According to our assumptions outlined in the previous chapter, the political potentials created by the new cleavage are rather similar from one Western European democracy to the other. All these countries are characterized by increasingly comparable social, economic and cultural context conditions. Defined in most general terms, the relevant societal context characteristics which determine the political potential of the new cleavage in a given country include the relative strength of the country's traditional cleavages, the overall level of its economic and human development, its traditional openness to the world markets and its integration into the global community, its current economic difficulties, and its definition of the national community and the perceived threat to this community by processes of denationalization. While insisting on the broadly similar societal contexts of our six countries, we shall also point out some variability with regard to these general context characteristics, variability which mainly depends on the size of the countries. Three of our six countries belong to the small European democracies – Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands in that order – while our three other countries – France, the United Kingdom and Germany – are the three largest European democracies. In this chapter, we shall first consider one by one the societal context characteristics before moving on to a presentation of the more political context conditions.