Louisa Parks

When trade unions succeed: Cases of blocked liberalisation in the common market

Despite the generally accepted weakness of trade unions at the European Union level, an analysis of two high profile cases - the Services Directive and the Port Directive - shows that trade unions are able to mobilise effectively at the European level and, within constellations of actors, crucially impact EU decision making. In contrast to common claims that a lack of access to EU institutions makes such groups powerless, it is argued here that the exclusion of large opposing societal groups from consultations is neither a quick nor a sure fire recipe for dismantling opposition.On the contrary,it politicises the process and may lead to opposing groups mobilising in more contentious ways.

2011: Subterranean Politics and Visible Protest on Social Justice in Italy

Subterranean Politics (SP) was the initial idea behind the studies presented in this volume — but what does this really mean in the Italian context? The idea was to go beyond the study of ‘civil society’ or ‘social movements’ in order to focus on all that was extra-institutional in the recent protests that have swept across Europe. Rather than look at particular movements or themes, we therefore decided to focus on protest. For us this general term is key to our understanding of SP as essentially all extra-institutional manifestations of politics, expressed by any one of a variety of informal or formal actors, but all united in some form of dissatisfaction with institutional politics and its outputs. Protest, in its most encompassing sense (protest denoting anything from a letter to the editor to a mass demonstration) was what we singled out as a common activity for SP, and forms the basis of our search for SP in Italy (see the methodology section below). Our work leads us to conclude that SP in Italy is to be found in the practices of democracy unfolding in what are, for the most part, familiar and long-established formal and informal groups, but groups which are at the same time challenged by new events. In labour marches, for example, trust in political institutions and even trade unions fell sharply between the beginning of the new century and 2011.

Europeanisation and Social Movements: Before and after the Great Recession

Trust in the European Union (EU) is falling among its citizens. Before the European elections of 2014, the first since the Great Recession took full hold, distrust had spread. Opinion polls — including the ones promoted by the European Commission itself through its Eurobarometer — clearly indicate the effects of the financial crisis on support for European institutions by European citizens. In short, they indicate a dramatic drop in citizens’ trust in the EU, going from 57 per cent in the Spring of 2007 to 31 per cent in the Autumn of 2013 (Eurobarometer 2013). While social movement studies, as other areas of the social sciences, seemed to assume an increasing Europeanisation, recent developments have challenged this view. European institutions not only could not mitigate the extent of the financial crisis, which hit some Member States with greater force than others, but were considered responsible for the suffering of large sectors of the population. Among social movement activists, increasing mistrust for the EU institutions was reflected in more and more critical visions of the existing Europe and somewhat less confidence in the possibility to build ‘another Europe’.

National and European? Protesting the Lisbon Agenda and the Services Directive in the European Union

The process of Europeanization, that is the growing importance of the European Union (EU) as a locus of political decision-making, affects its member states in an increasing number of policy areas and constitutes an important challenge for both institutional and non-institutional political actors at both the national and European levels. Social movements, on the other hand, developed in the context of the nation state. Yet with the rise of transnational power centres movements have become more transnational, directing their claims to organisations such as the WTO, the G8 and the EU. As one of the most developed examples of regional integration, the EU has attracted many kinds of interest groups, including the kinds of organisations we would consider to be part of social movements at the national level (or transnational social movement organisations, organisations that may be considered a subset of non-governmental organisations that are “devoted explicitly to promoting social or political change” (Smith 2005:252)). Accordingly, scholars have sought to theorise and inspect how these organisations work when transplanted into the EU arena. One piece of received wisdom about social movements and the EU is that on entering this arena, SMOs institutionalise and tend to abandon their contentious roots and protest actions for more traditional tactics and in particular lobbying, since these are judged to more effective (Marks and McAdam 1996). Protests concerning EU issues have been found to be ‘domesticated’, that is only or mostly taking place in national contexts (Imig and Tarrow 2001). This chapter will draw on two original case studies of European Union social movement organisation (EUSMO) campaigns on the Lisbon agenda and the Directive on Services in the Internal Market in order to take a fresh look at these ideas.

The Need for an Interdisciplinary Approach to Norm Diffusion: The Case of Fair and Equitable Benefit‐sharing

No systematic study discusses the evolution of fair and equitable benefit‐sharing across various areas of international law (environment, human rights, oceans), as well as at different levels of regulation (regional and national laws and guidelines, private law contracts, transboundary codes of conduct, customary laws of indigenous peoples and local communities). This article explores the usefulness of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of norm diffusion for understanding how and why fair and equitable benefit‐sharing is articulated in different sites. The article discusses mechanisms, actors and frames in norm diffusion, drawing on literature from sociology, international relations and law. The article uncovers underlying similarities in scholarship on norm diffusion across the disciplines considered. It also reflects on the value of an interdisciplinary approach that encourages legal scholars to consider the implications of power structures in the diffusion of law, while the nuances of legal knowledge may lead other social scientists to revisit accepted findings on norm diffusion. These findings appear particularly useful for informing an assessment of the potential of fair and equitable benefit‐sharing to promote the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources in a fair and equitable manner in the face of power asymmetries.

The need for an interdisciplinary approach to norm diffusion

No systematic study discusses the evolution of fair and equitable benefit‐sharing across various areas of international law (environment, human rights, oceans), as well as at different levels of regulation (regional and national laws and guidelines, private law contracts, transboundary codes of conduct, customary laws of indigenous peoples and local communities). This article explores the usefulness of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of norm diffusion for understanding how and why fair and equitable benefit‐sharing is articulated in different sites. The article discusses mechanisms, actors and frames in norm diffusion, drawing on literature from sociology, international relations and law. The article uncovers underlying similarities in scholarship on norm diffusion across the disciplines considered. It also reflects on the value of an interdisciplinary approach that encourages legal scholars to consider the implications of power structures in the diffusion of law, while the nuances of legal knowledge may lead other social scientists to revisit accepted findings on norm diffusion. These findings appear particularly useful for informing an assessment of the potential of fair and equitable benefit‐sharing to promote the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources in a fair and equitable manner in the face of power asymmetries.

Beyond Time and Place: Discourse, Power and the National/Transnational Debate

The three edited volumes that form the focus of this short essay are diverse in their structures, focuses and aims. Nevertheless, three themes of particular import to the discipline come to the fore. In the following, I shall discuss the contributions of the volumes in three areas – frames, discourse and diffusion; the debate on the national vs. the transnational; and finally the issue of power and how it is exercised by and upon social movements – with a view to reflecting on future avenues for research.

Untangling Influence: Studying Social Movement Campaigns in the Transnational EU Arena

‘Few social movement theorists do research that looks inside of international institutions to understand how social movements work there and what kinds of impact they have had’ (Sikkink 2005, p.152). Building an analytical framework for the study of social movement campaign outcomes in the EU is thus an important step in the research process before moving to empirical findings. The basis for the framework is rooted in the study of social movements. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the extensive literature on interest representation in the EU has in the past tended to analyse movement groups together with other types of interest groups including industry groups (though it does distinguish between different types of interest groups. For a review, see Rasmussen and Gross 2014). Drawing on the tools of social movement studies thus gives the advantage of providing ready-made attention to the repertoires of movement groups, which unlike other kinds of interest groups present in the EU arena include popular mobilisation. In addition, many of the analytical tools of the interest representation literature recall those found in social movement studies, and conversations between the two have increased in recent years (Mahoney and Baumgartner 2008).

The Outcomes of Political Campaigns in the EU

This chapter draws out the processes from the analytic narratives presented in the previous chapter with a view to suggesting the causal chains behind each of the outcomes in the ‘political’ campaigns. Three types of outcome are considered: access outcomes (the improved ability or position of a movement to communicate with those in power), agenda outcomes (a movement that has sparked a debate on a previously ignored subject) and policy outcomes (changes in policy concurrent with a movement’s goals) (see Chapter 2). After discussing the paths to outcomes in the Lisbon, Bolkestein and ACTA cases, they are compared and some tentative conclusions drawn about the nature of political campaigning in the EU.

The Outcomes of Technical Campaigns in the EU

The previous chapter provided analytic narratives, guided by the political opportunity and framing approaches introduced in Chapter 2, for each of the campaigns classed as ‘technical’ in nature in this work. The current chapter will focus on the outcomes of the campaigns, using process tracing to describe the paths leading to the said outcomes (or indeed the absence of outcomes as is the case with REACH). To recap, three types of outcome are considered in the scope of this work for each campaign: access outcomes (the improved ability or position of a movement to communicate with those in power); agenda outcomes (a movement has sparked a debate on a previously ignored subject); and policy outcomes (changes in policy concurrent with a movement’s goals) (see Chapter 2). After discussing the paths to outcomes in each of the cases presented in Chapter 3, the cases are compared with a view to drawing interim conclusions about the nature of technical campaigning in the EU.