Contentious Europeanization: The Paradox of Becoming European through Anti-Patent Activism

Abstract

Through an ethnographic account of a pan-European activist campaign against software patents, I investigate how European identities emerge through contention rather than consensus. I apply anthropological literature on Europeanization and on intellectual property rights in order to rethink conventional theories about the relationship between European integration and the formation of European identity. I develop the term ‘contentious Europeanization’ to denote a set of identities and approaches to Europe that are intimately linked to EU policy-making, yet purport to develop an alternative Europe. More broadly, I argue that information technology and intellectual property law operate as frameworks for the formation of contentious political subjectivities.

Keywords:

• Europeanization
• political subjectivities
• information technology
• patents
• technological activism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to anti-patent activists and free software advocates for providing material for this work. The research for this essay was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, French Embassy in Washington, and New York University. The fellowship at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University enabled me to complete the writing. I thank Susan Carol Rogers, Rayna Rapp, Herrick Chapman, Faye Ginsburg, Sally Engle Merry, Biella Coleman, Priscilla Song, Allison Alexy, Ayako Takamori, Ingrid Erickson, Samir Chopra, and the journal reviewers for advice and corrections in the text.

Notes

Most conversations and texts cited in this article were in French. I am presenting my translations.

I refer to them as ‘activists’ in the rest of the article.

Free software is distributed with licenses that afford users rights that are habitually reserved for copyright-holders. The users of free software can legally run, copy, modify their software, and redistribute their modifications.

While most EU member states ratified the European Constitutional Treaty (ECT) by a vote in the national parliament, France attempted to ratify the ECT by a referendum. My analysis is based on my fieldwork among French free software advocates, who were a (vocal) subset of all French activists mobilized against software patents.

A promising exception is recent literature on social movements, which suggests that ‘the increasingly salient controversies over the EU [are] not only (or prevailingly) a conflict between nationalists and Europeanists, but rather between different visions of Europe, real and imagined’ (Porta & Caiani 2009:24).

For example, regional, local and national agendas accompany or appropriate EU policies in ways that run parallel to, and in some ways contest, EU objectives (Bellier & Wilson 2000).

French newspapers regularly confused anti-patent movement with free software advocates and simplified the campaign against software patents to a confrontation between Microsoft and free software activists. See, for example, ‘Brevetage des logiciels: l'UE trouve un accord’, Libération, 8 March 2005.

Each patent lasts for 20 years.

FFII had adopted the motto ‘freedom to innovate and compete in the digital economy’ and claimed that patents are state-granted monopolies that threaten such freedoms, ‘a means of quelling competition and free-riding on the creative work of others’ (FFII 2005). FFII website presented 2000 software companies across Europe that have signed the petition against software patents and endorsed the FFII to represent their interests. This legitimized the FFII as a representative of European businesses. Such rhetorical and political positioning allowed anti-patent activists, allied experts, and politicians to duck accusations that their efforts obstructed innovation and market liberalization in the EU.

Activists also highlighted India and China as a counterpoint to the US-led expansion of intellectual property rights. These countries had banned software patents, which allegedly made their burgeoning software industries more competitive than the US one.

The European Patent Office (EPO) is accountable to the administrative board of the intergovernmental European Patent Organisation.

For example, MEP Michel Rocard claimed in an interview for a French IT managers' magazine that through procedural and political manipulation, votes in the European Council tended to benefit (US-owned) corporate interests (DI 2005).

In the same vein, the 1994 international TRIPS agreement affirmed that ‘all fields of technology’ could be patented, but did not explicitly mention whether that statement included software.

A key figure of French Socialist Party's politics in the 1980s, Michel Rocard has held many important positions in French political life: a former presidential candidate, a former prime minister, a former head of Socialist Party, he became a Member of the European Parliament in 1999. Although his position in the European Parliament is a retreat from national politics, French audiences are familiar with his name.

Rapporteurs are members of a Committee in the European Parliament charged with compiling a report about deliberations of that committee.

Anthropologists studying open source and free software developers have highlighted novel forms of public engagement that combine software expertise, interest in law, and various ideas about democratic engagement online (Kelty 2008; Coleman 2009). While I find this argument compelling, and while there is some evidence that free software ideals and practices have inspired other activists, including those in the movement against corporate globalization (Juris 2008), in this article I leave aside the analysis of the precise ways in which FFII activism was linked to – and different from – free software advocacy in order to focus on the consolidation of a European consciousness around a highly specialist subject.

In the first round of the 2002 French Presidential election, the far right-wing candidate Le Pen gathered more votes than the Socialist contender. Le Pen's appearance as a candidate in the runoff election shocked many French and provoked debates about the weight of protest vote and general political disenchantment.

The same claim was invoked already in the 1990s to explain the tensions between the Commission and the Parliament in formulating EU biotechnology policy (Jasanoff 2005).