TEAM

Donatella della Porta, Lorenzo Zamponi, and Niccolò Bertuzzi

START YEAR 2017

END YEAR 2019

The focus of this project is on civil society’s alternative visions and practices of Europe. As trust in the European Union (EU) is dramatically falling amongst its citizens, research on alternative visions of Europe ‘from below’ appear all the more relevant. Civil society organizations linked to the so called ‘left-libertarian’ movement family have long voiced progressively more critical positions about the EU, yet at the same time promoted ‘another Europe’ and Europeanized their organizational networks and action strategies. While social movement studies, along with other areas of the social sciences, have assumed increasing Europeanisation, recent developments have challenged this view. In particular with the advent of the financial crisis, progressive social movements seem to have moved back to the national and local levels, engaging very little or not at all with the EU and questions of Europe more generally. To what extent critical Europeanism has ceded terrain to Euroscepticism, including within this alter-European vision, is a central question we seek to address in this project. In order to answer these questions, the project draws on the tool-kit of social movement studies and a neoinstitutional approach to critical junctures as sudden and drastic changes. Our empirical focus will be anti-austerity protests and related mobilizations in the period 2011-2016. We will aim to assess the effects of the financial crisis on the multilevel governance of European countries and, therefore, on the ways in which social movements formulate claims, frames and justifications about European institutions. A cross-time comparison will be constructed by building on data collected for previous research on the GJM, namely through a parallel dataset involving in-depth interviews and document analysis.

*Original Picture by Olivier Ortelpa,  released under the CC License Attribution 2.0 Generic and here partially cut and modified

FUNDING

Scuola Normale Superiore