Social movements and Europeanisation: framing ‘responsibility’ and ‘responsiveness’ in times of multiple crises

ABSTRACT

Movements on the Right and Left have long contested EU politics and policy choices. By analysing public opinion data and the positions of right- and left-wing movements, the article highlights increasing criticism of European integration on the Right, and a persistent critical vision on the Left which challenges the content of EU policies rather than the existence of a European polity. Far-Right movements have moved from Euroscepticism to radical EU-refusal, while the Left has remained anchored in critical Europeanism. We present how these debates are linked with public opinion before looking in some depth at frames in Left and far-Right social movements. We then reflect on how these frames have targeted or reconfigured the meanings attributed to EU responsibility. While addressing how social movements voice and bring citizens’ opinions into the policy-making process (responsiveness), our research illustrates the contested nature and construction of the idea of ‘responsible government’. We find a clear line of demarcation between the Left and the Right concerning the legitimate territorial scale of the EU’s responsibility: while the Left calls for responsibility to expand beyond the continent to the global scale, the Right criticises the intrusion of the EU into national policy making as illegitimate.

KEYWORDS:

• Framing
• European integration
• left-wing movements
• far Right
• globalization

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (Philadelphia, 2023) and two workshops at the Université libre de Bruxelles (Brussels, 2022/2023). We are grateful to participants in these events and discussants for helpful feedback. We also thank the editors of of the journal and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Finally, we are also grateful to Amandine Crespy, Tiago Moreira Ramalho, and Vivien A. Schmidt for their help and support throughout.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data sources are properly referenced in the empirical discussion section.

2 Specifically, we analysed the Instagram feed of Fridays for Future Europe across 2020 and 2021, since this is the main communication channel for this group, and the most likely to communicate ideas on European integration. For Extinction Rebellion we analysed the Global Newsletters for the years 2020 and 2021, since this organisation had no European branch until part way through the analysis period.

3 Country distribution across European regions is as follows: South (CY, ES, GR, IT, PT, TR), North (DK, EE, FI, IS, LT, LV, NO, SE), East (AL, BG, CZ, HR, HU, ME, MX, PL, RO, RS, RU, SI, SK, UA, XK), and West (AT, BE, CH, DE, FR, GB, IE, LU, NL).

4 Wording of the left-right ideological self-placement scale reads as follows: ‘People sometimes talk about the Left and the Right in politics. Where would you place yourself on the following scale where 0 means Left and 10 means Right?’ (ESS, 2022). The simple 3-category variable was recoded as Left (0/3), centre (4/6), and Right (7/10) values.

5 We replicate Figure A1 for the demonstrators-only subset. Demonstrators are those who declare to ‘have attended a demonstration in the last 12 months’ (ESS, 2022).

6 All Bloc Identitaire quotes are authors’ own translations.

7 See https://www.dw.com/en/what-is-behind-the-covid-protests-across-europe/a-60074426.

8 Blockupy was formed in 2012 through the coordination of various German networks. Its main purpose was the organisation of a blockade of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt am Main, but quickly evolved in the construction of a socio-spatial imaginary of a ‘Europe from below’ (Risager, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

Martín Portos acknowledges support from the Conex-Plus Marie Curie framework (G.A. No. 801538) and the Ramón y Cajal grant (G.A. No. RYC2021-032179-I), which is funded by the MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the European Union’s ‘NextGenerationEU’/PRTR.

Notes on contributors

Donatella della Porta

Donatella della Porta is Professor in Political Science and Founding Dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy.

Louisa R. Parks

Louisa R. Parks is an Full Professor in Political Sociology at the School of International Studies and the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, Italy.

Martín Portos

Martín Portos is Ramón y Cajal Fellow in the Department of Social Sciences at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.