Seminář Ruud Koopmanse: Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism - How Globalization Is Reshaping Politics in the 21st Century

Politics in the 21st century is undergoing tectonic changes. They occur on both ends of the political spectrum. Among what is traditionally labelled as the “Left,” they pit a mainstream shaped by the tradition of the “Third Way” politics of Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and the Clintons against a rising new radical left epitomized by people like Bernie Saunders within the US Democratic Party and new parties such as Die Linke in Germany, Podemos in Spain, and Saryza in Greece. Outside party politics, this new radical left has been vocal in protest mobilization in the field of international trade, which successfully challenged the TTIP and CETA trade agreements. On the “Right,” the conservative establishment faces strong challenges by new contenders, both within the ranks of mainstream parties, with Donald Trump’s Presidential candidacy as the most spectacular example, and by new parties such as the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) in the Netherlands.  What these new fault lines have in common is that they pit opponents and proponents of globalization, or proponents of different types of globalization, against each other. In this presentation, I will discuss the origins and shape of this new divide and present new results from the WZB research project “The Political Sociology of Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism,” which investigates conflicts around globalization in five countries (Germany, Poland, Turkey, the United States and Mexico). Empirically, the project is based on a combination of existing mass survey data, a new elite survey among political, cultural, and economic elites in the five countries as well as on the European and global levels, as well as political claims data from national newspapers and EU Parliament and UN General Assembly debates.

Ruud Koopmans is the Director of the Research Unit „Migration, Integration, Transnationalization“ at the Berlin Social Science Centre (the WZB) and Professor of Sociology and Migration Research at the Humboldt University of Berlin.