Introduction

Whether or not environmental migrants can move to other countries may heavily depend on the immigration policies of those countries. Such policies constitute a core aspect of national sovereignty and the question of the composition of the national community. To understand how migration flows caused by climate change may develop, one needs to understand what actual migration policies look like and how they function. It is still an open question to what extent nation states have introduced more restrictive or liberal policies over the last decades and are able to control migration flows.

The first goal of this chapter is therefore to investigate the extent to which immigration policies have become more liberal or restrictive. As there is no legal category of environmental migrants, there are no policies that specifically address this particular migrant group (McAdam, 2012; see also Chapter 9 of this volume for a discussion of the development of policies at the global level). It can, therefore, be assumed that existing immigration regulations will be relevant in a similar way for the new immigration group of environmental migrants. This might, even more, be the case as it is debated whether or not environmental migrants can be distinguished from economic migrants as climate change affects the economy, which in turn leads to emigration (Beine and Parsons, 2015; Falco et al, 2018).

To understand how immigration policies affect migration flows (that may consist of environmental migrants), the second goal of this chapter is to test several arguments regarding how immigration regulations affect migrant inflows. It has been argued that the capacity to control immigration is more and more constrained by the high number of people who want to get access to a new country and, thus, that ‘borders are beyond control’ (Bhagwati, 2003: 98). On the other hand, it has also been emphasized that democracies have more and better means to control their borders than in earlier times (Freeman, 1994: 29). Besides the question of whether or not immigration policies matter, it is important to investigate how they matter, and under which circumstances they are more efficient.

compares cosmopolitan versus communitarian issue positions by mass publics and elites across our study. We investigate whether there is an attitude gap between elites, who tend to adhere to cosmopolitan positions, and mass publics with more communitarian leanings. Contrasting mass opinion surveys with results from our own elite survey, we show that the mass-elite divide on globalization issues is indeed pervasive and found in all five countries of study. We consider both economic causes in the shape of diverging material interests and cultural ones, the latter pointing towards cultural capital and symbolic boundaries defining transnational cosmopolitan class consciousness. The results align more with the cultural than with the economic explanation. Political elites in the five countries display convergent cosmopolitan positions across issues as varied as international trade, climate change, migration and supranational integration. Mass publics are much more divided on these issues. Also, education alone does not explain the mass-elite gap because the elites are still significantly more cosmopolitan than highly educated members of mass publics, even within the same country.

Introduction

This chapter offers an account of the actors' positioning in public debates, complementing the first and second parts of the book that dealt with how the new cleavage is structured in party politics and the protest arena. Most importantly, we will explore which actors are pivotal contenders in public debates on the three crucial issues of globalization: immigration, European integration, and economic liberalization. Further, we will identify the cleavage coalitions that emerge from the basis of the actors' positions as well as the coalitions' framing of the integration-demarcation divide.

As discussed in Chapter 8, public debates cover all arenas. This allows us to include the full variety of relevant actors engaging in conflicts over globalization in the analyses. The extension of the array of actors, however, raises important questions with regard to the analysis of the actor constellations in the new cleavage. First, it is unclear whether the new actors can be easily integrated into the two-dimensional space found in previous analyses. Second, whereas we looked at the consistency of actors' positions across arenas in Chapter 8, we will analyse the general positioning of actors in debates and the ways in which they differ across the economic and cultural aspects of the globalization debates. In addition, this chapter explains whether the articulation of the losers' potential varies substantially across countries.

Introduction

This chapter analyses the framing of the three public debates over globalization and the thematic structure of these crucial issues of the new cleavage. How do political actors justify their opposition and support of globalization, and, ultimately, how do they cue citizens' views? Throughout this volume, we have suggested that the new cleavage is driven by two different logics, an economic one and a cultural one. The economic logic articulates opposition to globalization by emphasizing the negative consequences of economic competition, and by reframing cultural and political conflicts in such a way as to intensify economic confrontation. The cultural logic, by contrast, stresses the negative consequences of cultural diversity and political integration, and interprets economic conflicts related to globalization in cultural terms. Our principal aim in analysing the framing of the globalization debates is to see where and under what circumstances the cultural logic or the economic logic comes to prevail.

So far, we largely have taken for granted – based on theoretical considerations and the actual location of the issues in the political space – that immigration and European integration are dominated by the cultural logic and that the economic logic prevails in the case of economic liberalization. However, the three issues are potentially multi-faceted, and we therefore expect substantial differences in the way the new cleavage is articulated not only across but also within issues. In a first step, the present chapter sets out to open these ‘black boxes’ of the three globalization issues by breaking them up into the relevant sub-issues. This more fine-grained conceptualization will enable us to formulate more specific expectations regarding the predominant logic, which we can then assess empirically.

Introduction

In the preceding chapters we analysed how the impact of globalization restructured electoral and protest politics – two political arenas occupied mainly by political parties and social movement organizations. Struggles over national boundaries, however, take place in a larger range of arenas and involve a wider array of actors. To address this broader scope of political conflict related to globalization, we look at the integration–demarcation cleavage from a different perspective in this third part of our volume. More specifically, we switch from an analysis of specific arenas to a comprehensive analysis of public debates, which encompasses all potentially relevant arenas and actors and focuses on the three issues central to the new cleavage, namely immigration, economic liberalization, and European integration.

A public debate includes all communication related to a particular issue and is therefore independent of the arena in which it occurs. A public debate is the sum of all public communication related to a particular issue in a process of argument and counter-argument. This definition is close to what Ferree et al. (2002: 9) call ‘public discourse’: ‘public communication about topics and actors related to either some particular policy domain or to the broader interests and values that are engaged’.