Struggling for a Social Europe

Neoliberal Globalization and the Birth of a European Social Movement

Andy Mathers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754645801
• eBook ISBN: 9781317049029
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Protests at summit meetings have inspired intense debate over the nature and significance of the 'anti-globalization' or 'anti-capitalist' movement. However, the European dimension of this movement is still largely unknown. In this insightful book Andy Mathers addresses this deficit by focusing on events that have marked the birth of a European social movement. He relates the development of the movement to key matters such as economic, employment and welfare state restructuring along neoliberal lines. He also challenges ideas about the nature of contemporary collective action and the character of present day social movements. Mathers discusses the significance of the movement and its future development through a critical engagement with the work of major writers in European sociology and of academics influential in the wider global movement such as Pierre Bourdieu. A postscript brings readers fully up-to-date with developments in the type of 'social Europe' propagated by the institutions of the EU as well as in the maturation of a social movement to oppose it.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Struggling for a Social Europe

15 June 1997 may prove to be a significant date in the development of the labour movement in Europe. Fifty thousand people from across the continent of Europe demonstrated in the streets of Amsterdam on the occasion of the EU summit. The demonstration was led by a cortege of several hundred ‘Euromarchers’ who had taken part in a series of international marches that had snaked their way across the continent during the preceding two months. Although mainly unemployed, the marchers made common cause with groups of homeless, workers and migrants to demand that the EU and its member states take concerted action to tackle the problems of rising unemployment, job insecurity and social exclusion.

As they proceeded from as far afield as Tuzla and Tangiers towards Amsterdam the marchers engaged in numerous high profile actions such as occupying the Château de Versailles to highlight their demand for universal social rights. The marchers were supported by local and national networks of grass roots activists drawn from a diversity of unions, associations and political organizations that were co-ordinated at the European level. These networks played an important part in organizing more than a thousand public meetings at which the immediate social issues and the broader question of European integration were debated. These networks also proved vitally important to the success of the initiative as the marches received an unsympathetic response from the ETUC: the official representative of the interests of European workers within the EU.

Amongst the militants engaged in the marches there was a widespread concern to go beyond the strategy of social partnership being employed by the ETUC and its national affiliates as a way of addressing the problems of unemployment, job insecurity and social exclusion. Their aim was to pursue a strategy of social protest thereby attempting to mobilize a movement around a radical agenda. The desired outcome was to deliver a solution to the immediate and pressing social problems through instituting a social and democratic Europe as part of a different world order and this aim has been epitomized by the development of the slogan of ‘For Another Europe In Another World’.

Leading commentators on social movement activity noted the growing debate around the issue of ‘social Europe’ and suggested that the European Marches would be an interesting test of whether the protests against austerity measures seen in France would converge with other struggles in the remainder of Europe.1 It was argued at the time by militants involved in them that the European marches marked a challenge to the neoliberal course of European integration. They also ‘made credible the idea of pan-European political mobilisation’ and also advanced ‘the struggle for “a different Europe”’.2 This was an expression of a new enthusiasm that, after years of struggle within nation states to defend existing social rights, this was the beginning of the construction of a transnational social force that could deliver the aspiration of a Social Europe. This expression encapsulated the desire for the institution at the transnational level of a new set of social rights which would counter the ‘race to the bottom’ between nation states in the face of neoliberal globalization.

This hope and aspiration for a Social Europe was shared and given intellectual credibility by leading academics the most prominent of whom was Pierre Bourdieu who had already allied himself with the wave of resistance to neoliberal reforms in France.3 Bourdieu argued that far from the EU offering a new level of social protection in the face of neoliberal globalization, ‘European construction currently amounts to social destruction’ (p. 54).4 This was the product of a ‘policy of depoliticization’ (p. 38) that took policymaking out of the democratic arena and placed it in the hands of remote institutions such as the European Commission that enforced economic and social deregulation upon nation states. The answer, for Bourdieu, was to ‘restore politics’, (p. 38) but at the transnational level through mobilization to install a social and democratic Europe. History, he asserted, taught that such a goal could only be achieved through the mobilization of a social movement and therefore he called ‘For a European social movement’ (p. 53). Bourdieu identified the European Marches in particular as an exemplary case of the necessary ‘internationalization of modes of thinking and forms of action’ (p. 63) that were required to bring such a transnational social movement into existence.

Ten years have passed since the first set of European Marches and the mobilization in Amsterdam, yet the formation of an effective European social movement desired by Bourdieu still seems a somewhat distant prospect. Moreover, the EU has increasingly become a mechanism for advancing neoliberal economic and social reforms and thereby for creating an ‘Unsocial Europe’,5 albeit in the name of the modernization of the so called ‘European Social Model’. Nevertheless, the European Marches Network, through which the European Marches were co-ordinated, is now but one small component of the much larger and broader set of organizations that are engaging in the European Social Forum (ESF) process through which the project for a Social Europe is being pursued.

A decade into this period of mobilizations against neoliberal globalization seems an opportune time to document the birth and infancy of this nascent transnational social movement. This documentation covers the period from its inception prior to the Summit in Amsterdam in June 1997 to its emergence as an identifiable part of the ‘global justice movement’ (GJM)6 at the EU Summit in Nice in December 2000. The GJM has provoked huge interest amongst both social movement activists and academics which is underlined by the welter of publications which have focused on it.7 However, the European dimension of this phenomenon has not received due attention. This book attempts to address this deficit not only by the aforementioned process of documentation, but also by focusing on the idea of a Social Europe which has been the main point of convergence for the individuals and organizations engaged in the mobilizations at EU summits.

A decade on from the initial mobilizations against neoliberal Europe also seems like a propitious moment to reflect upon the project to form an alternative Social Europe. This is not least because not only has there been a struggle for a Social Europe which has pitted the Left against the Right which has been advancing its project for a neoliberal Europe, but also because Social Europe has been a field of struggle within the Left.

This process of reflection has led me to engage critically with a highly influential set of writers in European sociology.8 Their work has laid the basis for the emergence of what I have characterized as a ‘New social democratic Left’ which has increasingly identified the EU as an institutional space in which an alternative to neoliberal globalization can be developed. In chapter two, I outline the earlier work of these writers from the period of the early 1980s, which saw the initial electoral successes of the neoliberal New Right, to the mid-1990s: a turning point which saw a renewed concern with ‘the social question’ (p. 33) and the return of ‘movements of the poor’ (p. 35) alongside ‘the transformation of labor action’ (p. 46).9

This latter point is particularly significant as these writers were influential in the formation of what amounted to a dominant paradigm in the sociology of social movements that rendered labour an anachronistic social actor and promoted its replacement by the New Social Movement (NSMs) as the new progressive social force. This was due to a purported shift in socio-structural conditions which I characterize as, firstly, a move from an industrial to a post-industrial society, or, secondly, a crisis and reformation of modernity. The corollary of this analysis was that for these writers from the ‘New social democratic Left’, a ‘new’ social subject is required as the agent of a ‘new’ social settlement needed to civilize the ‘new’ social order.

In the latter part of chapter two, I develop a critique of this analysis based initially on its misconception of class as an economic category rather than a social relation. This gave rise to a classification of social movements as either class or non-class based to which I would oppose a conception of social movements as manifestations of, and moments in, the process of class formation. I also challenge the primacy of the NSMs based on the radical disjuncture in socio-structural conditions. I argue that changing conditions are understood more accurately in terms of the ongoing crisis and restructuring of the capital relation which produces specific conjunctures. This alternative analysis not only draws attention to the possibility of renewing labour as the focal point of an anti-capitalist social movement, but also opens up the terrain for the development of more radical projects of social transformation.

The advance of the NSMs and the retreat of the labour movement are then related to the developing conjuncture of the crisis of Keynesianism and the emergence of neoliberal restructuring. This is considered in such a way as to highlight how the argument advanced by the dominant paradigm was not a necessary response to new realities, but an ideological intervention which not only described the demobilization of the organized working class, but also served to reinforce it.

I conclude chapter two by highlighting the significance of the strikes over welfare reform in France in 1995 which marked a breakthrough for those critical currents inside and outside of mainstream labour organizations which had been challenging the dominant strategy of social partnership. These currents were also at the forefront of promoting cross-national and transnational initiatives such as the European Marches to which I turn in chapter four.

However, before so doing, in chapter three, I provide the reader with an outline of the methodological approach adopted for my investigation of the European Marches as part of the broader social movement which emerged to contest neoliberal globalization in Europe and promoted an alternative Social Europe. This begins with a discussion of the role of intellectuals in relation to social movements opposed to neoliberal globalization. This discussion is structured around Touraine’s model of four ideal types of intellectuals.10

The ‘accuser’ (p. 106) provides a critique of neoliberal ideology and makes the suffering it engenders visible. The ‘ideologue’ (p. 107) declares solidarity with the victims of neoliberalism and bears witness to their suffering. The ‘interpreter’ (p. 110) analyses the protests and demands of social actors so as to assist them in forming an independent social movement. The ‘utopian’ (p. 109) focuses on developments in personal and cultural life out of which such a social movement may emerge. I argue that in relation to the opposition to neoliberal globalization, writers from the ‘New social democratic Left’ such as Gorz and Touraine have played the role of the utopian and interpreter. However, Bourdieu went beyond the role of accuser to adopt the utopian role which led him to engage in initiatives alongside social movement activists which focused on developing alternatives to neoliberalism. I highlight how some intellectuals have rooted themselves within the resistance to neoliberal globalization in such a way as to defy their labelling as ideologues and to suggest a renewal of the role of ‘organic intellectual’. While wishing to shy away a little from this somewhat grandiose title, I suggest that I adopted a similar role of ‘activist researcher’. This described the way that not only did I participate in the struggle for a Social Europe that I was investigating, but I also attempted to intervene into it so as to have a minor influence over its course of development.

In the remainder of chapter three, I set out initially the theoretical ideas which underpinned my methodological approach which I describe as ‘critical ethnography’. I then say how I adopted the ‘extended case method’ developed by Burawoy11 to investigate the European Marches as a critical case study of transnational resistance to neoliberal globalization. I then move on to describe the process of the actual investigation focusing on such issues and dimensions as gaining access, the extent of my participation, how I participated in the role of ‘activist-researcher’, how I selected respondents and conducted interviews, and the use of documentary sources of information.

In chapters four, five and six, I provide an account of the European Marches in relation to the broader social movement of which it formed a part. In chapter four, I describe the actual events that mobilized citizens in ‘protesting Europe’. This means setting out in as much detail as possible the mobilization of transnational protests which is based on materials produced by those individuals and organizations involved in the mobilizations as well as drawing on extracts from interviews with prominent activists and on my own eye witness accounts of events. This chapter not only focuses on the mobilization of the European Marches and the demonstrations at the EU summits at which they culminated, but also provides some background on the constituent social struggles occurring within nation states and how they related to the transnational protests. The chapter is structured around the three phases of mobilization which spanned the EU summits in Amsterdam, Cologne and Nice.

Despite the emphasis on providing as detailed a description as possible of the phenomenon of transnational mobilization, this empirical material is also related at the start of chapter four to some of the existing literature (mainly from the discipline of political science) on transnational social movement mobilization. This serves to alert the reader to the possible significance of the European Marches for understanding how the structure of political opportunity in the EU is affecting the mobilization of social movements. It also helps to explain how actors operated in a difficult set of circumstances to produce largely unlikely and somewhat unexpectedly successful transnational mobilizations. To this end, I highlight the elements of ‘brokerage’12 (p. 248) in the European Marches Network and the way that its flexible organizational form assisted in overcoming the obstacles to transnational mobilization.

In chapter five, I delve behind and beneath the visible protests against neoliberal globalization to examine the hidden bonds of solidarity that developed in and through these events which I characterize as the emergence of a ‘Europe of Citizens’. Once again the emphasis is on utilizing the experiences and words of those engaged in the protests. This was not only to produce as detailed an account as possible, but also to assist in providing a voice for those who have been made voiceless by neoliberal globalization.

I begin by developing Bourdieu’s idea that the formation of the unemployed movement in France was a ‘social miracle’ (p. 89),13 to state that its formation at the transnational level was yet more remarkable. This development was due, in no small part, to the deployment and generation of such non-material resources as a sense of dignity, social standing and moral authority along with the bonds of camaraderie and a revitalized internationalism. These resources were constituted in part by the discursive framing of issues. From this perspective, I argue that the European Marches was engaged in a clash between two interpretative frames of unemployment: the competitiveness frame advanced by the European Commission and a counter-frame of solidarity promoted by the European Marches. I then describe this effort to form a Europe of solidarity between citizens in terms of a se...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Struggling for a Social Europe
• 2 The Decline of Labour and the Rise of the New Social Movements in the Work of the New Social Democratic Left
• 3 Investigating the Struggle for a Social Europe
• 4 Protesting Europe: the European Marches to Amsterdam, Cologne and Nice
• 5 A Europe of Citizens
• 6 A Different Europe
• 7 The European Marches, Social Europe, and the Limits of the New Reformism
• Postscript
• Appendix
• Selected Bibliography
• Index