Cleavage lines in global politics

Left and right, East and West, earth and heaven

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6293249
AutoresRoberto Farneti (0000-0002-6511-8144, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, autor de correspondencia)
Año2012
Volumen17
Número2
Páginas127-145
Fecha de publicación2012-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Political Ideologies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1356-9317 • E-ISSN: 1469-9613
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13569317.2012.676850
OpenAlexW1968788575
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas3

This article revisits the ‘heuristic value of the left–right dichotomy’ for understanding global politics. For a little less than two centuries, the main left–right cleavage centred on class issues. Class remained the spur of political mobilization until the late 1970s, when a mechanism of polarization focused more on identity issues emerged. In international politics, talk of identity becomes especially heated in the discourse that opposes East to West. A number of international issues in which the East–West divide has become a reference and a blueprint (e.g. the Israeli–Palestinian conflict) are able to mobilize opinions along the left–right continuum. This paper contends that a third cleavage—between earth and heaven—is also playing a role in mobilizing opinions along the left–right spectrum. As left and right ‘reach out’ from local to global politics and become tied up with questions of identity, some international issues appear to act as catalysts to ideological polarization, especially when the language used to address them pivots on the East–West axis. The risk lies in the formation of a ‘cumulative cleavage’, a compound of the three cleavage lines detailed in this paper

Cleavage (geology · Heaven · Ideology · Left and right · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · European Union Policy and Governance · Gender Studies · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Philosophy