ABSTRACT
The erosion of the traditional cleavages that structured West European party systems (class, religion) has become an uncontroversial fact in the study of political change in Europe. Over the past two decades, scholars have studied electoral de-alignment and provided new analytical frameworks to explain the sources of political change and the creation of new cleavages. In the 1970s the main novelty in European politics was the rise of Green parties and ecological issues. In the past decade, a new family of parties, the alternatively labeled new radical right, new extreme right or populist right, with an agenda based on anti-migrant rhetoric and tax issues, became politically visible. Yet during the 1990s political change in Europe went far beyond the question of new party mobilisation and the emergence of new cleavages. This past decade brought economic and political changes that today reinforce new images of disintegration of nation-states and national political economies. The end of Cold War alignments and the relaunching of European integration have accelerated socio-economic transformation of the European continent at a major scale. A revival of nationalism in a variety of forms dominated political debates in Eastern Europe and the ex Soviet Union, but also in the pluralist democracies of Western Europe. At stake are the redefinition of categories of belonging and solidarity, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the construction of a European polity.
