Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

particular regions. In many European countries, political identity had in the
past been associated with religion, but, again, these associations were,
mostly, weakening; thus, for example, the post-1945 Christian Democratic
parties in Europe had become moderate conservative parties, no longer
based on the Catholic Church, while in Britain the association of Anglicanism
with conservatism and nonconformity with radicalism, although still statis-
tically significant, was nowhere near as strong as it once had been. The few
places, such as Northern Ireland, where national and religious identities rein-
forced each other seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Instead,
politics revolved around notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’, progressive and conser-
vative, that essentially related to economic issues, and in particular, property
relations. Most of the advanced industrial countries had political parties that
claimed to represent the interests of industry, commerce and the middle
classes, and parties that claimed to represent the interests of organized
labour; these parties operated in a world of cross-cutting social pluralism
which prevented the division between them from becoming too extreme.
Depending on the voting system and social structure, one might find multi-