Europeanisation and social movements: The case of the Stop TTIP campaign

Abstract

Over the past years, the economic crisis has significantly challenged the ways through which social movements have conceptualised and interacted with European Union institutions and policies. Although valuable research on the Europeanisation of movements has already been conducted, finding moderate numbers of Europeanised protests and actors, more recent studies on the subject have been limited to austerity measures and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has been investigated more from a trade unions’ or an international relations perspective. In this article, the TTIP is used as a very promising case study to analyse social movements’ Europeanisation – that is, their capacity to mobilise referring to European issues, targets and identities. Furthermore, the TTIP is a crucial test case because it concerns a policy area (foreign trade) which falls under the exclusive competence of the EU. In addition, political opportunities for civil society actors are ‘closed’ in that negotiations are kept ‘secret’ and discussed mainly within the European Council, and it is difficult to mobilise a large public on such a technical issue. So why and how has this movement become ‘Europeanised’? This comparative study tests the Europeanisation hypothesis with a protest event analysis on anti‐TTIP mobilisation in six European countries (Italy, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria) at the EU level in the period 2014–2016 (for a total of 784 events) and uses semi‐structured interviews in Brussels with key representatives of the movement and policy makers. The findings show that there is strong adaptation of social movements to multilevel governance – with the growing presence of not only purely European actors, but also European targets, mobilisations and transnational movement networks – with a ‘differential Europeanisation’. Not only do the paths of Europeanisation vary from country to country (and type of actor), but they are also influenced by the interplay between the political opportunities at the EU and domestic levels.

Commenting on Political Topics Through Twitter: Is European Politics European?

“…Previous studies have shown that political topics on social media demonstrate high levels of contestation and opposition (Pew Research Center, 2016). We would also expect this to apply to European topics, which are highly contested (Caiani & Graziano, 2018 Fossum & Schlesinger, 2007). Even tweets that are very critical about the issue publics are made within a Europeanized framework and can, therefore, contribute to the formation of a European demos and public sphere.…”

“…Previous studies have shown that political topics on social media demonstrate high levels of contestation and opposition (Pew Research Center, 2016). We would also expect this to apply to European topics, which are highly contested (Caiani & Graziano, 2018).…”

Political Contestation about International Economic Agreements: Lessons for the Canada-UK Trade Relationship after Brexit

“…Research on EU referendums show that when referendums are held in a sequence, campaigners borrow "winning" campaign strategies, arguments and posters from one another, providing evidence of such networking and learning across cases (Atikcan 2015a;Jahn and Storsved 1995). Research on TTIP and CETA suggest the existence of a similar process, pointing to connections between the antitrade movements in various European countries and the key role of the broader Seattle-to-Brussels network in facilitating such interactions (Bauer 2016;Caiani and Graziano 2018;Siles-Brügge 2017). A selection of posters in Figure 2 provides evidence of such effects.…”

The Politicisation of Transatlantic Trade in Europe: Explaining Inconsistent Preferences Regarding Free Trade and the TTIP

“…In sum, the TTIP debate did not only entail disagreements over its expected economic impact, but also related directly to the core tenets of Europe's socio-economic model and values, and even the very functioning of its democracy. With the keen politicisation of European integration following the Eurozone crisis, these concerns resonated profoundly with the citizens of several member states and stoked unprecedented social mobilisation across the EU against the agreement (Caiani & Graziano, 2018). This paper addresses some of the caveats in existing research on public support for trade liberalisation that have been uncovered by the TTIP debate.…”

“…While Europeans remain predominantly favourable to the idea of free trade (76,3 per cent in 2016), the backlash to the agreement with the USA indicates that they might not perceive the TTIP as a traditional free trade agreement (FTA). In particular, and given the politicisation of European integration (Börzel & Risse, 2018;Schmidt, 2019) and of the specific agreement with the US (Caiani & Graziano, 2018;De Ville & Siles-Brügge, 2017;Eliasson & Huet, 2018;Hamilton, 2014) we might expect to find a significant share of EU citizens who reject the agreement without rejecting the general idea of free trade.…”