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At present, the majority of the news from West Europe is regarding the rise of anti-immigration radical right parties. In the last Dutch elections held in November 2023, the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders became the largest party of the country and currently plays a central role in the new center–right coalition government, although it gave up the premiership after six months of negotiations. In the European elections of June 2024, the radical right marked a significant progress in many countries. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National; RN) gained the lead. Anxious about a potential RN victory in the 2027 Presidential Elections, President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly and declared a snap election. However, as most observers expected, his gamble turned out to be a political disaster. The new government that was finally set up at the end of summer is completely dependent on the “tolerance” of the frontiste RN deputies. Its immigration and public order policies would not fail to shift further rightward. The point is that this is NOT a political typhoon that one needs to merely wait for to pass. The changes that began at least 20 years ago are now culminating in a rather dramatic transformation of the party systems. Even in Germany, where racism is strongly condemned owing to the Holocaust, the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) has gained prominence as one of the major parties and has emerged victorious in the recent Land (state-level) elections of the eastern Länder.
 
A few pertinent questions are how these situations could happen and why they are deteriorating every year in West Europe, where human rights and equality are thought to be guaranteed and liberal democracy is firmly established. People may attribute the situation to major immigration-related events, such as the 2015 European refugee crisis. However, this approach will not help us get to the core of the problem. In West European countries, immigrants have always accounted for a considerable proportion of the population, at least since the end of the postwar economic boom. Antipathy or aversion to immigrants and their culture and religion is widely masked behind an anti-racist consensus or a taboo. Therefore, understanding how these biases came to be mobilized and expressed through the ballot box is crucial.
 
Recently, this issue has led to extensive debates that have persisted among eminent scholars in empirical comparative politics. When the futile controversy over “economy or culture” finally subsided, a wide consensus emerged, confirming that the answer lies in the ongoing process of liberalization and marketization caused by globalization and European integration. Evidently, white- and blue-collar workers in the now infamous “Rust Belt” constitute only a part of Donald Trump’s electorate, but one can safely say that they have played an important role in the breakthrough of anti-immigration radical right parties. However banal, our shared understanding about the alleged “losers of globalization” or “losers of modernization” is now confirmed.
 
In Western Europe, continual measures of austerity have been undertaken for over a few decades (except during the COVID-19 crisis) and have placed additional burdens on non-affluent citizens. In contrast to Japan, which lacks a supranational authority imposing financial discipline, the perpetual austerity policy led to West Europeans suffering from not only the widening inequality resulting from the deregulation of the labor market and the marketization of public services but also from the retrenchment of welfare services. All this increasingly radicalized the political orientation of lower social classes, which has benefited the anti-immigration radical right parties.
 
In Western Europe, however, the postwar regime of economic management greatly differed by country. If this is the case, liberalization and marketization must have also developed in similarly diverse patterns, as they involve the unraveling of each country’s postwar regime. The book that we have translated highlights the trend in France, where the first breakthrough of European anti-immigration radical right parties was marked with the Front National’s victory in the 1984 European elections. Similar to other West European countries, globalization and European integration have put immense pressure on France’s lower classes by transforming the labor market, public services, and social security and by imposing perpetual austerity. While the book describes the individual reform measures implemented by the government in considerable detail, it also focuses on the analysis of popular contentions against them. As indicated in the three decades of laborious pension reform efforts, the French government has been compelled to make important concessions and even withdraw its reform projects several times under pressure due to massive street protests. This is a peculiarity of the French case, which has not been observed in other West European countries. The authors reveal that after successive defeats, the government has now enhanced its police and judicial capabilities to take a tougher stance toward popular protests.
 
Both authors are eminent French historians renowned for their high-resolution analyses of financial policies and protest movements (manifestations) in the 20th century. This is the reason why the book seldom refers to the RN or its radical left rivals. Nevertheless, if a political scholar wants to understand the ongoing dramatic transformation of West Europe’s political structure, it would be indispensable to examine the extensive socioeconomic changes of the last few decades this book offers a deep insight into. Here, the parallelism with the events of the late 19th century seems evident; to understand how the party system and other major aspects of the 20th-century political structure were created in each country, an examination of the socio–political impact of what has recently been referred to as “the first globalization” of the late 19th century was essential.
 
However, these attempts would be in vain if the project were confined to one country, even if it is a major nation, such as France. Similar efforts should be undertaken in every other West European country, and we hope that this book’s publication in Japanese will serve as foundational information to our peers and students.
 

(Written by NAKAYAMA Yohei, Professor, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics / 2025)