Beyond issue diversification: N-VA and the communitarisation of political, economic and cultural conflicts in Belgium

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, the Flemish nationalist party New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) has experienced a burgeoning growth. Paradoxically, for a stateless nationalist and regionalist party (SNRP), this performance has occurred without major changes in mass support for independence and only ambiguous ones for more regional autonomy, which suggests that the party appeals to different electoral subgroups through a vote-maximisation strategy of issue diversification. Providing an in-depth analysis of the multi-dimensional ideology of N-VA, this article contributes to the literature on SNRPs by arguing that N-VA has gone beyond issue diversification through a strategy of 'issue communitarisation' that consists not only in expanding its agenda beyond the centre-periphery cleavage, but rather in framing all other policy issues explicitly in (sub-state) nationalist terms. According to this strategy, all major conflicts on political power, social redistribution and cultural identity are systematically represented as being based on an unresolvable and overarching centre-periphery antagonism between Flanders and francophone Belgium.

The welfare state criticism of the losers of modernization: How social experiences of resentment shape populist welfare critique

“…The welfare state is blamed for breaking the fundamental social contract and violating norms of distributive justice by providing welfare to the unproductive classes and by installing new social injustices at the disadvantage of the deserving lower social groups (Abts and Kochuyt, 2013; Dwyer, 2000; Derks, 2006, 2007; Hoggett et al, 2013). In particular, the welfare state is argued to inadequately protect the real deserving people, to encourage individual irresponsibility and passivity and to unrightfully provide welfare and privileges to immigrants, welfare abusers and the corrupt elite at the cost of the hard-working and deserving ‘common man’ (Abts et al, 2019; Derks, 2006; Hochschild, 2016). The ‘people’ are thus put in an antagonistic relation not only to the elitist institutions, but also to underserving profiteering groups.…”

Justifying Secession in Catalonia: Resolving Grievances or a Means to a Better Future?

“…Secondly, the dataset proposes a novel categorisation of the ways in which regionalist actors frame their demands as the basis for a systematic and comparative study of this aspect of regionalist mobilisation; the FraTerr coding scheme was informed by the extant literature on territorial politics and refined based on piloting using a sample of political documents from the FraTerr case studies (see Supplementary File). In this respect, the dataset offers a significant advance on inductive qualitative studies of secessionist actors' framing strategies (Abts et al, 2019;Dalle Mulle, 2017;Della Porta et al, 2017;Elias, 2019) and provides for a much broader range of possible cultural, economic, and political arguments for secession than have hitherto been proposed. Thirdly, by further coding the data on frames contained in the FraTerr dataset according to whether they articulate a sense of grievance or justify secession as a means to some kind of better future (see Supplementary File), we provide the first systematic examination of secessionists' use of such arguments.…”

“…The article advances on recent work on secessionist strategies in two ways. Firstly, it exploits the new Framing Territorial Demands (FraTerr) data set (Elias et al, 2021) on how regionalist actors in Europe have framed their territorial demands; this allows for a more systematic comparative analysis of secessionists' justification strategies than is provided by existing studies of individual political parties or movements (Abts et al, 2019;Dalle Mulle, 2017;Elias, 2019) and captures the broader range of arguments used and changing strategies over time which other datasets cannot (Griffiths, 2020;Griffiths & Martinez, 2020). Secondly, the article draws on interviews with party representatives to provide the first exploration of the factors shaping secessionist parties' strategies for justifying secession; the analysis thus provides new insights into why, as well as how, secessionists make the case for creating a new sovereign state.…”

Separatism and Regionalism in Modern Europe

“…19-22;Van Haute, 2005, p. 251), it finally split in 2001, giving rise to two new and distinct political parties. On the one hand, the conservative right-wing became the Nieuwe Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA), which can be considered as the "hard wing of Flemish nationalism" (Delwit, 2011, p. 28; see also Abts et al, 2019;Beyens et al, 2017). On the other hand, the more moderate and left-wing faction became spirit 12 and formed an alliance with the socialists (sp.a) in 2002 (Deschouwer, 2004, p. 196).…”