimate collective category at their disposal in order to think about the problems that they encounter on a daily basis and which they have trouble adapting to.3 To put this in a way similar to Richard Sennett (1998, 136148), when a group is confronted with changes and when different individual histories form in the face of these changes, each person becomes aware, in a brutal way, of what bound them to the others, although without being able to constitute a new ‘we’ to belong to. The rupture of the conditions for attachment to the workplace on the part of individuals cannot thus be dissociated with the necessary repositioning process. It is necessary to redefine one’s social sphere and one’s position/situation in this world. To be able to carry on despite everything, to do their work or to envisage the next steps in their trajectory, each individual must ‘redefine the external world in order to establish a new way of entering into a relation with it. By redefining it, one normalizes it, giving it a certain number of certitudes and, as a result, the possibility of gaining control over it’ (Kessler 2000, 28). This re-definition not only affects the work sphere but also involves all the areas in which individuals perceive a change: education, young people, immigration, insecurity, Switzerland’s identity, etc. In fact, by affecting the conditions

2 This concept relates to Dubiel (1994), as presented in this book by Jörg Flecker, Gudrun Hentges and Gabrielle Balazs in Chapter 2. As will be seen further on, we use it in a more operational way here, referring to the categories used by the interviewees in their narratives about the social order. 3 At most, today’s salaried workers can resort to law to rectify their situation. Harassment, for example (which is punishable by law) has become one of the few possible forms of suffering at work that it has been possible to counter-act in recent years (Dejours 1998).

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for attachment to work and the trajectories, organizational change also creates upheaval within individuals’ perception of the world surrounding them and their place in it. Relations with others and with their ways of acting, feeling and living become confused at the same time as one’s own daily conditions for commitment become disorganized. If the activity that takes most time in a day and that structures the organization of life is no longer a matter of course, and if this activity no longer constitutes the support behind the stability of one’s ‘character’ (Sennett 1998) – meaning both their best known character traits and their particular form of anchoring within the social hierarchy – then they must reconsider all the conditions that govern their social place in life. The second element comes from the fact that company re-organizations not only affect the world of work, but also the other spheres of activity (family, public, neighbours, etc.). In particular in the industrial regions where our qualitative research was carried out,4 we have been able to confirm that, once certain occupational spaces disappear, an entire mode of socialization and participation in the social space is threatened, in particular for those who began their working lives before the 1990s. The habits that have been built up around one’s work, the modes of sociability, the places of residence (company districts) lose some of their capacity to adapt to the new situation. At the same time as these indications signal a rupture in the conditions for attachment to work (a changed company name as a result of a merger, the arrival of young, foreign, mobile managers with multiple qualifications, instability of working relations, etc.), the residential areas also begin to change (larger presence of immigrants in districts where rents have remained low, changes of neighbours, pressure on income linked to uncertainty regarding state social benefits, etc.). A new ‘configuration of strengths’, to use Elias’s term, is thus exerted on the individuals. Since their objective living conditions have changed, individuals are forced to revise their ‘dispositions for belief’ (Lahire 2002, 419), which were constituted in a different historical context. This new configuration is thus conducive to the expression of elements of political subjectivity that had until now been ‘put on the back burner’ (Lahire 2002, 423). The next part of this article addresses precisely those elements of political subjectivity arising from of a re-working of the meaning that individuals attribute to their work and from their new social positioning: it is these elements that emerge from the interviews. As we have seen, when collective references and forms of protection become fragile, this gives rise to the individuals speaking of other forms of attachment to the social sphere, which we will highlight in the following two sections. The dimensions of political subjectivity The way in which individuals judge the social sphere and express their political subjectivity in connection with the changes experienced at work is structured by three main elements. These are drawn from the analysis of the interviews5 and 4 In particular, we are thinking of the chemical industry in the Basel region and northwestern Switzerland. 5 32 interviews were carried out within the framework of the Swiss qualitative research, in several sectors particularly affected by economic restructuring (chemical industry, telecommunications, microtechnology, sales and information technology).

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concern the way in which the individuals assimilate the change. They do not refer directly to political standpoints on subjects that are considered as legitimate (opinion on the ideological positions of the parties regarding government policies, etc.) and go beyond actual voting habits. Political subjectivity is thus very much an effort to set the world to rights, by each individual and on the basis of their own point of view and their own experience of change. 1. The reaction to change This first dimension of political subjectivity appears in the individual’s preferred way of dividing up the time of their narrative. There are various ways of placing oneself in relation to the time of the change. A large number of interviewees prefer comparing a ‘before’ and ‘after’. For these individuals, the reference to the past is a resource enabling them to face the changes that are controlling them rather than vice-versa. This division of time is marked by an absence of projection into a future that disqualifies what they believe in. Another form of speech that arises for a certain number of interviewees is that of adaptation. Their words are marked by a certain degree of fatality: ‘We don’t have the choice’. Adapting to a change, to a future that seems inevitable, appears as the only way out even if it entails suffering. During the interviews, they stress the present stage of adaptation. Finally, a third way of adjusting oneself to time, and one less present in the interviews carried out, is characterized by a resolute orientation towards the future. Change appears evident to such a point that it is no longer perceived as change. This is a doxic experience of what has been experienced in the sphere of work and in other spheres of daily life. There is a complete appropriation of the management’s ideology (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999), imposing change as a way of managing one’s life in general and one’s occupational life in particular. 2. The ingroup/outgroup relation This second dimension of political subjectivity concerns the way in which individuals define the community to which they refer and feel they belong and, by extension, the social groups or categories that they situate outside this sphere of reference. This reference community can appear as universal in the individual’s responses (‘I am a citizen of the world’), or on the contrary it can be restricted to a reference group whose contours are clearly defined (the ‘good Swiss workers’). The construction of barriers against ‘others’ mainly takes place around two criteria: a moral one (the others do not have the same values, do not behave in the same way, are not from the same milieu) and a cultural criterion (which touches on the question of national belonging and traits recognized as distinctive and associated with a difference of ‘culture’ or of ‘mentality’). In the end, this aspect of political subjectivity arises in the individuals’ responses as an effort to place themselves in society and to distinguish themselves from others. 3. The principles of justice The third structural element of political subjectivity can be recognized from the way in which the individuals evaluate their own place in the social sphere as compared to that of others, or, more precisely their own displacement within a social hierarchy. When interviewed, they compare their situation to that of others regarding certain principles of justice such as merit, need, etc. Comparisons are thus drawn with groups that are

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socially close (opposition to the ‘welfare scroungers’ or ‘bogus unemployed’ among ‘declassed’ workers (workers in situation of “déclassement”, for example) or with socially significant groups (the political or economic elites) whose behaviour is judged as being unworthy compared to one’s own. This dimension of political subjectivity thus stems from an evaluation of the place of each individual within society. In comparisons drawn by the interviewees, we can thus see the principles of the justice they would like to see applied in their country appearing behind their words. These, in a way, define what would – for them – be a ‘fair’ society. These three dimensions of political subjectivity, present to varying degrees in all the interviews conducted, compose – sometimes explicitly and sometimes by default – the model of society that the individuals would like to see in place. Comparison with others, identification with other social groups and with their own place in the social sphere, and the relation established with changes all define, in fact, the way in which individuals relate to the social sphere in which they live. This concept provides us with a better understanding of the articulation between the careers and experiences of an individual, and of the macro-social changes that have been widely analysed in the scientific sphere. Based on the results of our survey, we can underline the following central point: a political subjectivity oriented towards a national-populist position is the result of a particular combination of the three elements mentioned. In fact, the encounter between an idealist relationship with the past, an exclusive social positioning towards other groups and the expression of feelings of injustice regarding immigrants and/or elites produces a political subjectivity that presents major affinities with the proposals by the SVP. In the following section, we present a typology of these political subjectivities that activate ‘populist’ dispositions. Typology of political subjectivity The following typology retains three forms of political subjectivity that combine the elements of the responses we have just analysed in different ways. These three types represent historical individualities, ideal types (in the sense used by Weber), i.e. ways of experiencing change and of expressing one’s attachment to society, schematized and simplified with the aim of a sociological understanding of our objective, which is the (historically identifiable) rise of the SVP in Switzerland. It is thus a ‘picture of thinking’ (Schnapper 1999) that will permit us to get a better grasp of the social conditions behind the activation of populist dispositions. In this typology, we will thus highlight the configuration within which the individuals are confronted with changes in the sphere of work and the discursive resources they mobilize in order to face the new context and to preserve a certain degree of self-esteem. The individualists-conformists The expression of this type of political subjectivity corresponds to individuals who consider their integration in the social sphere as an individual adaptation to the

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standards governing it (in particular in the sector of work, the relation to the state and to the public institutions, etc.). They see social life as being based on the family unit or a restricted circle of friends and refer to individual responsibility as a principle for evaluating the behaviour of others. On the one hand they are conformist because they do not question the rules of collective life and they adapt to the inevitable changes. On the other hand they are individualists, in the sense that, in their vision of commitment to society, they base their approach on individual logic. They explain and justify the situation in which they find themselves and that of others by arguments related to individual choices. The question of justice based on merit is thus central for these individuals. Changes are seen as positive when they permit the recognition of efforts made willingly. On the other hand, however, if the adaptation to change is not rewarded, this can lead to profound questioning by the individuals regarding a certain form of recognition based on merit. The result of this is considerable individual suffering, since the individual bears sole responsibility. This is the case of Peter Imhof, who is a good example of this type of political subjectivity. Peter Imhof 6 was 44 years old when we met him. He has a university degree in biochemistry and entered the chemical industry in Basel at the end of the 1980s, at a time when the first reorganizations that would later lead to mergers in this sector were taking place. Lacking the qualifications necessary to carry out research (a doctorate was required at the time), he turned towards electronic data processing and joined the information technology department of the company for which he still works today. His working environment thus changed little during the 1990s. He had the same colleagues and the department was not affected by reductions in the workforce, since information technology was at the heart of the changes brought about by the successive mergers and played a key role in all the new reorganization projects. Although Peter Imhof states from the outset that he has not perceived any major changes to his work during his years in the chemical industry, this is also because – as his meritocratic discourse confirms – he believes in all the reforms concerning the working conditions he has experienced (introduction of salary based on merit, flexible working hours, constant restructuring and adaptation, ongoing training, etc.). However, from what he says, the second merger, which took place in 2000, appears as a major rupture. The arrival of a new management style represented by managers and consultants brought him in contact with a working culture that completely did away – albeit in a non-aggressive way – with the experience he had accumulated throughout his years of work. Whether he is discussing salary or the extent to which knowledge of everyday matters is acknowledged, Peter Imhof feels opposition towards this new generation of managers. Over the years you get more experience and, I think, that isn’t taken into account as much as it used to be. That’s what I find negative about this ... system. Because in my opinion, somebody who knows a company well, who’s been there for ten or twenty years, he ... he’s got a lot of experience and ... knows about it all, about the whole business. And in my opinion, that doesn’t count for much when it comes to salaries.

6

Names are used for easier reading of the analysis but are entirely fictitious.

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In the interview, his way of describing his inner conflict – his position in the company does not permit him to reverse this trend – takes the form of an effort to neutralize and even to reverse the domination he is subjected to. Yes, the biggest problems as I see them are simply that, er ... when managers, certain managers, er ... somehow ... stick their noses in and ... er ... you know that they know absolutely nothing about the subject. That makes things, er, really hard, because ... And to explain things to them takes time, and you never have enough time, and you have to explain it over and over again but he still doesn’t understand. That’s really irritating. We’ve ... er ... got a few like that and they’re so, so bigheaded, right, that to my mind have got no place in a company.

This intrusion, experienced on a daily basis, and the disqualification of the concept of social justice7 he defends – experience, commitment and years of service deserve recognition and reward – leads him to regard his professional future with apprehension. In other words, his attachment to an individualist and meritocratic vision of professional commitment no longer finds a basis in the new management’s proposals. His belief in a model company, which has been built up thanks to the effort and experience of its employees and in turn promises to reward long-term effort, leads him to see consultants and managers as a threat to his company and beyond that, to jobs in the country. Although his job is not at risk in the immediate future, Peter feels that the conditions for his attachment to his professional investment are threatened. While by no means adopting an attitude of resistance to change, Peter Imhof above all reacts to the dysfunctions that this new method of management – which no longer respects the principles of justice based on individual merit (proof of this being the lack of recognition for his experience in the company) – is likely to generate. Although he regards the evolution of society as a whole as being inevitable and impossible to fully control, he nevertheless believes that individuals can take action concerning the world around them. Control over his own world is something that Peter Imhof particularly finds with his family, which he speaks of at length in the interview in connection with the principles of education he upholds. In speaking spontaneously about the way children should be educated, he also states the position from which he sees the world. The family is thus the envelope and the place where his individualist-conformist impulses are reproduced. It is the family he talks about when he says that more and more people ‘with average incomes and a lot of children’ are getting poorer and are having difficulty in maintaining a certain quality of life. And it is based on the subject of the family and issues related to educating children, to which he attaches great importance, that he takes a stance on certain issues. This is the case with immigration, where the question of foreigners’ desire for ‘integration’ and that of foreigners’ children is central: I think a ... a country needs, er, immigration, immigrants. It needs ... They also bring new ... yes, new blood, er, in, and new ideas. What I find bad, though, when, er ... is when

7 To this should be added the English origin of the new managers, which adds to the difficulty of setting up frameworks for mutual understanding.

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people who immigrate don’t want to be integrated. Because in my opinion, they shouldn’t stay in that case. Because that leads to conflicts ... in districts or ... in the population. ... There are a lot of them, right, who just keep themselves to themselves and stay in their own cultural circles, and can’t even speak German. That happens a lot, unfortunately. OK, it’s different for kids, because they, er, do speak German even if it’s only because of school. In that case they ... they’re integrated relatively well, in my experience.

Along the same lines, this principle of justice should be applied in order to manage migratory phenomena. Although he acknowledges that this is acceptable in situations where immigrants are in danger, he does not accept that provisional residence should be granted to people who will ultimately have to be sent back. Yes, I think so, yes, because ... I mean of course you can’t ... you can’t ... simply, er, just keep on accepting them. There are always cases where people really need asylum, but ... for that, you can ... you can limit it to a certain time. In any case, Switzerland also has to be, er, consistent and then really ... it needs to send these people back and not only after, er, five years or however long, because by then they’re, then it’s harder, and also because of the kids. By then the kids are really integrated and, and by that point it would be ... completely wrong to send them back, right? Because then the kids suffer because they’ll no longer feel at home in the place they were born because they’ve been away from home for so long. Then there’s just ... these conflicts ...

For Peter Imhof, sending back refugees who do not ‘really need asylum’ immediately appears to be the most appropriate solution because it not only prevents their children becoming integrated in Switzerland and then being sent back to a place they have been away from for a long time but would also do away with the ‘conflicts’ that arise from the parents’ lack of integration (problems of ‘order and cleanliness’). In this stance, we find both his general desire to provide the best possible conditions for bringing up children – in order that they do not ‘become bored’ and involved in other (delinquent) activities – and his conformist impulses that are expressed here towards the other ‘cultures’ (they must adapt). His political orientation regarding European integration also arises from this: he sees this as necessary ‘from the economic point of view’, but problematic ‘from the political point of view’. As with everything else, the fear of ‘conflict’ among cultures and among ‘different customs’ and his desire to maintain Switzerland’s independence mean that he sees European integration as problematic. Finally, we also note his vision of the world, which is centred round his family and small communities (districts, clubs), and his rejection of globalization as being likely to destroy the fabric of the family firms that make up Switzerland. Yes, all of it, the entire economy will be, er ... global, er, globalized and Switzerland isn’t as ... (reflects) ... isn’t really that ready for it because ... I can understand very well, above all for agriculture, right? That is ... that is a really massive problem. The structure of the agricultural population is, is just unique in Switzerland, right? They’re family firms, mainly, and you can’t ... you can’t afford that any longer in a global environment, right? That can ... a family farm obviously can’t produce as cheaply as a farmer in the USA, for example. So that means the prices are completely different here in Switzerland. And obviously that means conflicts with ... as a whole, right? For Switzerland.

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In fact, an entire semantic field is present throughout what Peter Imhof says and the stances he adopts. If he can continue to be committed to his occupational life by following his meritocratic precepts and by adapting to change, it is because in return he relies on the support of stable relationships that are restricted to small groups (in particular the family but also his small group of colleagues, which has remained unchanged for many years). However, cracks are appearing in his model of society. On the one hand, the mixing of cultures and the ‘global economy’ are external elements that are likely to threaten these essential social units that he considers to be at the basis of a stable, peaceful Swiss society. On the other hand, the appearance of new managers with new management methods questions his concept of fair acknowledgement for efforts made and for experience. Critical solidarists This type of self-expression in connection with the social sphere and change resolutely takes ‘the people’ as a point of reference. This identification with the middle class, average people who earn a respectable living without being able to ‘throw money out of the window’ is what guides the individual responses. The ‘we’ is often used to reflect the domination they are subject to from above and in particular by ‘politics’ and ‘those who take the decisions’. ‘The people’ is thus considered to be a moral category: of people who work hard just to get by and who are subject to the ‘irresponsibility’ of the political and economic elite. This use of ‘we’ is also used to reflect a feeling that such individuals believe is shared by all: that of seeing one’s household budget strained as a result of charges and of the pressure from, or incomprehension on, the part of state bureaucracy (taxes, health insurance, indirect transfers, family allowances, etc.). ‘The people’ is thus a majority made up of workers (another term for ‘the people’ is, in fact, ‘the workers’) and a silent majority that nevertheless shares the same situation of pressure from ‘above’. This vision of the social sphere is, of course, held by those who are situated in the low income bracket or who have seen their quality of life drop. Their personal history should thus be considered as an important resource in order to understand how the ‘critical solidarists’ face up to change.8 Often considered negatively, changes affecting working conditions are either completely rejected or are accepted at the cost of strong resentment, revealed in different ways. The resentment can be sublimated in the form of rejecting only the domination from above9 or can turn into a ‘double closure’,10 i.e. a double expression of a feeling of injustice towards the social categories that one places at a lower level (refugees, those receiving social assistance in the wide sense of the term) on the

8 By ‘personal history’, we are thinking in particular of the ‘family trajectory’ (De Gaulejac 1999) and the projects involved in it (immigration trajectory, trajectory of women forced to deal with all the setbacks in life alone, trajectory of the son of a worker who pursues a better career) (Léo Fricker, etc.) 9 Classical dual vision held by the Marxist vision of the sense of history: the class struggle. 10 A term we have borrowed from Félix Keller, who constructed it on the Max Weber’s idea of ‘closure’.

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one hand, and towards those considered as being ‘above’ on the other. This view of society is marked by a strong defence of the reference group and its dignity, and by sharp criticism of social groups that scorn the values of these ‘workers’. André Einziger’s interview responses provide us with a better grasp of this type of political subjectivity. André Einziger was 50 years old when we met him. After working in the chemical industry for 28 years, his imposing yet bowed stature bears witness to the years spent in a physically demanding job. André Einziger’s working life has been a fairly typical one: he followed the same path as his father. When he abandoned an apprenticeship as an electrician after his schooling, his parents urged him to get into the labour market rapidly. Initially hired to load and unload goods for a large supermarket, he left this badly-paid job when he got married. At this point, at the beginning of the 1970s, he entered Basel’s chemical industry and took a job that was to change little for nearly 20 years: filling barrels with the product with the aid only of a shovel. After the death of his wife five years ago, he requested a change of job and was transferred to the production line where the packaged goods were labelled. His working environment thus changed in a tangible way since he now found himself in front of a computer screen, in charge of maintaining the printer, and working in a six-person team. Although this new job is only partly manual and does not require any particular physical effort, André Einziger nevertheless considers it less menschlich (human) than his previous activity. His transfer within the company, which took place nearly four years ago, in fact coincides with a reorganization of work there. He sees the arrival of a new team of young bosses and the installation of a new information technology system (SAP)11 as two concrete aspects of the change. The change affects the conditions that were at the basis of André Einziger’s attachment to his company. This is not due, however, to the tasks allocated to him. In fact, he states several times during the interview that the work is ‘still interesting’ and that he is even rather proud of it: he states that he is the only member of his team who has not made any mistakes in six months. What is lacking, however, is recognition for his work and his participation in the joint production project. In other words, it is above all a question of the redistribution of roles and the reorganization of the working relationships that contribute towards ‘dehumanizing’ his activities. How should I put it? Well, it would be human if they still accepted you a bit, like – the bosses, I mean, right? It’s simply that today, time’s the only thing that counts, right? And ... schedules, right? ... You know ... why haven’t you done this yet? Or that? But why isn’t that ...? But the people that give the orders don’t understand anything about it, right? They really don’t understand the business, right? They just have to keep an eye on savings, savings and savings. That’s the most important thing.

For André Einziger, these new, dehumanized working relations are due to the rhythm imposed by the new SAP production control system and to the attitude of the ‘young

11 SAP is a product of a German company that is the market leader for computerized company management systems.

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bosses’ with their degrees, who do not understand how the company works ‘in practice’. Then this kind of 38- or 39-year old boss comes along and they also do their work, but what they’ve brought with them, education and suchlike, the famous SAP system, it’s called; it means that, yes, er, it has to go according to that, right? And whatever you say or do after that ... they don’t do it ... if that no longer fits ... fits into their ... Because either it can’t be included in the budget, if you say anything, or, er ... Yes, then they say we’re just complaining again, right? And with the 30 years of service you’ve been doing it in practice, after all, you could ...

André Einziger compares these new bosses to his former ones, who were closer to his own position because of their professional careers and more aware of the workers’ practical skills. He goes as far as to claim that this new group of managers have no ‘business sense’, unlike the practical sense of the former bosses. While clearly situating himself at the bottom of the company hierarchy, he thus identifies himself with the former managers, with whom he shared the same approach to work and to hierarchical relations. In speaking of changes, André mentions that a certain work ethic, shared by both the managers and the workers, has been abandoned: that of doing one’s work well. According to André Einziger, the logic of professional commitment that exists following the restructuring is an instrumental, individual one: people no longer do any more than what is absolutely necessary within their job, they do not take time to discuss with colleagues, and ‘don’t even say goodbye to the others at the end of the day’. The problems encountered at work – and notably the difficulty in resisting orders from above – are no longer discussed: everyone keeps things to themselves. André feels that he is alone in his protests to the management about respecting the rules. He is all the more sensitive to this general rejection since he is a long-standing and militant trade union member. For him, the trade union serves as the single link through which difficulties encountered within the company can be discussed. In particular, it is questions of work organization (schedules, overtime) that affect André Einziger’s working life but also his private life. The attitude of resistance expressed in Einziger’s words reflects all the more the difficulty of acting on it, which is the result of the individualization of relations within the company. This reveals, however, the extent to which – for him – confrontation is important within his commitment to work: this permits him to maintain a certain dignity and to avoid seeing his private life swallowed up by his work. We could say that André Einziger is attempting to maintain, in the course of his response, a genuine ‘solidaristic orientation’ (Goldthorpe et al. 1972) but for which he can no longer see the concrete evidence or confirmation in the company’s daily activities. By belonging to the trade union, he continues to uphold a conception of work that is disappearing from the company little by little, destroyed by reorganization and weakened by the behaviour of the other workers. By criticizing the company’s salary policy and salaries based on merit, and by proposing that each employee should receive an identical bonus, he is also offering himself the possibility of reaffirming that each employee, beyond individual performances, is contributing towards the collective effort. To summarize, André Einziger’s idea of a ‘good worker’ (as he says

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himself), is not only someone whose work is accurate but it is also someone who can be ‘trusted’, who helps others and cares about others. When speaking about the change, he above all describes the dissolution of working relations, mutual assistance and the solidarity and the sociability that once existed among the workers. Beyond the sphere of work, André Einziger seizes every opportunity in the discussion to reaffirm his moral values of solidarity and mutual assistance. The trade union, the district where he lives and his municipality are the sites of resistance and of maintaining values that he feels are threatened. These are, in a way, the ‘moral milieus’ whose existence permits him to reject all ‘those’ who violate their foundations. Among this latter category, he mentions the ‘gang of crooks’ who show contempt for the ‘Volk’ (people) and are leading it astray. Similarly, the new managers are responsible for the degeneration of working relations: it is those who take all the decisions and are situated ‘on the top floors’ who are leading the people to its downfall. For André Einziger, the pressure at work is the same as that to which the working classes in general are subjected, and who bear the consequences of the rising living costs and the reduction of social benefits. Yes, a bit of a gang of crooks. That’s how Switzerland’s developing. Let’s start with ... with things that the people need to face now ... for ... for pensions, right? Suddenly down from four percent to three percent. You’ve been paying in for so ... since the beginning, and all sorts of things, right? Or ... or when you, or er, what I’m worried about right now is ... the health insurance, right? That just a ... today, that’s just a damned mess. And they could ... they could get to grips with it so easily, for example make it a federal thing and so on, so there’d be just one for all Switzerland ... and ... yes, it’s that sort of thing they can’t get right. And now they’ll be leading us up the garden path again because of that gold ... or ... or ... how shall I put it?

Health insurance, pensions, state retirement pension, privatization and increased prices are the issues behind constant pressure on the quality of life affecting the people or the middle classes (Mittelstand), as he calls them later in the interview. The people are made up of all the ‘petits gens’ who have worked in Switzerland all their lives, and who now find themselves deprived of part of the fruits of their labour. Beyond the feeling of being abused by the leading class, André Einziger expresses a feeling of injustice when he evokes the situation of asylum seekers, who he feels are better provided for than himself even though they contribute less. Asylum seekers are the living proof – the most immediately perceptible, visual, real incarnation – of the injustices to which ‘the people’ are subjected. They embody the pressure that André Einziger feels from above. Or now, for example ... I’m really not a racist or anything. When you see how these ... these asylum seekers ... how after two, three months, that they’ve already got everything and so on, and things, or ... or ... And how for a Swiss, who’s been here a lot longer, until ... the number of places, offices, he has to go to, or whatever, before he, er, gets anything, or gets something just for once.

In addition to the image of asylum seekers, who to him signify the unequal treatment of which he is the victim despite having worked hard all his life, comes another: that of foreigners who, by their omnipresence in the public sphere, reveal their

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inability to ‘adapt’ to the ‘standard’ Swiss way of life. Globally, then, the presence of foreigners not only threatens ‘our workplaces’, as he says during the interview, but also the system of beliefs that he has constructed for himself around work. Since he finds it difficult to maintain his dispositions for collective commitment and values of solidarity within his everyday existence, he erects strong barriers against all those who, by their behaviour, confirm the decline. André Einziger does not, however, reject all foreigners en bloc. Perhaps this is the reason why he asserts that he is not a racist. In fact, he has great respect for those who, in turn, respect the social order and do not stint in their efforts regarding work – like the Tamils, for instance, which he quotes as an example (‘They’re great’). So it is indeed the duty to adapt to this reference community of the ‘people’ that guides his judgements of ‘the others’. Moralists-functionalists This last type of political subjectivity refers to responses that mention a society designed as a relatively harmonious whole, and in which each individual has his place and his raison d’être. Although the individuals we have placed in this category recognize the existence of differences, their vision of the social sphere favours the ‘interpenetration of the social classes’, as Carl Bollinger proposes, whose interview we will examine in more detail. For communitarians, the commitments on the part of each individual – whatever their position – correspond to one common goal: that of progress and the well-being of all. They thus seek to maintain a certain social proximity even when there is clearly a wide distance between them.12 These individuals identify strongly with the values they feel should be upheld in order to maintain this harmony. Unlike the solidarist-critics, this type is more frequently encountered among people in high-level positions in the social hierarchy. Such a vision of the social world implies, on the part of those who hold it, a certain degree of confidence in their capacity to ‘change things’. The equation is the following: if I can imagine a society in which the ‘division of social labour’ (Durkheim) is provided for in a harmonious way, it is also because I have the resources to impose this vision of the world. In this ideal type, changes are perceived negatively when they do away with the rules guaranteeing those concerned the power to impose their vision of the world. On the other hand, changes are seen as being a matter of course when people who resemble this ideal type master all the necessary rules for maintaining their position in the social hierarchy. In this type of political subjectivity, the possibility of ‘managing’ the work of others has clear affinities with stances regarding certain social categories that require control. Carl Bollinger is a good example of this type of political subjectivity. A chemist by training, Carl Bollinger has worked in the research and development department of a large company in Basel’s chemical industry, where he finished his working life as the director of a unit of 200 people. At the time of the interview, he was 63 years old and 12 This is the case of Carl Bollinger, who lives in the same district as his employees or that of other managers encountered who consider themselves honour-bound to call their subordinates by the more intimate ‘Du’ form of address and to valorize their tasks, whatever their position in the company.

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had taken early retirement. Although he describes himself as someone who felt the winds of change coming, familiar as he was, thanks to his professional experience, with ‘keeping a finger on the pulse of the market’, between the lines the impression is that his conception of how a company should be managed has been rejected and replaced by a new, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ company culture. This new type of management, linked to a certain type of company culture, which, in his opinion, comes from the ‘Americans’, has been gradually imposed as a result of the recent merger of his company with another chemicals group in Basel. The unit he headed has, first of all, been de-coupled, forming a legally independent company. Furthermore, all the company’s activities – and particularly those concerning research and development – have been subjected to the principles of immediate profitability and to major staff reductions. The introduction of these ‘mechanisms for a pure market economy’ have, in Carl Bollinger’s opinion, gained the upper hand over any other form of managing economic activities within the company. At the level of individual experience, the successive restructuring operations appear to Carl Bollinger as a rejection of the work he accomplished in ‘his’ company for many years. In other words, the imprint he could have left – of a ‘liberal and social’ enterprise – was wiped out even before he retired. Although he claims that he is among those who have benefited from the change, the recent changes in management style mean that all the investments he made in the company over his professional career have been swept aside and no longer have any legitimacy. Although, as he puts it, he has come out on top as a result of this period of change – he claims that he ‘saw it coming’ and was able to retire when he still had the choice – the work that he has accomplished is now part of the past; it no longer counts for anything and does not form part of the new categories within today’s management. For Carl Bollinger, the recent economic changes have signalled the end of a liberal, social way of working by valorizing management methods that do not integrate any form of responsibility towards the workers and the social world as a whole, but that correspond to the need for productivity and company growth alone. This being the case, those in charge no longer take on the role of moral guarantor that they once did, and this threatens the smooth running of the company in the long term and also that of society as a whole. Carl Bollinger thus assumes a certain degree of responsibility concerning those for whom his role was to lead, support and in the last instance to control; this is expressed in his response by a certain form of paternalism. For him, in fact, the work of employees is subject to the need for motivation, creativity and well-being, but also to a need to be led by someone who sets objectives; the ultimate source of satisfaction at work being, for Carl Bollinger, ‘achieving a major objective, together’. This conception of a top manager’s role is strongly anchored in a work ethic oriented towards progress and social utility for all (Lalive d’Epinay 1999) within society. He even goes as far as to give his role as manager (geistiger Führer – ‘spiritual leader’, in his own words) a civic dimension (staatstragende Gründe) and thus an eminently political one. He personally lived in a village that was also home to many of the company’s employees, meaning he shared their lives and avoided giving them the impression of being ‘controlled from afar’. In his positioning, Carl Bollinger orients his criticisms of change mainly towards top managers who betrayed their essential

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and ongoing role which, in his opinion, is ‘serving as a model to the employees’. To his mind, ‘greed’ and ‘selfishness’ have gained the upper hand among the new ‘managers’ trained according to the ‘American experiment’. He sees these new, imported recipes as a threat to a certain ‘social justice’, which is particular to Switzerland and once guaranteed the ‘full interpenetration of the social classes’. Carl Bollinger develops his stances according to the same structure, whether he is speaking of his work, of the economic sector or of Swiss society. He divides his response between a ‘before’ and a ‘now’: a rupture whose corollary is the fact that his convictions are called into question. Thus, disqualified in his social status not by his early retirement but more by the impossibility of seeing his way of managing employees and the company carried on, he is at the same time losing the legitimacy of stating his point of view of the world, which is the prerogative of the country’s moral elite. This feeling is all the stronger since he sees his scope for decision making – on a moral level but also an effective one – slowly crumbling away because of the ‘foreigners’ (the new managers, new immigrants, asylum seekers). Indeed, in his eyes – and in addition to the fact that they are invading the physical space by settling in a highly attractive, small country – foreigners may also gradually undermine a certain moral space. Here, he sees a certain category of immigrants appropriating part of his vital Raum (‘space’): those who are in reality the furthest both from his values and from his position in the social sphere. We are highly attractive. We are highly attractive and we simply have to see, and here I’m saying something relatively harsh: Switzerland is already overpopulated. We have too many people ... on 41,000 square kilometres, of which two-thirds cannot be used for residential purposes. We’re living on top of each other. And that means tensions, and then there are problems. And we’re not a classical immigration country, like Australia, Canada, the USA, Argentina, Mexico. There, there’s still plenty of room ...

In concrete terms – as we have just seen – the threat of invasion is incarnated in the ‘Americanized’ managers, but also by the immigrants or more precisely the ‘refugees’, ‘who don’t behave as they should’. My wife worked with refugees for about eight years, and I helped her, so I’ve seen a few things. We’ve experienced extremely positive things, but also catastrophically negative ones ... And that’s probably also why we tend to have people coming here who are rather aggressive. That varies, I must admit ... there’s a huge difference, for example between ... for instance between a Tamil and a Lebanese, or between a Kosovo Albanian, a Macedonian and somebody from eastern Europe, don’t you think, when it comes to behaviour? You can ... er ... you can filter out certain things they have in common very easily.

His words on immigration very clearly reflect Carl Bollinger’s permanent feeling of a possible external threat. In the end, the object at risk is a particular Switzerland, and one that he defends all the more strongly because he no longer sees any point of reference around him, not even at his former place of work. To summarize, Carl Bollinger feels that Switzerland is only allowing immigrants from low social classes to settle in the country. They are seen as key figures within the change, a change that includes a potential danger to the ‘security’ of the country.

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He mentions prisons whose populations are swelled by foreigners, but above all a certain moral and social order that is particular to Switzerland being endangered. This external menace has grave consequences since it could affect the integrity of the Swiss people, and on a level that is not only physical but also moral. To protect himself from what could become a threat to his reference universe, whether real or imaginary, Carl Bollinger constructs ‘moral barriers’13 that exclude both what comes from above and what comes from below. The activation of populist dispositions and the question of national-populism The preceding typology shows three forms of political subjectivity that are a particularly good illustration of this shift experienced by the interviewees between how they perceive the social sphere today and the habits (dispositions regarding actions and beliefs as understood by Bourdieu) that were constituted in another context of work and of life. Even if our sample of interviewees included more individuals aged over 40, this shift was also felt by several young people who felt unable to follow in their parents’ footsteps, despite having more cultural resources available than their parents did.14 At the end of this article we are able to postulate that the rapidity of changes in the world of work has created conditions of ‘social insecurity’ (Castel 2003) by the partial abolition of collective forms of protection (collective labour agreements, guaranteed jobs, etc.) and the practices of collective resistance15 that provided a certain degree of career stability. Moreover, the delocalization of financing and the implications of economic activities have made a form of managing companies that is focused on local/national aspects outmoded. For this reason, it is the experience of ‘déclassement’, decline or even dequalification that predominates among the interviewees. In short, it is the expression of the end of a world, of the spirit of an era they were attached to. This rupture in time presents clear affinities with the symbolic position of the SVP, which implicitly (by intonation, vocabulary or the manner of intervening in public debate) refers to the worker’s ethos (Lalive d’Epinay 1999) ‘that made Switzerland what it is’. The three responses summarized above strongly represent the elements that make up what we have termed populist dispositions: identification with changes, regarding change as an expression of moral decline and a sense of belonging to a reference group, to a way of behaving or to a model of society – and against which the value of everything is measured, with a strong exclusion of ‘the others’. This type of response shows clear affinities with the stances taken by the SVP. We will conclude this article by formalizing the elements of political subjectivity that echo the proposals of this party. 13 In using this term, we are reflecting that adopted by Michèle Lamont (2002). 14 This is the case, for example, of Pierre, a 32-year-old electronics technician, who compares himself with his father, a worker, who became a team supervisor at the same age, and who states that his income and the uncertainty of his job situation do not permit him to start a family. 15 See the recent works by Beaud and Pialoux (2003) and Baudelot (2003) on the dissolution of these practices, in particularly in the sphere of work.

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1. Nostalgia for the past: Reference to the world of the past is without doubt a resource for André Einziger, Carl Bollinger and Peter Imhof, when faced with changes that are beyond their control. It enables them to perceive the rupture in their careers as the result of non-legitimate, external decisions. The way that the interviewees categorize their life-time in their accounts is consequently characterized by the lack of any projection into the future – a future that is clearly heading towards a failure to acknowledge the values they aspire to. In parallel to these individual experiences, the SVP has turned the question of ‘maintaining or re-establishing traditional values’ into a political issue in itself. The main protagonist of this ‘moral conservatism’ (Mazzoleni 2003) is the worker, whose efforts provide the foundation of a successful family life and contribute towards the homeland’s ability to progress. Although many interviewees reject this overly traditional view of Switzerland, they often subscribe to the quasi-nostalgic movement of valorizing the past, which forms an implicit part of this vision. 2. Double closure and individuals worthy of consideration: Faced with the individualization that is part of their experience of the process of change, and in the absence of possible collective forms of commitment, the interviewees also resort to another important discursive resource. The search for criteria that differentiate between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in fact is an important element within the individuals’ responses. This corresponds to a desire to become attached to a reference group when faced with the dissociation of the group they belong to. They make a marked distinction between themselves and other social groups. In erecting barriers against these groups by what they say, the individuals define the unit they identify with by default. On several occasions in this work of constructing an ‘us’, we have seen the same structure of speech emerging that, in reference to Weber, certain authors have called ‘double closure’.16 This vision of the world is characterized by an exclusion of both the upper strata of society, where the elites earn obscene salaries and decide for the people without taking them into account, and the lower strata – all those who benefit from social services without having worked all their lives to deserve them. In the middle, the reference group is that of the ‘workers’, the ‘people’, the ‘labourers’, etc., which represents the very image of morality upheld. The desire for justice thus takes place only via this reference group, worthy of consideration, which becomes the benchmark by which the merits and needs of all are measured. The feeling of injustice comes from the perceived gulf between the lack of social recognition granted to this group and the excessive consideration granted to those who do not adhere to the required moral values. Related to these discursive resources, several authors have revealed this same division of the social sphere within national-populist ideology (Papadopoulos 2000). The ‘denunciation of the false elites’ (Mazzoleni 2003, 70) on one hand and 16 We wish to thank Félix Keller of the University of Zurich, who proposed this concept to us in order to qualify this vision of the world.

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the condemnation of the ‘scroungers’ (Mazzoleni 2003, 74), such as the ‘bogus unemployed’ or ‘bogus refugees’, on the other, confirm a similar social frame of reference. The appeal to the people and to the citizens of Switzerland as the only elite worthy of consideration17 completes the process of transforming this picture of the social world into an ideological tool for the integration for a major working or middle class of Swiss nationality. In conclusion, we can thus see that the populist dispositions revealed in interviews with individuals affected by economic changes show an orientation towards society that owes more to the meeting of individual paths and the rapid historical displacement of the conditions governing social experience than it does to a face-to-face confrontation between the electorate and the parties. And despite the fact that there are clear affinities between the political subjectivities of individuals affected by the changes to their place of work and national-populist ideology, it is also – although this would be the subject of other research – the fact that there is a certain homology between what is experienced by workers and by the political representatives of the SVP, whose members, because of their position in the economic sphere,18 defend national capitalism against the ‘selling out’ of the Swiss economy. We hope that this article will make it possible to take a first step towards understanding the social conditions that favour such ‘political conversions’19 and to express political subjectivities that are hostile to our present times.

17 Idea developed by Christoph Blocher himself during a public speech (taken from Mazzoleni 2003, 71). 18 A large number of the elected representatives of the SVP are self-employed. 19 See Chapter 8 in this volume.

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Chapter 12

Conclusions and Policy Implications Jörg Flecker

Introduction It has often been argued, though rarely on the basis of empirical research, that the perceptions and political orientations of people who suffer from worsening employment conditions and growing labour-market insecurity are more likely to be susceptible to the extreme right’s ideological and political message. In order to contribute to closing the research gap and to provide empirical evidence, the SIREN European research project analysed subjective perceptions of changes in working life and their consequences for political orientations in eight countries. The project thereby brought together two fields of research that have until now hardly been related: research on changes in working life, labour-market developments and social security on the one hand and, on the other, analyses of political orientations and right-wing populism and extremism. Focusing on people’s political subjectivity, the research was concerned with the ‘demand side’ of right-wing populism and extremism. The term right-wing populism and extremism was used to cover a wide variety of parties, movements and ideologies that have in common a restrictive notion of citizenship, anti-immigration rhetoric, anti-political-system positions and, often, nationalism and authoritarianism (Taggart 1995; Kitschelt 1995; Betz 2002). The use of the term is based on the view that right-wing extremism and right-wing or radical populism are not distinct phenomena but rather that the difference between them is one of degree (Butterwegge 1996). The contributions to this book present the project’s research findings at national and European levels. They shed light on the different situations in the countries covered by the research in terms of socio-economic change and the political issues of the extreme right. In spite of the considerable national variation that emerged, it became clear that the different ways in which social problems are exploited politically actually represent variations on a common theme. The use of a variety of approaches within an integrated research activity made it possible not only to provide both indepth qualitative analyses and representative research results, but also to adequately cover the various facets of the object of study. The varied experiences of socio-economic change and the explanations and solutions offered in the political field led to a wide variety of political conversions. The findings clearly show that there is no such thing as the reason for the rise of right-wing populism and extremism even if we only consider the effects of socioeconomic change. There are clearly several paths of attraction: One is based on

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the fear of ‘déclassement’ and threatened economic interests that in the literature were stressed by authors such as Lipset (1960), Falter (1991) or Immerfall (1998). Feelings of insecurity and powerlessness correspond with right-wing populists’ addressing the population as passive victims of overwhelming powers. Another, though related, reason is welfare chauvinism, i.e. the view that social protection should be limited to an ethnically defined community and who have contributed to it (Kitschelt 1995, 259). Weakened social protection, problems in elderly care and insecurity regarding one’s old age pension often lead to strong feelings of injustice that make people receptive to xenophobic political messages. A completely different path of attraction is based on the ideology of success: As Rommelspacher (1995) argued xenophobia is not exclusively a problem of those ‘who have not received their fair share’. People who have experienced occupational advancement, including the ‘winners’ of recent changes, seem to strongly identify with their company and show great performance orientation. It is their social dominance orientation legitimating inequality and domination of some groups over others and leading to chauvinism and authoritarianism that makes these people receptive to the exclusivist messages of right-wing populism and extremism. Thus the research highlighted that people are attracted to the extreme right for many different reasons – and we are not suggesting that the main one is changes in working life. Although our research was primarily focused on extreme right-wing ideologies, it is important to stress that the negative consequences of socio-economic change or the way they are perceived by no means necessarily result in higher levels of receptiveness to right-wing populism and extremism. Much rather, the study found a wide variety of interpretations of and political reactions to the changing world of work, which also included a strengthening of socialist, social-democratic or conservative world views and convictions. This means that there has been a gap in what is politically ‘on offer’, in particular from social democracy and the Left, which it has been possible for right-wing populists to exploit. The subject matter of the research obviously relates to a broad range of policy areas. However, the research findings suggest that some policy issues are particularly relevant for attempts to counteract to the rise of right-wing populism and extremism. In the following we briefly summarize the research findings in the light of these selected policy areas or issues and present the policy implications of the research. Work organization and working conditions The analysis of the interviews clearly showed that stressful working conditions and health-and-safety problems are still very much part and parcel of modern workplaces. Often, blue-collar workers reported that work has become more repetitive, and many interviewees pointed to increased workloads and pressures at work. In the private sector, but recently even more so in the public services, the restructuring of companies and organizational change at workplace level have become continuous features of working life. One consequence of restructuring that was felt by many interviewees is the devaluation of qualifications and work-related values.

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The quantitative results indicate an increase in the amount of work as well as an increase in job autonomy. Perceived job security has decreased in five out of eight countries. On average, the working atmosphere has also deteriorated: only three countries have seen an improvement in social atmosphere on average, while in every country older workers have experienced a deterioration. No simple relation emerged from the survey data regarding the link between changes in work and political orientation: no clear correlation could be found between negative changes and attraction to right-wing populism. Interestingly, affinity to the extreme right was found both among the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of recent changes. The analysis shows two different psychological routes to extreme right-wing affinity: The ‘winners’ turned out to be very competitive, to strongly identify with their company, to be attracted by individualistic views and to believe that some social groups should dominate others. The ‘losers’ showed strong feelings of injustice and believed that people like them are not sufficiently rewarded for the work they do. This tended to foster a displaced aggressive reaction, leading to prejudice against immigrants and minorities, and to authoritarian attitudes. The findings on working conditions are in line with a large body of other research pointing at a deterioration in working life at least in some important dimensions. Eurobarometer data showed that ‘less than a third of employees in the European Union were in jobs where tasks were of high quality on measures of variety, opportunities for self-development and task control’ and that ‘there was an overall decline in the quality of work tasks for employees between 1996 and 2001’ (Gallie and Paugam 2002, iv). As a consequence, detrimental working conditions such as repetitive, monotonous work, machine-paced work, low control over one’s work, etc. are still quite widespread or even on the increase (European Foundation 2003). Our findings indicated that, in spite this, there seems to be a lack of legitimate forms of expressing the ‘pains of work’, partly due to the disappearance of the world of bluecollar and lower ranking white-collar workers from public and policy discourses. The first simple but important policy implication of our research is therefore the need for public recognition of the various problems people face at work (or as unemployed workers) in order to overcome some politicians’ inclination not to address issues for which they do not have ready-made solutions, thereby leaving the field open to political entrepreneurs mainly from the far right. Of course, at the same time there is a need for sincere efforts to improve working conditions, for example, by generalizing throughout the European Union workplace development programmes that have a long tradition in some member states, with the required adaptations to different societal conditions. In view of the perceived increase in the amount of work, effective regulations of working hours and workloads need to be developed that are sensitive to the diversity of employment relations, vocational identities and living situations. These should be complemented by policies aimed at improving the work-life balance. Obviously, working conditions directly depend on the bargaining position of individual and collective workers. Thus, the opening up, rather than the narrowing, of options for safeguarding material existence outside paid work and giving workers a strong voice in restructuring and organizational change would support the improvement of working conditions and at the same time mitigate feelings of powerlessness.

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While the policy implications of the findings on detrimental changes in work are rather clear, it is less obvious what follows from the result that ‘winners’ of socioeconomic change have also become attracted to right-wing populism. Further research is needed on how trade unions and companies can act against unitary organizational cultures fixated on competitiveness and denying a multiplicity of interests and organizational goals – because these nurture undemocratic and exclusionist stances. At the societal level this would mean preventing competitiveness from becoming a dominant value, which would actually necessitate reconsidering much of the political discourse at European Union level. Ways would need to be found to tame the ferocious economic competition between individuals, companies and countries again. Work and employment: Insecurity and inequality The European social model is usually seen as being able to combine economic performance with social justice; it is argued that Europe’s more extensive welfare systems and better employment relations allow for a more socially acceptable and less conflict-prone adjustment to globalization (Ferrera et al. 2000, 14; The Social Protection Committee 2003). According to this position the avoidance of large inequalities, long-term skill investment and more-or-less generous systems of social protection are considered to be comparative advantages of the EU. The research findings, however, suggest that Europe, rather than getting closer to this model, is actually moving away from it. Many of the perceived negative consequences of socioeconomic change and, in particular, changes in work can be subsumed under the headings of insecurity and inequality. Regarding insecurity, some of the dimensions distinguished by the ILO studies on the issue (Standing 1997) were covered by our research. Relating to job and employment insecurity, corporate restructuring and continuous change at workplace level lead to a general feeling of insecurity, which is aggravated by the fact that people have hardly any voice in the processes of change. The spread of non-standard forms of employment greatly contributes to insecurity. Income insecurity is on the increase due to the spread of precarious work, lowwage jobs and non-standard employment as well as through continuous restructuring. The situation is exacerbated by reductions in and limitations of access to socialsecurity benefits. Skill-reproduction insecurity is particularly sharply felt by many blue- and white-collar workers. Some interviewees with low levels of education complained that more and more theoretical knowledge is needed in working life and employers are looking for better-educated workers for almost every job. Others are concerned that the changes in work are devaluing their knowledge, skills and competencies or their cultural capital more widely. The interpretation of the qualitative material also showed that growing social inequality is a key issue for many citizens and, in particular, for those in precarious living conditions and those threatened by social decline. Some expressed their anxiety regarding their social position through the observation that there is hardly

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any middle class in society any more and that the gap between rich and poor is widening. What is crucial in our context is that, in the view of many respondents, such inequality is no longer legitimate, because it deviates too far from distributional patterns based on meritocracy. Growing inequality affects women in particular. With regard to perceived insecurities and feelings of injustice, most of the qualitative research showed that their perspectives were decidedly different from men’s: many of our female interviewees were deeply aware of the double disadvantage they suffer as (bluecollar) workers and as women. The quantitative findings regarding insecurity and injustice in general indicate that the basic material dimensions of change (job security, income) seem, at least for the majority of respondents, less problematic than the psychological and symbolic ones (perceived insecurity, social atmosphere): while most people in work in the eight countries consider the chance of losing their jobs or having to close their business rather small, a large minority (27 per cent) have experienced a decrease in job security in recent years (compared to only 18 per cent who have experienced an increase). On average, an improvement in family income was reported in every country apart from Germany. Interviewees who have seen their family income decrease over the last five years show a greater feeling of political powerlessness. People who have experienced an improvement in their family financial situation in the last five years show lower levels of prejudice against immigrants, as compared to people who have seen their family income decrease in the same period. One general result was that a higher or increased income relates to lower levels of receptiveness towards right-wing populism and extremism. What is alarming in this context is that on average more than 20 per cent of the respondents expect their financial situation to deteriorate over the next five years. In view of our research findings, old-age pensions are of paramount importance in the area of social protection. Withholding the rewards for a long life of hard work and denying access to early retirement with an acceptable income for those who have sacrificed their health at work provokes particularly strong feelings of injustice. Eurobarometer data confirm this, showing that only 21 per cent of the working-age population expect that they will not have problems surviving on the state pension, while the state pension is expected to be the main source of income (European Commission 2004b). Thus it seems to be crucial to restore security and calculability after a period of pension reforms and to reconsider the introduction of financial disincentives to early retirement as a means of raising the actual retirement age. We can conclude that many people consider the pressures of flexible capitalism to be a major restriction on their personal well-being and freedom and would feel far more comfortable if they could rely on basic protection against at least some of the most severe insecurities inherent in contemporary societies. This is already an important message of our research, well before any discussion of the dangers of rightwing populism and extremism: though discontent among working people has risen significantly in the course of the last two decades, a commitment by policy makers to fighting unemployment, social insecurity and growing inequality, as important causes of this discontent, seems to be widely missed by European citizens.

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Workforce ageing In recent years, work and employment of older workers has been high on the agenda of the European Union. At the Council of Stockholm in 2001, the goal was set to increase the average employment ratio of men and women between 55 and 64 to 50 per cent by 2001. In a Communication of March 2004 (European Commission 2004a), the European Commission states that although progress has been made in terms of the Stockholm and Barcelona goals, this progress is insufficient. The Commission concludes that member states will have to take drastic measures in the area of active ageing, in particular financial incentives, access to training and lifelong learning and active labour-market policy, good working conditions, flexible working hours and counselling. The empirical results of the SIREN project point out that the far-reaching changes in working life experienced by many workers have a more severe impact on older workers. This relates in particular to the frequent experience of breaches of implicit contracts: workers have the impression that their performance orientation, actual performance and the fact that they have sacrificed their health go unrecognized or unrewarded. For older workers this obviously takes on more weight as they look back on a working lifetime or decades of hard work and loyalty to one (or several) companies. Aspects of such perceived breaches of implicit contracts include the exposure to increasing insecurities, the devaluation of qualifications and workrelated values as well as layoffs and forced early retirement. Age seems to be the most relevant variable with regard to perceived changes in job security: under 35-year-olds report no clear decrease in job security. Interestingly, it is not necessarily the over 55-year-olds who report the greatest decrease in job security, but those aged between 45 and 54. This is alarming given the length of time this age group still needs to stay in the employment system – and in view of the slim chance finding a new job once one has become unemployed. In the light of the SIREN results, age does not appear to be a significant factor influencing an affinity towards right-wing extremism in any country except Hungary, where a significant effect of age on extreme right-wing party affinity can be found. In terms of policy implications, we can draw the following conclusions: The policy to introduce disincentives to early retirement may aggravate the situation because it exacerbates the loss of income. A more sensitive approach seems to be needed to counter companies’ strategies to externalize the cost of workforce reduction. It seems crucial to improve working conditions, to fight age discrimination and to provide employment for older workers and thus create the preconditions for raising the actual retirement age. For some groups of workers it seems premature to try to keep people in employment longer while working conditions are still deteriorating and health conditions are worsening. Immigration Most workers, whether ‘losers’ or ‘winners’ of modernization, are affected by changes in working life that entail more competition, more pressure to achieve, higher

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work rates, stress and intensity in performing one’s work, etc. At the same time, the rewards for this intense involvement in work are becoming increasingly insecure or are subjectively assessed by many as no longer being adequate. It may imply that people are realizing a decrease in and the insecurity of rewards for hard work and subordination in terms of living standards and societal integration. Internalized norms of achievement as well as the suffering entailed by subjecting oneself to the demands of working life may make many people hostile to those who apparently do not conform in the same way. The qualitative research of the SIREN project showed that, in a process termed ‘double demarcation’, some workers direct their frustrations and feelings of injustice against ‘those up there’ (politicians, managers) or those ‘further down’ (long-term unemployed, immigrants, asylum seekers). The emotions involved cannot be understood without reference to the pains of work, the physical and psychological strains that people have to accept while often living in rather precarious circumstances. Immigration is currently the most important political issue of the extreme right in nearly every country investigated. There are different reasons for resentment and prejudice against ‘foreigners’. First, there are workers who, because of their position on the labour market, see ‘foreigners’ as direct competitors for jobs. Second, intense feelings of injustice lead to aggression, which, under the influence of dominant ideologies and sections of the media, is directed at social groups that are perceived as benefiting from society without contributing to it, among which asylum seekers are frequently referred to. These are seen as being taken care of while respondents themselves often feel neglected. Third, for some workers immigrants symbolically stand for societal change, perceived negatively as threatening them with symbolic déclassement –– for them, ‘foreigners’ in their neighbourhood or in their children’s schools have come to symbolize social decline. In the quantitative results, prejudice against immigrants, defined as a rejection of immigrants for economic and cultural reasons, turned out to be the strongest indicator of right-wing extremist affinity. A perceived positive change in job conditions seems to ameliorate prejudice against immigrants. People who have seen their family income decrease in the last five years show higher levels of prejudice against immigrants, as compared to people who have experienced an improvement of their family’s financial situation during the same period. The SIREN research findings show that different social groups show similar levels of xenophobia and attraction to right-wing populism. These are both blue-collar workers and the self-employed, in particular the category of ‘traders, farmers and craftspeople’. The findings referred to above clearly emphasize the importance of policies directed at reducing feelings of insecurity and injustice through concrete measures of providing secure and stable employment and income resulting in satisfactory living conditions and a subjectively meaningful integration into society. Experience in various countries has shown that not tackling the underlying problems but asking for tolerance and political correctness instead has contributed to the success of rightwing populism and extremism (cf. Zilian 2002). The first conclusion to be drawn from the research is that there is a need to recognize the problems caused by social inequality and socio-economic change. In doing so, trade unions and policy makers should stress similarities instead of

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differences between the various groups of workers and, in particular, between the national population and ‘foreigners’. Granting immigrants the same civic, social and economic rights as those enjoyed by Union citizens seems an important precondition for more solidarity with immigrant workers. Enabling refugees and asylum seekers to work legally1 would help to avoid ‘scapegoating’. The prescription of ethical codes for employers with regard to the employment of immigrants and the enforcement of rules regarding terms and conditions of all workers could be effective measures. It seems important that trade unions are supported in their initiatives against racism and xenophobia and mainly that other interest groups, such as chambers of commerce and farmers’ associations, follow the example of the trade unions and also start such initiatives. Politics and political representation Although the research presented in this book has mainly focused on changes in working life and the appeal of right-wing populism and extremism, different political reactions to the consequences of socio-economic change were analysed. Apart from an attraction to right-wing populism and extremism, perceived negative changes in particular also triggered a strengthening of socialist, conservative or liberal political orientations. These differences in individual reactions are partly due to mentalities mainly shaped by social milieus and family socialization. But they also result from differences in the individuals’ educational and political capital and, in particular relating to comparisons between countries, from the mainstream parties’ programmes and messages on offer in a given situation. In general, the qualitative interviews identified a rather negative relationship of many interviewees with politics: experiences and disappointments include observations of and conflicts with undemocratic structures, the perception that politicians are unable or unwilling to promote changes in favour of workers, or accusations against shop stewards and trade unions of having changed sides and playing the role of co-managers. The SIREN research shows that in the eyes of many interviewees the disqualification of the traditional ‘game’ of politics rests notably on the disappearance of the workers’ world from the political scene and the national media. Workers’ apparent lack of interest in politics can be ascribed to politicians’ lack of interest in workers’ problems. Against this background, the public acknowledgement of people’s problems and, in recent years, the political interest in the workers’ world appear to be among the right-wing populists’ strong points. Some working-class interviewees showed themselves as pragmatic: they are convinced that the right-wing populist or extremist parties are on the side of the ‘bosses’ and explain their voting for them as being the most powerful means they possess to annoy the political establishment. Last but not least, anti-EU attitudes were very strong among many of those who showed a marked affinity with right-wing populism and extremism. In part, 1 According to Grünell and Van het Kaar, in the EU, the ‘general rule is that asylumseekers are not allowed to enter the labour market. ... Usually, only asylum-seekers who are granted refugee status are free to enter the labour market’ (Grünell and Van het Kaar 2003).

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such orientations came up when people presented themselves and their country as the passive victims of overwhelming, anonymous powers. This was partly in the context of a loss of national identity and to some extent respondents accused the European Union of corruption and a lack of democracy. Some interviewees who were concerned about EU enlargement had especially virulent fears about the effects on their job opportunities. Another reason for the political support for right-wing populists or extremists can be found in the perceived lack of democracy – whether it is experiences of nepotism and corruption or the feeling of not being able to participate in the political game. This means that, while right-wing populists and extremists are rightly seen as a threat to representative democracy, the reasons for their success can partly be found in undemocratic conditions of contemporary European societies at local, regional and national levels, but also at the level of the European Union. With many interview partners the impression arises that they see themselves as a powerless object and not the subject of politics. They have never had experience or success in political action and activity and conclude that ordinary people in general have no say and cannot change anything. As a result of this experienced passivity, politics is seen as being ‘up there’, while they themselves are down below and powerless. The survey findings indicate that feelings of political powerlessness are a relevant factor in promoting extreme-right party affinity in Austria, Belgium, France, and Switzerland, even though the effect of other receptiveness variables, e.g. prejudice against immigrants or authoritarian attitudes, is much stronger. The path analyses dealing with the links between the perception of changes within working life, social identity and extreme right-wing party affinity, includes ‘political powerlessness’ as one relevant factor on the ‘losers’ pathway’ to right-wing extremist party affinity. Overall, the findings of our research are indicative of a crisis of representation which seems to exist in industrial relations but which is strongest in the field of party politics and regarding the institutions of the nation state and the European Union. According to the research results, this crisis seems to be due to a lack of interest and recognition of many people’s living situations on the part of politics on the one hand and, on the other, to people’s perception of being unable and not having the opportunity to actively engage in the decision-making that affects their lives. It is an alarming finding in a democratic society that citizens consider themselves as passive victims of economic and political forces that are beyond their influence, and often even beyond their comprehension. Not surprisingly, right-wing populists successfully address people as passive and as victims. Making the various spheres of life, including companies, more democratic and actively searching for ways to enhance the control people have over their lives by empowering them to directly influence conditions that impact on their living situations seems to be crucial in this respect. Consequently, the impact assessment of European-level policies should include a consideration of their effect on the actual scope of policy-making at local, regional and national level. This obviously also relates to policies that deal with the formation and regulation of markets, e.g. for public services. ‘Liberalization’ policies, but of course also the single market and EMU, have triggered large elements of the current restructuring waves. The ensuing employment problems, in particular the employment of older workers, therefore need

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to be addressed already at this level and in these areas of policy making, because it is obvious that detrimental consequences cannot be successfully dealt with in other policy areas and at other levels of governance.

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Index

aggression 42, 70, 199, 245 Alleanza Nazionale (AN – National Alliance) 19, 71 amount of work, see workload anomy 33, 41, 49, 90, 103 anti-political-system attitude 13, 19, 38, 76, 136, 251 asylum 53, 103, 227, 231, 245–246 attachment to work 44, 218–222 authoritarianism 14, 38, 46, 70, 72–75, 105, 118, 140, 142–146, 148, 210, 214–215, 240 authoritarian attitudes 38, 70, 74, 79, 95, 97, 105, 143, 192–193, 197, 210, 241, 247 authoritarian reaction 46, 60, 91, 134 blue-collar workers 1, 27, 30–31, 33, 35, 53–54, 68, 73, 80–81, 95, 129–130, 132, 186, 240 Blocher, Christoph 20, 217–218, 237 care (health and elderly) 5, 51, 150, 153–155, 159, 164, 182–183, 240 career 17, 25, 44, 57, 98–99, 102, 110–111, 173–181, 185–186, 196–197, 206–207, 211, 224, 236 chauvinism 69,72,74, 76–79, 140, 142–145, 148, 208–215, 240 civil servants 45, 52, 55, 68, 139 collective relative deprivation 67–68, 77–79 competition for housing 60–61, 170 from immigrants 18, 26, 30, 42, 48, 69, 90, 103, 138, 151, 213–214 246 on the labour market 42, 60–61, 90, 112, 150, 170 competitive nationalism 5, 36, 43, 45, 55, 59, 89, 199 crisis of modernity 25–26, 33 crisis of political representation 46–47, 59, 90, 246–247 cultural capital 29, 44–45, 58, 170, 176–177, 186, 205, 242

Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People´s Party) 18, 71 disenchantment with politics 21, 24, 38, 61, 70, 101, 156, 159 distrust in politics, see disenchantment with politics double closure 184, 193, 228, 236 early retirement 38, 42, 52, 57, 60, 94, 107, 150–152, 157–159, 170, 177–178, 196, 233–234, 243–244 economic and political elite 17–18, 21, 43–44, 224, 228 entrepreneurs 28, 56, 73, 81, 204 European integration 18, 24, 227 European Union 19, 48, 51, 241–242, 244, 247 extreme right-wing attitudes 64, 106, 142, 189 farmers 72, 83, 16, 28, 55, 189, 218, 245–246 fascism 2, 15–17, 55 fear of déclassement 28–29, 60, 103, 170 feelings of resentment 27, 95, 97–98 fixed-term contracts 110, 114, 182 flexibility 48, 108–110, 125, 131–133, 137, 153, 196 foreigners, see immigration FPÖ – Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria) 17, 24, 26–27, 56, 87–88, 92–95, 97, 99, 100, 102–103 Front National (National Front) 18, 24, 31, 71 gender 4, 40–41, 52–53, 59, 64–65, 67, 72–73, 81–82, 83, 90–91, 103, 139, 144, 167, 191, 208 globalization 16, 24, 26, 33, 50–51, 57, 89, 163, 203–206, 227, 242 Haider, Jörg 20, 56, 87, 88, 92, 97, 99–100 identification with the organisation 20, 51, 55, 76–79, 99

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with the workgroup 76–77, 79, 82 processes 4, 43, 64, 69, 191, 202 identity collective 32, 54–55, 94–95 cultural 30–32, 34, 41, 48, 50, 54, 57, 99, 101, 103, 197 national 19–21, 32, 69, 101, 247 personal 46, 52, 60, 76, 95, 102, 105 social 60, 74–78, 99, 101, 103, 105–106, 129, 147 politics 2, 15, 89, 102 ideology of success 28–29, 36, 240 immigration 25, 30–31, 53–54, 57, 61, 90, 119, 149, 151–152, 155, 162–163, 170, 213, 226, 234, 244–246 income 29, 45, 48, 52, 67–68, 80, 83, 106, 114, 207, 242, 243–245 individualization 21, 25–26, 32–33, 49, 90, 103, 190–191, 221, 236 inequality 6, 19, 22, 24, 33, 59, 70, 79, 89, 91, 103, 117–118, 120–121, 166, 190–191, 204, 240, 242–243, 245 information technology sector 100, 157, 173–174 ingroup favouritism 30, 38, 60 injustice 60, 67, 79, 95–96, 98, 137–138, 158–160, 170, 204, 224, 228, 231, 236, 240–241, 243, 245 insecurity 24, 26–27, 38, 43–50, 54, 57, 90– 91, 97, 99, 138, 165–166, 186–187, 201, 205, 235, 240, 242–243 integration of immigrants 151–152, 163, 169, 172, 226–227 job (in)security 47,67–68, 83, 138, 140–141, 174, 207 job autonomy 65–68, 83 Kjærsgård, Pia 47, 158 lack of democracy 51, 92, 246–247 law and order 12–13, 18–19, 50, 89, 200 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 12, 20, 172, 183–184 Lega Nord 19 losers (of modernization) 1, 27–28, 33, 36, 79– 82, 90, 107–108, 114–118, 120–121, 190, 201, 207, 209, 211–213, 219, 241 Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja (MIÉP – Hungarian Justice and Life Party) 2, 18, 28, 50, 57, 71, 203–204, 213–214

manufacturing 107, 126–127, 153–157 mentality 29, 55, 110, 191, 193 meritocracy 56, 113, 117, 120–121, 177, 206–207 migrants, see immigration milieu 25, 29, 34, 39, 43, 58–59, 90–91, 190–191, 193, 246 National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland, NPD) 189 national populism 12, 14, 24, 235 nationalism 12, 14, 18–19, 26, 38, 69, 92, 146, 203, 207 Nazism 14–17 neoliberalism 14, 18, 24, 36, 50, 61, 90, 194–195, 199–200 older workers 67–68, 80, 115, 241, 144, 247–248 outgroup rejection 17, 38, 49, 69, 76, 82, 106, 118, 121, 143, 223 outsourcing 154 – 155, 158 patronage 24, 102–103, 193 people, the 12–13, 15–17, 44, 54, 60, 70, 101, 180, 219, 228, 231–232, 235–237 political capital 185, 187, 246 political conversions 51–52, 55–56, 58, 61, 165, 181, 187–188, 237, 239 political powerlessness 21, 27, 46, 68, 70–75, 77–79, 81, 140, 142–146, 148, 207–208, 211, 243, 247 political representatives 12, 20, 41, 46, 53, 90, 96–98, 132–137, 163, 178, 180, 193, 198, 237, 246 political subjectivity 35–36, 40–51, 59, 104, 218–225, 239 politicians, see political representatives polarization 107, 150 populism 11–14, 55, 194 populist dispositions 217–218, 224, 235–237 postal service 45, 93–94, 125–127, 135–136, 196 post-industrial society 25–27, 194 precarious employment 44–45, 60, 88–89, 97–99, 103, 110 precariousness 38, 43, 61, 97, 120, 202, 204

Index prejudice against immigrants 68–69, 72–75, 77–79, 81–82, 118, 138, 140, 143–146, 214, 241, 243, 245 private sector 123–124, 136–146 privatization 26, 42 protest vote 21, 24, 89, 167, 184, 217 public sector 68, 80, 123–124, 137–139, 141–147, 152, 154–155, 217 racism 47, 69, 102, 138, 168, 181, 188, 192, 246 railways 125–126, 133–135, 181 rationalization 154–155, 116, 128, 196 recognition 41–42, 61, 93–96, 98–99, 197, 225–226, 136, 241, 247 refugees 60, 98, 100, 152, 159–164, 227, 234, 237, 246 Republikaner (REP – The Republicans) 18, 56 right-wing populism and extremism conditions of emergence 10, 22 conditions of success 10, 19 definition 11–14 demand for 40–51, 90, 103 parties 10–15, 17–24, 26–35, 61, 89–90, 121, 124, 149, 190, 203, 211, 218–219 receptiveness to 38, 41, 48–49, 59, 63–64, 68–69, 72–75, 81, 103, 138, 140–146, 240, 243 risk 25, 41, 45, 48, 104, 111, 113, 190, 199 scapegoating 26, 198, 246 Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP – Swiss People’s Party) 19, 217–219, 224, 235–237 self-employed 45, 58, 67, 73, 92–93, 151, 189, 193, 218, 245 sense of justice 41–44 skills and qualifications 25, 58–60, 94, 109, 112–113, 115–116, 151, 153–154, 156–157, 177–178, 240, 243–244 social advancement 37, 55, 95, 99 social atmosphere 65–67, 77, 83, 140, 241, 243 social class 16, 21, 32, 49, 54–56, 99, 169, 170. 172, 176–177, 186, 190, 192, 194, 206, 214, 228, 237 Social Darwinism 36, 58, 61, 200 social decline 2, 42, 43, 54–55, 61, 101, 170, 176–177, 199, 242, 245

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Social Democracy 22, 58–59, 61, 158 social disintegration 49, 69, 89, 146, 176–177, 194, 198 social dominance orientation 68, 75–79, 81, 140, 240 social integration 26, 33, 47, 53, 69, 95, 192–194 social security, see welfare state socio-economic change perception of 63, 80, 195, 208 socio-political attitudes 124, 139, 142 socialization 43, 56–59, 121, 180, 190–191, 199, 204–206, 210–211, 222 standard of living 35, 41, 44, 55–56, 95, 202 symbolic interests 29, 69, 89–90 telecommunications 39, 125, 131, 152, 194–196 temporary workers 40, 107, 114 threatened economic interests 30, 240 trade union 28, 46–47, 127, 149, 165, 170, 185, 187, 230–231, 245–246 transfer income 151 – 152, 157, 181–182 uncertainty 74, 76, 81–82, 106, 111, 113–115, 167 unemployment 24, 30, 38, 45, 52, 87, 132–134, 149–151, 157–159, 165, 169–171, 194, 204 violence 177, 191, 220 Vlaams Blok (V-B, Flemish Block) 18, 71, 123–124, 133–136, 141, 144, 146 welfare chauvinism 30, 201, 207, 212, 240 welfare scroungers 24, 26–27, 90, 210, 224 welfare state 14, 24–26, 31, 56–57, 150–151, 159–164 winners (of modernization) 36, 58, 79–82, 106, 109–113, 120, 200, 205–206, 240–241 workers’ representatives 39, 46, 94, 129, 174 working conditions 38, 42–44, 54, 79, 125, 149, 154, 157, 195, 220, 240–242, 244 working hours 43, 48, 108–109, 176, 241 working life 26, 52, 57–60, 104, 120–121, 149, 154, 157, 195, 220, 240–242, 244 workload 43, 49, 65–66, 68, 80, 83, 136, 140–143, 145, 165, 173, 196, 241