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The Europeanization of Movements? Contentious Politics and the European Union, October 1983 - March 1995
Institute for European Studies
no. 96.3
(c) Doug Imig and Sidney Tarrow
This paper should not be reproduced in whole or in part without the prior permission of the author. All papers published are exact reproductions of the authors' text.
The town of Shoreham is a sleepy ferry port on the south coast of England. But in January 1995, it was the catalyst for a nationwide campaign against the export of live calves to the continent, where they are slaughtered after gruesome journeys and weeks in wooden crates. After an earlier campaign in the early 1990s, the practice of "in-crate feeding" that continental chefs say produces the most tender veal was banned in Britain. But a market is a market, and the response of British cattle breeders was to ship live calves to the continent, where cattle operators and governments are less fastidious than in Britain.
In 1994, a campaign of pressure from British animal rights groups aimed to stop the trade and, as a result, most British ferry companies gave up the practice. But Shoreham and other smaller ports continued to ship live calves to the continent, and a few air shipping companies found the trade lucrative enough to justify chartering aircraft to do the same. That was the background to what happened in Shoreham and of the events that followed, which we shall use in the first section of this paper to illustrate what we call "the Europeanization of contentious politics." The term "contentious politics" will be used in preference to the more familiar ones "social movements" or "protest." We use this term in preference to "protest" because what we are interested in is broader than political protest -- including all forms of clash of interests over competing claims that were located in a computer search of European news releases; yet it is not as consistent as a social movement, a term we use only for a sustained interaction between people making claims and their powerful antagonists. 1 We will signal our findings here to make this distinction clearer: there are tentative signs that contentious politics at the European level is growing as the European Union takes hold; but there is only fragmentary evidence of a cumulative growth of Euro-social movements. The remainder of the paper will be devoted, first, to outlining some of the dimensions and problems of European contentious politics, second to explaining how we propose to examine it through event analysis and, third, to presenting preliminary data that quantitatively indicate some of its dimensions over the past decade.
A. Carrying Calves to Market
In January 1995, under an array of hand-lettered signs reading "Shame on Shoreham" and "Misery for Money," a coalition of vegetarians, animal activists and local residents assembled on the south coast of England, with the press in attendance, to protest the shipping of live calves through Shoreham's port. Brought together by a local animal rights group, they had the support of the stodgy Royal Society for the Protection Against Cruelty to Animals and of many ordinary Britons whose love of animals is notorious on the continent. "What is wrong is the sheer hypocrisy of it," said one demonstrator, a retired engineer; "If we don't allow animals to be treated that way here, how can we allow them to be shipped over there?" (New York Times, 12 January 1995).
In response to the protest and to the publicity it generated, the Shoreham Port Authority suspended its contract with the meat shipper and, under pressure from the protests, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd took time out from the stalemated Bosnia negotiations to call for European Union legislation on the whole question of animal welfare. But the campaign was far from over. Encouraged by the successes of the Shoreham protesters, militant animal rights groups began to block ports like Dover and Plymouth and airports like Coventry. In response, Sir David Naish, President of the National Farmers Union, vented his anger at the protesters, whom he called a "sinister minority of boot boys in balaclavas." 2 And on a cold afternoon in late January, Jill Phipps, a 31-year old mother, was run over by a cattle truck that she and other demonstrators were trying to prevent from entering Coventry airport (The Guardian, 8 February 1995).
The response to Phipps' killing was immediate, and served to escalate the conflict. One group of protesters attacked the home of the head of an aviation company that ships live calves to France; another protested at the farm of Agriculture Minister William Waldegrave, who admitted that some of his calves were sold for export; a third called for a boycott of Prestwick airport, which had been shipping animals to the continent from Scotland. As Jill Phipps was buried after a packed funeral service at Coventry cathedral (its rebuilt ruins a symbolic reminder of an earlier European conflict), protesters successfully stopped cattle flights to the continent by running onto the city's airport runway (The Guardian, 8 Feb., 1995).
As public outrage grew, the RSPCA was displaced in the news by the more militant Animal Liberation Front, which promised to avenge Phipps' death. In early February, a group of demonstrators sailed down the Thames from Putney and scaled the embankment to reach the Houses of Parliament, where they unfurled a banner in Phipps' memory. Borrowing a tactic from Greenpeace, other animal rights protesters used inflatable Zodiacs to harass animal transport ships and prevent them from docking. A few days later, near Northhampton, four incendiary bombs were found attached to trucks that were used by a shipper to transport livestock. And when a plane belonging to Air Algérie, which ships calves to Europe for a British export company, crashed at Coventry airport, Animal Rights militants were widely suspected of planting a bomb on it. 3
B. Across the Channel
The extended publicity given the protests in Britain and the death of Jill Phipps in Coventry caused echoes on the continent. The Dutch meat industry promised to guarantee that calves imported from the UK would only be fattened on farms where they had room to forage. In Belgium, after more than 1,500 people were arrested in the British port of Brightingsea for blocking a shipment of calves and sheep, the mayor of the Belgian port of Nieuwpoort sent a fax to the British police informing them that he would refuse the ship docking facilities (Glasgow Herald, 11 February 1995). And in Brussels, actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot joined a protest group with a petition for the EU opposing live animal exports. "I am here, she said, "to protest, to fight, and to give homage to Jill." The Swedish Agriculture Minister offered Bardot her support, telling her that "the people of Sweden are behind you". 4
Faced by agitation on both sides of the channel and by an insistent British demand for a policy review, EU agriculture ministers met in Brussels in mid-February to try to work out more humane animal shipping regulations. But under the presidency of the French, the talks collapsed over the issue of the length of time that slaughter-bound animals could be kept in transit, with southern European members holding out for longer transit times against the British, who insisted on a 15 hour limit (Glasgow Herald, 21 February 1995). 5 When a Commission compromise was rejected, the issue had to be tabled for at least a year, while the Presidency of the EU would be held by the veal-loving Spanish and Italians. 6
C. British Parochialism or Euro-Movement?
What is happening in this story? From the point of view of the protesters' detractors, it was simply another example of Little-English parochialism coming up against the more sophisticated tastes of continental Europeans. For their supporters, it pitted British pluck against the inhumane forces of market capitalism and European bureaucracy. From the point of view of the newspapers, it made good copy, with pictures of windblown matrons in mackintoshes standing stalwartly in the rain on ferry docks against a driven tide of cattle-prodded calves, and of agriculture ministers admitting that they weren't above profiting from a lucrative trade between their sylvan acres and continental abattoirs.
But from another point of view, the story can be seen as exemplary of two phenomena, both of which have become increasingly prominent in discussions of Western Europe since the 1960s: Europeans' growing recourse to contentious collective action and Western Europe's growing integration. These two phenomena, and their problematic relationship to one another as European countries move closer together, are the subject of this paper. Is a Europeanization of social movements in Europe's future? Or are we simply seeing episodic bursts of contentious collective action that sometimes cross Europe's national boundaries? 7
I. Europe, A Movement Society?
From the 1960s through the 1980s, Europeans increasingly said that they had participated in various forms of contentious politics (Dalton 1996:Ch.4; Crozat and Tarrow 1996). Today, actors from across the political spectrum press their claims through an expanding array of channels, including both interest group lobbying and protest politics. Among the expanding forms of political expression, we find French farmers passing out wine and cheese in Paris to protest cheap imports of Eastern Europe while their Spanish counterparts blockade roads with bushels of lemons for similar reason, claiming that European Union trading guidelines will drive them to starvation.
The use of disruptive forms of political expression is not limited to Europe's contentious farmers. Over the past decade, a wide range of social and political actors, from left-wing anti-nuclear weapons activists to right-wing skinheads, have taken to the streets. For weeks in both 1994 and 1995, for example, many European newspapers featured stories about the Spanish fisherman who first attacked French, British and Irish tuna boats in the Bay of Biscay, and then invaded fishing banks in the Atlantic which Canada had unilaterally declared closed to fishing. 8
Nor have the main actors from the protest-filled 1960s -- students and workers -- ceased to protest as farmers' and fishermen's protests filled the headlines. In France, students struck and demonstrated against the reform of the educational system, and various labor groups targeted unemployment and racism and government retrenchment policies (Duyvendak 1994; Fillieule 1994; Favre and Fillieule 1995). But in other countries as well, the "new" social movements that were born in the wake of the 1968 student protests continued to engage in direct action through the 1970s and 1980s (Flam 1994; Kriesi et al, 1995; Rochon 1988). Post-1968 Europe has in many respects become "a movement society", one in which previously unacceptable forms of behavior entered the conventional repertoire of contention. 9
The use of disruptive forms of contentious politics has accompanied tremendous institutional change across the continent, surrounding the process of European integration. As Euro-regulation presses in on national legislation and individual states work to align their national policies, citizen groups have been shaken out of their complacency, scrambling to address new issues and respond to new opportunities. Some observers see an emerging juncture between the growth of contentious politics and the integration of Europe. Philippe Schmitter puts this as a provocative question:
How long will Euro-proletarians, Euro-professionals, Euro-consumers, Euro-environmentalists, Euro-feminists, Euro-regionalist, Euro-youths or just plain Euro-citizens tolerate such a benevolent hegemony [as that of the European Union] before demanding a greater voice? 10
But while there is little doubt that the process of integration has affected citizens all over Western Europe, how citizens' groups respond to it remains unclear. We do know that many interest groups have established offices in Brussels to lobby the European Union on behalf of their interests. 11 As regulations governing many sectors of European life have shifted to the EU, organized business, environmental groups, regional governments, women's groups and even indigenous peoples' representatives (European Commission 1994) have begun to lobby the Commission and have been invited to participate in policy formation. But we have not yet investigated systematically the degree to which European integration has given rise to routines of contentious politics shifting to the European level and investing European institutions. There is some evidence that, as groups like environmentalists shift their activities to the European level, they experience an institutionalization of collective action (Tarrow 1994b); if this is the case, then an inherent advantage will accrue to those groups -- like business associations -- which possess the resources for transnational organizations, and a disadvantage to those which do not.
If, as many think, Europe is becoming a polity, it follows that contentious politics will eventually gravitate from the national to the European level and that not only Euro-interest groups, but also social movements will eventually form at the European level. Therefore, identifying and beginning to measure Euro-centered contentious politics is the first step in understanding whether a Europeanization of social movements is on the rise. Conceptualizing the dimensions of that hypothetical phenomenon and beginning to measure it statistically will be the major aim of this paper.
A. Dimensions of Europeanization
The term "Europeanization of contentious politics" can mean many things. Three dimensions of Europeanization are theoretically possible. They relate to the sources that can trigger contentious politics, the processes of contentious politics and its actual outcomes.
1. The Sources of Contentious politics: Building on the example of the British Animal Rights protesters in the Shoreham story, we can say that contentious politics is Euro-centered when domestic actors are stimulated to take action -- wherever it is taken -- as a result of decisions taken by the agencies and councils of the European Union, the European Council of Ministers or the European Commission. But note that, in their responses to European regulations, domestic actors may act against other private groups -- as the original Shoreham protesters did; against their own governments -- as did the protesters at the farm of the British Agriculture Minister; against other foreign nationals -- as the crash of the Air Algérie plane in the anti-veal protests suggested; or directly against the EU -- as Brigitte Bardot and her follow protesters did in Brussels. In fact, one of the difficulties we will encounter in tracing European contentious politics is that its targets are not always the same as the sources of the grievances of the actors who mount it. This leads to the second dimension of Europeanization -- the process of contentious politics.
2. The Process of Contentious politics: Contentious politics can take place in many ways. The Shoreham protest was clearly aimed at an EU policy, but most of it was domestically based. First, as in the case of the mayor of Nieuwpoort's fax to the Brightlingsea police, it occurs when contentious politics in one country triggers a sympathetic response in another; second, it can occur when actors in different countries mount coordinated protests -- as, for example, in the European peace protests of the early 1980s; and, third, it occurs when the EU or its agents become the direct targets of contentious politics. As we will see (and for reasons we explore below), this is the rarest of all three channels.
3. The Outcomes of Contentious politics: Finally, as we saw in the EU Agriculture Ministers' negotiations following the British veal protests of early 1995, an episode of contentious politics may have a European outcome either when other countries take action in response to it -- as in the case of the Dutch meat packers who agreed that the British calves they import would be allowed to forage -- or when the European Union is influenced to remedy a perceived ill or to find a compromise among the interests of different parties or member states. And, in the long term, inter-European conflicts or issues will have European outcomes when trans-European social movement organizations develop out of conflicts within the Union. But with the exception of a few sectors, like environmental groups (Dalton 1994), this long-term structural change is very much in the future, if it comes at all.
B. Collective Action Problems
Merely sketching this typology of the dimensions of the Europeanization of contentious politics can take is sufficient to indicate the difficulties that stand in the way of the Europeanization of social movements:
First, with regard to the sources of contentious politics: there is a problem of information for domestic actors. Virtually all EU directives and regulations are administered by national governments -- and not by the EU directly -- and it is often difficult to identify their ultimate source. Although the British Animal Rights activists were clear about the fact that the ultimate source of their grievances lay in Brussels, not all social actors are as sophisticated as they were and not all grievances are so transparently placed at the EU's door. Particularly given the location of implementing authority for EU regulations in national executives and courts -- rather than in national legislatures -- political discussion about their implementation is likely to be muffled and intra-bureaucratic. 12 As a result, the EU sources of domestic grievances are seldom obvious unless some well-placed group or movement points them out. Indeed, one major reason why domestic groups turn to spectacular forms of protest is to attract media attention that will diffuse information to the general public about the source of their claims.
Second, with regard to the process of contentious politics: if there is any sociological generalization that can confidently be made about social movements, it is that their capacity to mobilize people does not result from grievances alone. Pre-existing social or institutional networks are necessary to organize and sustain contentious collective action. This is the thesis that Charles Tilly developed when he placed "organization" in a triangular relationship with interest and contentious politics in his "mobilization model" (1978). Social networks and pre-existing political ties were what Doug McAdam found in investigating the sources of Freedom Summer volunteers in the United States (1988). And networks are what James Scott did not find in the Malaysian peasants he followed -- which is why their "resistance" failed to produce social movements (1986). Without such networks behind it, potential collective action frequently disperses into aimless violence or remains at the level of individual alienation.
Some economic and public interest groups -- for example, organized business -- are well placed to take advantage of European decision-making. 13 But even where the collective benefits of Europe-wide contentious politics are obvious, the transaction costs of organizing an sustaining it are often too high for most people. Consider the European labor movements, in many ways the best organized of Europe's professional groups. For the most part, European labor unions are not taking advantage of possibilities for contentious politics at the European level (Turner 1995). Even where we do find sympathetic or coordinated collective action among workers across national lines, it is most often fleeting and episodic -- as in the sympathy strikes of factory workers in one national branch of a multinational corporations for workers in another branch of the same firm in another country.
Finally, the outcomes of contentious politics are often indirect, even when -- as in the British Animal Rights' campaign described above -- a protest targets trans-European processes or actors. It was not the Shoreham protesters themselves who brought pressure to bear on the European Union, but, rather, the British government acting as their proxy. If the British responded slowly and only partially to domestic protesters' demands, it was due to its position at the center of a parallelogram of group forces, between farmers, shippers, ferry and airline companies and activities, on the one hand, and its policy priorities in the European Union, on the other. Once protest enters the machinery of the political process, it encounters political games and institutional mechanisms that take it out of the control of its initiators (Tarrow 1994: ch. 10).
These observations can be generalized into a long-term speculative hypothesis about the eventual direction of social movement organization in the European Union. Given the difficulties that most citizens have in ascribing the sources of their grievances to the EU; taking account of the high transaction costs of coordinating collective action across national boundaries; and remembering the primary role of national governments in the EU: rather than a direct displacement of contentious politics from the national to the supranational and transnational levels, we are more likely to see pressure continuing to be exerted domestically to demand that national governments take action on behalf of aggrieved citizens' groups in the European community. This may lead to a partial transformation of national states from autonomous centers of sovereign decision-making to the European representatives of domestic collective actors who cannot themselves reach the European level but maintain considerable domestic political clout. If true, this would be a portentous change, but a very different one than the formation of transnational social movements, the short-circuiting of national governments and the direct targeting of the European Union. It is a result that would be more compatible with the notion of a "multi-level political system" (Sbragia 1992), than with that of a single European polity.
But all this is still couched at the level of speculation and is based on impressions gleaned from scholarly case studies and newspaper coverage of (often spectacular) incidents of contentious politics at the European level. What we still lack are systematic studies of European contentious politics which pinpoint its sources, processes and targets. It is to the development of a preliminary database on, and analysis of, the Europeanization of contentious politics that we will devote the remainder of this paper.
II. A Preliminary Assessment of Contentious politics In Western Europe, 1983 - 1995
While the European Union consists of a set of institutions, its institutionalization has been piecemeal and incremental - a process, rather than a sudden change. Thus, in attempting to assess its effects on contentious politics, it was necessary to find a tool that would allow us to carry out an analysis over time of the possible changes in the targets of contentious politics as integration proceeded. This need argued for a quantitative time-series measurement tool which could compare contentious politics over time to the progress of European integration. Although qualitative, case-based research will ultimately be necessary to interpret our findings and unravel the processes of Euro-contentious politics, we reasoned that if we wish to relate the hypothetical rise in contentious politics to the institutionalization of Europe, we would have to look for more systematic measures of such actions over time. The analysis of contentious events seemed the logical answer. As Mark Beissinger puts it, "events data are explicitly temporal, and therefore give us some understanding of how forms of collective behavior relate to key developments within the polity" (1995: 3).
A. Instrumentation
In keeping with this logic, we decided to base our analysis upon the extensive record of political events established by media coverage. Working from events data generated by public media sources places this research within a well-established tradition. 14 Yet events data ideally suited to our purposes proved elusive. In addition to all the well-known methodological problems involved in the use of media data, 15 we faced an additional difficulty in finding a source that would provide comparable data to allow us to study variations in contentious politics over time and across Western European states. Further, given the enormous volume of information produced by even a single news course, the mechanical work of collecting and coding events data for so many countries posed a daunting problem.
Rather than relying on the tried-and-true methods of manual coding of "hard" or microfilm sources, in responding to these issues, we turned to a recent advance in computerized data collection and coding of electronic data sources. Specifically, for this paper we use an automated coding software protocol called PANDA (the Protocol for the Assessment of Nonviolent Direct Action). PANDA is a computer program designed to "read" and code contentious politics events data from on-line news reports, based on a set of user-defined protocols. PANDA embodies three features which recommended it for use in this project: First, it identifies a full range of political actions -- including non-institutional collective action -- as well as a full range of social actors, including private individuals named organizations, and sub-national groups. This inclusiveness allows us to identify and focus on the ratio of routine events to extra-institutional political protest. Second, as a machine-based coding system, PANDA is fast, consistent, and relatively inexpensive to use. Third, PANDA is designed to "read" and code information from on-line sources, which means that it can be linked to electronic media sources, such as those on the Lexis-Nexis system. This capacity allows much greater access to comparable and timely data than we could have found using more traditional methods. 16
Employing this tool, we identified events which bear on one aspect of the Europeanization of collective action. To this end, we first built a data set made up of nearly 20,000 Western European events. We then carved out a sub-set of this sample, containing almost 800 reported Western European events which in some way involve the European Union, its directives, branches or agencies. Working with these sets of reported events, we sought to identify changes in the frequency of contentious politics in Western Europe over the period of integration and, more to the point, the ratio of events which involved the European Union to events that were not related to the EU during the last twelve years of European integration.
While there are still many uncertainties in the use and manipulation of machine-coded media data, the advantages of an inclusive population of political events and automated coding allow us to transcend a number of the limitations of both the case-study method and of laborious hand-coding of contentious events that have shackled many investigations in the past. 17 This expanded capacity allows us to examine European contentious politics in general; that portion of contentious politics involving the EU or its policies, and, eventually, to begin to ask whether transnational social movements (that is, sustained sequences of interaction between challengers and authorities) are forming around the European Union.
Our media source for this preliminary study is the Reuters' world-news service. 18 Reuters' has a number of attributes which make it a good data-source for code information from on-liour investigation. The strengths of this information source include its explicitly international and Western European focus, as well as its nonpartisanship. Additionally, Reuters' emphasis on business news makes it a "hard" test case for cross-national analysis (in that for a report of a particular protest to appear in Reuters' we assume that it had to pass a higher threshold of interest than to appear in a local or even national newspaper). Reuters' reports are also written in a consistent format which makes it easier to heighten the sensitivity of the coding protocols (reducing inconsistencies due to uneven reporting styles), which increases the reliability of the first (automated) data runs. 19
Still, we remain concerned that Reuters' may significantly and systematically under-report extra-institutional political activity. Our ideal data set would provide comparable, consistent, and inclusive information on the full range of political actions undertaken in each of these nations. We feel that Reuters' is highly comparable and fairly consistent, but that it is certainly not inclusive. Consequently we focus this paper only on those comparisons which draw on the strengths of this type of data -- its consistency over time -- and avoid comparisons between particular sectors of political action -- in order to explore the changing nature of contentious politics accompanying the process of European integration.
We have access to the full set of Reuter's news reports for the eleven and a half year period between October 1983 and March 1995. Taking advantage of this longitudinal record, we compare trends in protest activity in Western Europe over these 46 quarter-year periods. For purposes of comparability, we chose to focus exclusively on events which took place in the twelve nations which have been members of the Community through the majority of this period. 20 We believe that issues of integration posed similar problems and offered parallel opportunities for social actors in these twelve countries as they struggled through unification. Following this logic, we excluded non-EC nations, such as Switzerland, from the analysis. For parallel reasons, we excluded events reported to have occurred in East Germany prior to German reunification. 21
III. A Sketch of Western European Contentious politics, 1985 - 1993
A wide range of social movements, public interest groups, and citizens' initiatives have been active in Western Europe over the past two decades, undertaking both disruptive and routine collective action for causes including regional, ethnic, religious, cultural and political concerns. Early in the last decade, and following the Reagan missile build-up, a wave of concern with nuclear warfare took hold, with a range of anti-nuclear and anti-NATO protests undertaken by various facets of the peace movement (Klandermans et al, 1990; Rochon 1988). This resulted both in protests and -- in concert with the 1970s environmental and women's movements -- helped to produce the early electoral successes of Green parties across the continent.
Other prominent facets of Western European activism included women seeking equal rights, industrial action by labor movements and periodic outbreaks of protest by farmers, fishermen, and miners. Towards the end of the decade, following the crashing down of borders that attended the end of the Cold War, a scattered wave of violence against immigrants shook western Europe, along with more limited, but well-attended anti-racist rallies. In between, assorted regionalist, terrorist and animal rights protests punctuated the decade.
A. Frequency
We have identified and machine-coded 19,330 contentious events initiated by private actors in the twelve Western European nations examined. 22 These events range from farmers blockading roads across France in March 1984 to protest EC farm policies, to violent, extremist actions (e.g.: the bombings of Peugeot showrooms in Spain by the Basques in protest of tightened French border restrictions). Some of the most active segments of European society during the period of integration have been organized labor, environmentalists, youth and student groups, as well as a disturbing increase in racist and anti-immigrant activity, especially after 1989. Irish and Basque nationalists also continued to be ruthlessly active during this period.
Is the general level of contentious politics on the rise in Western Europe? Figure One reports on the distribution of the more than 19,000 events uncovered by our procedure between the fourth quarter of 1983 and the first quarter of 1995, presented in three month moving averages:
As figure one suggests, Europe remained in movement throughout the period under investigation. But the pattern of this mobilization is not linear as some have speculated. Instead, there appears to have been a decline from the high point of activism of the late 1980s, the downslope of the cycle uncovered by Kriesi and his collaborators in their study of four European democracies. 23 More to the point, and in contrast to survey research findings that suggest a growing incidence of the use of unconventional politics (Dalton 1996:Ch.4), our findings do not point to either a dramatic increase or decrease in levels of contentious politics in Western Europe, or anything resembling the kind of cycle of protest identified in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Italy (Tarrow 1989), in the four European states studied by Kriesi and his collaborators in the early 1980s (1995:74), or for the Soviet Union or its successor states during the late 1980s and early 1990s (Beissinger 1995). The picture which emerges is of two periods of heightened activism -- first building to a peak in 1989, and then trailing off before beginning to re-ascend in 1992 and 1993.
IV. Euro-Contentious politics
Drawing from our events dataset, we now turn more specifically to a consideration of the general movement of contentious collective action around the process of European integration. 24 There are a number of facets of this relationship to consider. One concerns the emergence of a pattern of responses by social or political actors to EU policies. A second includes confrontations into which the EU is drawn (e.g.: as an arbiter between two other parties). Still a third category of events involves explicitly cross-national activity. Cross-national activity and the European Union are intertwined, in the sense that the EU is a transnational target. But as a number of the cases already discussed -- and those discussed below -- suggest, social actors have found a wide range of ways to take domestic action against EU policies and, in that respect, they are taking domestic action against transnational targets.
Additionally, in an era characterized by increasing transnational exchange, the effects of actions in one country can have widespread ramifications elsewhere. A common example of this tendency was evident when striking pilots for Spain's Iberia airlines forced the cancellation of 210 flights over three days in June of 1984, which brought air traffic across Europe to a standstill. Likewise, the impact of strikes and lock-outs which seized West Germany's automobile industry forced thousands of workers waiting for these parts and products to stop production across Europe. Given these complexities, we now cautiously turn to a consideration of the range of ways in which European actors have begun to initiate contentious action in response to the process of integration.
Our most important finding concerns the magnitude of contentious collective action surrounding the EU: the "European" events we located in our media source represent a very small percent (791 events, or 4.1%) of the total number of Western European events reported in Reuters' Western European News between October 1983 and March 1995. This number includes not only actions launched against the institutions of the European Union, but also actions targeting other -- usually domestic -- actors, but visibly motivated by claims against EU proposals, policies, or their national ratification and adoption.
A second critical finding speaks directly to the hypothesis of growing Europeanization of collective action: while EU related protests continue to constitute an extremely small share of the total amount of protest in Western Europe, this percentage was increasing rapidly as the integration process gained momentum in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As figure two indicates, the frequency of EU related protests has tripled over the last decade.
Of even more significance to our question concerning the Europeanization of contentious politics, we find that not simply the frequency of EU-related events, but also the ratio of EU to non-EU events is on the rise. Figure three presents the shifting percentage of all Western European protests which involved the EU in some way through the period under investigation. Figure three indicates a steady increase in the ratio of EU to non-EU protests. While EU related action continues to represent less than ten percent of the total, this percentage constitutes a four-fold increase over 1984. This trend suggests that the European Union is increasingly coming to be recognized by social actors as both a source of contention and a as likely target for protest in Europe.
A. An Illustrative Topology
How did the EU fit into the contentious politics events recorded in Figures Two and Three? In order to address this question, we wanted to know more about each of these reported events than the basic information available through machine-coded events. Consequently, for this section of the paper we work from complete Reuters' accounts of 150 reported events involving the EU in some capacity. Working from this sample, we illustrate the ways in which the EU came to be a party to European protest between the final months of 1983 and the spring of 1995.
We find the EU or, more often, proposed EC policies, appearing with greatest frequency as the source of extra-institutional protest. Typically, movements undertaking protest sought greater accommodation in the process of integration. However, though motivated by European policies, these actors frequently launched their actions against domestic targets. In this final section, we sketch an exploratory typology of emerging forms of contentious collective action based on these 150 sample cases.
1. Domestic Action Against EC Policies: By far the largest category of events (93 of the 150 protests in the sample, or 62 percent) is made up of domestic actors launching domestic protests against European Community policies. What may be most interesting about these events was their broad range of targets. Farmers offer a number of telling examples of this phenomenon.
In April of 1985, for example, more than 100,000 French farmers blocked roads across France to protest Common Market plans to freeze 1985-86 farm prices and let Spain and Portugal into the European Community. The next summer, Spanish farmers maneuvered 12,000 tractors to blockade roads in protest of European Community farm policies. In the fall of 1986, West German farmers got into the act, as thousands marched against European Community agriculture policies and converged on market towns. Spanish farmers again took to the streets in August of 1986, as hundreds blockaded roads with crates of lemons to protest "discrimination" against them by the EU. This protest expanded the following month, with convoys of tractors blocking roads across Spain, demanding cheaper fuel and a better deal from their government and the Community.
French farmers added another tactic to their repertoire in 1988, as they plowed up a park underneath the Eiffel Tower to protest EU proposals to leave land fallow as a way of curbing falling agricultural prices. Portuguese farmers also held their share of protests against restructured markets. In July of 1989, they blocked roads in and around Obiodos with tractors in protests against the import of fruit from other European Community countries. French farmers took to the streets again in September of 1991, when upwards of 200,000 marched through Paris, handing out free wine, cheese and sausage in a peaceful protest against falling prices and incomes and an influx of inexpensive East European agricultural imports. Italian farmers rejoined the protests too, with hundreds of thousands marching through the streets of Rome to protest the Common Agriculture Policy reforms in November of 1991.
2. Actions Against Institutions A second category of domestic action differs from the examples above in terms of a clearer -- through only sometimes more direct -- target of activity. Forty-three of the 150 events (roughly 29 percent) in our sample fell into this category. In a typical example, French farmers in Lyons burned tires and hay on the steps of provincial government offices to protest the proposed Common Agricultural Policy. A variation in this category of action finds social actors seeking out and targeting domestic institutional outposts of the European Union. For example, rockets were launched at the European Union's office in Athens in December of 1990 by the leftist guerrilla group, November 17. The group claimed it was retaliating for EU support of a Greek government austerity program. Again in March of 1994, blasts said to be the work of leftist guerrillas rocked the Athens research offices of the European Union.
A more peaceful protest against EU outposts occurred in December of 1984, as the European Commission's offices in Dublin were occupied by members of Sinn Fein, protesting strip-searches of women IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland. This event is not simply an example of contentious action, but presents an instance of a national movement choosing to target the domestic outpost of an emerging transnational authority when the source of the protest was a domestic human rights issue. 25 The Union provided a new opportunity for domestic actors, who could appeal to an ostensibly higher authority to intervene where their own lobbying efforts had proven unsuccessful.
Similar patterns of activity are sometimes aimed at the local outposts of other EU governments. Spanish farmers angered over French import restrictions on their produce, for example, dumped 30 boxes of tomatoes in front of the French embassy in Madrid, blockading a main square and bringing traffic to a standstill. In a variation of this pattern, we find a number of examples where contentious politics is aimed at domestic outposts of transnational businesses. This kind of action emerged, for example, in farmers' protests in 1992 and 1993. Angered over the shape of EU-US trade negotiations, French farmers blocked access roads to Euro-Disneyland, attacked outlets of the McDonald's hamburger chain and occupied a Coca-Cola factory. Likewise, the fishing wars off the coast of Newfoundland between Canada and EU nations in 1995 precipitated a new round of Western European protests targeting domestic outposts of another nation. In the spring of 1995, for example, protesters pelted the Canadian embassy in Madrid with dead fish while the EU and Canada hurled accusations at each other. A much less peaceful variation on this tactic was seen in a series of bombings of Peugeot-Talbot car showrooms in Spain by Basque separatists angered over tightened French border restrictions.
3. Closing National Borders: Another way in which we see domestic movements taking action against cross-national targets and issues is at their own national borders. Over the decade, we found social actors closing national borders nine times (roughly 6 percent of the sample), either by groups blockading border points, or -- more selectively -- by stopping particular vehicles. Farmers once again were quick to adopt this tactic. In June of 1984 sixty French farmers took control of a border crossing into Spain, intercepted trucks bringing produce across the border, and dumped their contents -- 140 tons of apricots -- onto the highway. Similarly, French customs agents were well positioned to close national borders in the spring of 1992 as they struck in protest against European Community plans to abolish their work.
Fishermen too were ready to adopt the blockade into their repertoire. In May of 1986 some 50 Spanish fishing boats blocked entry to the French border port of Hendaye in protest against European Community restrictions on their movements. In March of 1990, Spanish fishermen once again undertook a blockade, this time to protest a hike in Moroccan fishing fines. As the blockade extended into its second week, the European Community entered into negotiations with the fishermen.
In 1992, members of the French Young Farmers' Union (CNJA) vowed to "throw the English into the sea," and blocked the cross-Channel ferry -- preventing passengers from boarding or disembarking -- in protest against an EC farm accord. Similarly, environmental activists, complete with a full chamber orchestra, staged a sit-in blocking a border crossing between East and West Germany to protest the export of West German waste.
As these examples suggest, social actors have been hesitant to venture far beyond their national homes, and have instead found creative proxies for foreign interests short of crossing borders. To date, we have few examples of more explicitly transnational movement activity. Most of the examples of it that we could identify were launched by the environmental movement and, in particular, by Greenpeace, which -- over the decade -- launched acts of civil disobedience in the United States, in the French South Pacific nuclear test site, on the open seas in pursuit of Norway's whaling fleet, as well as across the UK and Europe.
4. Targeting the EU: Over the period in questions, the number of events explicitly targeting the headquarters of the EU has remained small. Only eight of the 150 sampled events (five percent of the total), targeted the EU directly. Victims and relatives of a Spanish food poisoning scandal demonstrated at the European Parliament offices in March of 1985, seeking assistance from the Parliament in gaining more aid from the Spanish government. In 1988, members of Greenpeace pinned a huge banner to the European Community's headquarters in Brussels to protest EC acid rain policy. And in December of 1990, French fishermen dumped 22 tons of herring and sardines in front of European Community offices, concerned with EC reductions in catch limits.
Extremists have also targeted the EU offices in Brussels. In July of 1990, for example, the Union evacuated its Brussels headquarters after receiving a bomb threat from a pro-Iranian group. Likewise, hostages were seized from those same offices in May of 1989 and again in September of 1990. More peaceful was the protest group that Brigitte Bardot joined in Brussels in 1995 against the import to the continent of live British calves. But these were rare exceptions: the largest group of protests took place on domestic soil against EU policies and were often directed against the actors' national governments, accused of cow-towing to the interests of other EU governments or to the Eurocrats in Brussels.
5. Cross-Border Cooperation: Coordinated actions involving protest groups in different countries and transnational movement events also comprise an extremely small percentage of the European contentious politics identified in our study. Together, these two types of action continue to represent approximately one percent of EU related events. Several groups adopted the tactic of cross-border cooperation -- with individual national movements taking more or less coordinated actions. This was the pattern, for example, when the British protesters we met earlier tried to prevent veal transport ships from leaving Shoreham while Belgian protesters worked to prevent the ships from landing. In a more coordinated variation on the theme of cross-border cooperation, Belgian and French farmers blocked their common border in 1992 in protest of EU-US trade accords. Cross-national cooperation was also evident in a series of Kurdish raids on Turkish targets across Europe in June of 1993, which included hostage taking in Marseille and Munich, as well as vandalism against Turkish businesses in many cities and against the consulate in Copenhagen. But the most dramatic evidence of the growth of trans-national contentious politics occurred not against the EU at all, but against the decision of several NATO members to accept Pershing missiles on their soil (Rochon 1988).
6. Transnational Movement Events: Finally we found in our dataset a handful of explicitly transnational movement events. In June of 1987, for example, thousands of demonstrators from France and a dozen other European countries marched through Paris calling for an end to nuclear energy production. Likewise, in October of 1988, thousands of leftists and pacifists from six European countries demonstrated against the formation of a joint West German-French army brigade. And in June of 1992, about 40,000 gay men and women from across Europe marched through central London calling for recognition of their lifestyle and rights. Some 50,000 farmers gathered in Strasbourg in 1992 to protest against proposed EU agreements on subsidies. This protest included contingents from every EC member state, as well as delegates from Switzerland, Austria, Canada, Japan, and South Korea. The event was well-planned, dramatic and well-covered by the press, but was rare for this kind of event to be mounted.
V. Preliminary Conclusions
Our findings suggest that through its nascent development, the EU has remained largely beyond the reach of most domestic social movements. In this respect, it has yet to become a central actor in contentious politics in Europe. At the same time, we have identified a number of trends which point to an emerging Europeanized dimension of contentious politics. Notably, we find a decided increase in both the absolute number of events involving the EU, as well as an increase in the proportion of all Western European protests that are EU-related. This trend may indicate a developing role for the European Union -- and for the transnational institutional realm which it represents -- in contentious politics on the European continent.
There are significant reasons, though, to remain cautious about these findings. To begin with, our unit of analysis in this investigation is the protest event, and we have made no attempt to discriminate among actors including unions, interest groups, movement organizations or temporary aggregates of citizens. A second reason for exercising prudence is that our principal data collection and analysis tool is a mechanized method of identifying and coding events. This method needs extensive reliability testing, as does the compatibility of our Reuters' source data with other sources. A third reason is that the increase in Euro-contentious politics we saw around the beginning of the 1990s coincided with a heightening of European integration. This could either support the hypothesis that institutional integration is triggering a shift of contentious politics towards the European level, or it could be the result of the heightened media attention to European issues that attended the Maastricht treaty and the "year of Europe" in 1992.
The variations we identify in levels of contentious politics at the European level, and the increasing tendency of challengers to move toward the Union and away from their national governments and other domestic actors suggest the presence of a combination of push and pull factors. Push factors in this case would include the relatively closed nature of particular states to particular movements, like the factors that were identified Herbert Kitschelt (1986) and Hanspeter Kriesi and his collaborators (1995; Duyvendak 1994) in France. Where states prove unresponsive to domestic challengers, social actors may have reason to undertake transnational action, as the benefits of attempting an end-run around the state begin to outweigh the costs and difficulties of such actions.
In addition to such push factors, those groups which have been quick to appeal to the EU also may be responding to the pull of opportunities created by the Union. Changes in EU policies or its attempts to subsidize groups of national actors offer new political opportunities to challenging groups. One of the best known examples of this process concerns the women's movement. In Britain, women's groups have brought suit against their national government for failing to align UK labor standards with European Community directives concerning fair treatment of labor, and equal protection for women. For these activists, opportunities created at the transnational level increased the benefits of more institutional, legal political action on the part of women's groups.
Ultimately, the influence of the EU on civil society may be most evident in influencing changes in the standard repertoire of political tactics that collective actors adopt across the continent. The Union has shown an interest in orderly, institutional and representative approaches from a variety of movement actors. Dieter Rucht has noted the rapid pace at which environmental organizations have responded to the access and funding offered by the EU. As he demonstrates, the scarcity of resources for environmental groups at the national level makes EU money all the more attractive. But it may also move them towards more institutionalized tactics (Rucht 1993: 75-97; Also see Dalton, The Green Rainbow, ch. 8).
In both of these examples, we see the EU's potential to normalize social actors' participation into the routines of institutionally sanctioned forms of behavior. Lobbying established administrative agencies and filing civil suits are classic examples of such institutionalized participation. Gary Marks and Doug McAdam note the rapid increase in this type of behavior by social movement actors before the European Union (Marks and McAdam 1995). For observers concerned with distributive issues, this may be an ominous trend, for it stands in direct opposition to the fundamental power of resource-poor social actors -- that is, the ability to disrupt the routines of institutional participation (Piven and Cloward 1979). But for those for whom national polities are closed or unreceptive, the EU may offer an opportunity for "venue-shopping" that they would otherwise lack.
Ultimately, turning towards the EU will depend on each actor's calculus of costs and benefits. Social movements may increasingly make use of the European Union and of other transnational institutions if the benefits seen in performing an "end-run around the state" are recognized as outweighing the significant transaction costs of maintaining collective identities and mounting sustained collective action campaigns across a half-continent. Many of the examples already observed suggest that movements are currently taking steps in this direction by seizing those available opportunities where the costs are currently lowest.
To date, however, the preponderance of these opportunities appear to continue to reside where they have been for the last two hundred years for social movements -- in the national state (Tilly 1984; Tarrow 1994) -- even when the impetus for making claims lies in Brussels or even further afield. At the same time, we do find a growing number of cases of social actors both protesting against Union policies and occasionally engaging in coordinated or conflictual activity across national boundaries. The case of the Shoreham protesters and the recent "tuna war" between Spanish, French and British fishing fleets illustrate that -- while still relatively rare -- such encounters have explosive potential for inter-state relations in the EU.
Yet we must make two final observations about the current state of this phenomenon. First, truly transnational social movement action -- where national movements cross borders to act, or where they coordinate action across borders -- has been slow and erratic in coming. Additionally, the propensity of social movements to take transnational action appears to be highly episodic rather than evolutionary. In this respect, mobilization is tied to contingent -- and changing -- structures of opportunity. We suspect that it is also linked to particular, critical events which have an impact on the core concerns of affected social movements. Whether the European Union will produce a fundamentally new and permanent structure of opportunity for social movements, or add to the changing opportunities produced by shifting alignments, changing alliances and unexpected events, is a question that we can only confront after much more research has been done.
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Footnotes
Note 1: For more on this, see Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, "To Map Contentious Politics," Mobilization 1:14-28. Back.
Note 2: This discussion is based on the following articles: "Britons on the Barricades, on Veal Calves' Behalf," The New York Times, 13 January, 1995; "Clamour over Calves," The Financial Times, 14-15 January, 1995; "Bombs found on animal lorries," The London Times, 7 February, 1995; "Cathedral Funeral for Protester," The Guardian, 8 February, 1995; "Fears for staff leads port to ban animal exports," The Independent, 11 March, 1995. Back.
Note 3: These news stories are from The Australian, 2 February 1995, The Financial Times, 6 February, 1995 and The London Times, 7 February 1995. Back.
Note 4: Glasgow Herald, 21 February, 1995; Evening Standard, 20 February, 1995. Back.
Note 5: Because of EU rules could make the British government liable for millions of dollars in farmers' claims if exports were halted, the cost to the British government of the protests, and the broken contracts they produce, could be substantial. See "Clamour over calves," The Financial Times, 14-15 January, 1995. Back.
Note 6: The campaign ended where it had begun, with a significant victory for animal rights forces in Shoreham, when a Tunisian-registered ship chartered to export 20,000 calves was turned away by port authorities. The exporters replied by threatening a suit against the authorities, accusing the government of bowing to "rent-a-mob anarchists" (The Independent, 11 March 1995). Back.
Note 7: For a skeptical view, see Tarrow 1994b. Back.
Note 8: For a description and analysis of this episode, see Tarrow, "The Europeanization of Conflict" (1995b). Back.
Note 9: See Tilly 1978, for the concept of the repertoire. For contemporary applications, see Traugott, et. al, 1995. On the conventionalization of contentious collective action, see Tarrow 1994: ch. 11. On the relations between the concept of the "movement society" and the institutionalization of protest, see Crozat and Tarrow 1996. Back.
Note 10: Philippe Schmitter, "Representation and the Future Euro-Polity", Discussion Paper No. 23 (Nuffield College, Oxford: Center for European Studies, 1993), p. 38. Back.
Note 11: See Justin Greenwood, Jurgen R. Grote and Karsten Ronit (eds.), Organized Interests and the European Community; Sonia Mazey and Jeremy Richardson, "Environmental Groups and the EC: Challenges and Opportunities, in David Judge (ed.), A Green Dimension for the European Community; Mazey and Richardson, Lobbying in the European Community; and Philippe C. Schmitter and Wolfgang Streeck, "From National Corporatism to Transnational Pluralism: Organized Interests in the Single European Market," Politics and Society 19 (1991); 133-164. Back.
Note 12: See the work of Giandomenico Majone on the regulatory state; in particular, "Regulatory Federalism in the European Community", in Environment and Planning 10 (1992), pp. 299-316, "Cross-National Sources of Regulatory Policymaking in Europe and the United States," Journal of Public Policy 11 (1991), pp. 79-106, "Market Integration and Regulation: Europe After 1992", in Metroeconomica 43 (1992), pp. 131-156 and "Deregulation or Re-Regulation? Policymaking in the European Community since the Single Act", paper prepared for the research project on "La restructuration des Etats Européens", unpublished paper, 1993. Back.
Note 13: On European organized business, see Philippe Schmitter, "The European Community as an emergent and novel form of political domination", Instituto Juan March Working Paper No. 26 (1991). Also see Wolfgang Streeck and Philippe C. Schmitter, "National Corporatism to Transnational Pluralism", Politics and Society 19 (1991), pp. 133-164. Back.
Note 14: For a bibliographic essay on this type of research through 1988, see Olzak 1989. For a discussion of the concept of "the event" and its several meanings, see Tarrow 1995c. For discussions of the advantages and problems of events-based approaches to social movement activity, see Franzosi, (1987), and Rucht and Ohlemacher, (1992). Single-country research of this type has been pioneered by Tilly (1995), first working with Snyder (1972) and then with Shorter (1974. Other single-country analyses of this type are report by Olzak (1992), Tarrow (1989), Olivier (1989), Soule (1994), Beissinger (1995) and Rucht (1996)@. Comparative and multi-national studies have been carried out using similar sources by Tilly, Tilly and Tilly (1975), Paige (1975), Kriesi et al, 1991 and 1995, and Ekiert and Kubik (in progress). Back.
Note 15: The use of media-generated reports on events has been shown to have a number of inconsistencies and lacunae. In the summary of John McCarthy (1993), these are: (1) selection bias; in the selection of some from the many events that could have been chosen; (2) description bias; bias in the descriptions of the events selected for reporting; and (3) researcher bias; in the reliability and validity of media trace recovery by the investigator. The standard literature on media biases includes Danzer, 1975, Snyder and Kelly 1977 and more recently, Franzosi 1987 and 1990a and b and McCarthy, McPhail and Smith 1994. These tests are largely based on domestic data from American newspapers and do not go very far in the direction of investigating the possible sources of bias in comparative newspaper sources. Back.
Note 16: For their assistance and guidance, we thank the PANDA (Protocol for the Assessment of Nonviolent Direct Action) research team at the Center of International Affairs at Harvard. PANDA is a collaborative project of the Program on Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival at CFIA and the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) project of the Department of Political Science at the University of Kansas. The former organization provided generous research support to Doug Imig and advice and cooperative to both authors in the preparation of this paper. For information about access to the PANDA codebook and dataset, contact Doug Bond at the Program on Nonviolent Direct Action and Cultural Survival, CFIA, Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02137. For additional information on KEDS, contact Philip Schrodt at the Department of Political Science, the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. Back.
Note 17: Perhaps only those who have coded collective action events from ordinary "hard" or even microfilm based newspapers will appreciate to the full extent the advantages of working from an on-line news source like Lexis-Nexis. In addition to providing access to a number of different news sources (thus making it possible to correct for the biases of single sources), an on-line system can be scanned for key words, dates, particular actors or countries, and be "read" both qualitatively and quantitatively. The use of on-line news databases also makes it practical to utilize entire populations of events, avoiding the disadvantages of sampling particular days of the week, months of the year or years of a century that have dogged other studies in which manual coding is a financial and a temporal constraint. Back.
Note 18: Reuters is well suited to our major research question for a number of reasons: It is written in a consistent style, making it easier to define a set of reliable protocols for coding that if we were using a variety of national media sources; it covers each of the nations of Western Europe, in depth; and it is available on-line, through the Lexis-Nexis News Service. Back.
Note 19: Cite from the Reuters' style guidebook. Back.
Note 20: These twelve nations included Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Back.
Note 21: The PANDA software tags reported events as either routine, or extrainstitutional direct action. In successive data runs we reviewed events identified by the system as extrainstitutional "direct action" and chose to adopt this category as a workable operationalization of contentious politics. Events included in this category include rallies, vigils, demonstrations, marches, visual, audio or performance protest, unruly or illegal gatherings, processions, picketing, walk-outs and embargoes, actions which disrupt, subvert, overload, delay or slow down routine processes and procedures, boycotts, withholding services or materials, strikes, and other actions which block, obstruct, seize or occupy roads, buildings, borders, airports, production facilities, and similar installations. This is clearly not an exhaustive list of forms of contentious politics. Given the interpretive and improvisational nature of the repertoire of contention, it could not be. At the same time, the automated coding software proved as reliable at identifying these particular categories of events as did human coders, suggesting that our dataset is a reasonable (though conservative) resource for identifying trends in levels and types of contentious politics in Western Europe over this period. Back.
Note 22: What we mean by this is that governmental agents have been excluded as actors (although they often appear as the targets or subjects of collective action). Excluded as well are private actors engaged in routine behavior. Thus, while a "stoppage" of production due to a strike is coded as collective action, a similar stoppage due to a lack of raw materials is not. While the selection of events was machine-coded, each event was visually examined for "false positives" before being included in further phases of the analysis. Back.
Note 23: Kriesi et al, 1995: ch. 5, deal with the cyclical aspects of their findings in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland between 1975 and 1989. The data are arrayed by one of Kriesi's collaborators, Ruud Koopmans, who also takes up the general theoretical issue of the cyclicity of protest raised by Brand (1992) and Tarrow (1989 and 1994). Back.
Note 24: In searching for mentions of the EU, we included all variations and abbreviations of the following terms: European Union, European Community, European Economic Community, Common Agricultural Policy, Common Market, European Court, European Parliament, and Maastricht. We are interested in uncovering other usages and keywords that may have disguised Euro-centered events from our mechanical search procedure. Back.
Note 25: This is true only if Northern Ireland is defined as a constituent part of the United Kingdom, which Sinn Fein does not do. Back.
