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Scholarly debates over precarity are gaining unprecedented visibility across fields. From labor insecurity forming a growing dangerous class to the existential condition of vulnerability induced by millennial capitalism, precarity has become an object of both empirical study and theoretical reflection. While European social movements have been organizing and writing about precarity from the late 1970s to today, still, from the US perspective, the term precarity might be mistakenly taken as strictly a scholarly invention. "Precarious Writings" offers an important corrective to the ways that precarity has been taken up in anthropology and cognate disciplines, addressing the specific epistemological and political limitations of existing usages and returning the concept to its overlooked grassroots history in social movement struggles in southern Europe. By returning precarity to these activist roots, this paper makes the case for the recognition of social movements as knowledge producers as well as sources of theoretical insight and innovation in their own right. By failing to recognize precarity's development within contentious struggles, scholarly uses miss how the activist notion enables identity reformulations toward a kind of "precarity pride." That is, the politicization of insecurity has become a source for nurturing a fluid space of political creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporary contract migration schemes have experienced a revival in Europe. Such schemes mean that a significant number of migrant workers have limited access to rights and entitlements, let alone full citizenship. The temporary nature of their migration poses obstacles to traditional ways of organizing workers. This changing landscape of migration dynamics, thus, requires a changing landscape of migrant rights activism also. The focus in this paper is on collective activism by social justice organizations and their engagement with, and handling of, the subject matter of migrant workers' rights. Based on insights from scholars working on social movements and transnational advocacy networks, I argue that a transnational and trans-institutional perspective is required in addressing temporary migrants' socioeconomic and legal insecurities, and it is the concept of the 'network' which captures best these interactions between multiple actors at multiple sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that immigrant civic activism, which may at first glance seem to focus on diasporic ties and ethnic community building, becomes often a lever for transcultural capital and transcultural community building. The study is explorative of new repertoires and forms of transnationalism among sub-Saharan African immigrant activists in Europe. The findings suggest that immigrant civic activism, even if limited in size, proposes new types of transcultural societal networks and new forms of transcultural expression. In the first part of the study I discuss the theoretical background of transnationalism in migration studies and propose the notions of transcultural capital and transcultural community as working concepts. The second part of the study concentrates on the qualitative analysis of life story interviews with sixteen sub-Saharan African immigrants in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the dilemmas scholars can run into when they encounter the conflict between political activists and what can be proven by evidence. The dispute with historians revolves around what the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms “Silencing the past”. This is certainly true in the case of the Roma and genocide. What complicates the case is that a long-standing memory is part of a still ongoing political activist campaign to build a recognized memory for all of Europe’s Roma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electoral law in mans' European countries permits voters to indicate preferred candidates within a party list rather than to make a choice only between parties. This paper examines briefly the various voting arrangements which allow this and considers in some detail the patterns of their utilization and their possible consequences. Whilst such behaviour can be understood as a form of political participation it is evident that patterns vary and consequences are uncertain due to the complex interrelationship between the different elements in the electoral situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There seems little doubt that one of the processes experienced by the industrialized world in the post-Cold War era is that of a rise in Far Right movements and sentiments within political and social discourse. One of the issues around which many Far Right groups in Europe appear to be coalescing at the beginning of the twenty-first century is an antagonism towards Islam and Muslims within Europe (in some areas the Roma are more often the target of acrimony). In the UK, a new pressure-group emerged in 2009, the English Defence League (EDL), which has commenced a series of demonstrations across English cities, explicitly focused around an expressed opposition to the growth of ‘radical Islam’ within the UK. Most of these demonstrations have descended into street violence, often through clashes with the opposing Unite Against Fascism organization. This paper summarizes the results of some initial investigations into the EDL, and finds that, despite its protestations to the contrary, it conforms to many of the norms of a traditional Far Right movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent rounds of anti-neoliberal mobilizations in Europe have shown to be rooted in cities. Whereas Madrid has become a central hub in Spain's social movement, Athens has assumed a central and centralizing role in Greece. Through a case study on Athens, Greece, this paper aims to show how cities have become the driving force of these national movements. The argument maintains that political institutional factors and local networking processes among activists contributed to making Athens a central hub of this national movement. First, weak state traditions in Greece undermined the abilities of government officials to mitigate the most egregious effects of urban neoliberalism during the 1990s and 2000s. As this triggered a proliferation of struggles throughout Athens, weak state traditions also denied local authorities the capacities to co-opt and control aggrieved inhabitants. Second, as urban grievances spurred countless localized struggles, participants formed new ties to one another, learned how to engage in their broader public worlds, and discovered new ways to become political. At the same time, well-networked activists within these particularistic struggles assumed the role of brokers between localized mobilizations and the wider social movement space. This networking process permitted the city of Athens to become an important staging ground in national mobilizations. In sum, we maintain that political opportunities and urban networking processes combined in ways to make Athens a driving force of the country's anti-neoliberal social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the challenges of building capacity for collaborative participatory research with disabled people's organisations in European countries. The paper presents initial findings from the project 'European Research Agendas for Disability Equality' (EuRADE), which seeks to build the capacity of civil society organisations to participate in future research collaborations in partnership with academic institutions. The findings draw on survey data identifying the research capacity, needs and priorities of 68 organisations in 25 countries and focuses, in particular, on responses from national or European level representative organisations of disabled people. The findings demonstrate a high degree of motivation and readiness for collaboration in academic research but raise concerns about the readiness of academic institutions to engage disabled people as equal partners within social model and rights-based approaches. Respondent organisations identified a wide range of research needs that raise challenges for collaborative responses from the academic community. In this way, the findings provide a basis for developing user-led agendas for European funded research within the emancipatory paradigm, and indentify important opportunities for new international research collaborations between activists and academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on Dada poet Hugo Ball's diary Flight Out of Time to recompose his fragmentary writing on anarchism for two purposes: first, to establish the nature and extent of Dada's entanglement with the European anarchist movement; second, to demonstrate how Ball's attempts to articulate linkages between social and discursive orders led him to anticipate developments in poststructuralist theory. I conclude with an assessment of Ball's work in relation to contemporary anarchist praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper ventures an institutional explanation for distinct patterns of political contestation over the rise of activist investors such as private equity and hedge funds in Europe and North America. Taking issue with the dichotomous nature of the literature on varieties of capitalism (VoC) and the homogenizing assumptions of the literature on financialization, we argue that the specific patterns of politicization in the US, Germany and the Netherlands over the rise of activist investors result from the different institutional structurings of these countries' political economies. Although our observations fit the current (re)discovery of agency in the VoC debate, we argue that they point in the direction of a less voluntaristic view of agency than seems fashionable today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional literature on interest group behaviour presumes that private interests develop lobbying strategies based on the principle of effective allocation of resources. However, nearly 400 private interest groups actively lobby the Council of Europe, a classical intergovernmental organisation with weak decision-making powers, where no significant policy pay-off is expected to occur. This analysis aims to explain the seeming puzzle of private interest groups seeking to influence an institution which is generally perceived as having no strong decision-making powers in European political space. It does so by exploring three explanations from the existing literature, namely ‘policy overlap’, ‘venue shopping’ and ‘epistemic community’, and considers another explanation not hitherto fully developed, suggesting that the ‘ideological motivation’ of interest groups helps to explain their behaviour. Taking the ideological motivation of interest groups into account when analysing lobbying strategies can in fact shed light on certain lobbying preferences that would otherwise appear to defy the logic of interest representation. This paper therefore suggests that an ‘ideological motivation’ explanation potentially plays a crucial role in the analysis of the behaviour of any interest group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis, country by country, of sympathy scores given by European party activists from 58 political parties in 11 countries of the European Community to more than 100 different national interest groups. In all countries but one, the left-right dimension is the predominant criterion for interpreting the sympathy scores given. In Belgium, the exception, a regional (Flemish-Walloon) cleavage line is most important. The analyses were performed with a new adapted version of the unidimensional Coombsian unfolding model. Bad fit to the unidimensional model is not remedied by postulating additional common dimensions, but by identifying and removing stimuli (interest groups) that do not conform to the unidimensional unfolding model. The nonrepresentability of these stimuli can be attributed to lack of agreement among activists about the location of these stimuli on the left-right dimension. More specifically, certain relatively popular stimuli are perceived by most respondents as close to their own location on the left-right scale, and, conversely, certain relatively unpopular stimuli are perceived by most respondents as distant from their own location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The flexicurity approach to labour market policy may offer advantages for trade unions but also poses challenges, given their weak situation in policy formulation at EU level and in many member states. This article explores unions’ capacity to mobilize around flexicurity issues and to influence policy debates and outcomes in two member states. In the UK, flexicurity has low political salience and unions have little capacity for mobilization or influence, although they have linked flexicurity to campaigns on agency workers and restructuring. In France, unions have developed alternative proposals on making employment pathways secure and have succeeded in shifting debate towards these proposals rather than the Commission’s flexicurity recommendations, although differences with the positions of employers and the state have limited outcomes to date. EU policies provide only weak leverage, since trade unions’ ability to influence labour market policy depends on their position within domestic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that the contemporary revival of European municipalism should be examined within the rich context of the ‘long’ 20th century and the many and varied links forged between municipalities across national borders. In the first two sections we trace the emergence of the networked European municipality from the ad hoc individual connections made during the final decades of the 19th century, through the golden age of municipal internationalism during the interwar years, to the intensive cross-national cooperation pursued in the aftermath of the Second World War. We argue that the historical experience of these municipal connections was an essential prerequisite of the long-term move towards the multilevel networking experienced by European municipalities today. In the final section we focus on Eurocities, the main European municipal lobby group since the late 1980s, to show how municipalities have continued to utilise networking as their main tool within a supranational Europe, in effect to reinvent themselves within a globalised postindustrial economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role and significance of young activists in the process of international norm creation, diffusion, internalisation, and implementation have not received much attention in academic research. Yet, as a case study of Greta Thunberg campaigning on climate change has proven, children and teenagers can become significant norm entrepreneurs. Using the theoretical underpinnings of social constructivism, this article identifies and analyses Thunberg's actions to exhort pressure on states, members of governments and international organisations to further develop and implement norms that would help save the planet from the imminent climate crisis. Our research uses an exploratory and inductive approach in which qualitative research methods (a case study of Greta Thunberg) and discourse analysis are applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the role of voice or political activism in changing institutions and cost-benefit ratios for former Communist states in Europe becoming democratic market societies. Reasons why ordinary citizens participate in activist movements; Effect of discontent in political institutions; Comments on the cost of organizing protests on an European Economic Community level.

This article examines international collaboration between Western and Chinese feminists in the interwar decades. Focusing on the 1927-28 'mission to Asia' sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the article shows that, contrary to what existing historiography would lead us to suspect, neither feminist Orientalism nor colonial nationalism stood as a serious impediment to the formation of a truly international feminist alliance. Instead, European and Chinese women's varying experiences and memories of international conflict, and their varying understandings of the relationship between feminism, pacifism, militarism and political violence, defined the limits of global feminist collaboration in the late 1920s. The WILPF delegates, like many European women in the 1920s, were living in the shadow of the First World War, a conflict they condemned as futile and barbaric; their Chinese 'sisters' were living in the midst of a battle to determine the political future of their nation. For both sets of women, the question of women's emancipation was fundamentally entwined with broader national and international struggles. This article incorporates reports, personal letters and diaries of WILPF delegates as well as articles, speeches and letters by Chinese women to offer new insights into one of the earliest efforts to build a truly international women's movement and draw our attention to the centrality of warfare in defining the limits of global feminist collaboration in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activists are the engines of social movements. What spurs their activism? This article scrutinizes the role of civic participation in stimulating political action. We examine how the type of voluntary organization, scope of involvement and intensity of activity relate to political activity. Contrary to existing studies that collapse noninstitutional political activities into a single measure, we differentiate collective activities from individualized activities, enabling us to investigate how the type, intensity and scope of civic participation differentially stimulate political activities. Our sample included 14,787 participants in 71 street demonstrations. We show that membership and interest in activist organizations stimulates political activity, especially for those actively involved and especially for collective noninstitutionalized activities, while membership in leisure organizations only stimulates individualized political activities, but not collective activities. We therefore conclude that civic participation is a multifaceted phenomenon associated with various political activities in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the mid-nineteenth century European radicals developed contacts, relationships and networks. They organized activities and plans and propagated discourses and projects that transcended national borders. This article explores this transnational dimension of European democracy by analysing the case of Spain from around 1840, when the first Spanish self-proclaimed democrats began to organize, to the 1870s, when a certain national withdrawal took place among European democratic activists. It examines the journeys and contacts made by Spanish democrats as well as the extensive coverage of leading European activists that was published in Spanish newspapers, and considers how these connections were perceived by Spanish democratic activists. It is argued that contacts and networks contributed to configure a European democratic transnational political culture characterized by interrelations, exchanges and processes of cross-fertilization, through which the feeling of belonging to a national democratic community co-existed with a strong link to a wider European democratic family. The speeches, manifestos and projects of activists of various origins affected and greatly influenced each other, as well as shaping their socio-political views and strategic options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the strategic choices that radical activists face when a cycle of contention ends. It investigates the reorientation of the autonomous anarchists or left-libertarian activist milieu in Sweden after the riots at the Gothenburg summit in 2001, which ended a cycle of anti-globalization protests in Sweden. The article identifies five strategies by which this activist milieu attempted to reconstruct collective agency, build a new alliance structure, and renew the repertoire of contention: (1) rescaling and targeting of micro-politics; (2) moving from secluded to open communities; (3) rethinking collective agency with the help of a new movement theory; (4) reversing dominant discourses and opening up discursive space; and (5) redefining militancy and shelving of violent confrontation. The study builds on activist interviews and ethnographic research in Stockholm and Malmö. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While historiography has questioned the peasantry’s ability to produce ‘organic intellectuals’ of its own, the article claims that Antonio Gramcsi’s concept is applicable to peasant activists in late nineteenth-century Habsburg Galicia. It examines recent Ukrainian historiography of the period and argues that it has been interpreting social transformation taking place in the region primarily in terms of nation-building while imagining the nation as both constructed by elites and as a relatively uniform way of self-identification. Case studies of peasant activism and intellectual output reveal that peasants entered national politics and the national public sphere as a distinct voice representing and articulating a particular social class. Their intellectual contribution to the discussion has been universally recognized, while peasant activists used the nation not only as a venue for political action but also as an arena open to contestation and struggle. A closer look at peasant activists’ words and deeds provides an opportunity to rethink the process of nation formation, definitions of intellectuals and intellectualism, and the nature of the peasant class in the Habsburg monarchy after the great constitutional reforms of the 1860s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion is now politically active in ways that until recently were unthinkable. Both in Europe and elsewhere in the world, there are numerous examples of how religion has left its previously assigned place in the private sphere, becoming in some cases an important contributor to various political issues, conflicts and competitions. To understand what has happened in this regard necessarily involves a remodelling and re-assumption of our understanding of the public roles of religious actors. Until the 1960s or 1970s, theories of secularization had long condemned religious actors in both Western and non-Western countries to social and political marginalization. Secularization theory maintained that as countries modernized, religion would lose its public centrality. But, as this did not happen, there is now a need to rethink the public role of religion. This article is concerned with this issue, with a focus on Europe, using democratization, democracy and civil liberties as key examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 20th century is known for the unprecedented historical events that have marked the transformation of the political ideologies and of the social systems of many nations, influencing the individuals' destinies. We have witnessed the expansion of the Marxist and communist ideology and of the dictatorship-based systems, settled in many Central and East European states. Despite all these facts, the centralised leadership of the Iron Curtain did not manage to suppress the desire for freedom of the masses. Therefore, Poland is a good example as the resistance movement had started long before the complete destruction of the communist system. The Solidarność social movement was strongly influenced by the spiritual and ethical message of Pope John Paul II, delivered during his first visit in Poland, at the middle of 1979. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some international development agencies from Europe and North America, as well as some multilateral agencies, have played a critical role in instrumentalising religion in their development policy and practice. This article, written from the perspective of an activist-scholar, reflects on how religion has featured in these donor policies and the implications for advancing rights-based gender agendas in various contexts. It argues that development policy towards religion takes three broad approaches which are neither mutually exclusive nor do they unfold in a particular linear path. These approaches are to see religion as the main developmental obstacle, the only developmental issue to the exclusion of all others, and the primary solution to developmental problems. All three approaches are problematised in this article and are bound by their essentialisation of 'Muslim women' as a homogeneous group, as if bound by a common identity and a common set of needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of 9/11, debates about Islam and the West have taken some unprompted historical turns. In Europe and America many people who have spoken out, either as or for Muslims, have appealed to histories of Islam. Ordinary anti-war activists, public intellectuals, museum and gallery curators, even captains of industry: all have spoken of Islamic civilisation and empires of the past. These everyday representations of empires speak to postcolonial and cultural debates about the form and significance of contemporary colonial discourse, and also to controversies in academic and school history about memories of empires and languages of imperialism. Representations of the Islamic past are both reactive and pro-active. First, they can be read as interventions against the colonial present: contesting Islamophobic ideology in the context of the war on terror by rejecting allegations that Islam is careless about liberty and human rights, primitive and uncivilised. This interpretation is qualified, however , with the acknowledgement that these histories are not consistently anti-imperial; they can better be described as anti-western. But, more pro-actively, these histories also advance positive ideals of tolerance and citizenship, using Andalucía to substantiate claims that Muslims did not simply or grudgingly conform to European ideals of tolerance and liberty; they pioneered these values. Moreover , these historical claims are brought to contemporary debates about how to make tolerance work, identifying points of contact between British values and Islamic histories, and showing how Muslims can imagine not only adopting, but actively shaping British citizenship and other forms of belonging in Europe and America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the mid-1970s, members of the European integrationist movement worked hard to tap the remarkable energy of anti-nuclear activists. These globally-minded integrationists were convinced that grassroots anti-nuclear activism was an implicitly international, European project. Thus, integrationists adopted the anti-nuclear cause as a means towards their goal of developing Europe from the bottom up. This article explores the reasons local anti-nuclear activism was so appealing to globally-minded integrationists and examines the significance of this peculiar relationship for the re-shaping of the West German Left during the late-1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception in 2001 World Social Forum (WSF) has grown in numbers and drawn activists from all areas of the globe. It has also spawned a myriad of social forums around the world. But the pattern of participation within the WSF global event or within other forums has not been evenly spread in geographic or spatial terms. This chapter examines how and why social forum activism emerged in some places and not others. We map the social forum from the first WSF in 2001 through its proliferation and fragmentation over time as it has taken root at various levels-continental, national, regional and local. Then we provide comparative case studies of sub-global forums drawn from North and South America, Europe and Africa. We also compare different manifestations of social "forumism" along a number of dimensions. Drawing on comparative politics and its emphasis on the specifics of place and the role of context we discuss these patterns and the factors that might account for why these forms of resistance find barren or fertile ground around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we consider the forms of democratic participation that revolve around issues of religious faith and Islam. The context of such work is one in which a concern with the levels of participation in the political institutions of Western Europe and North America feature prominently in both journalistic and academic debate. The article speaks to debates that are concerned with the efficacy of specific forms of participation. In doing so we argue that we need to think carefully about the forms of social action that constitute participation in the democratic process. We also need to think precisely about definitions of the political with which people engage. If we take the political as a domain in which the ethical settlement of society is contestable, the sorts of mobilization around faith communities that this article describes are clearly a form of political participation. Yet the article argues that the reasons many become involved in these forms of social organization in contemporary East London is precisely because they are seen as less complicit with mainstream political institutions of the British state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article tackles the manifesto of the Party of European Socialists (PES), the organization of socialist and social democratic parties in Europe. The manifesto was developed by PES members under the leadership of Robin Cook. It recounts that PES launched the PES activists who exchange policy ideas, advocate on national issues, and collaborate Europe-related matters, and conducted a consultation process in 2007 with an aim of producing a pan-European manifesto for the 2009 elections. The PES manifesto focused on the areas of diversity, social Europe, environmental issues, and foreign policy. However, addressing the negative effects of globalization while aiming for a positive and dynamic living environment for citizens remains the main challenge for the PES manifesto.

Scholarship on the African-American diaspora in Europe has focused heavily on culture and tends to neglect the way that African Americans contributed to, as well as absorbed, political ideas and engaged in activism in these nations. Many European countries developed strong peace movements because of their uncomfortable position between two hostile superpowers during the Cold War. These movements played a pivotal role in uniting the strands of the civil rights and anticolonial movements internationally, and in supporting anti-war initiatives during the Vietnam era. Strategies and tactics emanating from African-American sources found a common language in a global discourse of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. The objective of the article is to show that in order to understand the ongoing transnational mobilizations of the European wing of the World March of Women (WMW) between 2000 and 2006 we also need to consider the politics of scale of the transnational social movements' mobilizations. The WMW is a transnational collective action that integrates women from grassroots organizations, labor unions, and leftist political parties in over 150 countries (approximately 6,000 groups) into a process of transnationalization of solidarities. Method. The method is based on the analysis of internal documents of the international and European wings of the movement, interviews with key actors and militants, and direct observations over the years 1998–2005. Results. The results are twofold: we investigate the shift in the politics of scale of the movement, from using the same scale as the political authorities with which they interact to the creation of its own scales of action (first part); we focus on the articulation of different scales of protest, showing how, by constructing networks and coalitions, actions, and demands under the WMW umbrella, grassroots women's groups are becoming empowered and are regaining political power over the definition, dissemination, and resolution of gender issues (second part). Conclusion. The conclusion is that this specific process of empowerment helps to explain why feminist activists pursue transnationalization actions despite all the material, ideological, and relational difficulties that accompany such actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fact that social stratification factors are closely related to different levels of political participation is a classical issue that has relevant normative as well as explanatory implications for the study of participation. Research on this topic has focused mainly on unequal participation in the United States and we know little about contemporary patterns in other contexts. This article uses data from the European Social Survey to explore the effect of various possible sources of inequality (gender, age, social class, education, income, ethnicity, and working status) on four political activities: voting, working with parties and action groups, attending demonstrations, and boycotting products. Overall, age, education, and social class emerge as the most common causes of distortion, while gender, membership in minorities, and occupational variables are less clearly related to participation. In conventional political activities the differences are more predictable in the direction of the disadvantaged, while demonstrators are in some respects undistinguishable from the general public. Finally, the fact that socioeconomic inequalities in turnout are unambiguously visible in most European countries stands in contrast to past research and deserves further attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) as well as its relationship with right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and conservative ideology was tested in three Flemish samples. In the first study conducted on a sample of ordinary voters (N = 208), a newly developed LWA scale was found to be internally consistent and to show high construct validity In the second study, another voter sample (N = 264) and a sample of political activists (N = 69) were tested. In the two samples of ordinary voters, only a few people obtained high LWA scores. Moreover, the aggression and submission items did not load on distinct components and LWA was positively related to RWA and cultural conservatism and negatively to economic conservatism. Conversely in the political activist sample high LWA scores were common among left-wing extremists and evidence was found for a two-dimensional LWA aggression-submission structure. LWA was negatively related to RWA, cultural conservatism, and economic conservatism. The concept of LWA and its theoretical underpinnings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first European Social Forum (ESF) held in Florence, Italy from 6 to 10 November 2002 brought together a diverse array of so-called 'anti-capitalist' movements including trade unions, new, radical unions and social movements to contest the agenda of neoliberalism as it is presented within and beyond processes of European integration. This article evaluates the ESF and the possibilities for cooperation between labour and social movements in forming joint strategies against neoliberalism. It is often assumed--rather than demonstrated--that established trade unions are an obstacle to more radical contestatory practices of direct-action social movement resistance. With detailed empirical analysis, the article assesses whether there was a continuation of reformist practices within unionist activities at the ESF allied with a focus on the often-contrary sensibilities of social movement opposition. The activities and joint strategies of labour and social movements at the ESF are therefore examined, not least their resistance to both neoliberalism and its ultimate extra-economic enforcement through military power as evidenced by the war on Iraq. Whilst conclusions about the efficacy of future cooperation are cautious it appears that the horizons of resistance are expanding not only within Europe but also at the global level. § Andreas Bieler is senior lecturer in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham, UK. His current research project deals with the positions of trade unions on Economic and Monetary Union against the background of global restructuring and how this impacts on the emerging European model of capitalism. He is author of Globalisation and Enlargement of the European Union and co-editor (with Richard Higgott and Geoffrey Underhill) of Non-State Actors and Authority in the Global System as well as (with Adam David Morton) of Social Forces in the Making of the New Europe . ¶ Adam David Morton is lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University and visiting lecturer in the Department of International Relations and History at the Universidad de las Américas (Puebla), México. His research focuses on issues of state formation, resistance, and economic restructuring in Mexico and Latin America. He is author of Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony, Imperialism, and Resistance in the Global Political Economy (Pluto Press, 2006) and he has published in various journals, including Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Review of International Studies, Review of International Political Economy and Third World Quarterly . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years following the end of the cold war in 1989, Western feminist scholars and activists expressed disappointment in the failure of the newly democratic Eastern and Central European countries to sustain mainstream women's rights movements and achieve a marked increase in women's participation within the new political parties and political life in general. The authors, historians of Hungarian women's movements with a broad East-West perspective, offer a novel explanation for this phenomenon. Following an outline of the main stages of Hungarian women's movements and women's political participation, they focus on two instances in twentieth-century Hungarian history that resulted in a rapid transition from anti-democratic regimes to liberal, parliamentary systems: the 1918 bourgeois democratic revolution and the 1990 re-introduction of free parliamentary elections. Examining these two turning points in recent Hungarian history, separated by 70 years, as case studies of women's activism, the authors propose a new, critical re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres, offering a timely if co-incidental comment on the recent debate in the Journal of Women's History . 2 Research for this article had been completed by the time of the publication of the Spring 2003 issue of the Journal of Women's History , 15 (1), devoted to "Rethinking Public and Private". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the ideology of Jon Pierre and the participants of the European Political Parties' Middle-Level Elites (EPPMLE) Project. The political actors in competitive democracies are found to be more involved in politics than mere voters. The project is created as an exploration of the whole series of different substantive curiosities. Pierre argues on the defining party activists, stating the standpoints and attitudes of a certain organisational stratum. He puts emphasis on commitments, beliefs, socio-psychological character of organisations and motivation.

During the last four years a research project has studied the 'Middle-Level Elites' of sixty European political parties. Like most previous studies in this area the main objective of the project was strictly party activists' attitudes: no attention was paid to their actual behaviour in the party organisation. Other studies of recent date indicate however that party activists, despite their often more radical or extreme stands on many issues, often submit to the authority and dominance of the party leadership in the intraparty policy-making process. Thus, attitudinal data seem to tell us very little about the actual behaviour of the party activists. The article first presents the results of some recent studies on the attitudes of party activists. Secondly. these findings are related to studies on the actual behaviour of the activists. When synthesising these different types of observations, we can develop a typology of intraparty conflicts, as well as one of party activist behaviour. Together, these two typologies represent different models of intraorganisational behaviour. Finally, by using empirical illustrations drawn from recent studies on party activist attitudes or behaviour, some hypotheses deduced from the theories of May, Hirschman and Michels are introduced to suggest paths for future research and to point to some of the most salient problems in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protecting diffuse interests has long been recognized as a central challenge in any system of governance, and has proven problematic in the European Community (EC) as well. Indeed, a number of analysts have argued that the EC is a 'businessman's Europe,' privileging concentrated and mobile capital over other interests and precipitating a deregulatory 'race to the bottom.' EC institutions, however, present opportunities as well as risks for diffuse interests such as environmentalists, consumers, and women. In particular, the institutions of the EC-characterized by both multiple tiers of government and by a separation of powers at the Community level - provide diffuse interests with multiple points of access, which they have used effectively to secure the adoption and the implementation of EC policies. These arguments are illustrated through a brief examination of EC policies in the areas of environmental protection, consumer protection, and women's rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in 1989. He considers the outcomes of revolutions in the region. He relates his personal life in Netherlands and his work as activist. He comments on the German reunification. He believes the democratic revolutions of CEE were happening against a global environment.

The article discusses the works of French historian, philosopher, and activist Michel Foucault who is believed to have made significant contributions to the study of European governance. It notes two major effects of Foucaults' works and cites a personal perspective that his works have made an attractive and exciting area of study. It also examines briefly the history of Foucault's study and the contribution of several authors to his works.

Intellectuals can better be defined as a new class, in order to recognize their rising to the status of a potential social force in this century. Their contribution to political change and the transformation of social values has been a notable phenomenon of modern times, yet slow to claim the attention of sociologists. Least of all has it been realized that the social role of intellectuals is not limited to just being critics of society, they can also become believers in their own right. The two books, "The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals," by William Barrett and "Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith," by James H. Billington, both testify to the importance of "men and women of ideas" in recent history and strengthen the case for the causal importance of ideas in social and political affairs. Billington seeks to establish or explore further the historical role of a group of European intellectuals and political activists, while Barrett's goals are to recall the life of the mind in a small circle of New York intellectuals, their conflicts and major personalities among them.