Graeme Hayes

Sustainable Development, Shock and Awe? London 2012 and Civil Society

There is a disconnection between the top-down, elite, nature of sports mega-events and the ostensible redistributive and participatory sustainable development agendas staked out by BINGOs (Business-based International Non-Governmental Organizations) such as the contemporary International Olympic Committee (IOC). Focusing specifically on the London 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, we argue that, for all the environmental technology advances offered by sports mega-events, their dominant model remains one of a hollowed-out form of sustainable development. Despite significant technical and methodological innovations in environmental stewardship, the development model of the London Olympics remains predicated on the satisfaction of transnational investment flows. We discuss what this means for claims about the staging of a ‘green’ Olympic Games.

Having your day in court: judicial opportunity and tactical choice in Anti-GMO campaigns in France and the United Kingdom

Investigating the recent direct action campaigns against genetically modified crops in France and the United Kingdom, the authors set out to understand how contrasting judicial systems and cultures affect the way that activists choose to commit ostensibly illegal actions and how they negotiate the trade-offs between effectiveness and public accountability. The authors find evidence that prosecution outcomes across different judicial systems are consistent and relatively predictable and consequently argue that the concept of a “judicial opportunity structure” is useful for developing scholars’ understanding of social movement trajectories. The authors also find that these differential judicial opportunities cannot adequately account for the tactical choices made by activists with respect to the staging of covert or overt direct action; rather, explanations of tactical choice are better accounted for by movement ideas, cultures, and traditions.

Olympic Games, Mega-Events and Civil Societies

The greening of sports mega-events, and the hosting of Olympic Games in particular, is now reasonably well established. The potential international disgrace that a host nation might experience due to construction delays gives added impetus for their completion on time; the same appears to be the case for projects relating to environmental commitments made by the host nation. This temporal pressure of the event has the potential to accelerate much-needed environmental reform on the one hand, and to bring ENGOs as consultants into the planning of key Olympic projects on the other. Yet evidence from the first decade of environmentally conscious Olympics points to diverging patterns of achievement in the operationalization of the IOC’s ‘third pillar’. As is now common knowledge, for example, Sydney 2000 was the first ‘green Olympics’ in the history of the Games; yet four years later, Athens provided a stark contrast, and was the subject of highly critical assessment reports by both the WWF (WWF-Greece 2004) and Greenpeace (2003, 2004a, 2004b).

Vulnerability and disobedience: New repertoires in French environmental protests

Abstract The emergence of the counter-globalisation movement in France has been accompanied by an apparent diversification of social protest repertoires. Protest events carried out by groups associated with a wide array of issues have been remarkable for their use of spectacular and novel actions, while civil disobedience campaigns have been prominent features of environmental and civil rights protests in particular. Drawing on a number of examples of contemporary environmental and global justice campaigns, opposing advertising, four-wheeled drive vehicles, nuclear energy and, especially, open field trials of genetically modified crops, this article discusses the rise of such new forms of protest, placing them in the wider context of transformations in protest repertoires in France. It identifies key examples of innovation, before discussing the twin processes of diffusion and domestication that shape them. It is argued that, although transnational agents and processes are key determinants of repertoire innovation, it is vital to identify the national, movement and sectoral contexts and discourses which enable the naturalisation and legitimisation of new action forms.

Regimes of austerity

Abstract This article discusses the European wave of contention catalysed by the financial market crash of 2008/9 and the subsequent imposition of austerity measures by governments across the continent. It develops two central arguments. First, it argues that we need a clearer and more sharply differentiated understanding of the operation of austerity as a social and political phenomenon than can be accounted for by reading the crisis of austerity as a solely material set of grievances. Second, it dissociates austerity into a series of interconnected regimes, which are fiscal, ideological, political and civic. In so doing, I show how the material aspects of austerity are intimately tied to the ideational, institutional and spatial enclosures they create, enabling us to see more clearly how the practice of austerity is intimately tied to the progressive dismantling of collective democratic space. The transformative potential of anti-austerity mobilizations accordingly lies in their capacity to develop an alternative moral economy grounded in new forms of solidarity and sociability, whether in workplaces or in the civic squares.

Bossnapping: Situating Repertoires of Industrial Action in National and Global Contexts

French industrial relations were shaken in the spring of 2009 by a series of labour struggles which featured the forcible detention of company managers and threats to commit major acts of sabotage. In this article I focus on the first of these two types of action, placing industrial sequestration in the context of the pattern of collective negotiation processes in France, and comparing it with previous cycles of the same phenomenon, particularly in the post-1968 period. I argue that the current cycle of sequestrations needs to be understood as a response to the deterritorialisation processes of neo-liberal globalisation, and is the product of asymmetries of power between the fixity of labour and the fluidity of global capital. I conclude by arguing that sequestration is a public melodrama of protest which might point to the development of a resistant politics of corporeality in France, in common with struggles in other social and economic sectors.

Introduction: Sports Mega-Events, Sustainable Development and Civil Societies

On 24 March 2008, at Olympia, the site of the ancient Olympic Games in Greece, a ceremony was held to mark the quadrennial ceremonial lighting of the Olympic torch. The event itself promised added value as a media spectacle for reasons beyond the symbolism of Olympic pageantry. The Olympic host nation, China, was subject to widespread criticism for its human rights record in general, and its violent repression of protest in Tibet in particular; the global media were expecting to capture the possible hijacking of the day’s events by pro-Tibet campaigners. A year earlier, Greece had experienced the most devastating forest fires in its modern history; the last-minute salvation of the world heritage site of Olympia, as the flames had already entered the site, provided an opportunity for the Greek government to demonstrate the country’s symbolic survival. Notwithstanding the extensive security operation that was mounted on the day by the authorities, three members of the Paris-based media advocacy group Reporters sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) managed to evade security and disrupt the speech of BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games) president (and Beijing Communist Party Secretary) Liu Qi and were arrested as they were about to unfurl a banner representing the Olympic Rings as handcuffs. Greek and Chinese state media acted promptly: live television coverage suddenly cut away to carefully selected footage of the ancient landscape. No footage of the incident was shown in the live transmission by either the Greek or Chinese state-run TV channels. ‘If the Olympic flame is sacred, human rights are even more so’, Reporters sans Frontieres said in a statement.

Regulating multiplexes:the French state between corporatism and globalization

The development of multiplex cinemas has reinvigorated film exhibition and cinema attendance in France. Yet in the wake of the exception culturelle, multiplexes also stoked corporatist fears over the Americanization of French cinema, and in 1996 the state introduced a regulatory procedure for multiplexes modeled on the loi Royer. Regulation has not stopped subsequent multiplex development but rather protected the dominant market position of the major, vertically-integrated French exhibitors. The resultant economic concentration has undoubtedly increased the domestic and international competitiveness of French cinema, but at the price of industry polarization and a loss of cultural and economic pluralism.

The French Greens in the 2012 presidential and legislative elections

These are heady times for the French Greens. In the 2009 European elections, Europe Ecologie obtained over 2.8 million votes (16.28%), and gained as many seats (14) as the Parti socialiste (PS); in the 2010 regional elections, Greens gained 12.18% of the first round vote, 263 councillors (up from 159 in 2004), and subsequently entered alliances with the PS in the executives of 21 of metropolitan France’s 22 regional councils. The dissolution of Les Verts in November 2010 into Europe Ecologie-Les Verts (EELV) was completed in a position of strength. In September 2011, the newly recomposed party confirmed this electoral breakthrough, increasing its membership of the Sénat (the upper house of parliament, traditionally difficult for Greens because of its rural base and indirect mode of election) from four senators to 12. Against this background, the party’s performance in the 2012 presidential and legislative elections requires explanation. Eva Joly, the EELV presidential candidate, polled the second lowest score by an official Green candidate since Les Verts was formed in 1984, whilst at the legislative elections EELV candidates polled a bare 5.5%. Joly’s campaign was, according to the press, ‘maladroite’ (Ouest-France), a ‘fiasco’ (Le Monde), characterised by poor media relations, a confused political line, and internal dissent, with one senior Green, Noël Mamère, wondering in a radio interview five weeks before the election whether Joly should not simply pull out in order to avoid humiliation. Not only did Joly’s poll ratings collapse over the course of a long campaign (one poll credited her with 7.5% during the party’s internal primary in June 2011), but so did the party’s membership, from 16,452 at the end of 2011 to between 5000 and 6000 in June 2012. In policy terms, the campaign was scarcely more successful, with broad Green thematics such as global warming, or the crisis in the renewable energy sector, conspicuously absent from the wider presidential

French Cinema: Globalization, Representation, and Resistance

It is now twelve years since French brinkmanship pushed American negotiators and the prospects of a world trade deal to the wire, securing the exclusion of cultural products and services from the 1993 GATT agreement and the maintenance of European systems of national quotas, public subsidies, and intellectual property rights in the audiovisual sector. The intervening period has not been quiet. Although the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was sunk when Lionel Jospin pulled the plug on negotiations in October 1998, the applications of new central European entrants to join the European Union and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have been accompanied by a continuing guerrilla battle fought by successive American administrations against the terms and scope of the exclusion. In addition, developing countries‐‐led, notably, by Brazil‐‐have been increasingly vocal in their opposition to the European regulatory and redistributive mix, which they perceive to be little more than the market protectionism of a rich man’s club. Moreover, as Jean-Michel Baer has recently argued in a perceptive overview of the cultural exception, the ability of European states to defend cultural diversity is also vulnerable to the risk-management strategies prevalent in Europe’s own cultural industries, which have accelerated the trend toward horizontal and vertical concentration amongst its major media companies. In the area of film, this has led to an increased emphasis on marketing and a concomitant reduction in the diversity of spectator choice. 1 The collection of articles in this special issue of French Politics, Culture & Society explores the terrain mapped out by the post-GATT debate on globalization, examining the way that the consumption and production of film in France is structured by the relationship between sociopolitical conditions, state regulation, and transnational economic processes. Of course, we are not