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Abstract
According to the political opportunity structure (POS) framework, mobilization tends to intensify when channels of access to the authorities open, leading the protest actors to hope for success. This happened during the protest campaign aimed at the reopening of the occupied Social Centre ‘Experia’ in Catania (Italy), after the eviction by police, because unexpectedly moderate centre-left political actors supported mobilization and the centre-right local government accepted to put the issue on the institutional agenda; nevertheless the social centre was not reopened. In order to explain why the mobilization was unsuccessful, we analysed the protest campaign combining the POS framework with the approach to strategic dilemmas by James Jasper; if opportunities and restraints of the political system influence the choices and behaviours of unconventional actors, in their turn the actions and decisions made by movement activists affect the POS. In this case, the social centre activists filtered the constraints and opportunities of the local political system through their cognitive lenses and faced some dilemmas (Naughty or Nice?, Extension, Shifting goals), whose strategic choices extended or reduced these constraints and opportunities, thus affecting the opening and closure of the POS. The failure of the solution attempted by the social centre activists to keep both options of the various dilemmas, i.e. the strategy of ‘double track’, demonstrates how it is very difficult to be successful by maintaining dilemmas rather than making the strategic choices they demand, when the local institutional POS is substantially closed.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Jim Jasper, the anonymous reviewers of this journal and the comrades-colleagues of the SQuatting Europe Kollective for the valuable insights and comments provided in different stages of this paper. We would like to thank and dedicate our work to the comrades of the CPO Experia and to the Social Centres militants of Catania.
Notes
1. The ‘antagonistic left’, formed by groups and activists as autonomists, post-autonomists, Leninists, anarchists, etc., in Italy is distinguished from the ‘radical left’, which is composed by the political parties placed on the extreme left of the political-institutional spectrum, as SeL (Sinistra e Libertà – Left and Freedom), and those currently without representation in Parliament: PRC (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista – Refoundation Communist Party), PdCI (Partito dei Comunisti Italiani – Party of Italian Communists), Greens, etc. (Piazza, Citation2011, p. 330).
2. Lulu movements are promoted by local residents against public policies concerning the use of territory, as the construction of large infrastructures, incinerators, refuse sites, military bases, etc. Most famous Lulu movements in Italy are: the No Tav (high-speed rail line) in Val di Susa, No Bridge on the Messina Straits, No dal Molin in Vicenza and No Muos in Sicily against the US military bases (Piazza, Citation2011; della Porta & Piazza, Citation2008).
3. We both participated actively: G.P., as a supporter of the SC, was a member of the Defence Committee and took part in all public protest events (rallies, assemblies, sit-ins, etc.); V.G., as full member of the Experia Political Collective, participated also in all internal meetings, contributing in writing leaflets and documents, and affecting the decision-making process.
4. The choice of calling the Social Center Experia derived both from the name of the former cinema, then Ex-Esperia, and from the Latin verb experior, that means ‘to experiment’, ‘to test’.
5. In Italian, ‘aggregazione sociale’.
6. Popolo della Libertà (People of Liberty), the former centre-right party of Berlusconi.
7. La Sicilia is the main daily newspaper of Catania, with a conservative orientation.
8. The quotations of the documents and newspaper articles are translated from Italian by the authors.
9. National public TV news.
10. Being the property an ancient building, it was under constraint of the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage of Catania, the local branch of the same Department of the Sicilian Region (the co-owner of the building). The Superintendent justified the eviction because the building should have been used by Ersu for ‘services’ to university students, but the director of that Regional Body replied he knew nothing about the eviction and the ‘Ersu had no future plans on that area’ (La Sicilia, 1 November 2009).
11. The unexpected positive coverage by the main newspaper, usually not friendly towards Experia squatters, was due to the ‘lucky accident’ that the journalist responsible for the case was one of the few progressive and left-wing reporters of La Sicilia and she wrote the articles without pressures from the direction.
12. PD (Democratic Party), the main centre-left party in Italy.
13. CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro – Italian General Confederation of Labour) the main union, with moderate left leaning.
14. Local newspaper on line.
15. No one had remained within the SC during the night because the air was unbreathable for a long period of time (the opening made was too small and all the other doors and windows were sealed with iron plates).
16. In Italy there are several political parties represented in the City Councils, both in majority and in opposition, and each has a head/coordinator called ‘group leader’ (in Italian ‘Capo Gruppo’).
17. MpA (Movimento per l’Autonomia – Movement for Autonomy), the regional party led by the then Sicilian Governor, R. Lombardo.
18. The address of Experia.
19. Main local TV news.