European social movements have been central to European history, politics, society and culture, and have had a global reach and impact. Yet they have rarely been taken on their own terms in the English-language literature, considered rather as counterpoints to the US experience. This has been exacerbated by the failure of Anglophone social movement theorists to pay attention to the substantial literatures in languages such as French, German, Spanish or Italian – and by the increasing global dominance of English in the production of news and other forms of media.
This book sets out to take the European social movement experience seriously on its own terms, including:
- the European tradition of social movement theorising – particularly in its attempt to understand movement development from the 1960s onwards
- the extent to which European movements between 1968 and 1999 became precursors for the contemporary anti-globalisation movement
- the construction of the anti-capitalist "movement of movements" within the European setting
- the new anti-austerity protests in Iceland, Greece, Spain (15-M/Indignados), and elsewhere.
This book offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective on the key European social movements in the past forty years. It will be of interest for students and scholars of politics and international relations, sociology, history, European studies and social theory.
Author(s): Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Laurence Cox
Series: Routledge Advances in Sociology
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2013
Language: English
Pages: 268
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: rethinking European movements and theory
Part I
European theory/European movements
1 European social movements and social theory: a richer
narrative?
Part II
European precursors to the Global Justice Movement
2 The Italian anomaly: place and history in the Global Justice
Movement
3 The emergence and development of the “no global”
movement in France: a genealogical approach
4 The continuity of transnational protest: the anti-nuclear
movement as a precursor to the Global Justice Movement
5 Where global meets local: Italian social centres and the
alterglobalization movement
6 Constructing a new collective identity for the
alterglobalization movement: the French Confédération
Paysanne (CP) as anti-capitalist
‘peasant’ movement
7 Movement culture continuity: the British anti-roads
movement as precursor to the Global Justice Movement
Part III
Culture and identity in the construction of the European
“movement of movements”
8 Europe as contagious space: cross-border
diffusion through
EuroMayday and climate justice movements
9 The shifting meaning of ‘autonomy’ in the East European
diffusion of the alterglobalization movement: Hungarian
and Romanian experiences
10 Collective identity across borders: bridging local and
transnational memories in the Italian and German Global
Justice Movements
11 At home in the movement: constructing an oppositional
identity through activist travel across European squats
Part IV
Understanding the new “European Spring”:
anti-austerity,
15-M, Indignados
12 The roots of the Saucepan Revolution in Iceland
13 Collective learning processes within social movements: some
insights into the Spanish 15-M/Indignados movement
14 Think globally, act locally? Symbolic memory and global
repertoires in the Tunisian uprising and the Greek
anti-austerity
mobilizations
15 Fighting for a voice: the Spanish 15-M/Indignados
movement
Conclusion: anti-austerity
protests in European and global
context – future agendas for research
Index
