Social Movements: Incorporation, Disengagement, and Opportunities, a Long View

In evaluating the outcomes of social protest, a fuller array of relations among social movements and political parties needs to be considered than is generally offered in the literature on collective action, This paper rejects the dichotomy implicit in much of the literature that social movements are either fully independent and active or else quiescent. (Taylor 1989) It shows that the incorporation of leftwing social movements into political parties has often resulted in the persistence of movement activities within party structures and that incorporated social movements have exerted enduring influences on social policy. For much of Western and Central Europe over the last century and a quarter, the paper maintains that the incorporation of social movements into parties and their disengagement has followed an historical pattern that provides a framework for analyzing the secular path of social movement evolution and the development of movement identities. Finally, it asserts that conditions of movement integration into political parties in the past have shaped the development and outcomes of social movements in succeeding periods.

Three phases in the relationship between political parties and left social movements can be identified, and they follow a distinctive rhythm: 1870-1914: disengagement/social movement independence, 1919-1960: consolidation/social movement integration, and 1960 to the present: disengagement/social movement independence. First, in the years between 1870 and 1914, western central and northern Europe proved particularly fertile in generating left SMOs. Organizations of working men and women, birth control advocates, students, educational reformers, trade unionists, peace activists, child labor reformers, tenant farmers, suffragists, opponents of sweated labor, unemployed workers and many more engaged in boycotts, petitions, rallies, demonstrations, marches, general strikes and many other forms of collective action. The second phase occurred between 1919 and 1960. Here we are dealing with countercurrents. Freeing itself from the influence of existing parties, labor movements transformed themselves into political parties. The development of labor-movement parties had direct repercussions on related social movements which were drawn into the its periphery and became its satellites; while labour movements became more independent, allied social movements became less. The third phase began in the 1960s and continues to the present, as social movements broke from the labor orbit and reasserted their independence.

Drawing on the rich history of European social movements over the last one hundred and twenty five years and employing historical and comparative methods, the paper emphasizes the importance of what Sidney Tarrow had defined as "social movement sectors''--dense and interactive spheres of activity in which movements compete and cooperate. (Tarrow 1992, p.24) Emphasizing the continuity of collective action, this study finds that the forms of social movement and their relationship to one another within left social movement sectors have changed depending on whether they sought to influence states directly through independent action or to influence them indirectly through political parties.

Five basic relationships between movements and parties can be identified: articulation, permeation, alliance, independence, and competition. The first two of these positions seriously limit movement autonomy, the last two are the least restrictive.

1. Articulation--SMQs are organized around the party program and articulate the policy positions of parties to constituencies where parties hope to mobilize support and to recruit members: In France, in the post World War II period, the Communist influenced Unions des femmes francaises and the Combattants de Ia Paix are extreme examples of this type but the Labour Party-controlled Hydrogen Bomb Campaign Committee and the Women's Sections of the Labour Party might serve as more typical examples. Even while such organizations are directly controlled by political parties, they often exert an independent influence on the party. Their success in mobilizing the masses strengthens the party's commitment to a particular cause. In return for routine access to the center of party power and institutional support for their cause, movement activists are expected to follow party guidelines and instructions.
2. Permeation--SMOs have operated within parties to recruit them to their cause; the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the UK, the group around Clara Zetkin and the paper Gleichheit in pre-1914 Germany, and the women's sections within the contemporary Swedish Social Democratic Party are examples here. To have prospect for success such strategies presume considerable pre-existing support within the political party. Although permeation implies that the party is not as fully committed to a particular goal as movement activists should wish, it also necessarily involves SMOs acknowledgement that they share a broad range of goals with the political party of which they are members. Loyal to the party, movement activists expect to receive a fair-minded hearing for their cause and, employing routine channels for exerting influence, to have a reasonable chance of winning the party to their point of view.
3. Alliance--SMOs may negotiate ad hoc alliances with parties or fractions of parties that involve close collaboration on specific issues but in which both party and SMO retains their own separate organization and overall freedom of action. Examples here would include the coalition between the Labour Party and the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in Britain between 1912 and 1914 and the fleeting link between the French trade union, the CFDT, and segments of the peace movement in the early 1980s. Coalitions imply that each side expects to obtain specific and concrete benefits; coalitions dissolve if these expectations are disappointed. Next let us consider the two more autonomous strategies.
4. Independence--SMOs act independently of political parties, pressuring them to make concessions at the risk of losing voters who support the movement: in 1907, following its break with the ILP, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) became an independent movement, founded in 1960, the British Committee of 100 was formed for this purpose from the very beginning. Frequently the choice of such a strategy implies support for the SMO within a political party sufficient that a failure to make concessions will lead to defections within parties --- and serious electoral consequences. A willingness to inflict serious electoral losses on those it wants to influence puts a SMO in a strong bargaining position but, if it actually does so, it risks diminishing its own prospects for achieving any measure of reform while at the same time losing support within the party.
5. Finally, (5) Competition--SMOs turn themselves into political parties. The labor movement in many European countries provides the key example here although at various times and places, peace parties and women's parties have enjoyed a brief existence. Typically, SMO parties began as "parties of protest," intended to articulate the grievances of ongoing social movements. Over time, if these parties grow, they are presented the possibility of becoming "parties of power" influencing state policy through their own electoral power or through governmental participation rather than as simple spokesmen for social movements. Serious debates within SMOs and SMO parties have generally occurred over the feasibility of combining electoral politics with those of social movements; social movements feel most comfortable within "parties of protest" but obtain the most benefits within "parties of power."

SMOs never have the full range of choices available to them outlined above. Choices are limited by the prevailing political context which itself is a product of past political struggles. Almost no political issues arise absolutely de novo and, in almost every circumstance, some strategies for obtaining political goals are backed by force of tradition, institutional support, and ongoing organization while others are untried or discredited. Without strong and compelling

draft resistors, and those groups opposed to the American deployment of an anti-ballistic missile system. "Women's movements" signal "gender conscious" groups that includes "feminists" who fight to advance women's right and interests as well as other politically-oriented groups in which "women are acting consciously as women." (Bogan and Yellin 1994, p. 2). Both the explicitly-feminist Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the not explicitly-feminist Women's Cooperative Guild (WCG) fit into this category. Not all "womens movements" belong to the left social movement sector examined here. For example, in France, women's movements would include the Catholic and anti-republican, Le Féminisme chrétien and Action sociale pour la femme. Both supported votes for women, but had almost no relations with suffragists in the left-wing movement sector.

By "labor movement" is indicated the overlapping networks of trade unions, ad hoc class based organizations, and working-class political parties that had emerged almost everywhere in Europe by 1914. Socialist and labor (and, later, Communist) parties were all part of this group. The great strength of the labor movement was rooted in the growth of trade unions and in the spread of the strike form of protest to every European nation. Even in countries like France where the national trade union movement remained aloof from socialist parties, local trade unions provided support and bitter strikes supplied the occasion for the spread of socialist propaganda. Its base in an established trade union constituency with a national organization and widespread regional connections helps explain why labor was uniquely able to form and sustain political parties.

1870-1914: Disengagement/Social Movement Independence

In the late 1860s and early 1870s, great majorities in labor movements, peace movements and women's movements identified themselves with a politics that styled itself as "liberal," "republican," or "radical." Ties that had been strained or broken in the wrenching conflicts between 1848 and 1851 had been almost entirely reknit--although not, as event were to show, entirely forgotten. Strategies of articulation and permeation dominated almost everywhere. In the late 1840s in France and Great Britain, the peace movement had been initiated by leading liberal spokesmen such as Frédéric Bastiat, John Bright and Richard Cobden. At its foundation, the Trades Union Congress (1867) was little more than a pressure group on the Liberal Party and many British feminists began their careers in organizations affiliated to the Liberal Party such as the National Liberal Federation (1877) and the National Reform Union. In Germany, August Bebel, later one of the chief pioneers of German Marxism, was an activist in the Verband des deutschen Arbeiter (bildungs) vereine whose main concern was working with liberals for reform and democratic national reunification (Breuilly 1992, pp. 148-149). K. Hjalmar Branting, the first Social Democrat elected to the Swedish riksdag, ran on a liberal political slate.

Nevertheless between 1870 and 1914, networks of activists distanced themselves from liberal or republican parties. In Western and Central Europe, the combination of industrialization and suffrage expansion shook the established political order. In France and Great Britain, successful liberals refused to make the concessions their trade-union supporters required. In these countries, liberal parties were becoming "parties of power" inured to governing and to the compromises that it entailed. As liberal parties edged towards a policy of conciliation with militarists and social conservatives they became incapable of fulfilling the hopes of workers and social reformers, hopes they themselves had first stimulated and encouraged. Liberal landsides such as those of 1906 in France and Great Britain resulted in legislative achievements that seemed to exhaust the liberal program, leaving them a spent force. In Central Europe, in the Austrian and German empires, liberalism increasingly became too weak and divided to contain rapidly growing labor movements.

such as Herbert Asquith to support women's suffrage, even when presented with an overwhelming political majority in the House of Commons, encouraged a decisive turn towards independence within the women's movement. The violent acts carried out against Asquith's government by militant feminists of the WSPU were premised on the assumption that, since many liberals supported women's suffrage, militant tactics would increase the pressure on Asquith within the party. Although fewer in numbers, French feminists were moved towards organizational independence by the same forces. The main obstacles to women's suffrage was the opposition of Radical Socialists in the Senate; while using the pretext that women would vote as their confessors instructed them, Hause and Kenney have shown that many were also social conservatives fearful of a threat to the family (Hause and Kenney 1984).

The geography of women's movements is also reasonably clear, and it differs from that of the peace movement and, as we shall see, from that of the labor movement. In a continental context, Great Britain had been the originator of the movement and remained its leader, although Scandinavian movements soon threatened to catch up. While success is not a certain measure of relative strength, it is not coincidental that Finland and Norway were the only European countries to grant women's suffrage before 1914. After the UK and Scandinavia, Germany had the strongest women's movement; the Latin nations followed well behind.

The sudden growth of Scandinavian women's movements was largely due to regional political and economic circumstances. There, liberalism was both newer and more progressive than in much of Europe. In Sweden and Denmark, industrial development came late, mostly occurring after 1900, and it proceeded with great rapidity transforming agricultural as much as industry; in Finland and Norway, pre-World War I development was mainly confined to agriculture, lumbering and fishing (Gourevitch 1986, pp. 110-111,). Scandinavian nations were too small to be involved in great power conflicts, except as innocent bystanders, and had no opportunity to involve themselves in colonial adventures. The central problem of Scandinavian liberalism was that its explosive economic growth created mass support for liberalism at a time when socialist parties were already beginning to compete for support among the masses and to join liberals in demonstrations in favor of expanding suffrage. Without traditional links to a mass working-class constituency, Scandinavian liberals were forced to prove their credentials and became more reliable and throughgoing champions of women's suffrage than liberals in the rest of Europe. Scandinavian countries developed quite strong women's suffrage associations which received support from both socialist and liberal parties but they generally remained closely associated with liberal political parties.

Of all the social movements in the pre-World War I European world, labor was undoubtedly the largest and the best organized. In the 1870s, the labor movement was still largely a social movement committed to mobilizing masses of workers in the streets and workplaces to put pressure on the established order. Between 1870 and 1914, labor distanced itself from liberal parties. Starting in 1890, every May Day, trade unionists and socialists showed off their strength in public marches and, after 1895, mass strikes were occasionally employed as a method of protest. By 1914, in those areas of Europe where the working class had even partial access to the suffrage, labor had made serious steps toward transforming itself into a political party.

Although the specific reasons for the break with liberalism varied greatly, the workingclass abandonment of liberal political parties is clear enough (Stone 1983). German liberals had been committed to the cause of a democratic nationalism, but these liberals with whom workingclass democrats, such as August Bebel, had first been associated were stunned by Bismarck's military triumph in uniting Germany by "blood and iron." German liberals had earlier believed that German unity could only be won by a democratic revolution modeled on 1848. In the wake of the Austro-Prussian War of 1867 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, the division of liberals between those who rallied to Bismarck and those who opposed him, led young workers like August Bebel to decide that they must strike out on their own and turn to Marx. French workers became disgruntled in the early days of the Third Republic when the leaders of the republican left, led by Gambetta, compromised and created a conservative republic with little to offer workers. English workers ties to liberals lasted longest, but the Liberal pre-occupation with Ireland led to worker dissatisfaction, and the split between Unionists and Liberals and the later battle over protectionism created conditions favorable for the growth of an independent labor party (Cohen and Hanagan 1995).

To one extent or another, all the social movement we have studied broke or strained their ties with liberals in the years before World War I, but only labor movements turned themselves into political parties. Besides the support of trade unions, what allowed the labor movements to successfully undertake this move was the vast expansion of manhood suffrage occurring in Europe between 1870 and 1914 as well as the great increase in the number of industrial workers. Almost everywhere, large sections of the working class were getting the vote and when labor movements broke with liberalism they were able to put their case before whole sections of the electorate that had never been recruited to other parties.

Scandinavian countries arrived at the same break but exhibited a pattern different from England and France where English Liberals and French republicans had built up a strongly entrenched position within their labor movements, In Britain and France, particularly, the break was piecemeal and occurred in a series of traumatic ruptures over decades. In Scandinavia, it was not so much a growing tension between liberals and socialists as it was that liberalism less successfully dominated the space for working-class politics. The Scandinavian cases are interesting because they show us that programmatic responsiveness is not the sole determinant of parties' relationships to social movements; political parties must have entrenched sources of strength within the politically -active population in order to make it worthwhile for an SMO to enter their ranks. Scandinavian liberals' relations with labor were weaker, and socialist parties were in existence in these countries before the advent of large-scale extensions of the suffrage so, once suffrage was expanded, socialists went ahead and appealed directly to the ranks of the uncommitted.

All of the parties that developed from European labor movements were parties of a "new type." They were designed to be mass membership parties with constitutions that spelled out how candidates were to be nominated, how party policy was to be determined, and how elected party representatives were to be disciplined if they failed to carry out party policy. The sense of party membership and involvement generated by working-class parties was unprecedented in European experience. Real socialists were "card carrying socialists." Party discipline was also unprecedented. Over the course of the following decades all of these parties, including the British Labour Party and the Swedish Social Democratic party, expelled elected representatives who failed to carry out party-mandated policy on key issues. The strength of party discipline enhanced the value of strategies of articulation and permeation by giving authority to party pronouncements and, thus, real power to the social movements who could win party support. The heartland of socialist parties could be found in the Scandinavian and Germanic world. As can be seen in Table I which shows the percentage of socialist votes in western, central and northern European nations in the last election before World War I.

As the labor movement broke free from the Liberals, it developed a new identity. A party led by a network of trade unionist or working-class supporters of liberalism proclaimed itself the "party of the proletariat." This new identity was not manufactured out of whole cloth but

1919-1963: Consolidation/Social Movement Integration

After World War I, as socialist parties grew, their efforts to build SMOs to articulate party policies became much more significant. (See Table 1) Between 1918 and 1960, almost everywhere, labor movement parties replaced liberal parties as the largest party of the left; under socialist party pressure, social movements abandoned strategies of independence and turned towards articulation and permeation. Within party structures, SMOs continued to organize rallies, demonstrations and petitions, but now they often did so as much to influence their own party as the state. SMOs were also subject to repression for violating the rules of party constitutions that sometimes imposed more constraints than did state repression. Where labor movement parties were less politically dominant, social movements were usually more successful in preserving their independence.

The integration of SMOs into labor movement parties was not accomplished easily. The process by which this occurred in the women's movement can be seen clearly in the British Labour Party, the party which had the best relationship with independent feminist and women's groups. In 1914, while it was still evolving from a social movement to a political party, British Labour Party leaders had a variety of ties to various women's movements. Between 1912 and 1914, the party had reversed its earlier stand supporting only universal suffrage and worked in close coalition with the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) for the extension of the existing suffrage to women. Affiliated to the party was the Women's Labour League (WLL), a group dedicated to supporting Labour candidates but which had also independently carried out its own campaigns for inclusion of women into the National Insurance Act of 1911, anti-sweating and public health (Collette 1989). Another important women's group, the Women's Co-operative Guild (WCG), had passed a resolution agreeing to a "closer alliance between cooperatives and the Labour movement." The Trades Union Congress (TUC) also allowed considerable leeway for women's organization. Organizations that focused on organizing women and representing the interests of working women, such as the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) and the National Union for Women Workers (NUWW), were loosely affiliated to the TUC.

In the next few years, the labor movement's strength grew dramatically and, as it did, its relationship to the women's movement also changed; everywhere relations characterized by independence or alliance moved towards articulation or permeation. Labour, a very junior partner in the progressive coalition in 1906, became the senior partner in the governing coalition in 1924. A new constitution, adopted in 1918, laid the basis for the party's future organizational development. The WLL became the Women's Section of the Labour Party; in the process it lost most of its autonomy but, by 1924, the WLL had acquired 150,000 members and become one of the party's major constituency organizations. During the same few years, the party's relationship with the WCG grew more intimate. Although retaining its organizational independence, the WCG allowed its local group to affiliate directly with the Labour Party and more than 100 branches took this course (Webb 1927). At the same time, the coalition with the NUWW no longer functioned. The Representation of the People Act adopted in 1918 gave women over thirty the right to vote and abolished virtually all property qualifications for voting. While full women's suffrage was not yet attained, the great hurdle was overcome and electoral equality was clearly a matter of time (it came in 1928); after 1918, the Labour Party and the NUWSS went their separate ways. A parallel policy was also implemented in the trade union movement when, in 1919, the NUWW was dissolved into the National Union of General Workers, and the WTUL became the women's section of the TUC (Rowan 1982).

But the reconfiguration of power in favor of the labor movement was actually much greater than the mere reorientation of organizations in the women's movement suggests. In the years

Party to work together to defend democracy (Pimlott 1977, p. 171)

The incorporation of women's movements such as the WLL and women activists like Selina Cooper, into the women's sections of socialist parties was hardly unique to Great Britain; in fact, the Labour Party was late in following a policy already dominant in Germanic and Scandinavian Europe. In 1908, the repeal of German laws forbidding women's participation in political activities gave the party the chance to integrate the new women's sections into its own party structures. As in the UK, German socialist women gained representation on the Party executive committee but women's organizations were also subordinated to the decisions of the party congresses. Women's organizations soon became an important component of the SDP. By 1931 22.8% of the party's membership, numbering around 230.000 women (Pore 1981, p. 56, Quataert 1979, p. 5). Austria followed the German model and by 1911, over 28,000 women were enrolled in women's section of the party. In Scandinavia socialist parties played the leading role in establishing women's sections, and everywhere they were an important component of the party's strength (Haavio-Mannila 1981).

While socialist parties significantly limited the autonomy of socialist women's groups, it also gave them institutional representation in the highest councils of socialist parties. What did the women's movement gain from institutional incorporation? Here the case of the German Social Democracy is probably typical. Although committed to an ideal of the "mother/housewife," German Social Democracy, promped by the demands of organized women, worked to educate working-class women on methods of birth-control and defended access to birth control. It promoted reform in the areas of marriage, divorce, illegitimacy, prostitution and the protection of mothers. It also opposed laws that discriminated against women in their biological capacity (Pore 1981, p. 79). Sometimes, socialist women were able to employ this maternalist rhetoric to promote programs that empowered women in the broader economic and social arena. In the 1930s Swedish socialist women championed the idea of the Swedish state as a "People's Home" which should provide help for everyone and in whose construction everyone should participate (Hobson and Lindholm, forthcoming). Further, on occasion, women's representatives on the leadership councils of Social Democratic party's could play a role in mobilizing support on issues, such as peace, which has been an historical concern of socialist feminists. In 1955, for instance, when the Swedish government was debating acquiring atomic arms and a strong defense program and the Cabinet was deeply divided. The peace party, according to Alva Myrdal, was strengthened by "strong mass support ... organized by an indefatigable campaign of the Social-Democratic Women's union" (Myrdal 1982, p. 86).

Although by 1950 the peace movement was to be incorporated into European labor movements, in the inter-war period, European peace movements relationships with socialist parties proved to be stormier than with women's movements. Certainly World War I and its aftermath made peace a far more central issue that it had been in the pre-war era. Millions of men and women in Britain, France and Germany had actual experience with the horror of warfare or had lost husbands, sons and brothers in the trenches and were willing to consider any alternative to the prospect of another war. What made peace so central a concern however was that the unstable diplomatic equilibrium after the Versailles settlement, the rise to power of dictators, first in Italy, then in Germany, and the exclusion of the USSR from world diplomacy, increased the likelihood of war.

To explain the peace movement's growing political independence in the thirties, however, it is necessary to take into account the dramatic change in the political bases of support for peace movements. In the 1920s, in the largest European nations, socialist support for pacifism seemed to pave the way for the incorporation of peace movements into labor movement parties.

Parties marched in favor of a defensive military alliance with the USSR, and liberal and socialist parties in Britain and France were divided between pacifist and pacifistic camps and advocates of rearmament. Conversely, conservative parties, hitherto resolutely militarist and chauvinist, began to divide on the wisdom of confronting Hitler and Mussolini; Sir Samuel Hoare, Sir John Simon and Lord Halifax appeared to join the anti-war camp. The division of all major parties (except the Communists where public division was not permitted and internal division discouraged) on the issue of peace versus rearmament created the opportunity for an independent peace movement.

As labor-movement socialist parties began to reconsider their total opposition to war, secular integral pacifism broke free of their hold and became an independent social movement. In Great Britain, the liberal League of Nations Union (LNU), a pre-World War I period organization, dedicated to arbitration and multilateral disarmament, continued in the forefront. In 1934-35, the LNU organized a "peace ballot," and its membership peaked at a little over 400,000. But small religiously-inspired pacifist movements like the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR) whose origins dated to the pre World War I period tripled their membership the inter-war years. Far more significant were the appearance of new secular "integral pacifist" organizations which maintained an uncompromising pacifism. By 1930, in France, the old pre-war APD had waned and a new, "integral pacifist", Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix (LICP) had formed and in the next few years became the major French peace organization (Ingram 1991). In 1936 in the United Kingdom, the integral secular pacifist Peace Pledge Union (PPU) opened its offices and rapidly began to challenge the LNU for leadership of the peace movement: by April 1940, 136,000 people had sent postcards to the PPU main office that read "I renounce war and never again will I support or sanction another" (Ceadal 1980, p. 223).

As it became independent, the peace movement began to fashion its own image of itself. The formation of a peace activist identity had begun in the religious pacifist organizations. In 1924 a member of the FoR Council had remarked that "The genius of the Fellowship was that it was not merely a propaganda body but something like a religious order. We were called to commit ourselves to a certain way of life" (Ceadal 1980, p. 65). Secular pacifist organizations developed in the same direction. "At the first Peace Pledge Union camp at Swansea" an early member recollected, "....there was a large table for vegetarians and as the days went by the number of people at the vegetarian table grew steadily...until the crowd was almost equally divided" (Ceadal 1980, pp. 228). If pacifists increasingly adopted a way of life that allowed them to identify themselves, it also gave their enemies a convenient stereotype to caricaturize them. Martin Ceadal has suggested that George Orwell's malicious characterization of ILP socialists in the 1920s was better applied to the pacifists of the 1930s: "typically a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, and a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position he had no intention of forfeitingae (Ceadal 1980, p. 83).

Yet the opportunity for the independent peace movement in the thirties to develop a full fledged identity was brief. Events in Munich in 1938, the invasion of the Czechoslovak rumpstate in 1939 and, then, the outbreak of World War II severely weakened it. Already by 1935, the clear majority of the British Labour Party had rallied to support programs of rearmament and national defense; in that year, George Lansbury, the Labour Party's leader was replaced because of his pacifism. Between 1933 and 1939, French socialists were more divided and fought interminably and inconclusively over the issue of armaments and pacifism (Bilis 1979). The decline of the peace movement left a much reduced number of pacifists in the field when war broke out in 1939; they were joined in their isolation briefly by the communist Parties, reeling from the Hitler-Stalin pact, but the communists returned to the pro-war fold in June 1941 with the attack on the USSR.

1960 to the Present: Disengagement/Social Movement Independence

The failure of the CND takes us to the watershed of the 1960s. In that year, under the leadership of Bertrand Russell, the Committee of 100 was formed, an organization dedicated to building an autonomous peace movement. Its use of massive civil disobedience was designed to pressure the Labour Party but, like the feminists of the WSPU, from outside the party rather than from inside. The Committee of 100 really began the current era of more independent social protest.

To fully understand the movements of the least three decades, it is necessary to analyze their roots in the late 40s and 1950s; the relations between parties and SMOs existing during that decade and a half has continued to influence the opportunities for the expansion of independent SMOs. During this period, many labor movement parties entered governing coalitions; their participation in power was no longer viewed as extraordinary but as a routine fact of political life. Once in power, parties were faced with the problem of allocating scarce resources and clearly defining priorities. In the 1950s and 1960s, the highest party priority were the demands of the trade unions, which had provided the rock on which the labor movement parties had been built, and the sentiments of the majority of voters, who elected labor movement candidates. Farther down the list came attention to the concerns of peace activists and organized women's groups.

Unfortunately, there were important areas of difference between trade unionists and popular sentiment and those of both the peace and women's movements. Following the trade unionists' lead, tacitly or not, European labor movement parties had supported a highly gendered conception of work in which women were expected to bear the major burdens of child rearing and men were expected to be the major breadwinners. The social security systems that were the pride of the most successful Social Democratic countries reflected these assumptions as did the contracts negotiated by communist and socialist trade unions (Schirmer 1982). Such policies might have reflected the status quo in most European countries in 1950 but, in the 1960s and 1970s, in many European countries, women's labor participation rate began to rise, at a time when an increasingly large number of children did not live in traditional families.

Those concerned with questions of peace also felt themselves abandoned. During the early days of the Cold War in 1947 and 1948 most European socialists were concerned about the Russian threat. Several Scandinavian nations and the Low Countries--though hesistantly--rejoined their European comrades. During World War II, neutrality had not worked for Denmark, Noway, Belgium or Holland, and they joined NATO, but the doctrine of neutrality survived; it had worked for Sweden and Switzerland, and they were joined by the diplomatically-mandated neutrals, Austria and Finland. As the Cold War lengthened, however, and American foreign policy came under the influence of a saber rattling John Foster Dulles, many European socialists had second thoughts. Still, party leaders were convinced that support of anti-communism and the American alliance were necessary to appeal to moderate voters and prevented party-dominated anti-war groups from too overt criticism.

During the sixties, the resentment of women's groups and peace activists to their regulation to an inferior position blazed up and opened a new period in the relationship between political parties and social movements; other social movements would follow in their wake. In this period, like that between 1870 and 1914, social movements disengaged themselves from political parties. But the departure of social movements from labor movement parties in the 1960s and 1970s was not so sharp or so complete as that from liberal parties between 1900 and 1920. Where labor movement parties had provided an alternative to liberal parties in the earlier period, no serious political alternative was available to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

social movement organizations. In much of Europe, social movement parties grew up that attempted to compete with labor movement parties, but these generally proved temporary and unsubstantial.

Let us briefly illustrate how past political configurations of social movements and political parties can bear on the emergence of a social movement. We turn first to the women's movement. A survey of European women's movements, published in 1986, estimates the strength of independent feminist SMOs, designated as "second wave" feminist organizations, in the early 80s. It found: "Strong feminist movements emerged in Britain, Italy, Holland, Finland, Denmark and Norway during the early 1970s at the same time as weaker forms emerged in West Germany, France, Sweden and Belgium" (Lovenduski 1986, p. 72).

While we do not claim that an understanding of party/SMO relations will explain all these cases, we do think it will significantly contribute to understanding some of them. For instance, how to explain the disparity between feminist movements in Sweden and Denmark? The key difference between these movements lies in the existence of well-organized women's sections in the Swedish Social Democratic Party which encouraged feminists to mobilize within the party and the lack of such sections in Denmark that led feminists to form an independent movement. Important and significant battles for women's rights were being fought in Sweden in the 1980s but they were carried on within the Social Democratic Party (Jenson and Mahon 1993, Gelb 1990). By the end of the 80s, the split between feminists and their opponents was one of the principal causes of divisions among Swedish socialists. The women's section of the Swedish party had served as an effective mechanism for rallying feminists, and their position in a powerful political party made it worthwhile for feminists to remain within this framework. Denmark provides an apposite comparison. There was little chance that the movement could have been centered on the Danish socialist party, partly because the Danish party was weaker and less politically dominant than its Swedish counterpart, but mainly because the Danish socialist party had dissolved its women's sections in 1969 on the eve of the feminist revival. Dahlerup traces the origins of the new feminist movement to two major currents: a small contingent of women from the youth organization of the old liberal feminist organization, the Dansk Kvindesamfund (Danish Women's Society) founded in 1871, and a much larger contingent, the Redstockings, which came from the left (Dahlerup 1986). The decisive factor that turned Danish feminists towards independence instead of working inside the socialist party may very well have been their lack of an organizational vehicle for exerting pressure within Danish social democracy.

Some of these same factors can be seen in the peace movement. In their comparative study of new social movements in Europe, Kriesi, Koopmans, Dyvendak and Giugni rank participation in peace movement protests between 1975 and 1989 for four countries. In terms of their participation in protest, from high to low, they rank West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and France. A significant part of this difference can be explained that one of the most potent issues of the `70s and `80s was the placement of America Cruise missiles, and their proposed locations were in West Germany and the Netherlands. Nonetheless, how to explain the far larger percentage of Swiss participants than French? At least a part of this difference can be attributed to the relatively strong control of the French Communist party over social movements concerned with the peace issue.

Independent peace organizations in France in the 1970s and early `80s found it difficult to work with the PCF, but almost impossible to work without it. Initially, the Communist-dominated Mouvement de la paix (MDP) was the party's main vehicle in the peace movement. Communist control over the MDP was well known. In the 1950, during the Tito/Stalin dispute, the MDP had denounced Tito as a fascist, and the organization's past had given it a large number of loyal

conservative European environment, new opportunities for the reintegration of movements within parties on a new basis may be emerging. Roger Karapin's study of social movements in West Germany in the 1980s shows that independent social movements were most successful when working in tandem with organized factions of the SPD (Karapin 1993). In the 1990s, as left-wing social movements have declined in Europe, some former activists have sought haven in labor movement and social parties. More attention needs to be paid for the conditions of sanctuary. Considering the outcomes of social movements on political parties, then, we must look not only at its programmatic elements, the extent to which parties embrace social movements' demands and translate them into a public policy, but at its structural aspects, the degree and manner in which social movements incorporated into parties are situated so as to exert an ongoing influence on policy formation.

This survey of social movements over a relatively long historical period also confirms Marco Giugni's view that outcomes need to be seen as a dynamic process; in his view, too much attention has been given to the success or failure of individual social movements, too little to interelationships among social movements and their social context (Giugni 1994). An examination of European social movements over the long haul shows that one way in which changing configurations within families of social movements affect outcomes is by changing the goals of social protestors. The bargaining position of independent social movements is stronger to the extent that they can recruit members willing to put movement loyalties above party ties. Social movements preach the transcendent importance of movement goals. Sidney Tarrow has analyzed in detail the cycle of social protest, characteristic of the recent past, in which initial successes achieved by independent social movements provoke imitators who accelerate a cycle of protest that climaxes as the number of independent social movements cascade and their success decline precipitously (Tarrow 1994).

But the movements of the 1960s, `70s and `80s are not the only model of social protest in the European experience. Powerful protest movements swept Europe between 1917 and 1950 based on political parties and the ability of incorporated social movements to mobilize their constituents for protest. The configuration of movements dominating in that period favored a broader political identity. Social movements working within political parties inevitably shared some of the party's larger goals; in such circumstances, success was viewed in relationship to both movement purposes and party goals. While the rigid subordination of constituent social movements to the priorities of labor must not be repeated, still the ability of parties to forge a common identity out of a variety of disparate movements is well worth studying; it represents both an important outcome of past struggles and an alternative form of mobilization for future conflicts.

In conclusion, this paper has argued for the continuity of social movements and maintainedthat this continuity is often neglected because students of collective action fail to note the existence of social movements embedded in political parties. The thrust of this argument is to integrate the study of social movements more closely with that of routine politics, to locate social movemen within parties and to emphasize the ongoing dialogue between movement and political parties. Social movements are not politics by different means, but politics tout court

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