Progressive activists in Europe and their concepts of democracy

Inspired by the Arab revolts and regenerating some feature of the culture of the alter-activists, indignados and occupiers camps and activists have spread over Europe and North America. Drawing on fieldwork research in London and New York and of a review of the early literature dedicated to this movement, this paper proposes to successively analyze its mixed scales of actions, protest and meanings and to consider it as a reactive, creative and democratization movement. (1) A global movement? Preliminary fieldwork suggests a contrast between an international repertory of actions (places occupation, camps, symbolic action, democratic assemblies…) and global scope and meanings (opposition to the hold of global corporations and financial markets) on one side, and, on the other, the dominant national framework and limited international initiatives of most of its actors. In Western Europe, the continental scale has actually been less present than in previous waves of protests, including jobless mobilizations of the late 1990s or the alter-globalization movements and its European social forums. (2) A reactive movement On one side, the intensity of the occupiers/indignados movement in each country seems to be connected to the intensity of the social and economic crisis. On the other side, the movement impact in mainstream media suggests it has been highly successful in providing alternative meanings and narratives to the global crisis (3) A creative movement The occupiers/indignados movements, and in particular their occupation camps, have open “spaces of experiences” that foster the expression of activists creativity and subjectivity (McDonald, 2006) and the implementation of prefigurative activism by which participants experiments alternative forms of social relations and democracy. (4) A democratic movement Democracy may be considered as the core value of these experiences, both in activists’ claims (e.g. the opposition to the power of global corporations) and in their concrete experimentations and innovations