Pillarization Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The phenomenon of pillarization is commonly associated with the social, political, and cultural organization of society into separated strata—along different religious denominations and ideological attachments—that manifested in the Netherlands and Belgium during the first half of the twentieth century. The term pillarization derives from the idea of a society consisting of pillars. This concept may have first been coined in the late 1930s by Dutch civil servants who invented the word pillars as shorthand for designating groups in society whose interests had to be accommodated in a party-political negotiation process. Since then, it grew into common usage and came to be studied as a self-standing concept in academia.

Pillarization may be roughly defined as the process whereby social interactions are separated into various cultural, religious, or political spheres where each has its own institutions. These include churches, political parties, schools, sports clubs, and the media. Within a society characterized by vertical pluralism, pillars coexist in the same geographical areas. Certain zones are predominantly Catholic or Protestant, while certain cities may be known as socialist bulwarks. It would be a misunderstanding to see the separations within society among different strata as creating a kind of segregation where one pillar dominates the others. The idea is that pillarization preserves a given diversity and that alterations in relative size or political differences between pillars do not immediately transpire into social tensions.

One of the questions that occupies social scientists, political theorists, and historians is to what extent pillarization impacts politics. Pillarization is not constitutionally anchored unless freedom of religion and political opinion are viewed in this light. Yet, its capacity to impinge on democratic representation has led to considerable debate. On the one hand, some writers interpret pillarization as galvanizing democracy, by virtue of its capacity to bridge gaps between contrasting views in different pillars on morally laden or otherwise controversial topics like abortion, labor and wage politics, and child care benefits. On the other hand, critics question the scientific methods used by these writers as lacking rigor; these critics instead argue that consociationalism, by its very nature, is undemocratic and is a tool of the elites to exercise control. These critics argue that, since the 1960s, the process of depillarization clearly exposed the consociationalist reality behind pillarization.

The question of whether pillarization optimizes political accommodation in a democratic fashion or whether it is a cynical tool to exercise political control echoes the original guise under which sociologists consider the subject. Early academic outlooks on pillarization focused on the idea that it was a problem—a barrier to modernity and a hindrance to national state-building. The counterpart to this view was that religious pillarization serves as a control mechanism to appease the working classes. Pillarization, on both counts, was seen as a perversion of an ideal course of history; it either stood in the way of normal national state development or of a proper unfolding of the class war.

Rather close to the first view is the popular idea that, historically speaking, the principles of pillarization, neocorporatism, and the welfare state can be traced back to the time of the Republic of the United Provinces. Only recently have historians researched the subject and found that actual manifestations on local levels of early twentieth-century pillarization hardly corresponded to the kinds of functions ascribed to it for decades. It appears that a historically sensitive approach to pillarization, developed against a longer background of the transformation of European political discourses, may not only result in new insights on the origins and nature of pillarization, but also provide a relevant perspective on the current crisis of Dutch social democracy and the welfare state, precisely by opening up late nineteenth-century centralized state-building theories.

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