Winners and losers of globalization
Globalization pressures have led to a new societal conflict in Europe. In their article for the European Political Science Review, WZB researchers Céline Teney, Onawa Promise Lacewell and Pieter de Wilde explore not only whether such pressures (including political internationalization, deregulation of markets and increasing migration) result in a new societal conflict but, additionally, whether this division is rooted in the normative ideologies of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism.
Drawing on Eurobarometer data from 2009, the authors focus on two key issues: European integration and immigration and examine how cosmopolitans and communitarians view each issue. In addition to socio-economic characteristics, the researchers use subjective measures to define winners and losers of globalization. Losers of globalization are citizens who see globalization as negatively influencing their life chances while winners consider themselves to have benefitted from globalization and consider globalization as an opportunity.
While existing studies already provided evidence of a social conflict between globalization winners and losers, the normative underpinnings of both sides had so far remained unclear. The findings show that cosmopolitanstend to be more open to universal values and their frame of reference is no longer the nation-state but rather the supra-national level. Citizens who perceive themselves as losers, on the other hand, share communitarian ideological stances that yield more exclusionary views toward immigrants and a general orientation toward the nation-state as opposed to the European level. Finally, the researchers show that these findings apply to both Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe.
The political conflicts relating to cosmopolitanism and communitarianism in the context of migration, political internationalization and neo-liberalismare investigated in the interdisciplinary bridging project “The Political Sociology of Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism”.
To the abstract of the article in the European Political Science Review