“Contentious Europeans: Is There a European Repertoire of Collective Action?”

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CIAO DATE: 8/99

“Contentious Europeans: Is There a European Repertoire of Collective Action?”

Contentious Politics Series
Lazarsfeld Center at Columbia University

Conference on Europeanized Politics
Nuffield College, Oxford, June 17-19, 1999

Lazarsfeld Center at Columbia University

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Europeanised Politics, Nuffield College, Oxford,June 17– 19, 1999

The research reported here was inspired by a talk that the second author was induced to give for a seminar in West European Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford, in February 1994 by Vincent Wright, to whom we express our gratitude and to whom all complaints and cavils should be directed.

Sans– Papiers Senza Accesso

“In many countries of the European Union,” began a manifesto that was circulated from Paris to immigrant groups in a number of European cities in late March 1999,

sans– papiers (unregistered immigrants) have been occupying public space and mounting hunger strikes to get their grievances heard. Why can’t such actions—for the moment dispersed—be combined to constitute a vast European movement for the respect of the rights of foreigners?...Organizations from all the countries of the European Union call for a European demonstration on Saturday, March 27^th, in Paris.

In the event, the seven countries became six. Although a claimed 9,000 marchers appeared at the Place d’Italie on the 27 ^th, another 4,200 from Italy were stopped at the border between Ventimiglia and Menton on the order of the French (Socialist) Interior Minister. The news that day was dominated by the bombing in the Balkans, and the demonstrators’ banner “For an Open Europe” contrasted sadly with the Italians blocked at the border. As the Green city counselor of Venice, Beppe Caccia—who himself arrived by plane—put it; “There has been a violation of the right to demonstrate and of the right of free circulation in Europe; it is a serious thing that a Red/Green government has made such a choice”. ₁

The story of the sans– papiers senza accesso is of more than folkloric interest:

First, it tells us that social actors—even the most marginal ones—are beginning to organize across boundaries, in a European version of the “transnational networks” that Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink call Activists Beyond Borders (1998).
Second, it warns us not to be hasty in assuming that transnational activism is about to erase the boundaries of states that developed over centuries. States, after all, still control the borders that activists attempt to cross—as the Italian sans– papiers learned to their dismay (Krasner 1995); and as Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham have demonstrated in a recent paper, migrant collective action is almost always directed at claims for insertion in national political communities (1998).
Third, the story also hints that—albeit crossing borders—activists still use the forms of contention that have grown up around the formation of the modern state—the march and demonstration (Tilly 1995; Tarrow 1998).

In this paper we will bracket the first two issues and focus on the third one: how often, and with which tools do protesters turn their claims to the European Union? We examine two rival hypotheses:

First, domestic social actors adjust the forms of collective action they employ to those that their targets are likely to recognize. Since the EU is a non– elective set of institutions that recognizes—indeed welcomes—institutional forms of contention, social actors will choose lobbying, petitions, and generally interest– group forms of action over the more contentious forms of public protest when they target the European Union or its policies.
Alternatively, domestic social actors will use the forms of collective action that they know best: those that target the national state in ways that have grown familiar over its modern history and have proven effective in the past in representing their claims.

Before turning to these hypotheses and to the evidence we have gathered to examine them, we turn briefly to the literature on transnational contention to attempt to link it to the so– far largely– isolated debate on European collective action.

I. Weakening States? Spreading Contention?

“For two exceptional centuries,” declares Charles Tilly,

European states and their extensions elsewhere succeeded remarkably in circumscribing and controlling the resources within their perimeters... But in our era...at least in Europe, the era of strong states is now ending (1993:3).

Tilly happily admits that this declaration is informed by a “series of speculations, conjectures, and hypotheses”. But let us, at least for the moment, assume that his instinct is right; that the strong, consolidated national state that formed in Western Europe after the eighteenth century really is in decline. The obvious question to ask next is; “what is taking its place?”

Most likely, “weaker states”—or at least states that have less control over the flow of funds and factories across their borders but retain the right to keep people out and regulate what goes on inside them—as in the story of the sans– papiers on the French– Italian border.

Some scholars go further, seeing a “global civil society” or “world polity” rising out of the internationalization of economics and culture, in which non– state actors connect to one another across boundaries and become empowered to confront once– powerful states along non– territorial lines. For other observers, internationalization is just as powerful, but it occurs at the cost of the rights, resources, and identities of non– state actors. Both kinds of processes may involve non– state actors in transnational contention. But what kind of contention and with what results?

The New Transnational Politics

Over the last decade, a new tradition of “transnational relations” has developed which turns its attention from that old standby, the multinational corporation, to other kinds of non– state actors—NGO’s, principled issue networks, transnational activists, and professional and business networks. The trouble with much of this work is that it is innocent of any attention to contentious politics—and with good reason, as the latter field has been cordially indifferent to what happens beyond the water’s edge (for exceptions, see the papers collected in della Porta, Kriesi and Rucht, eds. 1999 and in Smith, Chatfield, Pagnucco, eds., 1997).

Recently, some authors have begun to posit the development of a whole new spectrum of transnational social movements (Smith, Chatfield and Pagnucco 1997); others focus on one particular movement family—like human rights (Risse,Ropp, and Sikkink, eds., 1999), the environment (Young, ed. 1997; or the concerns of indigenous peoples (Brysk 1998 and Yashar 1998). Others are more circumspect, seeing—rather than the emergence of a transnational civil society—a variety of types of beyond– border activism on the part of actors whose interests continue to be framed by domestic political opportunities and constraints (Imig and Tarrow 1999; Tarrow 1998a). In place of the largely hortatory and impressionistic studies that greeted the 1990s, we are beginning to accumulate research findings on various forms of transnational contention.

Four main forms of transnational contention can be identified by combining the site in which contention occurs with the character of its main opponent. By domestication, we refer to making claims against external actors on home ground. By resource borrowing we mean engaging in domestically– based protest against domestic powerholders with the help of external allies. By externalization we mean activists working outside their own societies to gain support for their claims at home. By internationalization we mean cooperation between actors from different countries in the framework of an international institution. It is obvious that this fourth type must ultimately develop if the European Union is to give rise to a truly supranational polity. Figure One provides a typological sketch of the variety of ways in which domestic social actors can become involved in transnational contention.

Figure One: Domestic Social Movements and Transnational Contention

		Site of Contention
		*Domestic*	*Transnational*
	*Domestic*	Resource Borrowing	Externalization
Principal Opponents
	*Foreign*	Domestication	Internationalization

Source: Sidney Tarrow, “International Institutions and Contentious Politics,” presented to the Convener Group on “Beyond Center– Periphery Relations,” U. Of California, Berkeley, April 16– 17, 1999.

B. International Institutions and Transnational Contention

This new literature on transnational politics ought to have more of an impact than it has on studies of European unification. But it labors under a central ambiguity—the role of international institutions in stimulating and structuring transnational contention. Early scholars were impressed with how such institutions—especially the two big multilateral lending agencies—weakened domestic actors by enforcing strict austerity policies on their governments—though it sometimes triggered resistance (Kowalewski 1989; Walton 1989). These observers wrote mainly to address what we have called domestication; they were less interested in the effects of international institutions on the formation and mobilization of transnational activism. International institutions can stimulate and structure such activism by imposing policies that trigger parallel processes of mobilization in different countries; by offering support for transnational activist networks; and by providing venues in which domestic actors encounter others like themselves and internationalize conflicts.

That institutions matter is hardly a surprising assumption. What would be more interesting would be to discover that inherited and long–practiced forms of collective action retreat and give way to alternative ones in the face of new institutional venues. While international institutions vary greatly on the dimensions of communication, coordination, and constraint, and on the degree to which they encourage member–states to adopt transnational norms, many of them share at least one benchmark characteristic: legitimating the access of non–state actors to decision–making levels beyond the nation–state.

This facilitates the following hypothetical processes:

providing an authoritative venue in which non–state actors call into question behaviors of their own and other governments;
exposing them to international norms and forms of action that may or may not correspond to accepted norms and behaviors in their own societies;
placing them in contact with states and citizens of other states with whom they can jointly elaborate new norms and forms of action;
enabling the formation of transnational alliances where they can call into question behaviors of both their own and other governments;
legitimating the intrusion of these transnational alliances within the domestic structures of the states that support these institutions.

C. European Institutions and Transnational Contention

How do these processes affect the strongest set of international institutions in the world today? Thanks to the research of scholars like Justin Greenwood (1997), Beate Kohler–Koch (1994), Sonia Mazey and Jeremy Richardson, (1993, 1996), and others, ₂ we know a great deal about the creation of a spectrum of interest organizations around the decision–making structures of the European Union. But we know much less about how domestic social actors who routinely engage in contentious politics on their home ground behave when they face the distant and often impersonal agency of the European Union. In some sectors—for example, farming—we see hints that the EU is transforming the shape of domestic contention and producing episodes of transnational cooperation (Bush and Simi 1999). In other sectors, like the environment, we have detailed evidence about transnational cooperation (Rucht 1998). But we have little evidence equivalent to the interest group world of how Europeanization is affecting the quality and direction of collective protest at the base. We know more about the impact of international institutions on transnational activism in the Brazilian rainforest or on the Indian subcontinent than we do in the far better documented politics of the European Union.

Why is this? One reason is that, for most of its history, European integration has been a profoundly elitist project. Another is the difficulty of gathering and analyzing more than anecdotal or folkloric data on collective protest as European policy and implementation have spread to more and more countries and involved wider and wider sectors of the population. But a third reason is surely a certain bias among scholars of European Union in favor of institutional and policy analysis over the examination of popular politics.

Responding to these issues, we have constructed a data set that we think will allow us to examine the effects of Europeanization on contention in the nation–states of the European Union. Our work will deal with the targets of contention, the social actors involved, and, ultimately, the tricky question of its impact on European policy making and the adjustment of the role of the state between Brussels and the grass–roots. In this paper, we focus on a particular aspect of this relationship: whether directing claims against the European Union affects what has been called the “repertoire” of contention.

This question was inspired by an observation and a hypothesis put forward by two American colleagues, Gary Marks and Doug McAdam (1996; 1999). The observation:

If one is looking for the kinds of unconventional activities associated with social movements in national states—marches, mass meetings, public protests—one sees relatively little evidence of mobilization (1999:102).

And the hypothesis: unconventional claims–making is poorly suited to the EU because:

it is expensive and time–consuming to transport activists to Brussels;
public discourse is deeper at the national level than it is in Europe as a whole;
the structure of political opportunity in the EU is more open to conventional than to unconventional activity (1999:103–4).

Marks and MicAdam’s work builds on the well–known concept of “political opportunity structure,” which they apply to the way in which groups make claims:

Given the context of communication, media attention and political attachment in the EU, along with its formal political institutions, we are not at all surprised to find that there is a decided bias towards conventional and against unconventional political activity (p. 107).

We offer two additions to Marks and McAdam’s argument. First, they specify the concept of political opportunity structure cross–sectionally (that is, between the forms of contention that groups employ at home and those that they employ vis–a–vis the European Union). This is a legitimate and an important specification, but they give less attention to a second one: how political opportunities change over time (McAdam 1996; Tarrow 1996). Particularly given the disputes over the Maastricht treaty and the budgetary controversies over the implementation of the Stability Pact during the past decade, changing forms of contention may be linked to the changing level and extent of political controversy.

Second, not all groups of social actors are able to amass the resources necessary to form and maintain organized political lobbies and interest groups (Schattsneider 1960; Schlozman 1984; Walker 1991). The lapses and redundancies in representation that characterize the domestic interest group universe would likely be exacerbated in transnational politics—with a small number of groups enjoying disproportionate access to supranational institutions and policy–making while most others are able to participate only in local and—at best—national politics. The result of this could be the opposite of what Marks and McAdam hypothesize: that while well–financed and well–connected business groups lobby cozily in Brussels, their opponents in domestic politics protest within the members–states.

D. A Counter–Hypothesis; The Tradition of Contention

An alternative thesis offers itself to Marks and McAdam’s hypothesis. In his Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (1995), Tilly defined the “repertoire of contention” as “the ways that people act together in pursuit of shared interests” (p. 41). The concept was not new to Tilly’s work. In his 1978 text , From Mobilization to Revolution, p.151, he wrote:

At any point in time, the repertoire of collective actions available to a population is surprisingly limited. Surprising, given the innumerable ways in which people could, in principle, deploy their resources in pursuit of common ends. Surprising, given the many ways real groups have pursued their own common ends at one time or another.

The repertoire is at once a structural and a cultural concept, involving not only what people do when they engage in conflict with others but what they know how to do and what others e xpect them to do. Had sit–ins been tried by challengers in eighteenth– century France, their targets would not have known how to respond to them, any more than the victim of a charivari today would know what it meant. As Arthur Stinchcombe writes, “The elements of the repertoire are ... simultaneously the skills of the population members and the cultural forms of the population” (1987: 1248).

Implicit in the concept of a repertoire is that it is more or less general. “Because similar groups generally have similar repertoires,” writes Tilly, “we can speak more loosely of a general repertoire that is available for contention to the population of a time and place” (1986:2). As national states consolidated and claimants adapted their routines to target them, national social movements gained a common cultural and behavioral foundation that allowed them to spread from sector to sector, place to place, and institution to institution. Forms of contention became every bit as much a part of national political traditions as voting or paying taxes.

Based on this line of thinking, we propose a counter–hypothesis to Marks and McAdam’s:

Domestic claims–makers who target policies and institutions of the European Union will continue to employ the same forms of collective action that they have developed in their national polities—despite the gap that separates them from Brussels.

In summary, we wish to ask: does the emergence of a new institutional venue in the EU provoke different forms of contention than those that developed with the growth of the modern democratic state, or does the general character of national repertoires continue to guide people’s actions, despite the shift in the locus of authority? In the next section, we sketch the development of our data set and the kinds of measures it affords us for examining European contention. We then present some preliminary findings from this data to begin to understand the mechanisms that link domestic contention to the political processes surrounding the European Union.

II. The Europeanization of Contentious Politics

First for some definitions:

We define contentious politics as episodic, collective interaction among makers of claims and their opponents when a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the conflict and b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants. ₃
We define European contentious events as that subset of contentious politics in which we can identify an EU policy or institution as the source of the grievance of the protest.
We define transnational events as that subset of European contentious events in which cooperation between domestic actors targets a state, a private actor, or an agency or policy of the European Union.

In practice, there are operational and theoretical difficulties in neatly assigning definitions. Policies hammered out by the commission and then interpreted and implemented by national governments may lead to protest against a national government whose actual target is the EU. For example, a 1999 Westcountry farmers’ protest against Jack Cunningham—which focussed on his “aloof manner, uncaring pronouncements and failure to come and meet Westcountry farmers”—was actually a protest against his failure to adequately protect their interests against the EU beef export ban ( Western Morning News, 1 March 1999).

Further, it is not always easy to infer our category of “transnational” contentious politics from the written record. For example, the recent EU discussions on the “Agenda 2000” CAP reforms produced a number of protests in Britain, France, Germany, Portugal and Spain. Were they based on “transnational coordination?” It was only during the demonstrations attending the Berlin summit meeting that Reuters produces clear evidence of Dutch, French, Finnish, and German cooperation in the same protest against the reforms ( Birmingham Post , 30 March 1999).

These are some of the problems we face in attempting the task of mapping European and transnational contention. They are both serious and frustrating. But on the theory that partial and spotty data are better than pure speculation—and—unlike the latter—can actually stimulate counter–evidence, we will proceed to use them to examine whether a repertoire of contentious politics is currently emerging in the new Europe.

A. An Empirical Assessment of European Contention

Developing a method of analysis appropriate for this investigation posed a number of challenges. We needed data that would allow us to assess the evolving pattern of collective political action across the member–states of the EU (fifteen for the time period studied), and over the recent history of Euro–integration. Further, we sought to account for the actions of a broad and inclusive range of social actors, including not only farmers and workers, environmentalists and peace activists, but also students, skinheads, immigrants, and many others. Moreover, we needed to include a broad and evolving spectrum of routine forms of political engagement, including strikes, marches, sit–ins, and rallies, as well as violent forms, like rock throwing, hunger strikes, and soccer hooliganism, and confrontational—but still peaceful—forms of protest like obstructions, blockades, and sit–ins.

To develop this cross–national and longitudinal data set, we turned to the record of political events reported in the international news media. By collecting and coding articles and press releases drawn from the Reuters World News Service , and Reuters Textline , we compiled a data set containing a record of the shifting forms of contention in Western Europe over the recent history of European integration.

There are reasons to be cautious about using media data as a source for contentious events analysis (Hug and Wisler 1998; McCarthy and McPhail 1998), and more reasons to be cautious about using any single media source for such analyses (Mueller et al 1997). There are still further reasons to be cautious about the coverage of contentious politics in the Reuters news service. Reuters’ focus on business news, in particular, is likely to mean that this service will devote higher levels of coverage to industrial conflict than to other sectors of contention. Likewise, we find that Reuters devotes relatively greater coverage to larger Western European countries and cities, which will make it difficult for us to engage in reliable comparisons between the EU member–states.

Against these limitations, Reuters offered a number of advantages for a cross–national, longitudinal study of contention. First, this service provides an extensive, continuous daily record of Western European political events available in an electronic format for the period from January 1984 to the present. Reuters also avoids the partisan and national foci of many other European news sources, and its news reports are widely available to researchers. Moreover, Reuters news reports are written in a consistent format—allowing the preliminary steps in data collection and analysis to be automated. ₄ Finally, while print news sources contain large seasonal variations in the percentage of space they allocate to advertisements versus news coverage, Reuters does not (Bond and Bond 1998).

We utilized this media archive as our main source in drawing a representative sample of Western European contentious events. Our purpose in drawing the sample was to isolate and code reports of a set of contentious events with which to examine the evolving nature of European contention, to investigate the role of the EU in shaping collective action, and—for this paper—to compare the repertoires of contentious events within and beyond the nation–state. We drew the sample by searching through Reuters media articles using a carefully–selected set of key words. This set of key words, which was developed during a long period of experimentation and testing, identifies a broad range of social actors, issues generating contention, and forms of contentious political action. By sampling across all three of these dimensions—actors, issues, and forms of contentious action—we sought to triangulate toward a representative sample of the range of contentious political events that took place across Western Europe over the past fifteen years. ₅

Through this process we have isolated and coded 9,872 discrete contentious political events of all kinds mounted by private groups in at least one of the 15 European countries that were member–states of the EU between January 1, 1984 and February 28, 1998. Working from this data, we have identified a broad and evolving repertoire of contentious action, ranging all the way from bombings in the Basque country, to border blockades by olive growers, marches against skinhead violence, peace camps, strikes by students, labor unions, and professional groups, and relatively peaceful street demonstrations, rallies and processions. ₆ , ₇

B. An Overview of the Data

What insights can be gained into the repertoire of European contention from this record? First, we gain some indication of the distribution, magnitude and trends in the overall level of contentious political action across Western Europe—regardless of its target and venue. Figure Two reports on the distribution of the larger sample of 9,872 contentious events detected by our procedure between January 1, 1984 and December 31, 1997.

Figure Two: Distribution of Contentious Political Events in Western Europe, 1984–97 (N=9,872)

Turning first to the overall pattern of contentious political action depicted in Figure Two, we find a high level of contentious political activity between 1984 and 1986, which corresponds to the end of the “new social movement” protest cycle identified by Kriesi and his collaborators in their study of four European countries (1995). This early peak was followed by a decline and a trough in protest activity extending from 1987 through 1991. We find a second, but isolated peak of protest activity in 1992, followed by a sharper rise in contentious politics through 1996. This latter upsurge corresponds in time with the widely reported wave of contentious political activity launched in response to the national austerity measures that have accompanied the recent rounds of European monetary union. Its timing offers a hint that—rather than dissipate—contentious political action may be increasing in response to the recent intensification of unification of the EU. ₈

What share of this overall record of Western European contentious politics was motivated by claims against EU policies or institutions? Within our sample, we identify 1,411 contentious events (14.3% of the total) that fit this definition. Figure Three reports on the percentage of Western European contention that was generated in response to EU policies and institutions.

Figure Three: Annual Percentage of Western European Contentious Events Responding to EU Policies and Institutions, 1984–97

As Figure Three indicates, EU–related events accounted for an average of about fifteen percent of the annual total of contentious events we found in the Reuters data set. It also describes strong temporal variations in the percentage of EU events. Interestingly, both the greatest percentage of such events (30.1 in 1997), and the lowest (8.4 percent in 1996) occurred in the last two years of our investigation. Whatever is happening in Europe, a substantial proportion of it—but apparently not a linear increase over time—is aimed at the European Union or its policies. Whether the 1997 increase in the number of European protests is part of a trend or a temporary spike it is, of course, too soon to tell.

III. Repertoires of EU Contentious Politics

What can we say now about the tactical repertoires employed in each of the two subsets—events with EU sources and those with non–EU sources? We first examine the distribution of a typology of protest forms in both domestic and Euro–centered contention; we then construct an index of contentiousness to directly confront the Marks and McAdam hypothesis.

A. A Typology of Contentious Forms

For purposes of this analysis, we have divided our data set into four main categories of protest routines: peaceful protests and demonstrations; strikes and boycotts; confrontational protests; and violence. Here are some examples of each, drawing from our subcategory of “European contentious events”:

The first category—routine protests —ranges from petitions, marches and public meetings to processions and picketing. Here is an example:

Months of despair among the farming community culminated in thousands of Westcountry farmers and their families making the pilgrimage to London to force the government’s hand. They had WMN banners proclaiming “Keep Britain Farming” and pleaded with Ministers to “Listen to us.”

The Western Morning News, which covered the story, underscored the peaceful nature of the demonstration:

If farmers had dared to adopt the radical demeanor of some foreign protests and burnt an effigy as they marched through London, Dr. Jack [Cunningham, the Labour Agriculture Minister] would surely have been the guy (Western Morning News, 1 March 1999).

The second category, strikes and boycotts, implies more sustained—if not more confrontational—behavior. Here is an example:

German coal miners shut down all 18 of Germany’s coal pits in response to the Kohl government’s announced cuts in federal subsidies to the beleaguered coal industry. As some 5,000 miners demonstrated in Saarbruecken against the proposed subsidy cuts, a convoy of miners streamed into Bonn, where they waved their shirts in the air and chanted “do you want the shirts off our backs?” (Reuters Western European News Service, March 14, 1997).

The third category consists of confrontational protests—including blockades, property seizures, sit–ins, and building occupations. Here is an example:

Angry pig producers closed a meat–cutting plant owned by Malton Bacon last week for nearly seven hours in protest against imports of live pigs from Ireland ... (Farmers’ Weekly, 12 March 1999). ₉

Violence: finally some protests go over the edge from confrontation to violence and property damage. The campaign against genetically–modified foods imported from the U.S. has recently produced a number of such incidents:

They gathered at the edge of a field here late one night, about 20 people wearing dark clothes and gardening gloves. The gently rolling, half–acre test plot that stretched before them was lush with thousands of experimental canola plants, genetically altered by a German biotechnology company. When lookouts in three cars all gave the go–ahead, the shadowy figures illuminated the battery–powered miner’s lamps atop their heads, crept from behind the hawthorn hedgerows and began ripping every gene–altered plant from the earth (International Herald Tribune, 26 April 1999).

Table One presents the relative appearance of these four types of contention from the Reuters data set for both EU and non–EU contention in the fifteen countries covered in the Reuters data set.


Table One: Major Components of the Repertoires of EU and Non–EU Western European Contentious Action, 1984–97

	EU Events (%)	Non–EU Events (%)

General Protests and Demonstrations, Rallies, Processions, Pickets	27.3	30.1
Strikes, Social & Economic Boycotts	7.9	24.6
Blockades, Property Seizures, Sit–Ins, Occupations	18.6	9.9
Riots, Violent Clashes, Property Burnings	26.6	33.8
Other Forms of Contention	19.6	1.6

As Table One indicates, our data show a significant difference between the repertoires of contention employed when social actors respond to EU policies and institutions and when they respond to non–EU grievances. While the use of peaceful protests and demonstrations is roughly equivalent in the two types of activity—accounting for roughly a third of each total—Europeans are three times less likely to employ strikes and boycotts in response to EU issues then when they protest about domestic issues. Perhaps this difference reflects the continued rooting of industrial relations in national opportunity structures (Turner 1996).

Our major finding relates to the more contentious forms of collective action: unless we are far from the mark, European protesters are twice as likely to employ confrontational actions when responding to EU linked issues as when they respond to non–EU issues. Marks and McAdam’s thesis of greater institutionalization of protest in the European sphere receives no support from these findings.

On the other hand, Europeans are less likely to employ violence when facing the EU than when they are involved in domestic conflicts. Whatever else is true, European issues do not seem to be increasing the violence with which claimants face their opponents. Indeed, most of the cases of violence we have found in our Reuters data set were against property—not against people. Where violence is concerned, Marks and McAdam’s hypothesis receives some support from our findings.

Finally, the repertoire of EU contention is characterized by a more diverse set of tactics than domestic contention, with nearly twenty percent of EU events not accounted for by these four main categories of action. For non–EU events, in contrast, only 1.6 percent of events fell outside of these four categories. We will return to this heterogeneous category in the next iteration of this paper for further analysis. It poses the possibility that, when facing a new level of governance, protesters are neither imitating what they do at home or adapting to the EU’s institutional style but are elaborating new routines of contention. The next version of this paper will explore these “other” forms in detail.

B. Comparing Contentiousness

In order to construct a common metric for the study of European vs. domestic contention, we drew upon efforts in International Relations to quantify the degree of conflict inherent in different forms of political engagement. Modifying the Moore/Davis Conflict Scale, we assigned each of the events identified in our data set a ‘contentiousness score.’ ₁₀ We were then able to compare the degree of conflict inherent in the repertoires of contention employed in EU and non–EU events, and also to follow changes in these repertoires over time.

Viewed through this lens, our evidence suggests that the pattern of EU contention over the past decade and a half has been marked by higher levels of conflict than the parallel pattern of non–EU related protest events in Western Europe. On our scale, scores in the 400s signify that political events are marked by low to moderate levels of conflict while scores in the 800s signal highly contentious forms of political engagement. The overall mean contentiousness score for EU events for our period of investigation was 692.5, compared with a score of 674.5 for non–EU events.

This evidence would again seem to argue against the Marks–McAdam thesis of institutionalization when Europeans face the European Union. But the process of European integration has proceeded through critical stages over this same period, underscoring the importance of a more context–sensitive reading of the record. Employing our contentiousness scale, we are able to analyze changing levels of contentiousness over time. These results are presented in Figure Four.

Figure Four: Annual Mean Contentiousness Scores for EU and Non–EU Contentious Political Events, 1984–97.

Reading across the figure, we can follow the average annual level of contentiousness of non–institutional political action for both EU and non–EU events. The trends in Figure Four are tantalizing. We see a clear distinction in levels of contention between the repertoire employed by actors responding to the European Union and that of the repertoire employed in response to other grievances. In all years from 1985 through 1994, the repertoire in EU events was more contentious than in non–EU events. From 1995 forward, however, our evidence suggests the reverse was true, with EU events marked by decidedly lower levels of contentiousness than non–EU events.

Naturally, the data in Figure Four—which includes data on a variety of sectors of contention—is only a rough–and–ready guide to how people protest vis–a–vis the EU in relation to their domestic targets. In fact, we have no way of knowing whether it is the same or different actors whose behavior is tapped in the two lines in Figure Four. We are in the process of disaggregating that data set and comparing specific sectors to allow us to ask whether the same social actors behave differently or similarly in different venues. But as it happens, we have access to data from one particular sector that to some extent reinforces our earlier findings.

In her research on European protests against the importation of genetically modified foods, Vera Kettnaker (1999) sought to identify the intensity of collective action at various levels of governance. ₁₁ This was a conflict that ranged between the very local level (eg. destruction of field trials being carried out with GM seeds), the national level (eg., protests designed to pressure national Parliaments), and the supranational level (as the EU deliberated about labeling requirements for GM foods). What Kettnaker finds is that—for this sector of actors—the intensity of protests at the supranational level largely follows the level of intensity of protests at the national and subnational levels. We reproduce Kettnaker’s findings in Table Two.


Table Two: Intensity of Protest Pressure against Governments

	0	1	2	3
National Governments	15.4%	74.6%	7.5%	1.5%

European Union	18.2%	78.8%	3.0%	0%

Source: Vera Kettnaker, “The European Conflict over Genetically–Engineered Crops, 1995–97,” Working Paper 99–7, Institute for European Studies, Cornell University.

As Kettnaker concludes, “In this campaign, protest against national governments and the EU showed surprisingly little difference in frequency or intensity of protest forms” (p. 26).

It will remain for us to examine the year–by–year record of EU–linked protest events to try to understand how these findings dovetail with the specific and critical steps in the process of integration. Certainly, among these critical steps were the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty, the revision of the Common Agricultural Policy accords, and the stability pact guidelines surrounding the process of European Monetary Union. But even at this stage of our analysis, we can underscore several principal features of this relationship for the European case.

First, for most of the recent period of integration, extra–institutional politics involving the EU was more conflictual, on average, than domestic contention. This follows both from the importance of the issues under consideration, as well as from the absence—or only nascent development—of institutions available for more institutional approaches.
Second, we observed a marked reversal in this pattern for the most recent period of integration, with EU–events likely to be less contentious than non–EU events.

Should this pattern of more—but less contentious—EU–directed protest continue, two interpretations are possible:

that increased contention over EU–induced claims produces an adjustment on the part of social actors to the more institutional routines that give them direct access to EU decision–makers—as Marks and McAdam predict; or
that once EU decisions are reached, and become final, implementation becomes the crucial venue for contentious politics, and this takes place in the national sphere, where it becomes part of the familiar repertoire of domestic contention.

IV. Preliminary Conclusions

This paper has reviewed the development of contentious politics in Western Europe during the recent period of Euro–integration. The data reported offer some insights into the distribution, the supranational focus, and the repertoire of contentious political events over the past decade and a half.

We have employed these data to evaluate the thesis that opportunities for political engagement beyond the state favor institutional over contentious forms of political action. For the most part, our findings suggest that, as the governance structures of Europe develop a supranational dimension, political actors have sought to follow. This is evident in the rising share of Western European contention that involves the European Union. In this respect, our findings suggest that domestic actors are eager to respond to—and shape—political developments at the supranational level, and are in the process of developing a repertoire appropriate to politics beyond the state.

We have also presented evidence comparing the nature of the repertoires employed in contentious events responding to the European Union to those that respond to domestic issues and actors. Our findings indicate a cleavage between these two spheres of political activism. We identify a pattern of responses to EU issues and institutions that have been more contentious for most of the past fifteen years. Only in the last three and a half years has this trend been reversed, with EU–related contentious activity developing a more routinized character.

We suspect that these findings affirm the importance of critical social and political events for explaining cycles of contentious activism. In the case of European integration, contentious political events follow both the pattern of policy development and deliberation [e.g.: in the realm of agricultural quota and subsidy levels], as well as the emergence of supranational institutions which, in turn, allow for more institutional approaches.

European protest has followed a different pattern in the more recent years of our data collection The meaning of these findings is still unclear. On the one hand, we could be seeing a “Marks–McAdam” effect in which domestic social actors are adapting their forms of claims making to the institutional style of the European Union. But another interpretation is possible: as issues are resolved at the supranational level, the process of national implementation leads to escalation in levels of domestic contentiousness.

Our evidence suggests that the process of supranational institution–building is producing a category of protests that do not conform to the traditional repertoire that grew up around the national state. Just as the consolidation of the national state in Europe produced a “new repertoire” (Tilly 1995), organized around the growing power of centralizing states, the consolidation of a new European composite state may be producing new routines of contention that bridge center and periphery and turn the national state into a pivot between irresponsible European decision–makers and mass publics that demand to hold someone responsible for their claims.

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Endnotes

Note 1: Reports from Liberation, 29 March, 1999; Le Monde , 30 March, 1 999. Our thanks to Virginie Guiraudon for pointing out this emblematic episode. See her’Weak Weapons of the Weak’ (1999) for further information. Back.

Note 2: Also see the papers collected in Justin Greenwood and Mark Aspinall, ed., Collective Action in the European Union (1998). Back.

Note 3: Source: Doug McAdam., Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, ch. 1, in preparation. Back.

Note 4: We employed the Kansas Events Data System (KEDS) and the Protocol for the Assessment of Nonviolent Direct Action (PANDA), and the Find, Read, Evaluate and Display (FRED) data systems to assign basic codes to these media–generated event reports. Back.

Note 5: To maximize the reliability of the data, we employed an iterative data development method. First, we used an automated coding system to “read” and assign basic events–data codes to every political event reported in our Reuters sources. Specifically, we employed the PANDA (Protocol for the Assessment of Nonviolent Direct Action) data system to establish a set of decision–rules that—in turn—guided a sentence parsing and coding program (named KEDS, for the Kansas Events Data System). We used these tools to code the location, source, event type, and target of political events reported in the media. Automated sentence parsing and coding programs offer the promise of constructing and coding contentious events data sets from electronic media sources in a comparatively short period of time. Intercoder reliability statistics on KEDS/PANDA indicate a human to machine convergence of upwards of 70 percent (Bond et. al. 1997). Still, automated coding is a developing technology, and it is appropriate to be cautious about its limitations.

Second, within this complete collection of event reports, we isolated a subset of some 33,727 KEDS/PANDA coded reports of political events that fit the following criteria: They occurred in one of the 15 EU member states between January 1, 1984 and February 28, 1998; were initiated by a private actor or group; and were contentious rather than routine interaction events.

Third, to develop customized data appropriate for our research questions, we returned to the Reuters articles underlying this set of 33,727 European contentious events and drew a sample for more intensive analysis using key word searches through the text.

Our key words identified over one hundred groups of European social actors and issues generating contention, as well as sixty–five forms of contentious political activity. Keywords were chosen to tap into the full range of actors engaged in contention in Europe that have been identified either in the case study literature or through our own earlier empirical analysis of the record of contentious politics found in media data. Our keywords identified not only groups likely to launch contentious political action in response to EU policies and institutions—such as farmers, fishermen, and—more recently—trade unionists and other labor and professional groupings; but also actors reported to be slower to engage supranational institutions—including national extremist groups, racist and anti–immigrant organizations, ethnic and religious representatives, migrant and undocumented workers, and representatives of the women’s, student, and jobless movements. Additionally, we included key–words to identify actors that historically have had both national and transnational presences, but that may or may not engage the EU through contentious political action, including the environmental and peace movements. As a means of cross–checking this list, we also drew sixty five keywords from the PANDA event dictionary to identify a wide range of forms of contentious action (c.f.: Bond and Bond 1998), these included forms of protests and demonstrations, strikes and boycotts, blockades and property occupations, and riots, violent clashes, and property destruction.

Through this method we generated the sub–set of 9,872 contentious political events (29.2% of the total) that are the empirical basis of the findings reported in this research paper. Each of these event reports was hand checked and coded, using an expanded range of codes identifying the issue or source sparking the contentious event, as well as identifying transnational dimensions of each event. Back.

Note 6: The task remains for students of European social movements to collectively establish and validate a master key–word list for electronic searches through media archives. Such a list would advance the compatibility of various research projects and would also allow for meta–analyses combining the empirical insights of individual projects. Back.

Note 7: While our evidence offers useful insights into the range of non–institutional political action in Europe, we have much less to say about the range of institutional, routinized political action. The strength of our empirical analysis, therefore, is focussed on the evolution of the repertoire of contention, comparing domestic with transnational contentious responses to EU–source grievances, and to transnational–source grievances more generally. Back.

Note 8: Footnote is missing. Back.

Note 9: Pigs and blockades evidently have an affinity for each other, for a week later:

A group of pig farmers tonight blockaded two supermarket distribution depots in protest at low pork prices. They prevented lorries entering or leaving the plant in a move which they claimed will affect supplies to stores in the North and East ... low pork prices meant they were losing money on every pig, while Somerfield was stocking increasing amounts of still cheaper foreign meat (Press Association Newsfile, 19 March 1999).

Back.

Note 10: Efforts to create scales to evaluate the contentiousness of political interaction events include Joshua Goldstein’s Conflict/Cooperation scale, and Will Moore and David Davis’ Conflict Scale from the International Political Interactions project. The most complete such undertaking is probably the ongoing IDEA project, undertaken by the Project on Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival at Harvard University. The basic structure of these enterprises is generally the same: a panel of experts is asked to evaluate and place dimensions of conflict behavior along a continuum (usually graded from conflict to cooperation).

For this research, we modified the Moore/Davis Conflict Scale to cover the extra–institutional repertoire of contentious political action. Principal modifications included removing state generated actions (e.g.: failure to form a ruling coalition in a legislature), and expanding the portion of the scale describing contentious political action.

On this scale, the majority of contentious political activity earns scores between moderately contentious and highly conflictual (on the scale this would correspond to the range between 400 and 870). The lower end of this range corresponds with peaceful protests and rallies. The upper extreme corresponds with riots, looting and violent demonstrations. Back.

Note 11: In order to perform a qualitative characterization of contentious actions over genetically altered products, Kettnaker assigned each protest event a score for the intensity of pressure that protesters brought to bear. We reproduce her scale below, and extend our sincere thanks for allowing us to refer extensively to her research:

Coding Schema for the Intensity of Actions

Intensity level	Example actions
0	Press release with no target mentioned, educational actions
1	Lobbying, petitions, small peaceful or symbolic demonstrations
2	Confrontational but legal actions
3	Confrontational, illegal actions such as occupations and blockades
4	Actions of light violence (limited property damage)
5	Actions of heavy violence (e.g.: destruction of exp. fields)

Source: Vera Kettnaker, 1999. “The European Conflict over Genetically–Engineered Crops, 1995–97,” Working Paper 99–7, Institute for European Studies, Cornell University. Back.