Abstract
Pierre Monforte’s protagonists in Europeanizing Contention: The Protest against “Fortress Europe” in France and Germany face a new conjuncture in world history with the 2015 refugee crisis. We ought to join them in figuring alternative futures better than those issuing from this terrible present in which I write this review. Monforte’s volume provides a great springboard.
Social movement organizations (SMOs) dedicated to asylum and immigrant rights have been developing capacity in Europe over the last couple decades. Of course each SMO draws on a rich legacy of mobilization around solidarity, whether rooted in convictions about religion, human rights, or social justice alongside different visions of change, from the reform of immigrant services to militance in the name of revolution.
French and German SMOs organized around extending refugee and migrant rights started out quite different from each other. The French movement was more cohesive, diverse and embedded in society, while the German pro-asylum organizations were more fragmented, isolated, and sporadic. We should not be surprised that movements would vary by national context. But we should be intrigued by Monforte’s next finding.
When it comes to the Europeanization of French and German movements, national context does not matter. Both nations’ movements Europeanize networks, perception, and collective action in similar ways. The best illustration of Europeanization is one master diagnostic frame, the subtitle of this volume. With the image of Fortress Europe, the very notion of the European Union as a normatively superior political association crashes on the shoals of a glaring reality. This Europeanness can violate fundamental human rights for migrants and refugees.
Both French and German SMOs Europeanize, but humanitarian organizations like France Terre d’Asile and Caritas Deutschland and more politicized SMOs enact different visions of Europe. The former mainly lobby and find common ground with their counterparts in Brussels bureaucracy. Indeed, Monforte’s analytical predecessors have argued that as movements Europeanize, they also become more like professional NGOs. They even form, Monforte argues, a public policy “field” in the Bourdieusian sense with their modes of interaction.
I’m not sure that Monforte has used field theory as other Bourdieusians would, but there is a more important thing on which he and I agree: the more politicized actors do not operate in the same arena as the humanitarian organizations. He is right: these politicized SMOs dedicated to immigrant and asylum rights not only Europeanize in a different way than the humanitarian organizations. They also falsify the thesis that the Europeanization of social movements means their professionalization. That is a really fine empirical and theoretical contribution of this volume.
Monforte documents how these more politicized movements created their own alternative coalitions across Europe. These alternative networks are accompanied by strategies around politicization, mobilizing public opinion, globalization (by which he means allying with non-European SMOs), and linkage-making with politically aligned movements in different substantive areas. More militant groups follow this logic too; France’s Act Up and Kein Mensch Ist Illegal are, for example, active in the No Border network, but in this case make a much more radical critique of EU policies. Some charge EU migration policies with a kind of global-level apartheid (p. 207).
One of Monforte’s main conclusions is to argue that the European public sphere that emerges is fragmented, not only by issue, but also by approaches to issues. The more professional lobbyists around asylum have little to do with the more militant and politicized groups, even while both modes of contest around immigration are increasingly European in conception. This argument is fascinating, as is this book.
Monforte conceived, researched, and wrote up his project impeccably. He has mastered the social movement literature and identified the best parts of it to figure out how this particular mode of contention can help us understand not only the dynamics of protest around asylum policy in Europe but also the Europeanization of politics and the public sphere. He draws on Sidney Tarrow, David A. Snow, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, and Donatella della Porta (his PhD supervisor), among others, most thoughtfully. But how does this superb account help us think about the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe?
First, it encourages us to recognize the very different approaches that exist around the issue. Humanitarian organizations work to provide services to those most vulnerable but struggle to remain politically neutral and therefore do not engage in contentious action. More politicized groups are prepared, rather, to act on behalf of migrants in order to realize a more just or egalitarian society. More radical groups are less interested in reforming existing systems and practices and are more interested in looking at the issue from the perspective of migrants and refugees themselves, with an eye toward refiguring larger systems of power. In this case, asylum-seekers are part of the movement, not the beneficiaries of others’ largesse. The German concept “Autonomy of Migration” (p. 87) exemplifies this idea.
This very clarification, however, raises an issue Monforte does not. The book views the dynamics of these movements through the prism of the movement activists and their organizations. The refugees themselves are barely visible in the volume. Political elites beyond the movements, and especially the refugee field, are hardly evident either. Of course that makes a dissertation, and book, manageable. But it also illustrates the difference between the analysis of movements and the analysis of that over which movements struggle.
Although this volume bears all the marks of a most professional sociological accounting, one can also recognize the imprint of someone who cares about refugee rights and the even more consequential implications of addressing them. He respects what the humanitarian organizations do, but I feel skepticism about their adequacy and even a certain appreciation for the standpoint of the militants. I would expect terrific insight from the author about this 2015 refugee crisis, especially because movements are different from both state authorities and the refugees themselves.
In the European public debate about the refugee crisis of 2015, we mainly get state perspectives and tales of migrant wishes, lives, and deaths. We also get intellectuals shaming their states and offering open letters about what ought to be done. We have racists, sometimes in power, declaring that migrants should go elsewhere and stop shopping for asylum, buttressing their counsel with overt violence. And sometimes, civil society, and decent politicians, offer food and shelter to men, women, and children who look to survive. Sometimes, even, universities offer opportunities to learn. Little of this that dominates the press comes from SMOs so dedicated. I wonder then about the articulation of Monforte’s terrific sociology of social movement organizations and the 2015 refugee crisis.
Of course the ready proposition is that the media I consume are missing the SMO accounts that could lead our interpretation of, and intervention in, the refugee crisis. Or it could be that SMOs have lost control of the debate about migration and asylum, for it has become too important to leave to the sector most engaged in it. It’s likely a combination of both, but that bears implications for how we think about social movements.
We might, as most professional sociologies of movements do, explain their dynamics. Or we might, as Alain Touraine exemplified, look to the ways in which social movements enact historicity and express our capacities to recognize the times in which we live and to increase the chances that we might live in the societies we want. Pierre Monforte has, with this volume, done an exceptional job in the former, and I hope, with his considerable accumulated expertise and substantive knowledge, he is doing much with the second. We should all join him.