Metapolitical de-legitimization strategies of labour unions and their right to strike in Flanders, Belgium

This paper focuses on the way union activism has been de-legitimized by union critical voices during two recent periods of anti-austerity protest in Belgium. It seeks to identify the metapolitical fantasies that quilt these projects together. The authors introduce the notion of metapolitics in order to analyze metapolitical fantasies that aim to re-structure entire public spheres and the entities and practices that animate them. They combine discourse theory (Carpentier and De Cleen 2007, Glynos and Howarth 2007, Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008, Zienkowski 2017) and critical discourse analysis (Van Leeuwen 2007) in order to identify metapolitical de-legitimization strategies deployed by union critical actors. They seek to understand what metapolitical visions of democracy inform union critical statements. They identify six groups of de-legitimation strategies: (1) depictions of unions as conservative anachronisms; (2) individualizations of unions as self centered, irresponsible and child-like actors; (3) criminalizations of unions and unionists as vandals, hostage takers and/or terrorists; (4) oppositions of unions to a homogenized general interest; (5) metadiscursive de-legitimations of unions’ communicative practices; and (6) more direct metapolitical claims that question unions as democratically legitimate actors. The corpus is based on a collection of newspaper articles from three mainstream Flemish newspapers of two periods of intense social protest in 2015 and 2017 (Zienkowski and De Cleen 2017).