Resentment, Social Cleavages and Euroscepticism: The Case of Belgium

This paper investigates the relationship between social resentment and Euroscepticism. Starting from a description of the transition from organized modernity to liquid modernity, we propose that contemporary society is characterized by a de-closure of the social contract, the cultural compromise and the political cleavages of organized modernity. We argue that the processes of Europeanization – together with globalization and individualization – is undermining the established principles of integration and demarcation linked to the bounded structuring of nation-states. The de-bounding and de-structuring of organized modernity results in resentment and new cultural and socio-economic conflicts of integration versus demarcation that could be mobilized by political challengers. We hypothesize that populist parties mobilize the resentment of the losers of modernization by addressing new cultural, economic and political cleavages as well as the issue of European integration. The first proposition is that social change will lead more likely to feelings of anomia, insecurity, relative deprivation and social injustice, which combined with powerlessness are the belt drive of contemporary resentment. The second proposition is that resentment goes together with adjusted schemes of perceptions, appreciation and action, and is likely to result in an ethno-populist habitus as a combination of nativism and populism, but also Euroscepticism. Using survey data from the Belgian National Election Study 2014, we empirically investigate the relation between social resentment – conceptualized in terms of feelings of anomia, economic insecurity, relative deprivation and powerlessness – and Euroscepticism (as well as the mediating effects of anti-immigrant attitudes, political cynicism and neo-liberalism).