Media Representations of Anti-Austerity Protests in the EU

Grievances, Identities and Agency

Tao Papaioannou, Suman Gupta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138685932
• eBook ISBN: 9781134868865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyzes constructions of injustice, group identification and participation in news and social media in anti-austerity protests within the European Union (EU). Since 2008, EU member-states have witnessed waves of protests and demonstrations against the adoption of austerity measures and alignment of domestic economies with the prevailing global neoliberal order. Understanding how the media represents dissent and how it influences public deliberation is of critical importance. It is accordingly necessary to explore the strategies deployed and role played by news and social media in representing and perhaps acting upon anti-austerity protests in the Eurozone crisis. This volume undertakes such a critical exploration.

1 Introduction

Articulating Grievances, Identities and Agency: Critical Issues in Media Representations of Anti-Austerity Protests in the EU

Tao Papaioannou

In the wake of the Eurozone economic crisis in 2008, European Union (EU) member-states such as Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain have witnessed a number of protests against the adoption of austerity measures and alignment of domestic economies with the prevailing global neo-liberal order. The implementation of austerity policies has exacerbated social conflicts within and across EU member-states, between citizens and elites. Anti-austerity protests largely condemn the neo-liberal version of democracy and capitalism, and attempt to reconceptualise social justice and equality at both material and discursive levels (della Porta, 2012; Demetriou, 2013). Using protests as a mechanism of political representation, protesting citizens usually aim to achieve their objectives through either influencing particular target groups such as key decision makers and constituencies, or communicating their agendas to as wide an audience as possible. In this process, protestors rely on media to convey, amplify and sustain their messages in order to obtain legitimacy in public discourse, mobilise political support and broaden the scope of conflict (McCarthy et al., 1996). Consequently, media portrayal of protests – or a lack thereof – influences the dynamics and outcomes of social protests. Since the institutional politics and social demands that animate contentious action have arguably become more extensively mediated and complex than ever (Cottle, 2008), understanding how media represent these and bear upon public deliberation within and across EU member-states is of critical importance. Such a project is of particular significance amidst public misgivings about the rise of far-right populist parties across Europe, the emergence of new left movements in Southern Europe and the dominance of the neo-liberal financial–political elite in national and European political spheres. As such, anti-austerity protests offer a context for examining media’s functions and capacities for providing information and analysis, encouraging the deliberation of differing policies and interests, and thus enabling democracy to function.

When examining media response to social protests, in addition to mainstream news media, commercial social media platforms have become important to contemporary forms of citizen activism. Social movements, advocacy groups and non-governmental organisations increasingly incorporate such platforms into broader practices of informing, networking, campaigning and mobilising. It is widely accepted that media play a seminal part in contentious politics, and may bridge or widen fissures between different publics and within opinion formation and policymaking. It is accordingly necessary to explore the strategies deployed and the role played by news and social media in representing and acting upon anti-austerity protests in the Eurozone crisis. This volume undertakes such a critical exploration.

The following are the key questions addressed in the book:

• How do media negotiate with and represent forms of economic, political and social conflict that give rise to anti-austerity protests?
• How does discursive struggle over visibility and representation of public grievances become manifest in news and social media across and beyond the EU?
• How are collective forms of identification portrayed in and materialised through media discourse?
• How do the evolving potentials and constraints of (social) media affect consensus and action mobilisation?
• What emerging developments in the media influence forms and spaces of political activism and citizen advocacy?
• What ethical considerations attach to journalism in the neo-liberal, democratic and pluralistic contexts of the current crisis?

With these questions in mind, analysing media discourse on anti-austerity protests in the EU requires reflective deconstruction of media representation, wherein the relations between national and European governing institutions and elites, state agencies and protesting citizens are constructed and performed. There is, for instance, no necessary unity amongst them; neither is there amongst the popular masses. There have been various accounts of the dynamic interplay between late neo-liberalism, the politics of austerity, public discontent and media coverage of the economic crisis in recent years. For example, research studies have examined media representations of the crisis in the context of those individual member-states that have accentuated neo-liberal austerity policies (Mercille, 2015; Papaioannou and Hajimichael, 2015; Tzogopoulos, 2013). Focusing on questions of identity, agency, solidarity, citizenship and democracy, books such as Social movements in times of austerity: bringing capitalism back into protest analysis (della Porta, 2015a), Understanding European movements: new social movements, global justice struggles, anti-austerity protests (Fominaya and Cox, 2013) and Austerity and protest: popular contention in times of economic crisis (Giugni and Grasso, 2015) offer overviews of the processes and dynamics of protest movements in the context of austerity. Still, the likes of Critical perspectives on social media and protest: between control and emancipation (Dencik and Leister, 2015), New media and public activism: neoliberalism, the state and radical protest in the public sphere (Roberts, 2014), and Social media, politics and the state: protests, revolutions, riots, crime and policing in the age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (Trottier and Fuchs, 2015) explore social movements’ strategies for using social media as campaigning and structuring devices to organise protest rather than just represent it.

This has, then, been a rich field of investigations and analysis and production; and yet, none has adequately addressed the issue of comparing and contrasting media representations of anti-austerity protests within and across EU member-state countries. There is a need to examine media portrayals of – and interventions in – protests and issue-based campaigns, with an emphasis on how these relate to citizen advocacy from domestic to European to global levels. Such investigation must necessarily adopt a comparative perspective across news and social media and across political and national contexts. The media’s role in anti-austerity movements in Europe has so far appeared as an ancillary or tangential concern, an interstitial factor, as the theme of occasional context-specific papers or chapters, but has eluded focused, sustained and comparative analysis. And yet, as will become apparent in the following chapters, such scholarship and publications as are available do attest to the great importance of this issue.

Increasingly, recent research is detecting less straightforward and more fractured media response to protests, suggesting complex mitigating variables in media politics of dissent. A number of social, political and technological changes might be responsible for this. First, mass demonstrations are increasingly moving from the political margins towards public acceptance for an expanded range of causes, involving many political groups and actors at various levels. Globalisation, Europeanisation and Euroscepticism, left populism (e.g. Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece) and right-wing nationalism (e.g. the UK Independence Party), the global or Eurozone financial crisis and the War on Terror have combined to produce a new world order in which geopolitical interests and outlooks have shifted. News reporting of demonstrations taking place across different EU countries has become more intricately interconnected. Such changing dynamics in turn alter the alignment of the media’s interests with those of political elites, leading to more complex media interactions with governments and global institutions and media representations of dissent. Second, the social and technological trend of freer and wider access to information and a complex and pervasive media ecology – comprising mainstream, alternative and independent media platforms and increased communication flows and interactive capabilities – have made possible new forms and spaces for contentious politics, facilitating international and even global dissemination. In considering the new turns of contentious politics, the commercial interests and agendas of media providers need to be factored in (Papaioannou, 2015). Third, news reporting of protests is inflected by the increasing convergence between anti-austerity protestors and journalists as members of the middle class, resulting in more supportive media coverage and criticism of neo-liberal policies and their polarising social effects (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2014).

These recent developments prompt new approaches for the analysis of the contemporary media politics of dissent. This crucial field of mediated democracy, in the context of anti-austerity protests in the EU, requires comparative examination across media, temporal-spatial contexts, and more importantly, modes of social mobilisation. It is broadly recognised that news media are largely relevant for protestors’ inclusion in wider society, in order to obtain public recognition and support and to generate pressure for policy response. At the same time, the ongoing transformations in information and communication technologies and grassroots media practices have undoubtedly affected the mediation opportunity structures facing protest actors. As seen in some protests in Spain and Greece, social media have played a crucial role in the articulation of citizens’ grievances and coordination of protest action, nationally and internationally (Khondker, 2011). Arguably, social media have also expanded the symbolic process of their constitution as collective or connective forms of identity (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; Papaioannou and Olivos, 2013). The networked nature of social media may decentralise hierarchical, top-down movements and generate new forms of ‘flat’ social movements, emphasising personalised action frames such as those enabled by individual (or collective) content production and input. More broadly, social media may alter the political opportunity structure by further publicising dissensus amongst the political elite (Bennett, 1990) and creating lines of communication for protestors to engage new political players and draw international attention to national or local problems. With that said, research has detected disparities between online communication, interest and action and offline engagement, indicating a process of participation more complex than previously thought – from minimal to more ambitious modes, from online to offline (Carpentier, 2011; Kroh and Neiss, 2012; Papaioannou, 2013). Hence, understanding how contentious actions are negotiated in the online environment also has implications for transferring online interests to online and offline participation.

Additionally, functioning policies need information-flow to engage citizens, and that information is usually first created and circulated by news media and then redistributed and commented upon on social media. Most news media organisations nowadays provide news in the format of news websites and news feeds that are tailored to individual users’ preferences, both for media/platform access and for content/topic. Also, celebrity-status journalists, co-branded with their organisations on social media, offer updates and commentaries through blogs, Facebook discussions and tweets. Combined with strategic use of social media platforms by protestors for expressing and aggregating grievances, news and social media may create differing perceptions of the distribution of societal opinion about contentious action. The lenses provided by both news and social media thus affect public understanding of the economic, political and social conflicts that give rise to protests and the collective demands emerging from their progression, the responsibilities for redressing public grievances and the structural arrangements of national and European governance that condition protest mobilisation.

Furthermore, anti-austerity protests have occurred within the wider, evolving context since 2008, including implementation of increased austerity measures in several member-states, the (drastic) change of governments in some countries, requests of governments for continuous financial assistance from the EU (sometimes instigating further public discontent under controversial circumstances), and the changing dynamics of nationalism and geopolitics and the escalation of EU contestation within and across certain member-states. In this regard, alternative responses to the project of European integration and the Union’s austerity policies have gained considerable support (Fazi, 2016). One major argument is a departure from European integration, emphasising the need for a revival of national political authority and policy processes. This includes demands for greater fiscal autonomy of national governments against European budget rules and other policies concerning the protection of the national welfare state, fiscal planning, production and trade activities, and border and immigration control, leading to calls for a progressive exit from the Eurozone or the Union. Left political parties sharing a strong anti-Euro or EU-critical stance include Izquierda Unida in Spain, the Parti de Gauche in France, the Portuguese Communist Party and the Greek Communist Party. Also, within the last two years, Europe has witnessed various ‘Plan B’ conferences and protests, indicating the mounting voice for alternatives to the Eurosystem. And the recent voting of the ‘Brexit’ option in the UK referendum has made the reversal of European integration a startling reality, further challenging the adequacy of current crisis management, nationally and at the EU level.

Another narrative of democratising Europe has focused on the integration of Europe beyond neo-liberalism, arguing that the Eurozone crisis and attendant public disaffection are the result of the neo-liberal paradigm enforced by European institutions with a flawed structure. Research in political economy has pointed at some general characteristics of late neo-liberalism and its role in the economic crisis (della Porta, 2015b). The free market system has driven policies orientated not so much towards a retreat of the state from the market but rather towards reduction of investment in social services, protection of financial capitalism, privatisation of public goods and services, bailing out failing banks through public financing, and the increase of informal labour, low-paid jobs and precarious working conditions. The crisis has taken separate trajectories in respective member-state countries in accordance with the specific varieties of capitalism that prevailed in them. However, despite these differences, particularly amongst those member-states that have been confronted with a liquidity crisis and requested assistance from the EU, austerity-based rescue packages imposed by the Troika, either directly on Ireland, Cyprus, Portugal and Greece or indirectly on Italy and Spain, have disregarded these variations and obliged these countries to accept often counterproductive policies (Armingeon and Baccaro, 2012). These measures, in turn, led to decreasing the provision of state services and social welfare and growing public anger at rising unemployment and poverty. These developments have broadened the social bases of contentious action, as seen in the waves of protests in 2011 and 2013 onwards (della Porta, 2015b). In 2011, protestors were mostly members of a newly emerged precarious class that were particularly affected by austerity policies. Since 2013, the protests have drawn in middle-class participants, and now encompass a wide range of social backgrounds – students, those in precarious employment, manual workers and professionals at various socio-economic strata.

As the crisis continues, some of the criticisms articulated in civil society have been supported by mainstream economic and policy analysts, research institutions and government agencies. The most notable indication was when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reconsidered several of its standard policy recommendations based on evidence from its own research. In a report derived from assessment of the effects of fiscal austerity and liberalisation of capital flows, the study reached the following three conclusions: the benefits of increased growth were fairly difficult to establish when examining a broad group of countries, the costs of increased inequality were prominent, and increased inequality in turn reduced the level and sustainability of growth. This led to the caution that advocates of the IMF approach need to pay attention to the distributional effect as ‘the benefits of these policies that are an important part of the neo-liberal agenda appear to have been somewhat overplayed’ (Ostry et al., 2016, p. 40). In the most recent report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) on the IMF’s management of the crises in Greece, Ireland and Portugal, a critical recommendation was made to minimise political intervention on the IMF’s analysis and policy judgements as its handling of the Eurozone crisis raised significant issues of accountability and transparency (Takaji, 2016).

Hence, in addition to demands for change in domestic policies, a voice that emerged from anti-austerity protests spoke of how the democratisation of the European decision-making process entails a reduction in the power of financial and technocratic bodies, in contrast with the kind of authoritarian federalism that European elites are perceived as pursuing. Other grievances include limiting the dominance of economic elites in European politics, moving beyond austerity in macroeconomic policies, reduction of inequalities, greater protection of social and workers’ rights and a stronger role for trade unions. This approach has been articulated by initiatives such as Les Economistes Atterrés in France, Sbilianciamoci! in Italy and Geração à Rasca (the Struggling Generation) or Que se Lixe a Troika (Stuff the Troika) in Portugal and transnational NGOs such as the European Economists for An Alternative Economic Policy in Europe (the EuroMemo Group) and the Transnational Institute. Political parties sharing this position include Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal. A recent development in this area is the creation of Yan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Articulating Grievances, Identities and Agency: Critical Issues in Media Representations of Anti-Austerity Protests in the EU
• PART I Constructing Grievances
• 2 Discursive Constructions of the Anti-Water Charges Protest Movement in Ireland
• 3 Crisis, Labour and Education: Media Discourse and Anti-Austerity Protest in Italy
• 4 ‘It is Not the Time for Intifada’: A Framing and Semiotic Analysis of Televised Representations of the 2013 Cypriot Protests
• PART II Group Identification
• 5 Solidarity or Antagonism? An Analysis of German News Media Reporting on Anti-Austerity Protests in Greece
• 6 The 2015 Greek Bailout Referendum as a Protest Action: An Analysis of Media Representations of the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ Campaigns
• 7 Anti-Austerity Protests, Brexit and Britishness in the News
• PART III Articulating Agency
• 8 New Media, New Resistance and Mass Media: A Digital Ethnographic Analysis of the Hart Boven Hard Movement in Belgium
• 9 The Mediation of the Portuguese Anti-Austerity Protest Cycle: Media Coverage and Its Impact
• 10 Transnational Solidarity and Anti-Austerity Campaigning for European Political Change
• 11 Conclusion: Media-Framing Analysis, One-Word Framing and ‘Austerity’
• List of Contributors
• Index