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.

Keywords:

• Nationalism
• ideology
• welfare deservingness
• N-VA
• Flanders
• Belgium

Notes

Acknowledgements

Emmanuel Dalle Mulle would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial support (grant P2GEP1_165085) and the Institute for Social and Political Opinion Research at the University of Leuven for hosting him during the preparation of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Lynch (2009) has argued that the party later moved back to a ‘no ideology’ position, but this has been in part nuanced by recent research on party membership showing that the party is clearly perceived as being firmly in the centre-left (Mitchel et al. 2011: 125–6).

2 Although certainly interesting, properly accounting for the post-2014 election period would require too long a treatment and therefore it would not fit within the limits of this paper.

3 Welfare producerism is different from welfare chauvinism in that welfare chauvinism refers to the ascribed criterion of identity, while, as we will explain in more detail below, producerism refers to the behavioural criteria of control, attitude and reciprocity.

4 Although the terms ‘Walloon’ and ‘francophone’ are often used as synonyms in the party’s propaganda, the former is most frequently adopted with regard to economic issues, whereas the latter most often relates to cultural and political issues.

5 ‘Flanders-as-potential’ is not an expression found in N-VA’s discourse. With this formula, which hints at the more general actual vs. potential distinction, we intend to summarise the representation of Flanders as a community hindered in the realisation of its full political, economic and cultural possibilities.

6 This refers to the period before N-VA joined the 2014 federal government coalition, in which it became responsible for migration policy.

7 In fact, N-VA has continuously been in government with other Flemish parties at the regional level since 2004 and simultaneously criticised its governmental partners for their actions at the federal level.

8 As mentioned before, this is superficially in contradiction with the conservative profile of the party. However, as pointed out by Müller (2006), the defence of a process of carefully managed change can be in line with conservative thinking.

9 What we could not do, for reasons of scope (see note 2), was to venture into the most recent period, after the 2014 elections, when the N-VA took the unprecedented decision to join a federal government coalition, or extensively to compare the party with its immediate predecessor, i.e. the VU. However, both may well be topics for future research.

Additional information

Funding

Emmanuel Dalle Mulle would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial support (grant P2GEP1_165085) and the Institute for Social and Political Opinion Research at the University of Leuven for hosting him during the preparation of this paper

Notes on contributors

Koen Abts

Koen Abts is Assistant Professor at Tilburg University and Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Political Opinion Research, University of Leuven. His research interests include resentment, welfare attitudes, radical right parties, voting behaviour and Belgian politics. [[email protected]]

Emmanuel Dalle Mulle

Emmanuel Dalle Mulle is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and non-resident Fellow at the Centre for Sociological Research, University of Leuven. His interests include Western European nationalist parties, welfare nationalism, minority–majority relations and separatism. [[email protected]]

Rudi Laermans

Rudi Laermans is Professor of Social Theory at the University of Leuven. His research and publications are situated within the fields of social theory, cultural sociology and the sociology of the arts, especially the performing arts. [[email protected]]