A Broken Promise? Grassroots Visions of Europe in Italy in Times of Crisis

As trust in the European Union (EU) is dramatically falling amongst its citizens, research on alternative visions of Europe ‘from below’ appear all the more relevant. Civil society organizations have long voiced progressively more critical positions about the EU, yet at the same time promoted ‘another Europe’ and Europeanized their organizational networks and action strategies. While social movement studies, along with other areas of the social sciences, have assumed increasing Europeanisation, recent developments have challenged this view. In particular, with the advent of the financial crisis, progressive social movements seem to have moved back to the national and local levels, engaging very little or not at all with the EU and questions of Europe more generally. To what extent critical Europeanism has ceded terrain to Euroscepticism, including within this alter-European vision, is a central question we seek to address. In order to answer these questions, we draw on the tool-kit of social movement studies and a neoinstitutional approach to critical junctures as sudden and drastic changes. Based on qualitative interviews to representative of organisation and groups of the Italian social movement milieu, on surveys of participants to marches and other protest events in Italy and on the comparison with similar data collected in the context of the Global Justice Movement, we aim to contribute in understanding how changes in the social, political and economic context (in this case, the economic crisis and austerity policies) affect claims, frame and collective identities in social movements.