Struggle over Borders

de Pieter de Wilde, Ruud Koopmans, Wolfgang Merkel, Oliver Strijbis, Michael Zürn

"As we will demonstrate in this book, the new fault lines around globalization can no longer be fully captured along the classic redistributional left-right axis. In important respects, they run perpendicular to it. Since the end of the Cold War, parties of the mainstream Left and Right, which had transformed themselves in the decades before from 'class' to catch-all parties (Kirchheimer 1965), have converged further on pro-globalization positions on a range of issues, such as support for European integration, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and trade agreements such as TTIP. Even on immigration, probably the most divisive of the issues related to globalization, differences between the mainstream Left and Right have become much smaller than they used to be - both because mainstream left parties have distanced themselves from earlier experiments with multicultural policies and because Conservatives have, at least in large parts of Western Europe, embraced pro-immigration views"--