The challenges and the nature of consociationalism in the 20th and 21st centuries : the case of Belgium and the Netherlands

• Autor(a) principal: Vajas, Anna
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/31263
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Ciências Políticas

The phenomenon of populism has been a passionately debated topic of political science. Many among political thinkers, theorists and actual decision-makers have not only shared a common point of interest and concern, but they also have approached from a variety of different aspects. As can be witnessed in current times, the threat of the populist “awakening” has not exclusively been the experience of relatively recently democratized countries, but also of enduring and stable democracies. The present thesis is to serve as the introduction and comparison of two examples with consociational arrangement, from the latter category – namely, of Belgium and the Netherlands. The core of my inquiry lies in the fundamental discrepancy between the traditional eagerness of conventional parties to cooperate and the populist parties with the intention to oppose the arrangement of the former. According to my supposition, the political activity of the Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the Partij Voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands generates a tense relation to the consociational arrangement. Namely, these populist factions articulate an exclusive idea of the society – “the people” – which seems to oppose the inclusive nature of consociationalism. Also, their anti-establishment nature contrasts the cooperation and consensus of the elite, whom tend to react to this rather “antisocial” political behaviour with a sort of dissociation, the application of the so-called cordon sanitaire. The conclusion that I will endeavour to draw from the case studies of Belgium and the Netherlands in the last, concluding chapter, will hopefully be able to support the following hypothesis: the Flemish Vlaams Belang and the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid have been kept in a distance from actual power, however, their presence have resulted in the traditional parties borrowing elements from their agenda. It is an unconcealed hope of the author that the thesis will eventually be able to demonstrate that as democracy itself can be viewed as a diverse system, populism by which it has been endangered by, might also be a varied and manifold phenomenon.