France + Holland say NO - signal of a political watershed?

-- Anybody know how to translate "Zeitwende" into English? --

In the "Following the European Union" thread, the focus is now on the Dutch results of the referendum on the European Constitution. After France, The Netherlands too has said "no" - and even more resoundingly. Results in about the page of posts from here onward.

Surveying the results, I digressed into broad-brush mode. See below. Are we at the brink of a new political era? Or have we already launched headlong into it, these past couple of years - the European version of post-9/11 polarisation and communalism, perhaps?

-------------------------------


OK, I kind of obliged myself to follow up there, didnt I.

An article I'm also translating (or was, until the election results got in the way) still concerns the French referendum's results. I found it a real eye-opener, especially after all the talk [..] about the results in terms of left vs right, center vs extremes etc. Instead, says the article, we should see it simply - however anachronistic this may gonna sound - as good old fashioned class struggle. Very interesting. Will post later, but for now this key outtake:


The Dutch local results that I've been spouting basically echo the French results, if with a cultural twist here and there. Workers voted NO. Intellectuals voted YES. The wealthy voted YES; so did liberal suburbanites. But common-folk in Labour strongholds voted NO, as did the communalist Protestant fishing towns and bible belt villages.

Now please allow me some broad-brush grandstanding. Because I think these referenda might signal nothing much less than a "Zeitwende", a turning point between eras.

They coincide with British elections in which Tony Blair did not win because, but in spite of his reformist, market-oriented self-delineation from the classic Labour Party. That party was (rightly or wrongly) symbolically represented by his rival Gordon Brown, who will probably soon take over. They also coincide with an electoral collapse of Gerhard Schroeder's "New Center" project in Germany, which had promised, way back in 1998, to take the SPD down a Blairite "Third Way". Instead, the centre-left is collapsing. A tough-minded Right is riding high now in Germany, while on the other hand a potential hard left party is promised a windfall in the polls even before its proposed constituent parts have gotten their act together.

In Holland, opinion polls have shown the centre-right government collapsing the past year or two. Attention was justifiably focused on the momentary, spectacular rise of the populist Geert Wilders and his one-man "Group", which stepped in Pim Fortuyn's anti-immigrant, anti-Islam shoes. But more consistent gains were made on the left - and ever less so by the socialdemocratic Labour Party and its reformist leader Wouter Bos, whose gains are now down to less than a handful seats. Instead, its far-left rival, the Socialist Party, is set to double its seats.

In case I havent lost you yet with all the details: the liberals - and I mean that both in the American and the European definition - are dead. Forget mere communitarianism; collectivism is back. We knew the stock of nationalism and xenophobic populism was rising. More astonishingly, it's an almost-forgotten old-fashioned socialism that's following its lead. The apparent upwind for the Christian Union may be a local thing, but neatly completes the picture. Whether classist, nationalist or religious, the collective is used as a shield against looming economic, cultural and social insecuritisation (Verunsicherung). The result will be a further resurgent polarisation - and a marginalisation of "enlightened" free-thinkers in both camps.

These will become tough times for postmaterialist Greens or wholly materialist free-market partisans. Thomas is cheering now, but he may come to regret it still. Myself, I've been more than exasperated with the mindless, egoist grabbing of the booming 1990s; how I hated the spoiled, resentful, fat-fed bunch the Dutch had become. And how I resented the way those wishy-washy socialdemocrats, pretty much everywhere, totally wasted the chance they got when they were elected back in office that decade: Bill Clinton and "four more years / of things not getting worse". I cant say I havent felt much like swinging back far to the left myself recently, especially as the grabbing was replaced by hatin'. But at the same time this whole, vaguely emerging prospect of resurgent polarisation, collectivism and populism fills me with a kind of still-undefined dread.

It may still all turn out differently. I realise how much of this sounds awfully like the late seventies, after all. Perhaps Sarkozy and Merkel will use the occasion to push the tide yet again in a different direction, like Thatcher did back then. In that case, Thomas will be right to cheer after all - and I will really be pissed.