From Growth Consensus to Fragmentation in Western Europe: Political Polarization over Redistribution and Ecology

For approximately two decades Western Europe was marked by a more or less comprehensive, more or less explicit policy consensus on the management of the economy: priority was given to economic growth over and above other objectives.' Success, as reflected in the remarkably high growth rates of the 1950s and the 1960s, greatly transformed the European political landscape, reducing and sometimes removing old tensions and conflicts. This state of affairs changed in the 1970s. Both the international and the domestic environments, long favorable to growth, contracted. New constraints on affluence brought a division to European societies over the issue of development and the direction that further growth should take; in several countries, that actively opposed and sometimes blocked governmental policies of continued industrial growth were formed. Industrial growth was more and more perceived to be in conflict with rising aspirations for a more humane society and a more harmonious relation to the environment. In the second half of the 1970s, an earlier division regained importance: the prevailing scarcity, although relative, led to greater levels of polarization and conflict between the left and the right, who were no longer able to agree on the boundaries of growth. It is important to note that the two rifts widened simultaneously: one polarized the world of politics (i.e., parties, interest groups, and the state); the other arrayed the established groups of politics and the economy against the antipolitics of the new movements of the 1970s centered in the ecology movement (social that stand for much more than environmental protection) and the regionalist movements.2 One might have expected the resulting elements to regroup in some way; but so far regroupment has happened only rarely. The groups reflecting these rifts argue for quite different, conflicting approaches to the current economic and social predicament (i.e., unemployment, inflation, energy dependence, etc.); and this fragmentation helps explain the hesitations and discontinuities that characterize much of current policymaking in Western Europe.