CIAO DATE: 1/99

Building a Composite Polity: Popular Contention in the European Union ₁

Sidney Tarrow

Cornell University
March 1998

The Institute for European Studies

 

Abstract

While much research has focussed on the interest group process growing up around the institutions of European union, far less attention has been given to the contentious forms of politics appearing at the base of the process of European integration. Part of the problem lies in models of integration that either focus on single levels of the European Union — states or supranational entities — or on vertical policy networks and domains. But another important part results from the difficulty of systematically analyzing the reactions of ordinary people to EU directives. This paper both reports on a new, computer-assisted method of studying European contentious politics and draws on a case study of recent industrial conflict to demonstrate how supranational actors, national political elites, domestic social actors and the press are beginning to interact to produce a composite — and contentious — European polity.

 

"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" (1994:277-278). 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 state in Europe really is in decline. The question is; "what is taking its place?"

Two older, whole-system models seem to claim too much — respectively, for supranational authority and for state autonomy — while a newer one — that of vertical policy domains and policy networks — leaves too much out. Let us sketch these three models before proposing a fourth one, based — of all things — on a reflection on early modern Europe. I will argue that the European Union is best seen as a composite polity, which I define — following historian Wayne te Brake — as a system of shared sovereignty, partial and uncertain policy autonomy between levels of governance, and patterns of contention combining territorial with substantive issues.

A. Supranationalists and Intergovernmentalists

Since the publication of Ernst Haas's The Uniting of Europe in 1958, some political scientists have posed a supranational answer to Tilly's question. In their view, groups with transnational interests are producing a supranational entity through a process of what Haas called "spillover". As the European Community expanded, groups of producers would begin to find one another across national boundaries. This process would snowball as networks formed among them. A later generation would have said that the "transaction costs" across borders would lower to the point at which those with something to sell or buy would find their optimal partners regardless of state boundaries. Haas suggested that, ultimately, "the interests of states will change by the existence of these groups and [as a result] cooperation will move in new directions" (Fligstein and Mara-Drita: 6).

Despite later disclaimers, when we consider the development of the dense tissue of transnational lobbying groups and trade associations that flourish in Europe today, Haas's model has proven remarkably prescient, (Schmidt 1997:145). But in focussing so centrally on transnational transactions and inferring from them supranational outcomes, Haas gave little attention to the deliberate choices of supranational authorities and to the equally deliberate reactions of national states. Had his book been written in 1998, instead of 1958, he would no doubt have had more to say about the inter-actions of states, social actors, and supranational authorities.

As convinced as supranationalists like Haas were of the inexorable logic of European integration, a school of "intergovernmentalists" (sometimes called "statists" or — in the jargon beloved of international relations specialists, "neorealists") — is equally convinced of the staying power of the states that make up the European Union. For these scholars, "cooperation among national states can occur only when interests coincide or when states can trade off in a series of agreements" (Fligstein and Mara-Drita:7).

Intergovernmentalists do take issue with "conceptions of international relations which focus on relations among unitary state actors". But like the supranationalists, they focus on a single locus of power — in their case, the national state (Marks, Hooghe and Blank:345). They predict that, when conflicts within national states arise over European policies, these are fought out domestically and their outcomes forwarded upward by national governments. The typical form of resolving disputes in the EU — the treaty-making power of the Council of Ministers — lends support to this view (Keohane and Hoffmann 1991). But — like the integrationists — intergovernmentalists ignore how internal processes in these states relate to the supranational level.

B. Policy Domains and Policy Networks

More institutionally-sensitive than the supranationalists and more vertically-oriented than the intergovernmentalists, sociologists Neil Fligstein and Iona Mara-Drita wish a plague on both houses. These theories, they argue, miss the elements that can be provided by a culturally-informed institutional theory. Their view is worth citing in detail:

Neither the neorealist (e.g. intergovernmentalism) nor the neofunctionalist (e.g. supranationalism) accounts can theorize about how actors find collective solutions in bargaining situations marked by differing and incompatible interests. Both theories are limited by the presupposition that actors know their interests and bargain for institutions in line with these interests (p. 7).

Unlike most sociological institutionalists — who are content to describe the rational mimicry of successful or "legitimated" forms of organization (Powell and DiMaggio 1991) — Fligstein and Mara-Drita do not stop with the rational foundations of collective action. They draw on cultural perspectives to show how new institutional projects and new identities emerge through the political process (p. 27). But whose project and whose identities? The actors in the story they tell of the adoption of the European Single Market are mainly Europe-oriented elites, and in this they share the approach of the supranationalists and the intergovernmentalists — they leave domestic politics out altogether.

Indeed, when it comes to the broader structural underpinnings of the integration process, Fligstein and his collaborators are strangely silent. ₂ When he characterizes the integration process as a whole, (writing, this time, with Jason McNichol, 1997) Fligstein follows Laumann and Knoke (1989) in focussing on the separate vertical "policy domains" that have grown up around the EU's major policy responsibilities. Fligstein and McNichol write:

Policy domains generally form when there exists a constitutional agreement to create legislation, a collective definition of what the issues are and who gets to be an actor, and organizational capacity and procedures to mobilize the production of new rules in the domain (p. 2).

This narrowing of focus to policy domains enables these authors to avoid the intergovernmentalist/supranationalist trap of focussing on either the national or the supranational levels of power. Interest groups in these domains operate "both at home and in Brussels" (p. 33). But by focussing so single-mindedly on vertical policy domains, Fligstein and his collaborators provide a structurally-thin account of the dynamics of integration that leaves out both the horizontal relations between policy domains and the cross-level conflicts among domestic actors, state actors and supranational authorities.

Fligstein and McNichol are not alone in narrowing the focus to vertical policy areas. Building on the policy research of the 1970s and 1980s, a broad group of political scientists have used the related concept of "policy network" to describe and explain variations in the pattern of interest intermediation in the EU. Writing in the prestigious review, West European Politics, John Peterson writes that "policy network analysis can help us assess both how much has changed in specific policy sectors, as well as the tightness of fit between intergovernmental bargains and EU policy outcomes" (1997:1). ₃ But like Fligstein and McNichol, these authors specify the integration process vertically, following the traces of the domains of policy areas defined by EU treaties. They too provide no framework "with which to understand and explain major structural changes in the political economy of states" (Sbragia 1997: 8).

How policy domains and policy networks relate to the "steering function" of the EU (Sbragia 1997); to one another; to conflicts of interest and value within European states; or to the increasingly broad processes of contention that grow up around them is outside the policy-network account. There is need for a more complex, multi-tiered and conflictual account of the integration process.

C. Multi-Tiered Governance

The newer focus on "policy domains" and "policy networks" has at least one thing to recommend it: its recognition that multiple centers of power operate across different vertical domains of decision-making in the European Union. If we combine this focus on verticality with a broader attention to the horizontal linkages between policy areas, and with the contested nature of decision-making in areas of European policy, we can only be struck by how dispersed, shifting, and multiple the relations of power and alliance formation are becoming in Europe today.

Political scientists Gary Marks and his collaborators propose a model of multilevel governance that seeks to encompass these various levels and interactions (Marks, Hooghe and Blank 1996). For them, the emerging European polity has the following major characteristics:

• Like policy-network and policy-domain scholars, they argue that "decision-making competencies are shared by actors at different levels" (p. 346). But unlike them, they broaden the focus to officials at both the supranational and national levels;
• Like the supranationalists, they agree that "collective decision-making among states involves a significant loss of control for individual state executives" (ibid.). But unlike them, they do not see this process as inexorable or linear;
• Like the intergovernmenalists, they agree that subnational actors contest European policies within national states, but disagree with them in rejecting the view that subnational actors "are nested exclusively within them". Instead, "subnational actors operate in both national and supranational arenas, creating transnational associations in the process" (ibid.)

Marks and his collaborators go further than their opponents in complicating the relations within the European integration process and in bringing a broader range of actors into the process. But in specifying that participation only through the creation of transnational associations, they stop at contention's edge. Lacking from their account are both non-state actors who contest European policy outside of institutions and associations, and the construction of European conflicts and identities outside constituted institutions. Nevertheless, these scholars come closest to the idea of the "composite polity" that I will put forward in this paper. ₄ In Figure One, I contrast that idea with the three approaches outlined above, in terms of the multiple vs. single locus of how power is conceived and the degree of vertical integration posited in each approach.

Figure 1. Four Approaches to European Integration

In the next section, I will outline the concept of the "composite polity", taking off from the work of historian Wayne te Brake on early modern Europe. Next, I will present the method that Doug Imig and I have adopted to examine contentious politics in the European Union, one which I argue will help us to go beyond the institution-centric approaches that currently dominate thinking about the EU. Finally, I will describe a recent case of industrial conflict in Europe — the Renault plant-closing in Vilvoorde, Belgium — to illustrate both the impact that ordinary people's conflicts can have and how those conflicts are constructed by the media.

 

I. Composite Politics in Early Modern Europe

"At the beginning of our period," writes Wayne te Brake of 16th-18th century Europe, "most Europeans lived within composite states that had been variously cobbled together from pre-existing political units by a variety of aggressive `princes'":

Since the dynastic "prince" promised to respect the political customs and guaranteed the chartered privileges of these constituent political units...Ordinary people could choose not only when and how to challenge the authority of their rulers, but also where...It was often in the interstices and on the margins of these composite early modern state formations that ordinary people enjoyed their greatest political opportunities (1997:12). ₅

For two hundred years in much of Europe, "almost all European states above a very small scale were segmented" (Tilly 1994:278). Ordinary people "acted in the context of overlapping, intersecting, and changing political spaces defined by the often competitive claimants to sovereign authority over them" (te Brake: 13). Some, like England and Wales, or the mosaic of pays d'élection and pays d'état in France, were made up of contiguous territories under a single prince. Others, like the checkerboard of units that made up the Habsburg empire, were physically separate and boasted strong local rulers making competing claims on people's loyalties — as in Catalonia and Portugal (te Brake: ch. 2).

Most of the local units in early modern Europe — by analogy, the equivalent of national states today — were ruled by, or were at least under the sway of powerful local elites — bishops, merchant aristocrats, dukes, and rival princes. Ordinary people, oppressed by either nationalizing claimants or by their local rulers, did not simply "resist" overweening claims from above, as in the textbook version of state consolidation. As rationally opportunistic as their betters, they sometimes made common cause with local rulers against expanding kings and at other times hazarded alliances with them against their local oppressors. The latter, similarly, could ally themselves with the people against nationalizing claimants, or, worried at the threat of social unrest or religious rebellion, align themselves with them against the people. "In composite states," observes te Brake, "political opposition usually entails political alignment as well" (ibid.).

Figure Two reproduces the three modal forms of political alignment that te Brake finds within composite states by studying 150 years of European contention. They are what he calls:

• local consolidation between local rulers and ordinary people, which produced either sovereign city-states, as in Italy, or confederated provinces, as in the Netherlands and Switzerland;
• elite consolidation between nationalizing claimants and local rulers, creating "layered sovereignties", as in Catalonia and the Empire; and
• territorial consolidation between national claimants and ordinary people at the cost of local elites, as in France or Britain. ₆

Figure 2. Alignments of Political Actors Within Composite States. Source: Wayne te Brake. Making History: Ordinary People in European politics, 1500-1700. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

To be sure, many of te Brake's paths proved unstable or reversible. A city-state like Florence eventually accumulated so much territory that it evolved into a national claimant before falling under Austrian control; the Habsburg empire collapsed under the weight of its dispersed acquisitions and its rulers' inability to create a governing structure to unite them. With the creation of the least-composite state of all in 1789, France's patchwork of pays d'élection disappeared for good. But for a longer period than we often recognize, political contention was not simply fought out within territories by ordinary people against local elites, or between territories among national claimants — though there was plenty of that — but among a triad of actors whose playing field was both intra- and extra-territorial.

But the picture is even more complex than the one that te Brake draws:

First, as nationalizing claimants began to win out, they created both links and commonalities across jurisdictions. As vertical cleavages among ordinary people, local rulers, and national claimants were reinforced by cross-territorial alliances national social movements eventually formed: sustained interactions of challengers against authorities, taking advantage of the opportunities caused by interelite conflicts and based on modular repertoires, social networks and common frames of meaning. ₇ That the modern social movement organization first appeared in a state that had gone furthest towards territorial consolidation — Great Britain (Tilly 1995) — should warn us not to anticipate that every act of resistance, rebellion or protest in Europe today will take form as a transnational social movement. ₈

Second, properly for a student of an age when the boundaries of the political were shifting, te Brake focusses mainly on alignments and conflicts. But as European politics nationalized and some conflicts and alignments became habitual, a new category of interaction developed: routine struggles between actors whose regular conflicts became part of institutional politics. Particularly as broader functional alignments developed across territorial lines, corporate bodies — landholders, those paying the same taxes, members of minority churches and diets — interacted contentiously but routinely in the struggle for territorial dominance. Out of these routine struggles grew institutions and around them came states in the modern meaning of the term.

Figure Three attempts to formalize te Brake's "territorial consolidation" model, adding these two elements of cross-border social movement formation and routine struggles, to show how complicated contention in these polities might be.

Figure 3. Contentions Politics in a Modular Territorial Consolidation

There are implications of the composite polities of early modern Europe for European integration. If I have understood the burden of te Brake's study correctly, it was both the threat of increased pressures and the uncertainty and jockeying over both territorial boundaries and group rights that opened up opportunities for contention for ordinary people. He writes of:

The relative instability of political alignments within the polity; the availability to popular political movements of influential allies; and the degree of political division among established political elites.

All of these were reinforced by "multiple and overlapping structures of political opportunity" (pp. 12-13).

 

II. From Early Modern to Late Modern Europe

The pattern of opportunistic alliances and outcomes within broad structural parameters that te Brake identifies has strong analogies with what is happening in Western Europe today. ₉ As in the earlier epoch, the model of "territorial consolidation" favored by most advocates of a united Europe — eg., "supranationalism — is not the only one available. Routinized struggles between elite players — eg., intergovernmentalism — are an important part of the picture, as is the formation of vertical policy networks in the various vectors of EU policy. But all of these leave ordinary people and their conflicts out of the equation.

In early modern Europe, when boundaries were shifting and local rulers were pressed by nationalizing claimants, ordinary people took advantage of the opportunities created to either align themselves with their national states against supranational claimants or with the latter against the former. Routine forms of struggle, like diets and estates, provided institutionalized outlets for some of their claims, provided they could find powerful patrons or legally-constituted representatives. Provided they were backed by common identities and frames of meaning, cross-territorial social movements eventually developed in different states around the most broad-ranging of their claims. Not only was contention both territorial and functional; it involved various axes and various alliance structures.

There are some important lessons for students of European union in the checkered histories of Europe's early-modern composite states:

First, the process by which consolidated polities are created out of composite states is long, complex, and often follows different trajectories. In early modern Europe, some of the paths of the eventual losers looked for a time as if they were winning (eg., the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century), while low points in the careers of eventual winners would not have predicted their victory (e.g., the House of Savoy in the eighteenth).

Second, contentious politics involved a triad of suprastate claimants, local rulers and ordinary people in widening relationships. At the outset, many of these must have looked like purely local conflicts — both to participants and to those who observed them. Territorially distinct clusters of ordinary people, whose struggles against their immediate rulers were independent of each other, would later congeal into broader movements that could challenge these rulers and forge alliances across territorial boundaries. In early modern Europe, these twisting trajectories arose amid the tangle of alignments, conflicts, and routine struggles of the Reformation; in late-modern Europe, they may be emerging as parallel but separate responses to the policy directives of the European Union. Whether they will coalesce into transnational social movements is an empirical question.

Third, we cannot hope to grasp this dynamic of change by tracing only the elite policy networks associational networks that develop vertically within distinct policy domains or the associational networks that organize around them — although that is an important part of the picture. Lobbyists swirling around the various Directorates General in Brussels gain access to power and make inputs to EU regulations, but that is only part of the picture. It is in the horizontal linkages and broader communities of discourse between policy domains that an eventual European polity will have to be formed.

Finally, since the paths to consolidated states were so deeply couched in intra-national conflicts and institutions, ordinary citizens who fought alongside local elites against nationalizing claimants, or who lent support to the claims of the latter against the former, were not likely to think themselves players in a struggle to establish national states. Had they answered questions on some early-modern Eurobarometer poll, would their views on state formation have helped us to predict the eventual victory of some claimants over others or the shape that eventual states would take? We need methods of examining the political dynamics of European integration that are systematic as public opinion polling, but which connect actors and institutions at all levels of the emerging European polity. It is to proposing such a method I now turn.

III. Popular Politics in the Study of European Integration

There are strange ironies in the annals of research. Over thirty years ago, the modernists in political science rejected what was then called the "legal/institutional" approach handed down from scholars like Wilson, Bryce, and Friedrich. They joined a behavioral revolution, carrying out systematic studies of voters, parties, and legislators (Eulau 1963). In the study of domestic politics, that revolution — by now so thoroughly domesticated that the term "behavioral" can hardly be found in the literature — led to immense strides in our understanding of mass politics in democratic states, both in its electoral forms and in the less structured world of contentious politics (see the reviews in Barnes 1997 and McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 1997).

But worms turn amazingly fast in the annals of research. In the study of European integration, there has been a recent re-embrace of institutions. In part for descriptive purposes, and in part to find a venue for the previously-institutionless abstractions of formal theory, both area specialists and formal modelers have avidly turned to studying the institutions of Europe. In Table 1, I have "coded" the content of five panels that were dedicated wholly or in large part to the European Union at the 1997 American Political Science Association meetings. It shows that the largest proportion of contributions were either inter-institutional or dealt with elite behavior within the institutions of Europe. Only a quarter dealt with mass politics at all and of these, half were limited to describing survey evidence about public attitudes towards European integration. Hardly the triumph of the behavioral revolution! ₁₀

Table 1. "Content Analysis" of European Papers at the 1997 APSA Annual Meeting, by Focus of Analysis

	Institutional	Inter-Institutional	Public Policy	Elite Behavior	Mass Behavior	Inapp./Uncodable
(N.)	2	5	2	6	4	2
Note: With apologies to the authors, this "content analysis," which is meant for illustrative purposes only, is based only on a reading of only the titles of their APSA papers and includes only papers given at panels whose stated titles included the word "European."

Note: With apologies to the authors, this "content analysis," which is meant for illustrative purposes only, is based only on a reading of only the titles of their APSA papers and includes only papers given at panels whose stated titles included the word "European". —

There are good reasons why scholars should fasten onto the institutional and elite levels of European integration. First, until quite recently, the construction of Europe was exquisitely an elite process of institution-building. Second, these institutions are quite new; and nothing pleases students of comparative politics and international relations like the "new". Third, the European Commission, the site of the actual regulations that contribute to European integration, has every incentive to publicize the outcomes of its deliberations. But the obsessive focus on institutions has left the examination of ordinary people's actions a residual category. Like the traditional historian's focus on kings and princes in the period of national state-formation in Europe, focussing only on elites and the institutions they construct and ignoring popular politics leaves us in the dark, not only about the reactions of ordinary people to what has been decided for them, but about the processes of institutionalizing routine conflicts and the eventual growth of European citizenship.

How can we better operationalize these questions? Given the dispersed and rapidly changing nature of European integration and the sectoral professional commitments of most scholars of contentious politics, the bulk of research will inevitably take the form of sectoral case studies. Already, the literature on farmers, ecological, women's, immigrants', and labor movements' activities within the European Union is taking this familiar form. Given the costs and logistical difficulties of carrying out reliable cross-national and cross-sectoral studies of European contention, this is probably both inevitable and productive (Marks and McAdam, in press). However, lobbying the Commission is not equally available to all social actors, nor does it often go outside the parameters set for it by European authorities. It will be difficult to illustrate — let alone test — whether and how European forms of popular contention are developing without developing appropriate research tools. One such tool recommends itself at least as a starting point: the computer-based coding of on-line press agency data archives.

A. Contentious Event Analysis ₁₁

Arising from the systematic study of the 1960s ghetto riots and from the study of strike behavior, the analysis of contentious events has recently gained ground in comparative politics and social movement sociology. As Mark Beissinger puts it in a recent paper, "events data are explicitly temporal, and therefore give us some understanding of how forms of collective behavior relate to key developments within the polity" (in press: 3). Provided they are based on comparable sources and methods, events data are also cross-nationally comparable, allowing us to compare the rates of change and the diffusion of collective action across space and over time. The method is therefore theoretically suited to analyzing dynamic processes with differential cross-sectoral and cross-territorial rates of change and interactions.

In practice, however, finding continuous and comparable sources of events data suited to this purpose is not easy. In addition to all the well-known methodological problems involved in the use of media data (Danzger 1975; Franzosi 1987; McCarthy, McPhail and Smith 1994; Snyder and Kelly 1997), we face the difficulty of finding a source that will provide comparable data both cross-nationally and over time, allowing the researcher to reliably study variations in contentions politics as the European Union develops. In addition, given the "thickness" of European political and economic transactions and the volume of information available, we face a seemingly crippling problem of data overload — making the mechanical work of collecting and coding events data a daunting problem. ₁₂

Responding to these concerns, Doug Imig and I set aside the tried and true methods of manual coding of "hard" or microfilm sources such as those used to study American ethnic conflict (Olzak 1992), the comparative study of "new" social movements (Kriesi, et al 1995), Italian protest cycles (Tarrow 1989), the history of British contention (Tilly 1995), and began to experiment with a recent advance in computerized data collection and coding of on-line data sources developed by international relations scholars. Specifically, we employed an automated coding software protocol called PANDA (Protocol for the Assessment of Nonviolent Direct Action). PANDA is essentially a computerized codebook which establishes a set of decision-rules to guide a sentence parsing software program (named KEDS, after the Kansas Events Data System developed by Philip Schrodt of the University of Kansas), which "reads" and codes reports of political interactions from on-line news reports. ₁₃

Using a version of the PANDA automated coding system, we are constructing a dataset which, as of May 1997, had drawn from Reuter's World News Service media accounts of 19,330 discrete Western European contentious events between October 1983 — when Reuters' went on line — and March, 1995. By hand-checking the machine-coded data against the original news accounts, we are increasingly confident that the system is turning up real and reliable variations in collective action within the countries of the European Union. ₁₄ Parallel work by another research team appears to be showing similar results (Reising, Francisco and Huxtable 1997; Reising 1998).

B. First Findings

There is food for skeptics, nationalists, and statists in the earliest concoctions from our kitchen. For within this set of some 19,000 odd events, the overwhelming proportion occurred in the confines of — and contested the actions of rulers or other groups within — discrete national states. Only some 791 events — or 4.1 % of the total — involved contentious interactions between domestic social and political actors protesting actions taken in the name of the European Union. States and their channels of contention overwhelmingly still structure the main lines of contentious interaction in Western Europe today.

Figure 4. The Ratio of Euro-Centered Cententious Politics Source: Analysis of Reuter's Data

But turning more closely to the subset of 791 Euro-centered contentious events, we find evidence that suggests a growing tissue of contentious interactions involving the European Union in some form or another. Over the twelve year period we have so far studied, Figure Four shows an increasing ratio of Euro-centered events, compared to the larger set of contentious events that our coding procedure picked up. If the inflections indicated in the graph are to be believed, they suggest that the European Union is increasingly recognized by domestic social actors as both an antagonist and a likely target for contention.

But how do they behave when they do so. One way of specifying our hypothesis about the rise of European contention is to examine direct protest against European authorities — whether it takes place in Brussels or on national territory. If that hypothesis proves true, it would lend strong credence to the supranationalist model of integration. Another way would be to look for cross-border alliances among similar social actors — much as cross-territorial social movements developed in early modern Europe in response to supra-local rulers' attempts to create higher level states.

But in a multilevel, composite polity, protests against EU policies may be more likely to target familiar and accessible targets than the institutions of the Union themselves. This is because of the distance and unfamiliarity of the latter and the proximity and familiarity of the former. To nested social actors like organized workers (Turner 1996), who have adapted to national opportunity structures and institutions (Krasner 1995), the European Union may seem an unpromising target. Farmers as well appear to direct their protest more often against national states or competitors across borders than at the distant European authorities they hold responsible for their economic plight (Bush and Simi, forthcoming).

Indeed, when we began to examine the subset of events that our computer search identified as "European," we found that actions launched directly against the institutions of the EU constituted a small minority of the total, suggesting that the reach of domestic social actors seldom goes beyond their national boundaries. Most of the actions motivated by claims against EU policies and directives targeted other — usually domestic — actors and institutions. In social movement terms: although the source of the protests was the European Union, their targets were domestic.

Three examples will suffice to illustrate this point: First, the vast majority of French winegrowers' protests — though triggered by EU policies — have been aimed at the French state (Mann 1990). Second, the "tuna war" launched against French and British trawlers by Spanish fishermen in 1995, though mobilized on the high seas, was actually aimed at forcing the Spanish government to defend their interests more vigorously (Tarrow in press). More recently, German construction workers, underbid for jobs by southern European workers coming in under EU regulations, have protested — not directly against Brussels — but against the German government. These results are highly preliminary and tentative, but they give us the first systematic evidence that there is — so far — more of a Europeanization of domestic politics than a transna-tionalization of social movement activity. If this is so, then the decline of the national state predicted by some scholars (Badie 1997; Cerny 1995) is less probable than a growth of what we might call the "pivot function" of national rulers within an emerging composite polity. Faced, on the one hand, by authoritative supranational directives and, on the other, by pressures from restive citizens within their national boundaries, these leaders are involved in increasingly complex two-level games. While domestic pressures irritate national officials, they may have the latent function of fortifying them against their supranational interlocutors and state partners. Like the radical flank effects seen by social movement scholars in domestic politics, feckless farmers, turbulent fishermen, or enraged workers may fortify elites confronting faceless bureaucrats and indifferent partner states.

This argument suggests that the pattern of European polity consolidation may — in te Brake's terms — remain "local" [that is, national] for some time to come, with national rulers according only so much authority to supranational claimants as the pressures from ordinary citizens permit. But three kinds of changes hint at the emergence of both cross-territorial and center-periphery patterns of alignment. First, EU authorities or court decisions occasionally intervene directly in domestic conflicts. Second, other actors — notably the press — may be beginning to play an increasing role in "Europeanizing" what might otherwise be seen as purely domestic or economic disputes. Third, if ordinary peoples' conflicts are triggered by the threats and opportunities of political conflicts, then they are probably not isolated acts of resistance but are imbricated with elite-level bargaining. All three patterns may be seen in the episode with which I will close.

 

IV. From Strike to "Eurostrike" ₁₅

On February 27th, 1997, Louis Schweitzer, President of the ailing French auto firm, Renault, announced the imminent closure of the company's plant in Vilvoorde, Belgium (Le Soir, 28 February 1997). ₁₆ The first angry reaction to Renault's announcement came from Belgian Prime Minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene — as it happens, the member of Parliament from Vilvoorde — giving rise to accusations in the Flemish press of French "chauvinism" (Le Monde, 5 March, 1997). Belgian ire rose further when it became clear that the French government had been apprised of Renault's plan at least six weeks prior to its announcement and that the firm was hoping to use European Union structural funds to expand its plant in Valladolid, Spain just as it was closing Vilvoorde (Le Monde, 6 and 8 March 1997).

Though the closure of Vilvoorde would involve only Belgian workers, it took only a matter of days for the European Parliament to express outrage at what some of its members called an "anglo-saxon" restructuring. Even normally-deadpan Commission President Jacques Santer called the decision "a serious blow to European confidence", urging the workers to sue the company for violating European labor law (IHT 10 March, 1997). Embarrassed at what seemed an attempt to move Belgian jobs to Vallodolid, the Spanish government quickly withdrew its plan to subsidize the Renault expansion in Spain and the French government — which could not have been ignorant of Renault's decision — began to tut-tut about the lack of consultation and the brutality of the move. If Belgian, French, and EU officials were ruffled by Renault's move, that was nothing compared to the reactions of Vilvoorde's workers. Almost immediately following the announcement, the heavily-unionized workers occupied the plant, "kidnapped" a large number of cars due for shipment, and began a series of public protests that would make Vilvoorde synonymous with a new term in the European political lexicon — "the Eurostrike". These actions quickly crossed the border, bringing a Vilvoorde "commando" into France and French Renault workers to Belgium to demonstrate alongside their Belgian colleagues. ₁₇ When the Belgian unions organized a mass demonstration in Brussels, they were joined by leaders of the French left and by delegations of French, as well as Spanish and even Slovenian Renault workers. As Schweitzer was hung in effigy and a giant wickerwork figure carried by the demonstrators made nazi salutes, Belgium's Christian Democratic union leader, Willy Peirens, told the crowd; "This is a signal of anger and indignation; a signal of solidarity against brutality" (Reuters, March 17, 1997). Figure Five indirectly shows the path of protest events by plotting the number of Agence France Presse dispatches from the announcement of the closure to the close of the episode with the plant's partial closure in late July.

Figure 5. Vilvoorde Coverage, Agence France Presse Dispatches, February 27th - July 29th, 1997 Source: Lagneau and Lefebure, "La Spirale de Vilvorde: Mediatisation and Politisation de la Protestation," Inistitut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris 1997

Not only contentious direct action and European Union responses, but national courts, acting under European law, soon entered the fray. Two years earlier, the firm had appointed a European Works Council. The EU regulations required firms contemplating layoffs and plant closures to consult its EWC prior to taking such decisions. When they did not, the workers took the firm to court, both in France and in Belgium. When both courts found in the workers' favor, more pressure was put on the French government.

The joint pressure on the French government from Belgian politicians, the EU, the French and Belgian demonstrators and from the courts was too much for French Prime Minister Juppé; on March 20th, he appeared on television to announce that 800,000 francs per worker would be disbursed for the measures of reconversion and accompaniment to the plant's closure (Le Monde, 26 March). ₁₈ By July — with a new Socialist government in place in France, the workers agreed to the compensation package Renault was offering (Le Monde, 6-7 April 1997). What had begun as a strike of workers from one country against a multinational firm brought European law to bear through national courts, involved national supranational institutions, and was redefined as a "Eurostrike" — not the first in the EU's history, but the first to be clearly defined as such. Let us close with a reflection on how this event was constructed by the press.

A. Constructing a "Eurostrike"

From the beginning, the printed and video media of all three countries — Belgium, France, and Spain — gave detailed coverage to the conflicts surrounding the events at Vilvoorde. ₁₉ Particularly the dramatic protest actions engaged in by the workers — and their tendency to combine across the French-Belgian border — gained the attention of the press. The sight of Belgian Catholic unionists linking arms with previously-Euroskeptical French Communists in the streets of Brussels lent both a transnational as well as a politically-ecumenical air to the episode.

Part of the reason for the press' attention was the vigorous debate in course all over Europe over the conditions for different countries' entry into the EMU; another related to the rate of unemployment — at a postwar high in that year; and another was undoubtedly the imbrication of the controversy in the election campaign that was beginning in France at the time. ₂₀

But another important explanation of the event's extensive press coverage relates to the dramatic forms of protest mounted by the workers and their allies — from the mass marches of workers from several nations in the streets of Brussels, to Belgian "commandos" kidnapping completed cars and erupting into Renault plants across the border, to busloads of uniformed Belgian and French workers milling under the windows of the firm's Paris headquarters (Lagneau and Lefebure 1997:20-23). It was between March 2nd and march 17th, when the largest number of demonstrations were mounted, that the newspapers gave the greatest amount of coverage to the Vilvoorde case.

But far more important than the quantity of coverage of the Vilvoorde episode was its framing as a "European" issue. ₂₁ From February 27th on, the press focussed largely on the management vs. labor issues in the conflict, with some attention given to the pronouncements of European and national officials but a major focus on the layoffs. This focus was no doubt related to the fact that the majority of coverage was reported by "social" reporters and came from trade union sources (Lagneau and Lefebure, p. 38). But from the end of the first week of March, we begin to see the events described as a "Eurostrike" (ibid., p. 43). As the AFP journalist who first used the term wrote in her dispatch of March 5th:

...the brutal announcement of the closure of the Renault factory of Vilvoorde has given rise to a major first the appeal to a "euro-strike".

Interviewed a few months later, she recalled that

We had already analyzed the events from the point of view of "the social glass is broken"; That played out well, and thus, the idea was to project the idea a bit more into the future to widen the subject. That was how the "eurostrike" was born (Lagneau and Lefebure, p. 43).

Given the role of press agencies in sending dispatches to their subscribers, the daily press was not far behind. On March 6th, Libération used the term "eurogrève"; on the 7th (published on the 6th), it appeared in Le Monde, and on the 7th and 8th, it appears in Le Parisien, in the Communist journal L'Humanité, and the conservative France Soir. By the evening of the 7th, both France 2 and TF1, two of the three major television channels, are using the term (ibid.).

Though originating with the French wire service, by the 8th., the term "eurostreik" had appeared in the Berlin Tageszeitung; by the 12th., it was being called a "euro-demo" in The Guardian, a "europrotesta" in Rome's La Repubblica, and a "euromanifestacion", followed by a "euro pic-nic", in Madrid's El Pais (ibid. pp. 44-5). Once defined as "euro-", various aspects of the protest were re-framed along the same lines. Lagneau and Lefebure find in the French press of the next few days the terms "eurolicenciement," "eurotrouille", "europatronat", "eurosyndicats", "euromanif", "euroconflit," and, finally, "eurocolère" (p. 44).

What is most interesting about the diffusion of the "euro"-ization of the Vilvoorde episode is that there is little evidence that the workers originally saw their actions as "European". But like social movement activists everywhere, they were quick to take advantage of the political opportunity that the intervention of the European Union, the participation of Spanish and French workers, and the framing by the press offered them. "We didn't throw ourselves into this action saying, ´This is for Europe!', said a Vilvoorde union delegate in an interview; "The reflection came later (ibid., p. 41). The press, the politicians, and the primary actors converged in construction a conflict between workers and management into what may well prove a watershed in the "Europeanization" of industrial conflict.

 

V. Conclusions

Like the composite states of early modern Europe, Europe today cannot be grasped with a simple model — whether it be supranational, intergovernmental, or policy-based. True, there are important dimensions of "steering" by European authorities (Sbragia 1997) that have taken important areas of competence away from national states. On the other hand, national governments continue to reserve crucial areas of decision-making to themselves and to make binding agreements through intergovernmental treaties. And there is no doubt that in important policy domains, decisions are made without reference to central authorities. But the three models that have emerged from these trends fail to capture some important dimensions of Europeanization. As Borneman and Fowler conclude their survey of "Europeanization":

...we would do better to drop the search for a totalizing metaphor and the analogies with a European superstate or a United States of Europe. Instead, we suggest dealing with the EU as a continental political unit of a novel order, and with Europeanization pragmatically as a spirit, a vision, and a process (1997:510).

Some other lessons can be drawn from what has been argued above:

First, as the last section suggests, actors with no institutional position in Europe — like trade unionists, local politicians and the media — are actively participating in Europeanization, conceived not as a process of institution building, but as "a strategy of self-representation and a device of power" (Borneman and Fowler 1997:487). The media did not simply report on what happened in Vilvoorde; they responded to the broader pattern of conflict and alignment by framing an issue that had come onto the agenda as an industrial dispute in terms of the broader issue of "social Europe." Whether this will help to redefine future cross-border plant closings as "European" - or extend to sectors of industry without substantial labor intensity - it is too soon to tell.

Second, in the Vilvoorde story, the EU entered a contentious encounter not only as a formal authority but as a set of political players, providing opportunities for and constraints upon different actors. This was evident in both the intervention of the EU's Director-General for Competition (in the event, a Belgian), and in the statements issued by the European Parliament, condemning Renault's actions. It was also evident in the unions' use of EU law to take the firm to court — and in both countries involved in the case.

Third, while the struggle of the Vilvoorde workers and their French allies seemed to take this issue well outside the boundaries of institutional politics, was actually part of the political process. It is only by analyzing such actions and their interactions with significant other players that we will be able to understand the degree, the direction, and the models of the Europeanization of Europe.

Finally — and this is a point that has been cordially ignored throughout this paper — what is happening in Western Europe today should be seen in the context of the growth of a transnational tissue around interstate and intergovernmental politics in the world in general. Around the institutional nodes of the Helsinki accords, around the United Nations, NAFTA, and environmental and industrial standards regimes, we are seeing "transnational advocacy networks" form. While they do not engage in highly contentious politics, they nevertheless imbricate institutional and non-institutional actors across borders and between levels of the international systems in intricate and dynamic ways (Keck and Sikkink 1998).

With few exceptions, Europeanists have been so absorbed in the transformation of their own polities that they have paid little attention to the emerging literature on the "new" transnational relations. This literature is not only bringing the subject of transnational relations "back in" (Risse-Kappen, ed. 1995); it is linking it to social movement research (Smith, Chatfield and Pagnucco 1998; Tarrow 1998, ch. 11); its advocates are devising new constructs to understand its relations to non-governmental organizations (Keck and Sikkink 1998); and they are relating it to the new institutional sociology (Boli and Thomas, in press). If students of social movements and comparative politics and international relations scholars are reading and profiting from one another's work, perhaps both fields will profit from the exchange.

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Endnotes

Note 1: This paper was prepared while the author was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. It is based in part on my own reflections and in part on joint work in progress with Doug Imig (UNLV and Center for International Affairs, Harvard), under National Science Foundation Grant # SBR 9618281. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Contentious Politics (Ron Aminzade, Jack Goldstone, Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly) and to Doug Imig, Beth Kier, Gary Marks, John Meyer and Alberta Sbragia for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Back.

Note 2: For an analysis of contentious politics that looks towards the integration of rationalist, culturalist and structural perspectives, see Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly (1997). Back.

Note 3: For a more thorough review and critique of policy network analysis, see the reviews in Marks, Hooghe and Blank, 1996, and in Sbragia 1997. Back.

Note 4: For authors taking a similar approach, in addition to Marks, Hooghe and Blank 1996, see Marks and McAdam,in press; Sbragia 1992, 1993, and 1997; and Schmitter 1992 and 1997. Back.

Note 5: I am grateful to Wayne te Brake for allowing me to quote from his soon-to-be published major study, Making History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U. of California Press. Back.

Note 6: I have simplified te Brake's "trajectories" somewhat for the sake of brevity. For the entire paradigm of outcomes, see Chapter 5, and especially the discussion of Figure 5.1. Back.

Note 7: Readers familiar with the social movement literature will recognize the language and the Tillian reasoning in my Power in Movement (1994 [1998] and in Tilly's Popular Contention in Great Britain (1995). Back.

Note 8: I have laid out a typology of forms of transnational contention in chapter 11 of Power in Movement, revised edition, Cambridge University Press, 1998. Back.

Note 9: For a sketch of a strategy of comparison based on the search for analogical causal mechanisms, see Charles Tilly, "Kings in Beggar's Raiment," and McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, "Democracy, Undemocracy, and Contention." Back.

Note 10: The onset of the European Parliament is changing this lack of systematic behavioral analysis of the institutions of Europe. As an example, see George Tsebelis' study of conditional agenda-setting in the EP (1995).] Back.

Note 11: This part of the paper is drawn from Doug Imig and Sidney Tarrow, "From Strike to Eurostrike: The Europeanization of Social Movements and the Development of a Euro-Polity," presented to the 1997 European Community Studies Association, Seattle, Washington, May 29 - June 1, and published in revised form as Center for International Affairs Working Paper No. 97/10, Harvard University, 1997. I am grateful to Imig for agreeing to its use here. Back.

Note 12: Charles Tilly, who has done more of this kind of work than anyone, once estimated to the author that it took his team of researchers at the University of Michigan a year of work per year of information coded to produce the dense dataset on British contention that eventually appeared in his Popular Contention in Great Britain. Tilly used seven press sources; but even in my study of popular protest in Italy from 1965 - 1974, based on only one national newspaper, it took my team of researchers four years to gather the data on eleven years of daily newspaper articles. Other researchers have, I am sure, had similar experiences. Back.

Note 13: For a discussion of these methods and their potential contributions, see Bond, Jenkins, Taylor and Shock, 1997. For information about KEDS, contact Philip A,. Schrodt, Department of Political Science, University of Kansas, lawrence KS 66045; for information on PANDA, contact Doug Bond, Program on Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival, Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138. Back.

Note 14: For initial presentations of our findings, both quantitative and qualitative, see Imig and Tarrow 1996 and 1997. Additional results and evidence from a manually coded complement to our machine-coded data will be presented at a panel of the American Political Science Association in September 1998. Back.

Note 15: The bare bones of this story appear in Imig and Tarrow, "From Strike to Euro-Strike," but I owe the press agency and interview data analysis to Eric Lagneau and Pierre Lefebure's unpublished report, "La Spirale de Vilvorde: Mediatisation and Politisation de la Protestation; Un cas d'Europeanisation des mouvements sociaux", to whom I am grateful for their research, carried out in the framework of the Imig/Tarrow project on the Europeanization of Movements. Also see Cultiaux 1997. Back.

Note 16: For a more detailed analysis of the strike, see Imig and Tarrow, "From Strike to Eurostrike: The Europeanization of Social Movements and the Development of a Euro-Polity." Back.

Note 17: When Schweitzer announced that he would meet with the Renault Works Council at the firm's Paris headquarters, a convoy of 80 buses transported 3,000 workers in their red and green union jackets to Paris, where they called for solidarity strikes (Reuters, 11 March 11, 1997; Le Monde, 13 March, 1997). The Belgian workers followed with a surprise "commando action" on the 13th across the border to the Renault plant in Douai.] Back.

Note 18: These figures turned out to combine both "social measures" and the loss of value due to the abandonment of Renault's investment in the plant, but Juppé's tactic was enough to disarm the unionists. Back.

Note 19: There was also attention from the German and Italian press, but of a less sustained nature. See Lagneau and Lefebure, pp. 35-6. Back.

Note 20: Although the Managing Director of Renault had been inherited by the Gaullist government from its Socialist predecessors, this did not prevent the Socialists from using the Vilvoorde closing to remind French workers that — under the right — their jobs too were at stake. Back.

Note 21: The following section draws on the work of my French collaborators, Eric Lagneau and Pierre Lefebure. I thank them for their careful and insightful documentary and interview study, which will be reported in greater length in subsequent papers. Back.