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PART I
European theory/European movements
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1 European social movements and social theory
A richer narrative?
Laurence Cox and Cristina Flesher Fominaya
Introduction
Anyone researching social movements will find themselves hearing or reading a near-identical account, often repeated word-for-word, of how the discipline came to be. It is a tale of the bad old days of collective behaviour theory, followed by the rise of resource mobilization theory, the addition of political opportunity structure, the encounter with (‘European’) ‘new social movement’ theory and the arrival of framing theory. Those who reproduce this account are usually doing one of two things: as newcomers to the field, they are affirming their right to belong by repeating its origin myths, or, as established figures, they are underlining the orthodox status of those myths.
We say origin myths because this is the actual function of this particular account. Original research is virtually always lacking; even where the author has read the figures cited there is no attempt at rethinking the intellectual history. The closest relatives of this kind of myth are the accounts by Tibetan Buddhist schools of ancient philosophical debates in India, which they understood as predecessors to their own school and as sources of intellectual status – accounts which necessarily relied upon earlier accounts within the same tradition and did so uncritically, producing canons rather than histories.
Our contention is that the form of such accounts is that of origin myth – the formulation of a textual canon and the performance of rituals marking membership of a particular group. This is so whether or not the actual content of such accounts is accurate; since they are not critical works of intellectual history but, rather, reproduce the accounts of previous scholars, their accuracy is secondary. As far as the representation of ‘European social movement theory’ goes, however, the origin myth is at best a very partial and misleading account which confuses a history of transmission, reception and interpretation within a US subdiscipline for actual European debates.
This chapter does two things. It shows that European social theory has largely developed through engagement with movements, in ways which differ from the US experience and which are not represented by ‘social movement theory’ as a narrowly-bounded subfield of sociology and political science. Second, we explore one aspect of this, which in the standard origin myth is routinely as ‘the European contribution to social movement theory’, the discussion of new social movements. Re-placing this debate in its historical and political context, we show that the canonical account severely misrepresents this European scholarship on movements and reduces it to a soundbite which misses the point.
The preceding paragraph is polemical, but more in sorrow than in anger. As scholars researching contemporary European movements, we have found the conceptual tools of US movement research helpful on the micro-scale, but incapable of dealing with the macro-questions that are central to European movements (Mayer 1995). An uncritical translation of US exceptionalism (the historical weakness of the political left and labour movements) has been turned into an operating assumption of social movements as a particular ‘level’ of the political system. This leaves out entirely the European experience, where democratic, nationalist, labour, fascist, anti-fascist, communist and anti-communist movements have repeatedly remade and reshaped states and reorganized whole societies in their own image.
Similarly, the uncritical repetition of a reductionist account of ‘European social movement theory’ bears no resemblance to the social theorists and processes of movement theorising we encounter within movements and in European writing on movements. This account, regularly reproduced by monoglot writers (in a circular relationship with academic translation processes) is a travesty of the actual debates within which movements have engaged in the last five decades and of the ways in which European intellectuals have engaged with those movements. This chapter is a first attempt at rectifying some of these intercultural misrepresentations and misunderstandings.
A richer narrative
In attempting to provide a richer narrative we first return European social theory to its roots in social movements, showing how well-known figures in social and cultural thought, both classical and contemporary, have shaped and been shaped by movements in their lives, themes, and forms of reflection. Locating them as ‘public intellectuals’ within a movement society offers a richer understanding of their line of thought and its relevance to the study of movements.
We then use this broader perspective to rethink the category ‘European social movements theory’. In place of a selective and misleading canonical account we sketch an alternative history of the complex academic and political theorising around a broader spectrum of movements. European social movement theory was a broader-based reflection upon popular agency in contemporary society, which encompassed strategic as well as cultural elements, the political as well as the economic, working-class struggles as much as others.
Without treating ‘Europe’ as isolated or bounded, and recognising exchanges between continental western Europe and the English-speaking world, we insist on the need to recognise intellectual context, modes of theorising and relationship to movements if we want a more realistic, and theoretically fruitful, account of European reflections on movements.
European social theory as reflection on social movements
The foundations of European social theory are closely linked to social movements. Saint-Simon, Marx, Weber and Durkheim were all politically engaged with or against movements – as utopian socialist, movement theorist, conservative opponent and party member respectively. De Tocqueville attempted to grasp the American Revolution, while Engels struggled with the Peasant War. The Marx of the Communist Manifesto and the historical writings, or the Weber of the Protestant Ethic and the analysis of status-groups and parties, were both centrally engaged with theorising popular collective agency and its many different forms in this unstable time.
These were normal concerns for nineteenth-century European intellectuals, in a period in which ‘the social question’ came to life as ‘the social movement’ (Cox forthcoming), the plebeian challenge to a society and polity which had no place for them except as ‘hands’. Movement took many forms, as did its theorisation: if von Stein’s use of the phrase ‘social movement’ focussed on the French Revolution, this was so characteristic that those who made (Lamartine) and broke (Thiers) later revolutions had themselves written histories of the subject. Elsewhere in Europe, the struggles of German, Italian, Polish and Irish nationalism in particular were central to intellectual life in those areas and resonated internationally. The battle for democracy played a strategic role in a Europe where only a handful of states saw anything approaching full suffrage or the ending of monarchical power before the end of the First (or sometimes the Second) World War.
The late nineteenth-century European political and intellectual experience, then, saw mass popular struggles for power shape the construction of new kinds of state and society, a process which only found a provisional resting-point with the postwar construction, in western Europe, of ‘organized’ societies combining full formal democracy and corporatist movement involvement in decision-making – and a Cold War which threatened (and which, in Greece and Hungary, delivered) lethal violence to defend superpower control against popular movements which failed to accept their place.
Southern Europe, where dictatorships continued the fascist strategy of mass mobilization around conservative goals until the 1970s, and Eastern Europe, where states supposedly founded by popular movements actively repressed actual movements until the end of the 1980s, were shaped differently again; but in each situation (including their downfalls) social movements were central to the making and remaking of Europe. As Ken Macleod famously put it,
Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down.1
Unsurprisingly, twentieth-century European intellectuals continued or intensified their concern with social movements, notably in the ‘European civil war’ (Pavone 1991) between left movements and fascist counter-movements that shaped the continent in the revolutionary years of 1916–1924, the fascist surge from 1922–1942, and the European Resistance from the Spanish Civil War to 1945 – and which, in many ways, continued to underlie the postwar order in west, east and south.
The generation of engaged intellectuals which flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s – including Rosa Luxemburg, James Connolly, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci, among others – is testimony to this. The Mass Strike, Labour and Nationality in Ireland, State and Revolution, History of the Russian Revolution, History and Class Consciousness and the Prison Notebooks – all profoundly influential on movements far beyond their own traditions – discuss social movements in this perspective of long struggles, revolutionary transformations, or movement defeat and fascist hegemony. Such figures fused organizing practice with theorising about movements and social change in ways that were inspirational for postwar writers.2
Lesser, but still influential figures in this generation include Anton Pannekoek, Gustav Landauer, and Karl Mannheim. Politely forgotten today are those Catholic and fascist writers who defended the new European order, and the Stalinists who justified purges and show trials. One generation of engaged social movement theorists died in action or in exile as the processes of social-movements-become-states (nationalist, fascist or communist) turned one-time activists into state functionaries or defenders of the state against movements (Victor Serge, George Orwell).
The post-fascist rethink
The next generations of engaged theorists came of age during the intellectual Resistance against fascism (Wilkinson 1981) and developed in the shadow of Cold War anti-communism in the west and dictatorship in the east and south, brutal wars against Algerian and Vietnamese movements, and the disappointments of national independence and welfare states. E.P. Thompson captured this experience in the words of William Morris’ Dream of John Ball:
I pondered all these things, and how men [sic] fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name …
(Morris 1886, ch. 4)
The brutal defeats of movements which nineteenth-century thinkers – including many conservatives – had seen as almost unstoppable; the failure of formal democracy to deliver anything resembling social equality or popular power; the once-inconceivable sight of mass popular action behind programmes to reinforce inequality, strengthen the state, impose conservative religion and expel ethnic minorities; the failure of national independence movements to deliver new societies; the transformation of the Russian Revolution into a monster that ate its own children; the subjugation of a once-revolutionary Europe to fascist power underpinned by mass collaboration, the destruction of movement organizations and industrialised mass murder; and the failure of postwar social democracy and state socialism to deliver either social justice or popular power: all of this changed how European intellectuals thought about social movements.
It is not that nineteenth-century intellectuals were naive; conservative intellectuals often shared left-wing, nationalist and democratic assumptions about the future, because only a fraction of pre-1848 Europe was politicised in the modern sense. The British, Irish and French experience of recent revolution and mass social movement engagement was absent in nations where authoritarian monarchies still ruled supreme. The brief ‘springtime of the peoples’ was rapidly crushed, and nationalism coopted by constitutional monarchies with middle-class suffrage.
It was only in the 1880s, with new kinds of mass trade union, the Second International, suffragist agitation, and the new nationalisms, that the rest of Europe could be seen as movement societies; and only after the dust had temporarily settled from the battles for formal democracy, national independence, welfare states, socialism and fascism that an adequate balance sheet which did not simply translate polemic into theory became possible.
Intellectuals now had to grapple with four areas of reflection which shaped the subsequent relationship between social theory and social movements. The first, unsurprisingly, was a reassessment of the state and its relationship to social movements. Previously, movement-becomes-state could be imagined in many different ways, because the examples of more than temporary success were so few. Now it became clear that states made or reshaped by social movements were nevertheless very different from those movements, and had goals and outcomes of their own. Nation states need not be democratic; supposedly socialist states could kill revolutionaries; democracies could enthusiastically seize colonies. The notion of linearity of outcome was radically disrupted.
Second, the idea that some degree of progressive social change was predictable suffered a decisive defeat, whether dated to the rise of fascism out of the defeats of the revolutions of 1916–1924 or to the earlier failure of the Second International to resist the senseless violence of the First World War. The simple organization and mobilization of resources as the articulation of a long-term social trend carried no guarantees of success. Michels and the anti-war revolutionaries drew different conclusions (Barker 2001), but twentieth-century intellectuals were left with a much clearer sense of the importance of political choice, as opposed to simply moral or heroic choice, and of movements as constructed, rather than automatic.
If in the nineteenth century it was possible to combine a progressive historical automatism with an interest in popular agency, by the mid-twentieth century many intellectuals adopted an automatism of despair, in which mo...
