New actors on stage: Analysis of the emergent forms of collective action in the European context

The European context has been remarkably characterized by the emergence of new collective actors that exhibit distinguishable features both in what concerns the modes of action adopted and the detachment from the traditional institutional dynamics. Their formation takes place in a turbulent context of changes that reveal the difficulties, by modern societies, in accommodating the modernizing processes: the rising of unemployment, the dismantlement of the welfare state, the dictatorship of markets, the segmentation of the labor force, and so forth.

The European context and its welfare state tradition are affected by the proliferation of market ideologies and the new politics of production. The challenges of the new order are not easy to accommodate and by no means desirable. However, given a great number of interrelated constrains, the institutional responses – especially the trade unions – are not as effective as desired. Nevertheless, responses are by no means inexistent. The civil society has come to display a great capacity of self-organization, turning to be a locus of conformation of political actors and of processes of contentious dynamics.

Our aim is to highlight and analyze these processes in the context of the recent mobilizations in Europe, widely known as “Indignados” movement, born in Madrid but rapidly disseminated throughout other European countries. By analyzing the international context of mobilization, is also our aim to demonstrate in what ways it relates with mobilization’s national realities, largely embedded in the context of the precarization of labor relations. Given the limitations of both the Resource Mobilization perspective and of the European (Identity based) paradigm in what concerns these new forms of collective action, it was our choice to combine other theoretical options, as the analyses of the dynamics of contention and the elements provided by the theoretical approaches of authors as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.