Social Movement Studies in Europe

The State of the Art

Olivier Fillieule, Guya Accornero, Olivier Fillieule, Guya Accornero

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785330988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Bringing together over forty established and emerging scholars, this landmark volume is the first to comprehensively examine the evolution and current practice of social movement studies in a specifically European context. While its first half offers comparative approaches to an array of significant issues and movements, its second half assembles focused national studies that include most major European states. Throughout, these contributions are guided by a shared set of historical and social-scientific questions with a particular emphasis on political sociology, thus offering a bold and uncommonly unified survey that will be essential for scholars and students of European social movements.

PART I

European Social Movements in Comparative Perspective

Chapter 1

The European Movements of ’68

Ambivalent Theories, Ideological Memories and Exciting Puzzles

Erik Neveu

Those students who temporarily took over Paris … had no ‘rational’ reason to rebel, for they were for the most part pampered offspring of one of the freest and most prosperous societies on earth. But it was precisely the absence of struggle and sacrifice in their middle class lives that led them to take the streets and confront the police. … [W]hat they rejected was life in a society in which ideals had somehow become impossible’. (Fukuyama 1992: 331)

For activists, researchers and citizens in many European countries, ‘’68’ would suggest a meaningful figure and a vintage year. That March, Polish students were demonstrating for freedom of expression. The spring months were those of the ‘Prague Spring’, the reforms developed by the Dubcek government having been strongly supported by public opinion. German students organised important protest movements. France faced the greatest social movement of its modern history with mobilizations by students, industrial workers and an amazing variety of social groups. Italy opened its contentious bienni rossi (Albanese 2006). Even in countries where the level of mobilization was lower, activists and organised groups—mostly youthful—challenged the established order and developed new lifestyles. Let us just mention the Dutch ‘Kabouters’ and ‘Provos’, the Internationale Situationiste, the civil rights movement in Ulster, the first student strike in the history of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, anti-Franco demonstrations in Madrid. An enormous number of conferences and scholarly books, but also novels, films and biographies, has documented these historical moments. The details of the events, the causes and meanings of those months of mobilizations, should thus be clear, even over-investigated, on the long shelves of this library. However, most social scientists would agree that writing about ’68 is a major challenge because of—rather than thanks to—the amazing mass of interpretations that serve to shroud the ‘events’, compared to the relatively limited amount of precise, empirical investigations into the actors, events or social morphology data. Even the time frame of ‘68 is unclear. Should one focus on the core moment of mobilizations during the years 1968–69? Is it not methodologically sounder to make sense of these events over a longer time frame? But which one: 1962–81 for France, as in the landmark book edited by Artières and Zancarini (2008), or the time of the ‘baby boomers’ (1945–69) as another French historian suggests (Sirinelli 2003)? Génération, the best-selling nonfiction narrative of the French ’68 covers the years 1963–75. Would it be better to think of ’68 as the apex of the 1960s? Gitlin (1987) locates these events between 1958 and 1971, whereas Marwick (1998) extends them to 1974. The selection of a time frame would define which movements would be connected to ’68, the outcome of these events being the emergence of organizations (especially terrorist ones) linked to their decay, as well as the birth of other entities (feminism, ecology) challenging their legacy.

But even if we imagine that scientific agreement could be reached on the whos and whens of events, as well as the how of methodological approach, a new challenge arises. How can access be gained to sources and research developed over the past forty years, in a great many countries? For the researcher, this would entail having command of many languages.¹ Moreover, some countries, such as Italy and France, have given birth to a cottage industry of research, whereas there is much less available about Eastern Europe.

And as Bracke (2012) has suggested, Southern and Northern Europe seem to belong to a study area so different that research results are poorly connected. It is thus not surprising that comparative studies are rare (Fraser et al. 1988). And even excellent books are more parallel case studies than springboards for global interpretive frameworks. This point is highlighted by Horn in his The Spirit of ’68 (2008), perhaps the book compiling the richest variety of sources in different languages. The recent work of Gildea, Mark and Warring (2013), which assembling the resources of oral history, pays more attention to the Eastern ’68s (Poland, Czechoslovakia). The book takes the risky stance of having a truly comparative structure, questioning the different ways of becoming and being an activist, and comparing the importance of faith, the challenge of violence, the surprises of unforeseen social encounters which were both common experience, and major differences among European radicals.

Being aware of these challenges, this chapter is based on three methodological choices. The first of these will be to reason in a large time frame. Massive demonstrations, waves of strikes and violent unrest were indeed visible in most European countries, mostly between 1967 and 1973. If the ‘events’ of ’68 can be located in short or mid-size time frames, the influence of this historical moment of mobilization, comparable only to 1848 in Europe, goes far beyond. The short ’68 ‘events’ have, for years, structured social movement repertoires, targets and legitimacy in European polities.

The second choice harks back to the hermeneutics versus empirical sides of the cottage industry publishing on ’68. Social research needs theory to develop empirical fieldwork, and such reflexive fieldwork produces theoretical outputs. Our choice is thus to focus on the best of empirical studies. Should we go as far as completely ignoring the flow of interpretations based on the frail basis of personal remembrances or superficial investigations, or the production of fast thinkers using ’68 as a peg for their soft concepts (individualism, post-industrialism, narcissistic society)? The answer is clearly no. In France and Italy, books and interpretive discourses which are sociologically hollow have had an enormous influence. They institutionalised explanations and memories of ’68, making it something taken for granted, even among sociologists. It is thus a sociological imperative that is paying attention to their social effects and criticizing their fallacies.

The third option would be to consider ’68 to be as much an unsolved puzzle as something having definitively received its explanations and obituaries. Making sociological sense of the range of the European ’68s is a challenge only partially achieved, a puzzle whose solutions might be found in a solid and consensual body of research. And the issue of understanding ’68 may also mean understanding part of the 1980s and beyond, since a generation of activists remained committed to a range of causes through their (unusually long) militant careers. Would it be excessive to suggest that the keys to understanding the present are also linked to the long ’68? Among the casualties of these years of contention lies probably the master frame—the central ideological resource of most twentieth-century mobilizations: the Marxist toolkit—with its references to social class, and to economic exploitation as the origin of unjust societies—as the blueprint for a socialist future. The topicality of ’68 could also originate in the question: why was there such a critical spirit among the privileged generations of baby-boomers, compared with the more difficult emergence of great mobilizations among populations and generations facing such discouraging experiences in contemporary Europe?

This short exploration of the ’68 movements will be threefold. The first part briefly suggests that many of the initial empirical investigations of the May(s) developed—among European researchers reflecting on what they perceived as the radical ‘newness’ of these mobilizations—a framework that was at once stimulating and full of dead ends. The second part addresses the irresistible rise in the late 1970s and 1980s of a highly selective and politically biased memory-doxa on the ’68 movements. The final pages will try to highlight current interpretive challenges as well as innovative research directions.

’68 as the Emergence of New Social Movements: What If Sociology Were Overbidding on Its Objects?

An extraordinary blossoming of mobilizations sprung from ’68. The occupation (red flag at the balcony) of the building of the Fédération Française de Football by amateur players and sports journalists, criticizing the ‘Mafia of coaches’—the ‘hereditary system’ of appointment at the head of the organization—is just one surprising expression of this diversity. When Melucci developed his mapping of the actors of ’68 (1977: 150), he needed thirteen categories: feminism, sexual politics, consumerism, ecology, urban struggles, regional movements, ethnic groups, students, youth culture, anti-institutional protest, new working class, public service users and neo-religious movements. In the realm of European social sciences, ’68 frequently triggered a renewal of reflection on social movements—which occasionally took off. What is striking here is the high level of agreement between academics from different countries (especially in Germany with K. Eder and C. Offe, Italy with A. Melucci and France with A. Touraine, later Reichmann and Fernandez Buey in Spain) around the idea that so-called new social movements (NSM) that emerged in the wake of ’68² were founded on new modes of action, new claims, in challenging classic conceptions of political participation, and ultimately in blurring the centrality of class conflict. Though NSM theory appears to be a European theory inspired by the European movements of ’68, its impact extended to the whole academic community of social movement scholars thanks to the gradual convergence of American and European scholars that had taken place in the 1990s (see introduction to this volume).

Beyond its contribution to social movement studies, the ’68 movement has left a legacy rich in social theory. Melluci’s analysis of the growing importance of symbolic power and the role of science and information in power relationships remains illuminating, as are his reflections on the endless growth in social and institutional controls on lifestyles, bodies and cognitive tools. Many of Touraine’s ambitious pages (1978) on what he describes as the société programmée and its new repertoires of social control triggering the resistance of modern social movements remain worthy of debate. But it is possible to admire the thought-provoking dimensions of this analysis and yet question the analytical system to which they belong.

Does that fact that ‘newness’ is a good fit for speaking of wine or fashion justify its use by academics to rate the value of theories? Were not many ‘old’ movements mobilised on qualitative issues such as, for example, the 1880s May Day demonstrations’ demands for an eight-hour working day that would open up access to leisure and education? Using data from police recordings of demonstrations in France in the 1980s, Fillieule (1996) shows the vision of contemporary protest as mainly targeting post-materialist claims to be a myth. Did not the founding manifesto of French trade unionism—the Charte d’Amiens—exclude any connection between trade unionism and political parties? Conversely, are long investigations needed to identify that in Germany, France or the Netherlands former NSM leaders have become national members of parliament, European members of parliament or politicians? Where are the green parties or the ‘femocrats’ (Hoskyns 1996) influencing EU gender policies coming from? The interactionist notion of ‘career’, in not subjecting its users to the pitfalls and teleology of ‘natural history’, is probably more useful in understanding the trajectories of movement and leaders. We might also ask where those movements once depicted as the carriers of historical change are now, in many European countries. Despite success stories in Scotland and Catalonia, how many regionalist movements have quickly vanished? Such has been the fate of organised feminism and consumer organizations in many countries. Melucci wisely noticed that, paradoxically, certain NSM, in denouncing the most disciplinarian and archaic dimensions of domination (the prison system, penalization of abortion), helped modernist factions of rulers get rid of these backward institutions. Combining the ‘social’ and the ‘artistic’ criticism of society (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999), the celebration of autonomy by NSM was not unambiguous. The desire for individual autonomy has sometimes been channelled into an over-commitment of individuals—body and soul—for the benefit of companies in participative management. It has been hijacked as a Trojan horse for the organised destruction of collective solidarity in the workplace. Demands for new rights have also given rise to new markets. Duyvendak (in Kriesi et al. 1995) shows, in the Dutch case, that once gay rights were established, the survival of a strong feeling of ‘we-ness’ is only one aspect—the rise of a market in gay meeting places, shops and social events is another.

Because it was in very close, sometimes over-friendly, relation with the movements it studied, Touraine’s ‘sociological intervention’ was a resource for a rich, almost insider’s knowledge of NSM. Combined with a kind of messianic quest for modernity’s social historic movement, this closeness may have been ambiguous. Sociologists often paid more attention to in-depth interaction with activists and their discourse than to the objectification of actors and networks—as is only too clear when re-reading, for instance La prophétie anti-nucléaire (Touraine 1980). There is a scientific price to be paid for over-identification with the claims made by one’s research objects. Here is another methodological legacy of ’68.

’68 as the Cunning of Liberal Reason: When Repentant Activists and Media Intellectuals Beat Sociology in Memory Battles

Although ’68 has sometimes spoken for itself in books and frameworks by the NSM analysts, it was soon spoken for by a small group of media intellectuals and event interpreters in countries such as France and Italy (and the United States). By the end of the 1970s a doxa—an official memory—which has served to straitjacket the events, was established internationally.

May ’68 Revisited and Tamed: The French Conjuring Trick

In a book that was a stimulating revisitation of the French May, US historian Kristin Ross (2004) studied May ’68 and its afterlives. Indeed, the May ’68 at the core of media images, social memory and sometimes academic discussions is the result of fierce interpretive battles.

Two journalists, ex-participants in the movement, wrote Génération, which soon became the best-selling and quasi-official narrative of the French May. The book can be read as a sort of well-documented social movement thriller. It also provides an almost chemically pure sample of the official memory of the French ’68. This memory—as history organised in a coherent and selective narrative—is based on six major interpretive operations.

The first of these defines ’68 as a student-centred event mainly located in Paris, whose major actors are leaders of leftist organizations. Such framing implies that what happened in the provinces was of minor importance, that trade unions were second-ranking actors and that the working-class strike—the biggest ever in French history—was less significant than the upsurge of the Quartier Latin. This first reframing of events is combined with a vision of the strategic actors as belonging mostly to one of two Parisian networks: the older generation of the sixties dissenters inside the UEC (the Communist student organization) and the younger circles of Maoist intellectuals which was to give rise to the Union des Jeunesses Communistes Marxistes-Léninistes (UJC-ML), and later to the Gauche Prolétarienne—connected to the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure. Such a selection of the heroes worthy of being on the official picture of ’68 pushes out of the frame thousands of middle-ranking activists, trade unionists, leaders of local strikes and mobilizations. A third dimension of the official narrative of May is its twin focus on ideology. Significant emphasis is given to the fascination of many leaders with the highbrow-modernist strand of Marxist ideology (Althusser), hybrid variants (Marx and Freud or Reich) or exotic blends (Mao, Castro). Activists were misperceivi...