Routledge Handbook of Contemporary European Social Movements

Protest in Turbulent Times

Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Ramon Feenstra, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Ramon A. Feenstra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351025164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Conservatisme et libéralisme

European social movements have become increasingly visible in recent years, generating intense public debates. From anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements to right-wing nationalist movements, these movements expose core conflicts around European democracy, identity, politics and society. The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary European Social Movements offers a comprehensive interdisciplinary overview of the analysis of European social movements, helping to orient scholars and students navigating a rapidly evolving field while developing a new agenda for research in the area.

The book is divided into eight sections: Visions of Europe; Contemporary models of democracy; Historical evolution of major European movements; Feminism and sexualities; Movement diffusion within and beyond Europe; Anti-austerity movements; Technopolitical and media movements; and Movements, parties and movement-parties. Key theories and empirical trajectories of core movements, their central issues, debates and impacts are covered, with a focus on how these have influenced and been influenced by their European context. Democracy, and how social movements understand it, renew it, or undermine it, forms a core thread that runs through the book.

Written in a clear and direct style, the Handbook provides a key resource for students and scholars hoping to understand the key debates and innovations unfolding in the heart of European social movements and how these affect broader debates on such areas as democracy, human rights, the right to the city, feminism, neoliberalism, nationalism, migration and European values, identity and politics. Extensive references and sources will direct readers to areas of further study.

Part 1

Visions of Europe

1

Visions of a good society

European social movements in the age of ideologies and beyond

Simon Tormey

The aim of this chapter is to outline the dominant ideologies that have shaped politics in Europe over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. It is also to give a sense of how social movements have positioned themselves in relation to these ideologies, how they have contested them and challenged their hegemony. Finally, it is to orientate ourselves to one of the key issues that inform debates about the nature and form of social movement politics as opposed to a politics driven by commitment of an ideological kind.

In advancing the argument I identify four distinct phases of ideological contestation, in turn highlighting the nature of grand visions of the good society. The first is that ideologies are not themselves static doctrines or positions, but rather evolving assemblages of ideas, beliefs and values constituting a distinct tradition or worldview. The second is that ideological contestation is not fixed in terms of particular stances that oppose others. Rather the form contestation takes reflects the dominant social and political forces current at a given moment in time and in a particular location.

The golden age of ideologies – 1880–1945

We need to begin by reflecting briefly on what we mean by ‘ideology’. It’s an elusive term used in a variety of contexts with different meanings (Freeden, 2003). Here what we mean by ideology is a body of beliefs, sometimes but not always systematised in the form of a doctrine or an intellectual tradition, that outlines the nature of ‘the good society’. It tells us about what is important for human flourishing, about how goods are to be distributed, and about what institutions and processes we need in order to govern ourselves effectively.

A preliminary distinction might be made then between conservative ideologies on the one hand and progressive ideologies on the other. Conservative ideologies tell us why we should support and maintain existing social structures, whereas progressive ideologies take a critical stance in relation to the present. This opposition between those who wanted to preserve matters as they are, and those who criticised them and wanted greater or lesser degrees of social change marks the first phase of ideological politics that we see emerging in Europe over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. This culminated with the French Revolution in 1789, an event that marked the publication of one of the key texts of conservative thought, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. It is during this period that we also see the systematisation of numerous currents of progressive thought, notably anarchism, socialism, and then communism.

Key to the emergence of ideologies was the challenge to feudalism and monarchic absolutism by new emerging classes and the challenge to the domination of Christian orthodoxy by heterodox sects and groups seeking to challenge the wealth and privilege of the dominant order (Hill, 1972; Hobsbawm, 1988). This was greatly aided over the course of the 19th century with the extension of suffrage and the creation of new political parties to represent these new and emerging social forces. By the end of the 19th century socialist or social democratic political parties were well established in opposition to conservative, Christian or more secular liberal parties representing the nascent middle-class. These two dominant trends became what we refer to as the centre-left and centre-right in politics. Parties of this kind have dominated mainstream electoral politics in most European countries until the present. More radical currents of politics generally lay outside or beyond the electoral process. Anarchism, which posits the abolition of the state as a requirement for collective self-government, remained for the most part an illegal and outlawed political tendency across the Europe of the 19th century. In Russia, for example, where anarchist groups were amongst the best organised and most militant in Europe, violence against state officials and the monarchy became a common occurrence leading to ever more vicious crackdowns by the police and army (Avrich, 2006).

Anarchism vied with communism in Russia and elsewhere to be considered the ideology of choice for those who harboured the dream of a radical transformation of society, as opposed to the moderate reformist programme being advanced by Social Democrats. Communism is associated with the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, positing the necessity for overcoming capitalism, a transition to socialism before the full realisation of a society underpinned by the maxim ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’, one marked in other words by the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production (Marx, 1875).

Like anarchism, communism was a largely underground phenomenon in the late 19th and early 20th century, attracting those dedicated to overthrowing the existing order, through violent means if necessary. Until the 1860s communists and anarchists cooperated under the umbrella of the International Working Men’s association, or First International. However, continued disagreements between Marx and the dominant anarchist figure of the time, Mikhail Bakunin, led to an acrimonious split, one that was to become a marker for the sectarianism of militant left-wing politics that would become so familiar over the course of the 20th century.

Towards the end of the 19th century another key ideology, nationalism, reared its head in response to imperial competition between the major European powers (Hobsbawm, 2012). This often took an extra parliamentary form with nationalist sympathisers organised into groups and movements opposed to the state and to the moderate centrist political forces elected to office. One such nationalist, Gavrilo Prinzip, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the name of the Serbian nation, directly sparking the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. But nationalism enjoyed vociferous support in many parts of Europe, particularly those that through late state development perceived themselves to have missed out on the spoils of colonial conquest and expansion. The two most notable examples here are Germany and Italy.

German nationalism was fuelled by an intellectual class that lamented the ineffectuality of its industrial and military capacity when compared to that on display in Britain and France. They argued that without significant mobilisation German interests would be harmed over the long term, leading perhaps to decay and the death of the dream of a greater Germany. German nationalism as expressed in the contribution of figures such as Arthur Müller van den Bruck and Oswald Spengler often had an apocalyptic tone that foreshadowed events to come (Eley, 1991).

Italy had enjoyed primacy in the form of the Roman Empire many centuries previously, and this inspired the emergence of a new ideology, fascism, a term derived from the fasces, or bundle of sticks used to denote the holder of power under the Roman Empire. The distinctive feature of fascism when compared with other nationalisms was its unashamed imperial and militarist ambition. The nation alone was not enough of a canvas upon which to paint the ambitions of a Duce or supreme leader. Only a relentless carving out of empire would likely satisfy the needs of the ruling coterie. Nationalism was also prevalent in other European countries, but often in the form of national chauvinism, the idea of the superiority of national culture without the antagonistic overtones associated with nationalist movements and parties. Or it was, as in Russia, allied to a populist romanticism that extolled the humble peasant as the true or authentic expression of the soul of the nation. Such rustic notions were the stock in trade of Narodnichestvo – the Way of the People – in turn the dominant ideology of the left in the pre-war years. They did not however survive the brutal realities of war.

The First World War was precipitated by this dangerous cocktail of nascent nationalism with imperial rivalry, leading to armed conflict. However, the problems did not disappear with the defeat of Germany and the break up of the Austria-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The defeat of the former, and its humiliation at the hands of the authors of the treaty of Versailles, led to the emergence of a much more virulent strain of nationalism, National Socialism under Adolf Hitler. It also led to the promotion of fascism under Benito Mussolini, and the forging of an axis of nationalist expansionism. The First World War also led to the collapse of the Russian monarchy and the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks to instigate a form of primitive communism predicated on the collapse of the Western powers and a leap to collectivist modernity. From here European politics became overshadowed by what was to prove a deadly conflict between two state-centric ideologies whose worldview committed them to a nihilistic contest in which there could only be one winner.

The contest between National Socialism on the one hand and communism on the other was thus both the apogee of a particular kind of ideological conflict, and also its termination. State-centric ideologies demonstrated an extraordinary ability to marshal and mobilise collective support behind a particular vision, but at the cost of pluralism and the correcting mechanisms that help societies to maintain technological and social progress. As Karl Popper was to note, progress requires criticism and an openness to the new, neither of which are compatible with closed societies characterised by the demand for overt adherence to a particular ideological vision (Popper, 1966). So whilst communism survived the end of the Second World War, it was defeated over the long term by its inflexibility and inability to adapt and modify itself in accordance with new imperatives.

Les trente glorieuses and the ‘end of ideology’ – 1945–1975

The victory of the Allied powers in 1945 represented not only a victory against a certain brand of apocalyptic ideological politics, but also against ideological politics as an explicit doctrinal or text-based political practice that mobilised adherents behind a particular vision of the good society. This is not to say that followers of Marx or Bakunin, or Mill or Burke, for that matter, departed the scene entirely. It means that politics during this period took on a more pragmatic aspect driven by the twin desire to promote economic growth whilst at the same time modernising welfare services in the interests of maintaining a competitive workforce as well as fulfilling that bargain between governing elites and ordinary citizens that marked the elections immediately following the Second World War. ‘Social democracy’, a label that was once associated with non-revolutionary varieties of Marxism, became the proxy term in Europe for this new hegemonic ideology. Emblematic of this new dynamic was the defeat of Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, by the much less heralded Clement Attlee in the 1945 election.

Notwithstanding his quite extraordinarily charismatic and effective leadership of the country during wartime, Churchill failed to read the mood of the British public who felt that national sacrifice required acknowledgement in the form of much greater investment in the health service, in terms of the provision of housing, and in the opening up of educational opportunity to all citizens. Churchill’s description of the welfare state programme promoted by Attlee as ‘totalitarian’ demonstrated just how out of touch he was with the feelings of those he had only so recently served. The emphasis on Keynesian growth policies, coupled with a rapidly expanding welfare state was to be the hallmark of politics for the next 30 years in virtually every advanced democracy. Indeed the social democratic postwar consensus became itself the dominant ideology, so much so that differences between centre-left and centre-right appeared to become more a matter of political style than substance, more a matter of competences than of substantive differences of policy.

The waning of ideological contestation in this period, termed Les Trente Glorieuses marking thirty years of high economic growth and low social conflict, led many commentators to conclude that politics had lost its antagonistic quality, but also its sense of possibility and contingency. Daniel Bell writing in the 1950s described the effect as ‘the end of ideology’, by which he meant the driving out of significant differences of value and belief by adoption of a core set of expectations which informed the program of all parties aiming at electoral success (Bell, 1960). C. Wright Mills put a further sociological spin on the matter by describing ideological consensus as the result of ‘the power elite’ exercising domination over the media, the educational apparatus and the means of public dissemination of thought and ideas (Mills, 1956). This was itself a mere variation of a hypothesis put forward improbably by President Dwight Eisenhower, who described the United States as in the grip of a ‘military industrial complex’ able in effect to determine the shape and content of political life without itself having to run for office.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of this conviction that ideological politics had come to an end was Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man published in 1964. It described in a manner to be later amplified by Noam Chomsky and others how an ideological veil had been placed over the heads of citizens preventing them from seeing the true nature of their own societies (Debord, 1994; Chomsky & Herman, 1995). This was not capitalism in the narrower formulations found in the classic works of Marx, so much as ‘modern society’, a society that is which could either be capitalist or indeed communist, but whose imperative is driven by the demand for economic growth. It was an imperative that pushed consumerism, individualism and materialism less as ends in themselves, but more as means of driving or propelling the system towards further expansion.

In its wake, Marcuse argued, all forms of ‘negation’, that is critical forms of thought that juxtaposed the present to some other alternative world, were expelled or expunged in a manner he too described as ‘totalitarian’. With the political system merely functioning to enable this form of social reproduction to operate as smoothly as possible, opposition had to come from outside the socio-political system itself. It would, he thought, come in the form of a ‘great refusal’ propelled by those with nothing to lose and everything to gain from opposing the instrumentalisation of life. It would come from artists, hippies, drop-outs – the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary society. This idea of society or the ‘life world’ having been ‘colonised’ by the system was to be influential for the work of later Frankfurt School theorists such as Jürgen Habermas (2015), in turn one of the first to recognise the potential of new social movements to provide the agency that Marcuse searched for.

Marcuse’s work nevertheless turned out to be extra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Contemporary European social movements: democracy, crisis and contestation
• PART 1: Visions of Europe
• PART 2: Contemporary models of democracy
• PART 3: Historical evolution of major European movements
• PART 4: Feminism and sexualities
• PART 5: Movement diffusion within and beyond Europe
• PART 6: Anti-austerity movements
• PART 7: Technopolitical and media movements
• PART 8: Movements, parties and movement parties
• Index