Abstract
Practicing Democracy: Local Activism and Politics in France and Finland is an intri-guing contribution to the study of social movements and political culture. The monograph compares two sets of activist cultures, both self-identified as part of or connected to struggles for global justice, in two cities of similar size, the Finnish capital Helsinki and Lyon in France. It looks at political culture as local and historically shaped and, perhaps because the research was carried out prior to the Arab Spring and the global styles of contestation associated with that, the book comes across as particularly concerned with historical depth and, in various ways, as serious and detailed empirical research.
The question that Luhtakallio addresses is how democracy and citizenship are currently practiced, or ‘done’. She approaches the issue by juxtaposing the experiences of Finnish and French activist groups, and by considering what these tell us about how politicization, or the opening up of possibilities and alternatives, takes place in the two countries. All this is supported by helpful historical and scholarly context. The book also considers municipal and mainstream visual representations of good civic behaviour, as well as the activist cultures and imagery that counter these official accounts. This strategy does help clarify differences and similarities between the two case study countries. Using descriptions of the mundane workings of voluntary and protest action and its encounters with officialdom, Luhtakallio sometimes draws the contrasts rather sharply and – despite her protestations – somewhat stereotypically. She presents her work as ethnographic, with analytical co-ordinates drawn from Erving Goffman’s frame analysis supported by neo-pragmatist styles of scholarship. The use of the term ethnography signals the idea that politics is meaningful and deeply cultural or personally felt, but also underscores the author’s more or less intimate engagements with the actors in the story. However, the wide range of actors, the mostly brief forays into the activists’ and officials’ worlds, and a somewhat mechanistic conception of what sociology can achieve, mean that the richness of Luhtakallio’s material sometimes remains implicit rather than laid out on the page.
Nevertheless, especially her discussions of squatting movements and of gender practices offer illuminating accounts of different styles of citizenship as well as of how these loop back into citizen-official interactions. Showing that there are systematic differences between Lyon and Helsinki is informative, particularly against the background of the homogenized practices of urban management now ensconced in so many cities. Her ana-lysis of activists’ commitments to local, very divergent, understandings of citizenship certainly clarified why Finnish political culture – which I know far better than the French – appears as it does: conflict averse and easy to both de-politicize and to adjust to neoliberal demands. Luhtakallio’s analysis also provides intriguing insight into one seemingly curious aspect of Finnish political culture, namely the relatively good relations (thus far at least) between activists and the police. The contrast with the French activists she describes is stark. For all their appreciation of the country’s long tradition of civil disobedience as a recognized force of progress, and their definition of democracy as an ongoing project, the French activists appear unable to establish grounds for change or even much hope. The contrast with Finnish activists’ ease with an almost technocratic style of political engagement, emphasizing expertise and efficiency, is informative if also rather depressing.
This problem of the hollowing out and shallowness of contemporary democracy becomes the book’s core question, paramount for both activists and for scholars of political sociology. In both these countries, where participatory democracy is promoted by citizen-activists as well as in neoliberal policy, the tensions between this and representation clearly exacerbate activists’ frustrations. It is a shame then, that Luhtakallio is not bolder when considering the connections between de-politicization and the ‘practices of neoliberal governance [that] appear to have overrun much of the local political space’ (p. 187) on the one hand, and the mutually entangled repertoires of activism and citizenship that the preceding chapters spelled out, on the other.
The book’s uneven language – it could have done with more language editing – does it no favours unfortunately. It is based on a doctoral thesis defended in 2010 at the University of Helsinki, which perhaps explains the weight given to methods and processes of data gathering over more abstract discussion. The result fits squarely within a tradition of representational knowledge production, where the expert sociologist addresses an audience of other experts, and where the aim seems to be to provide an authoritative account of a world out there. Such relative lack of reflexivity is a little unexpected. However, as a careful piece of research that will be of interest well beyond Lyon and Helsinki, the book fully deserves the ASA Award it received in 2014 for Best Book by an International Scholar in the Section on Global and Transnational Sociology.