Contesting Austerity and Free Trade in the EU

Protest Diffusion in Complex Media and Political Arenas

Julia Rone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000288940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Social Aspects in Computer Science
• Index: Computer Science

The book explores the diffusion of protest against austerity and free trade agreements in the wave of contention that shook the EU following the 2008 economic crisis.

It discusses how protests against austerity and free trade agreements manifested a wider discontent with the constitutionalization of economic policy and the way economic decisions have been insulated from democratic debate. It also explores the differentiated politicization of these issues and the diffusion of protests across Western as well as Eastern Europe, which has often been neglected in studies of the post-crisis turmoil. Julia Rone emphasizes that far from being an automatic spontaneous process, protest diffusion is highly complex, and its success or failure can be impacted by the strategic agency and media practices of key political players involved such as bottom-up activists, as well as trade unions, political parties, NGOs, intellectuals and mainstream media.

This is an important resource for media and communications students and scholars with an interest in activism, political economy, social movement studies and protest movements.

1
STUDYING PROTEST DIFFUSION

1.1. Hard to Be a God: Diffusion in Protest Cycles

In the 1967 Russian sci-fi novel Hard to Be a God (Strugatsky and Strugatsky, 2014), Anton, an undercover operative from the future planet Earth, is sent on a mission to a distant planet inhabited by human beings who still have not advanced beyond the Middle Ages. Anton can only observe but is not allowed to interfere, because this might change the course of history. This, however, proves to be increasingly difficult for him as difficult moral dilemmas arise. The fictional plot of Hard to Be a God points to some of the crucial dilemmas of social science. Is it possible to observe a foreign society and assume it is completely independent from ours, as if it were on a different planet? How long can “separate” cases remain isolated from each other before diffusion of ideas or practices takes place?

For a long time, social and political sciences have championed a comparative approach that treats different country cases as separate and comparable, setting aside the many ways in which they could influence each other. Contrary to this classical type of sociology that treats the world as an empty experimental space, this book understands the world as a complex system, which is constantly transforming itself. What matters in complex systems are not their different components analyzed separately from each other, but the very process of interaction and communication between components forming a part of a single whole. As the philosopher of information Paul Cilliers insists, “complex systems display behaviour that results from the interaction between components and not from characteristics inherent to the components themselves. This is sometimes called emergence” (Cilliers, 2005, 257). Cases cannot be neatly distinguished from each other as they form part of the same system – one case would not be the same without the other.

What follows from this epistemological principle in terms of approaching the topic of the book is that protests against austerity and free trade in different countries cannot simply be compared to each other as if there were no diffusion processes between them. Similarly, protests against austerity and protests against free trade agreements have influenced each other across time, being part of the same protest cycle. This is the reason why instead of studying them as separate cases, I am interested in the diffusion processes between them, perceived in both their spatial and temporal dimensions. It is impossible to understand protest cycles and their inner logic without paying attention to diffusion processes.

Before turning to the history and theory of diffusion studies, however, a brief discussion of protest cycles is due. This term is so widespread by now that it is treated almost as self-evident in most books on protests. Yet it is anything but self-evident.

One amazing thing about large protests is that they are not evenly distributed across time and space but tend to cluster. While there are of course single-event protests, some of the most prominent and significant historical examples of protest formed part of larger cycles: the 1848 Spring of the People, the 1968 student movements wave, the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Eastern Europe, the late 1990s/early 2000s alter-globalization protests, and of course, the post-economic-crisis protests against austerity and free trade that I am interested in.

According to the classical definition, a protest cycle or a “cycle of contention” is

a phase of heightened conflict across the social system, with rapid diffusion of collective action from more mobilized to less mobilized sectors, a rapid pace of innovation in the forms of contention employed, the creation of new or transformed collective action frames, a combination of organized and unorganized participation, and sequences of intensified information flow and interaction between challengers and authorities.

(Tarrow, 1998, 199)

The most characteristic feature of cycles of contention is their innovative nature and the role they play for the creation of transformed symbols, frames of meaning, and ideologies to justify collective action that later enter the culture in more diffuse and less militant form (Tarrow, 1998, 204). Snow and Benford, the pioneers of framing theory, emphasize that social movements do not simply carry extant ideas and meanings that emerge as if automatically out of structural arrangements, unanticipated events, or existing ideologies. On the contrary, movement actors actively produce and maintain meaning for their constituents, antagonists, and bystanders (Snow and Benford, 2000, 613). During protest cycles new ideas, frames, and practices diffuse both in space and in time, from one protest to the next.

The notion of a protest cycle presupposes that different protests clustered in time in space are not happening in isolation but influence each other in terms of ideas, frames, protest repertoires, or sometime even in terms of actors involved. This does not mean that all protests in the same cycle are “the same” or share many common features. It rather means that they share some features, and that makes it even more interesting to explore which beliefs, general ideas, frames, and protest repertoires diffuse within the same protest cycle and which do not. For example, demands for more “real democracy now” and beliefs in the power of digital media did diffuse from Indignados-style protests in Southern Europe to protests in Eastern Europe. But left-wing anti-austerity frames did not. Thus, while protests in Bulgaria and Romania in 2013 formed part of the same post-cycle crisis of contention, they cannot be conceptualized as “anti-austerity” protests. Why was there such a gap in diffusion? This is one of the questions this book tries to address.

There is also another, broader understanding of cycles of contention that I do not engage with but has been fundamental for conceptualizing cycles of contention in the 1980s and 1990s. According to this understanding, clusters of protests reoccur cyclically, and this is how one gets to the concept of protest cycles. Scholars in this tradition posed several fundamental questions, most of which led to a dead end, but this doesn’t make them less interesting. One such fundamental question was, what causes the reoccurrence of protest cycles, starting with the 1848 Spring of the People all the way to the 1989 pro-democracy protests? Different authors have tried to find a connection between protest cycles and so-called Kondratieff waves – hypothesized cycle phenomena in the modern world economy, consisting of periods of high economic growth alternating with periods of low economic growth. Nevertheless, economists do not agree on whether Kondratieff waves exist or are just an attempt to see a pattern where there is none (Frank and Fuentes, 1994). Even if one accepts the existence of Kondratieff waves, it seems that the connection with protest cycles is rather tenuous – evidence shows that protests tend to happen both during the downward turn of the cycles and during periods of dynamic expansion and economic growth (Frank and Fuentes, 1994). This means that one can expect protest cycles to take place both in times of economic crises, such as the protest cycle we explore in this book, and in times of relative affluence and economic boom, as experienced in 1968. Other authors have searched for connections between protest cycles and demographic changes, claiming that state breakdowns and social movements, at least in the early modern period, could be explained with population growth that leads to changes in prices, shifts of resources, and increasing social demands (Goldstone, 1991, quoted in Frank and Fuentes, 1994). Yet, these connections are difficult to prove for the 20th and 21st centuries. All things considered, there is still no definite academic opinion on whether there is indeed such a thing as protest cycles reoccurring in time, following a pattern. What is even more remarkable is that this question that seemed to be essential in the 1990s seems to have been completely forgotten in the literature since then. Rather than answering this question, this book has the much more modest ambition to explore the diffusion of protest events, and the corresponding frames, protest repertoires, and ideas, within the same protest cycle following the 2008 economic crisis.

Of course, one might argue that there was no diffusion present in the cycle and the fact that many EU member states experienced protest more or less at the same time is largely due to the exogenous shock of the 2008 economic crisis that created grievances in many places at the same time. Yet, such an exogenous shock-based explanation cannot explain why not all EU countries had protests. Refining this hypothesis, one might say protests were not triggered by the crisis per se, but by governments’ adoption of austerity measures, i.e. protest often emerged as a reaction to particular types of policies, not as a reaction to economic grievances (Kriesi, 2015). Nevertheless, after the 2008 economic crisis, there were many countries in which the government adopted tough austerity measures – Ireland, the Baltic countries, Bulgaria, and Romania, among others, but no serious anti-austerity protests took place. Thus, an exogenous shock alone cannot explain the incidence of protest.

What about endogenous reasons? The classical explanation why protests succeed in some cases but fail in others points to diverging political opportunity structures. Political opportunities have been defined as a combination of increasing access for movements, shifting political alignments, divided elites, influential allies, limited repression, and low state strength, among others (Tarrow, 1998, 78–85), even though this list has been regularly refined and updated since its first appearance. Yet, most of the EU countries that adopted austerity measures did not have political opportunity structures so radically different that they could explain why protests occurred or failed to occur. What was different seemed to be rather whether their players were ready to seize political opportunities. In the Baltic countries, as in other Eastern European countries, there were simply no players ready to mobilize on the left. Incidentally, this was also the case for Ireland for quite some time (O’Connor, 2017). Recently, authors have also begun drawing attention to the presence and strength of local organizations and players as a key endogenous factor as well (Kriesi, 2012). Social movements with resources and strong protest traditions have a key role in offering a diagnosis of the political situation and a prognosis of what could be done to improve it (Flesher Fominaya, 2017). They can also use the experience from previous mobilizations, resources, and contacts to mobilize. This is exactly what happened in Southern Europe’s mobilizations against austerity, where social movements stepped in to mobilize action, often in alliance or competition with trade unions, NGOs, and political parties.

Thus, if one wants to understand the protest cycle in the EU after 2008, one should take into account both the economic crisis as an exogenous factor and the national presence and strength of players capable of organizing protest as an endogenous factor. Both explanations are crucial and necessary for understanding the dynamics of the protest cycle. But they are not sufficient. One important question cannot be answered by either of these explanations, namely, why did protests in different countries often share the same slogans and protest repertoires, such as occupying squares and organizing assemblies? What explains the striking similarities between protests in different countries? And why were protests often clustered in particular regions: protests against austerity in Southern Europe; anti-ACTA protests mainly in Eastern Europe, Austria, and Germany; and protests against TTIP and CETA in Austria and Germany, with strong instances also in Belgium and Spain? What explains the predominance of certain types of protest within certain regions where countries have close cultural ties?

Beyond both exogenous and endogenous explanations of the dynamics of the protest cycle, I argue that what was at play in all these cases was clearly a dynamic of diffusion of information and resources between countries, often facilitated by sharing the same language or having similar cultures. Different countries influenced each other and could not be treated as fully sep...