In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

315 15 The End of the Social Movement as We Know It? Adaptive Challenges in Changed Contexts The character of the nation-state has undergone important changes. Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht (2003) note that formal state authority has been relocated or transferred from one governmental level or branch to another. There has been uploading of responsibilities to supranational organizations such as the European Union (EU), the United Nations, or the WorldTrade Organization. Authority and responsibilities have also been downloaded to substate, regional, or local governments. Parallel to these vertical changes, lateral loading of power occurs, particularly from the legislative to the executive arena. Finally, states also offload responsibilities to nonstate actors or to the impersonal forces of the market.1 These trends—some of them more than others—pose important challenges to social movements as we have known them during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the lasting lessons of Charles Tilly’s work (e.g., Tilly 1995, 2004) has been that the rise of the social movement and the repertoires of protest that have been historically linked to it were intimately tied to the rise of democratic nation-states, parliaments, and political parties , on one hand, and the long-term trend of increased state intervention in markets and income redistribution, on the other. With the profound recent changes in these contextual conditions that gave rise to the birth of the social movement, the question is raised whether social movements can successfully adapt to these changed circumstances and maintain the salience and influence that they have had over the last two hundred years. Of course, it is highly unlikely that social movements and protest politics will entirely disappear, but it is not so sure, in my view, whether they will be able to avoid the fate of other children of the democratic, national, redistributive welfare state such as Ruud Koopmans ruud koopmans 316 political parties and labor unions, of which the formal–institutional skeletons still stand but which have lost much of their former mobilizing power and, with it, arguably also their influence on decision-making processes and public opinion formation. The interconnection between parliamentary and social movement politics is at the heart of McAdam andTarrow’s contribution to part IV of this volume (chapter 16), which stands very much in the Tillian tradition. By emphasizing how important linkages between elections and social movements are, they implicitly also raise the question what the erosion of the central position of national parliaments and parties means for social movements. In very much the same vein, della Porta (chapter 17) describes the challenges for social movement activists and scholars of a shift of power from the nation-state to international governmental organizations, from parties and legislatives to executives , and from states to markets. McCarthy, Rafail, and Gromis’s (chapter 18) claim about national-level demobilization and local-level mobilization in the United States also fits in this framework, as does Mayer’s (chapter 19) analysis of the “relative autonomization” of the social movement sector from the partisan and political field and its incumbents. In this chapter, I first make some remarks on the strength and uniformity of the transfers of authority identified by Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht (2003) and present some evidence on their consequences for social movements. Second, I raise some empirical questions about recent trends in mobilization that might indicate how social movements have adapted to new contextual challenges. Partial answers to these questions are presented in the four other contributions to this section. Let us begin by examining the degree to which various forms of “loading away” of authority from the nation-state have actually occurred. In two fields in which I have actively researched over the last decade, original claims of “denationalization” have turned out to be premature and exaggerated. In the field of immigration, 1990s theories of “postnational” rights and “transnational communities” (e.g., Soysal 1994; Sassen 1996) saw the nation-state no longer as a very relevant point of reference for claim making on immigration and cultural diversity, which were said to thrive on global human rights discourses, transnational linkages of immigrants, and support for immigrant rights against restrictive nation-states by supposedly more inclusive supranational spheres of governance such as the EU. In a five-country comparative study (Koopmans et al. 2005), we found, however, only limited references in claim making, whether by migrants or by other actors, to supranational institutions or treaties or, transnationally, to other countries. Instead, we found that immigrant claim making...

Share