Horizontal Networking beyond Brussels by ‘EU-Bubble’ Actors: From ‘Permissive Consensus’ to ‘Empowering Dissensus’

Our paper analyses the effect of the transnational activism against TTIP on the field of European Brussels based civil society. Even though most of the incumbent organisations in this field did not join in the campaign, most of them experienced pressure from the campaign and their own grassroots members to act on TTIP even though this was not considered a priority. We analyse the competition between European incumbents and transnational challengers in the field of European civil society by asking two questions. Firstly, how is the mobilisation against TTIP different from the traditional involvement of Brussels-based civil society actors on EU issues? Secondly, why actors which did not work together in previous campaigns cooperated in the case of TTIP? We analyse the mobilisation against TTIP in Brussels and argue that the change in the positions of some of the key European civil society actors in relation to TTIP can be explained on the basis of a change in the value of transnational mobilisation abilities and resources that we conceive as a form of ‘empowering dissensus’. We find that a coalition of long established transnational protest groups – essentially the network Seattle to Brussels (S2B) –, new actors attracted to EU activism by the new transparency and participation agendas of the Commission – such as Transparency International or More Democracy – and of some “new incumbents” like Greenpeace Europe succeed in attracting incumbents to more EU-critical positions. This is explained by contextual factors - a re-evaluation of protest as a form of EU-oriented collective action resulting from the growing contestation on EU affairs - and by strategic ones relating to the ability to involve national organisations that had traditionally been disconnected from EU affairs in the campaign. We will use a combination of methods, using semi-structured interviews and network analysis.