Protest Actions against the European Union, 1992–2007

Bibliographic Data

ID8041532
AuthorsK Uba (0000-0002-0715-6492), Fredrik Uggla (0000-0002-4315-5999)
Year2011
Volume34
Issue2
Pages384-393
Publication date2011-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWest European Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0140-2382 • E-ISSN: 1743-9655
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01402382.2011.546581
OpenAlexW2126068515
LanguageEN
Citations received15
References cited13

In spite of the enormous amount of attention devoted to the process of European integration, the study of protest actions that take the European Union as their target is only incipient and suffers from a lack of up-to-date systematic information. This research note presents new data on protests in the member states which, directly or indirectly, targeted the Union between 1992 and 2007. These data show that the increase in protest mobilisation anticipated by previous scholars has not taken place and that the advances in formal European integration have not been matched by any corresponding increase in protests targeting the EU. Acknowledgements The research presented in this essay was financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. We would like to thank David Rosén and two anonymous reviewers from the present journal. We would also like to thank Sidney Tarrow for allowing them to reproduce some of the data. Notes 1. Thus, our conclusions below are restricted to trends with regard to the absolute number of Europrotests. We cannot say whether they have become more important as a share of total protests in the member states. In order to test that proposition, we would have to combine our data with information on the total number of protest actions in each country. Unfortunately, however, such information is not available for most of the EU's member states. 2. We have excluded cases where political parties or governments (or even EU-related authorities) were the sole sources of an expression of protest. We identified the relationship to the EU on the basis of participants' express claims. When an article contained references to EU policies without directly relating them to the protest in question, we have not coded the event as a Europrotest. This may cause some underestimation of protest numbers, but it helps avoid 'stretching' the term 'Europrotest' (see Imig and Tarrow Citation2001: 43). 3. For example: Dow Jones, Reuters, and the Associated Press; and Le Monde, The Financial Times, The Independent, and El Pais (see more in http://www.factiva.com). 4. One of the main search-commands was: '(EU OR EC OR European Union OR European Community) AND (protest* OR strike OR demonstration*) NOT (strike a deal OR demonstration project)', searching for full-text, but limiting the time-frame to 01.01.1992–01.01.2007, and the geographical area to member states of the European Union. Katrin Uba, together with David Rosén, our research assistant, selected the relevant items from the search result by reading the first paragraph of each report. This allowed us to exclude repeated news items, as well as irrelevant reports about, e.g. an 'air strike in Serbia'. 5. The data in Figure 1 are derived from our own database, as well as from the figures presented in Imig and Tarrow (Citation2001: 35). Even after a special examination of the protest search procedures we cannot explain this difference between our studies. In a personal communication, Doug Imig suggested there might have been some kind of change in Reuters' reporting system for that year. Another option, a comparison with the data furnished by Reising (Citation1999), is problematic because of differences in defining the protest event. For us, an event lasting more than 24 hours is a single event, as is one involving multiple actions. Reising, by contrast, separates such events from one another, thus ending up with a greater number of events per period. 6. And of course, our data does not allow us to say whether truly globalised protests are becoming more important in the member states of the EU. It could be that certain protest movements which aim beyond their country of origin simply bypass the EU in order to situate themselves on a global arena instead

Economics · European integration · European union · International trade · Member states · Order (exchange · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Proposition · Sociology · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · European Union Policy and Governance · Law · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies

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