Value Politics in Japan and Europe by François Foret & Airo Hino

Author:François Foret & Airo Hino [Foret, François & Hino, Airo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367551247
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 58501817
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Values and Varieties of Polarisation

Though our study looked at only four countries, we found four very distinct varieties of polarisation and division; while the broad conversation about social media ‘filter bubbles’ and their interaction with social and political polarisation is of universal interest, the specifics of how those ‘bubbles’ are formed, what they filter and how they influence individuals’ perceptions and their senses of community and values are highly country-specific. The fact that the degree of social polarisation is different from country to country is important for our understanding both of the relationship between political and social life in these nations and of the impact social media has had on their social fabric, while the fact that the foundations of social polarisation also differ so much from country to country is highly relevant to our understanding of how citizens’ different values have come to be expressed and reflected across various spheres of their lives.

One core value can be said to exist in some form across all nations and to be expressed to different extents in each of our analyses − the value of ‘national community’, the sense of shared community, identity and solidarity with one’s fellow citizens. Although this value is constructed differently in different contexts – coloured in some cases by an infra-national sense of nationhood and in others by a sense of nationhood that crosses certain national borders – in its various forms its strength or weakness is the ur-value of polarisation. This sense of national community exists in a co-substantive relationship, a feedback loop of sorts, with an individual’s sense of social proximity or distance from other groups within their nation. A country where values of national community are strongly held is more likely to see its citizens resist social polarisation even as divides along other value lines emerge; the sense of shared participation in a single national community overrides, to a greater or lesser extent, the drive to ‘other’ those who hold opposing values of some kind. This appears to be reflected in the results of our analyses in Ireland and Japan, where despite clear lines of division over certain values (notably historical issues with echoes in contemporary political life: the partition of the island in Ireland, and the legacy of the Second World War in Japan) the overall degree of social polarisation remains very low. On the other hand, in countries where the value of national community is relatively low or not universally held, conflict over other values can easily either become reified across existing lines of social cleavage or deepen into new forms of social polarisation. This is one possible explanation for the results seen in the other two nations in our study. In Italy, we saw quite deep lines of social division being defined to some extent by cultural values, with different figures in entertainment and culture appearing on opposite sides of a politically aligned division, while in Belgium, though the language divide was of course by far the most significant line of

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