Abstract
This article addresses some of the issues concerning the trans-nationalisation of collective action by focusing on the White Overalls and the Disobedients and their participation in three transnational cycles of protest that took place at different geographical levels – local, macro-regional, and global – between the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s.
The first part briefly discusses some historical, transnational precursors to global collective action and will argue that the Global Justice Movement was a global and original actor with reference to three dimensions of contentious action: the organisational dimension, framing processes and campaigns. The second part focuses on the origins and identity of the White Overalls, while the third describes their analysis of globalization and looks at how the scale of action has shifted. The analysis of these three cycles of protest shows that the global shift has not superseded other scales of action, but rather has been interwoven with them as a consequence of the political cleavages offered by the international context. It is also argued the space for action is only partially global and the global mobility of social movement activists is stratified. Finally it is shown how opponents, institutions and movements have all dynamically contributed to the transformation of the external political environment.
Introduction: transnational or global?
The ‘Battle of Seattle’ in November 1999 and the emergence of the Global Justice Movement 1 (GJM) in subsequent years have fuelled a considerable number of studies which investigate different issues including the movement's framing processes, its organisational structure, and its mobilisations. Regarding discussion of the movement's scale of action and its degree of globalization, these studies can be broadly summed up as dividing into two main strands. The first, which can be defined as globalist, argues that the globalization of social movements and civil society is a fully complete phenomenon (Anheier et al., 2003; Cohen and Rai, 2000; Kaldor, 2003; McDonald, 2006; Pianta and Zola, 2007). The globalization of the economy has provided the opportunity for collective movements to move away from the national scale of opposition and become global. Global movements are therefore characterised by national and international networks of individuals, groups and movements which span continents, the organisation of trans-continental protest campaigns which focus on neoliberal globalization, and the identification of supranational governmental and economic institutions as the main causes of global problems and targets against which to direct protest.
The second strand, which can be defined as realist, more cautiously describes recent movements as trans-national collective actors. According to this approach, the trans-nationalisation of collective action refers to mobilisations and organisational structures that cross national borders and involve two or more states (Rucht, 2007; Tarrow, 2001). Their range is still limited and does not cover the whole planet (Olesen, 2005; Tarrow, 2005). Therefore, most of the protest events classified as global should be reclassified as examples of the internalisation of international and foreign targets, or the global framing of domestic disputes (Tarrow and McAdam, 2004: 122).
The differences between the globalists and realists are not only terminological. The former imply that national and local dimensions for collective action are no longer available or have been relegated to secondary stages; that actors taking part in protests are cosmopolitan actors referring to global civil society; that global institutions have ‘more’ sovereignty than nation-states. The latter imply that states still matter, they control considerable material and ideological resources despite transnational activism, the weakening of state powers and the movement towards global governance (Grugel, 2004). States forge the political cultures of social movements and collective actors, control the resources they rely on, and are still the main target for protest. According to this approach the geo-politics of action is thus trans-national rather than global.
A third strand may be outlined. This attempts to resolve some of the problems with the globalist and the realist approaches. While recognising that collective action is still dominated by local and national activists, this approach argues that networks and issues have become increasingly global. Many activists identify themselves and are identified as global actors, they belong to transnational networks structured around global issues and define their scope as global, targeting global institutions (della Porta, 2007; della Porta et al., 2006). However, this approach does not underestimate the problems with what has been termed ‘globalization from below’. As Routledge and Cumbers (2009) have clearly shown, spatial extension does not mean that all places and movements are empowered to the same degree, and global linkages do not imply a shared global agenda among actors, as local/national identities prevail. Also, global collective movements reproduce power inequalities, with some groups and individuals being more connected and globalised than others. The implication is that, although the GJM differs from past social movements in terms of its extension, the density of its networks, and the target and framing of protests, the local and national dimensions have not been totally replaced by a completely unified and globalised space of action. This is the point of view taken by the author of this article.
By focusing on the Tute Bianche and Disobbedienti (henceforth the White Overalls and the Disobedients) and their participation in three transnational cycles of protest that took place at different geographical levels – local and national, macro-regional, and global – this article will address some of the issues concerning the shifting scales of collective action. The White Overalls is a movement network that first appeared in Rome in 1997. Following the events in Genoa in July 2001 they became the Disobedient Movement, which slowly dissolved after a few years. Over time their organisational structure has changed, with some actors joining the network and others leaving it. However, the backbone of the movement network remained relatively consistent, guaranteeing continuity in terms of identity, repertoires of action, framing, and the definition of goals. The first part of this article will briefly focus on the origins and identity of the White Overalls, the second will describe their analysis of globalization as an opportunity for social movements, while the third will look at different cycles of protest involving the White Overalls and the Disobedients.
This article draws on 45 in-depth interviews with White Overalls and Disobedient activists with a range of experience and involvement in the movement, social characteristics (gender, age, education and occupation) and towns of origin. They were carried out between 2001 and 2007 and the activists narratives inform much of the empirical parts of this paper; I use pseudonyms to maintain their anonymity. Interviews were integrated with periods of ethnographic observation at demonstrations, meetings and social events and analysis of documentary sources, including printed leaflets, magazines, and electronic communication, such as websites and e-journals.
The empirical aim of this contribution is to describe the White Overalls and the Disobedients and their participation in different protest cycles from their emergence. An additional aim is to analyse their transformation in relation to political cleavages opened up by the national and international context and the movement's resources.
The invisibles become visible
The White Overalls is a movement network made up of some occupied social centres 2 based in Padua, Venice, Rome, Milan and other Central-Northern towns; more or less formalised associations clustered around the solidarity network Ya Basta!; and individual movement activists (Montagna, 2006). They first emerged in Rome in 1997 as a group of young people calling themselves ‘the invisibles’ and ‘like phantoms in the city’ wore white overalls in the course of their action (Navarro, 2004). These activists were already involved in local social movements, particularly in the occupied social centres, university student movements and squats. They also had links with other groups in Veneto and other regions dating back to the 1980s and the early 1990s. These contacts facilitated the circulation of information and the construction of the first level of a national network. However, the spread of the White Overalls from their localised origin to a national scale also took place through the construction of new contacts – what McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001) call brokerage – which brought together previously unconnected actors and opened up the network to other political areas including the Giovani Comunisti 3 and some militants in the Green movement. Through these links the White Overalls organised locally-based but nationally-coordinated campaigns over the Centri di Permanenza Temporanea (CPT) – temporary detention centres for undocumented migrants – the decriminalisation of recreational drugs, and social rights for people generally excluded from welfare benefits, such as the unemployed, precarious flexible workers and migrants.
At the time that the White Overalls were taking their first steps, Italy was governed by a centre-left coalition which included the Partito Democratico della Sinistra and the smaller Rifondazione Comunista, both of which were parties born out of the dissolution of the Partito Comunista Italiano in 1991. The country was experiencing a period of huge social change and political instability; both in public discourse and socio-economic processes the 1990s marked a definitive departure from Fordism. There was increasing reliance on a productive model based mainly on small firms and regional economies; the restructuring of large-scale industry and the introduction of lean production, which implied the dismantling of the working class as a homogeneous social block; the relative tertiarisation of the economy; the growth in the number of women in employment; and an increased flexibility, individualisation and segmentation of work (Bagnasco, 1996). The rhetoric of the end of permanent full-time employment and flexibility was accompanied by reforms that de-regulated the labour market in the 1990s and 2000s, increasing precariousness, particularly among younger generations (Accornero, 2006). However, these changes were not matched by any adjustment in terms of social security and the welfare state, which largely remained indifferent to changes in the labour market.
Since the late 1980s and early 1990s Italy has become an increasingly important receiving country in the geo-politics of international migration. The migrant population doubled between 1991 and 2001, from almost 600,000 to over 1.2 million, and reached 4.330.000 in 2009 (Caritas/Migrantes, 2009). The impact of these inflows on Italian society and politics has been enormous. Migration has increasingly become a major political issue, making the fortune of some political parties, particularly the Northern League, and bringing to life new, anti-racist, collective mobilisations.
These dramatic changes were reflected in the political realm with most of the 1990s marked by instability and the ‘difficult’ transition from the First to the Second Republic. In 1992 the ‘clean hands’ investigations prosecuted and imprisoned hundreds of local and national politicians. Together with the growth of the regionalist force, the Northern League, in the wealthy northern regions of the country, ‘clean hands’ led to the collapse of the ‘First Republic’ and the dissolution of the two major governing political parties, the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party. In 1994 Silvio Berlusconi emerged as a political leader and the main focus of Italian politics, a role that he still plays in 2010. The collapse of the First Republic, the emergence of new political forces, and the national and local electoral reforms that pushed the system from proportional representation to a relatively bipolar form of political representation, did not improve the stability of the political system. Between June 1992, a few months after the eruption of the clean hands scandal, and 2001 – the second Berlusconi-led government – there were seven different government coalitions and six prime ministers.
In contrast, the first decade of the 2000s has been more stable. This period has largely focused around the figure of Silvio Berlusconi as the prime minister and the dominus of Italian politics. He has governed for most of the decade, apart from a short break when Romano Prodi led a centre-left coalition between 2006 and 2008, setting the Italian political agenda and passing a number of ‘leggi ad personam’ – laws aimed at saving him from judicial prosecutions. The weakening and eventual collapse of the parliamentary left has been counterbalanced by a number of collective mobilisations that have aimed, on the one hand, to challenge the Berlusconi government's policies and, on the other, to stimulate a dying institutional left that has been progressively more unable to provide an effective opposition (Diamanti, 2009; Shin and Agnew, 2008).
The formation of the White Overalls was deeply rooted in the labour market changes that marked these decades. Most of the activists worked under part-time, temporary, self-employment arrangements, in the broad tertiary sector. These types of contracts are often characterised by precarious wage labour, with no guarantees of employment continuity, occupational development, health and safety protection, or pension schemes. The activists' occupations were heterogeneous and mostly dependent on the economic structure of the areas they lived in. Many worked in the knowledge industry, for example, as web designers, researchers, architects, psychologists and social workers in voluntary sector organisations. Many were university students who worked to sustain their studies.
The white overall was both a symbol and a medium. As a symbol it represented the plurality of social productive figures which characterise post-Fordism and are employed in a number of different precarious forms (for a discussion of these new forms of labour see DeAngelis,2007; Hardt and Negri, 2004). As one activist said: ‘the colour white as the sum of colours was an allusion to different social subjects that are productive figures of whom we are part and yet not represented. Therefore, the colour white was allusive, metaphorical’ (Interview with G.M.: White Overall and Disobedient activist of the Occupied Social Centre ‘Rivolta’, Mestre-Venezia). According to the movement, these new figures resulted from the decline of factory hegemony and the dissolution of the working class as the main productive class.
The white overall was also a metaphor for invisibility (Hardt and Negri, 2004). The transformations in the mode of production not only generated a multiplicity of new productive figures and blurred the difference between waged and unwaged labour, but also accentuated the lack of social rights and the inadequacy of the welfare system. Not only were there multiple new working subjects, but they also had no rights and were invisible from the point of view of the welfare system.
Finally, the white overall was a medium, and its use had the same communicative function that the black balaclava had for Sub-Comandante Marcos and the Zapatistas. For the movement's activists it was a kind of counter-logo, an object that public opinion could immediately identify and link to the White Overalls.
The white overall was like the balaclava, which had a great communicative impact. We are invisibles, we are ghosts, but showing ourselves as ‘invisibles’ we turn the matter upside down. As the balaclava has been used to be seen and not to be covered, the white overalls not only state that we are invisibles but also force people to look at them (Interview with Gianni: White Overall and Disobedient activist of the Occupied Social Centre ‘Rivolta’, Mestre-Venezia).
White overall use during protest events allowed activists to turn their initiatives, which sometimes involved very few people, into highly visible events and gain media attention.
The White Overalls, globalization and scales of action: framing and opportunities
The White Overalls were inspired by the Zapatista movement and Sub-Comandante Marcos in several respects. Hardt and Negri, whose writings have heavily influenced the action of the White Overalls and Disobedients since their inception, emphasise that, ‘the really decisive development in the organisation of the White Overalls, however, came when they first looked outside Europe to Mexico’ (2004: 266). More specifically, it seemed to them that the Zapatista rebellion had understood the newness of globalization and, particularly, the idea that, in a globalised world, both the rural indigenous populations in the Lacandon Jungle and the immaterial labour in the metropolitan areas of the global North suffered from ‘the new laws of the division of labour and power in the new global market’ (ibid).
The White Overalls' analysis of globalization stemmed from within the Marxist and Workerist 4 stream. Its focus was mainly on living labour transformations and their implications for social movement mobilisations. The White Overalls assumed globalization to be an ineluctable fact involving both the social and economic dimension and argued that it changed the characteristics of inequalities and hierarchies, both between individuals and across geographical areas. According to this analysis, globalization does not only refer to the sphere of world trade but also points to a unique productive social space, characterised by discontinuities and hierarchies, following chaotic dynamics and conflicts within places and social groups:
Globalization has several layers and plans, it is structured through the overlapping of networks and ‘networks of networks’ where places and non-places draw, progressively but not linearly, a hierarchical space that is crossed by goods, financial products, communication and labour-power. (Caccia, 2000: 72)
Globalization restructured the asymmetries between core and peripheral countries problematising the traditional hierarchies of the international division of labour (Marazzi, 2000). From this perspective, globalization has unified the world and created an economic universal order, but it has not reduced poverty and class differences. Today, extreme poverty and Third World conditions can be found in the most industrialised countries. Meanwhile, huge financial wealth is accumulated in poor and developing countries. Starvation, malnutrition and oppression are possible anywhere, not only in the global South but also in the wealthy metropolises of the global North (Negri, 2000: 91).
This fractal and unified space became the new scene of social movement protests. Globalization and Empire, as first Hardt and Negri (2000) and then the White Overalls termed the ‘decentred, deterritorialising apparatus of imperial control’ emerging with the global economic system, are relatively autonomous from sovereign nation-states. Although national entities do not disappear, they lose their power in regulating the internal economy, and social relations and conflicts which target national objectives are no longer possible. As a consequence, according to the White Overalls, collective action must overcome state borders. Globalization as the new dimension of global capitalism represent an opportunity for social movements which they must deal with in an open way. As Negri (2000: 97) put it after ‘the battle of Seattle’: ‘the Left wing must recognise itself in globalization. It has to be interpreted and viewed as the inevitable and just horizon of social struggles and conquests’.
This globalist view was reflected in the European and global cycles of protest discussed in the following pages.
The turning point
The European Marches against Unemployment in Amsterdam on 16 June 1997 represented a turning point in the transposition of supranational frames into supranational forms of collective action (Caruso, 2004). With the ‘border-breaking’ train, which brought several thousand activists to Amsterdam and became a way to assert the right to free movement and to make the invisibles visible as citizens (Mathers, 2007), trans-national mobilisation assumed a concrete dimension. The White Overalls raised the issue of a new, European-level, social contract based on a universal basic income to deal with the issues of the precariousness of labour and social exclusion. The assumption was made that local welfare policies are determined at a European level and therefore social movements must act somewhere between the local and global levels. The nation-state had, according to this thinking, exhausted its function in the regulation of social and economic processes and been superseded by supranational institutions such as the European Union. Demands must therefore be addressed to and negotiated with European institutions as the most proximate power institutions to European social movements in a globalising world.
Within a similar frame, in December 2000, the White Overalls organised another train, the Global Action Express, to demonstrate in Nice where the European Council was set to proclaim the Charter of Fundamental Rights. However, as had already happened in Amsterdam and the Czech Republic 5 , national borders were rediscovered and the train was stopped on the border between Italy and France, preventing the White Overalls from reaching Nice. The movement was not prejudiced against the constitution of Europe as a political entity – on the contrary, this was encouraged because it represented an overcoming of nation-states – but was critical of its neo-liberal framework, as it rendered expendable citizens' rights and social protection measures, like basic income or the minimum wage, and the absence of clear positions on war and democratic involvement in decision-making processes. 6 While only a few activists took part in the European counter-summits at Barcelona on 14–16 March 2002 and Seville on 20–22 June of the same year, the European Social Forum in Florence in November 2002 was the last stop of this journey around Europe.
The imminent war on Iraq was one of the main issues raised by the Disobedients 7 , and they took part in the ESF's concluding march with a long and colourful banner saying ‘no global war’. However, some other issues such as freedom of movement for all, the demand for a social Europe in opposition to the neo-liberal Maastricht treaty, and the opposition to neo-liberal globalization also characterised the Disobedients' participation in this event.
In order to support their European agenda, the White Overalls organised dozens of local actions throughout Italy oriented on conflict. They combined both cultural and redistributive demands reflecting the social and generational characteristics of the movement's activists. These protests were characterised by non-violent and theatrical repertoires of action – a mix of festive vocation and political activism. Communication and the use of media were crucial, whether in the form of street ‘carnevalesque dance parties’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004) or utilisation of the mainstream media system. As one activist said:
In 1998 the movement decided to break through to the media, infiltrating events or places where there was communicative tension. For example, we interrupted some television programmes [that focused on some controversial political and social events] in order to spread our message. These were blitzes that were made in order to communicate. We infiltrated in order to provide a message for the media to focus their attention on. (Interview with Francesco: Ya Basta! Activist based in Bologna)
As a result of this communicative strategy the White Overalls quickly spread out across Italy and, later (particularly after the anti-WTO protests in Prague), to some other countries such as Finland, Greece, Spain and the USA (The White Overalls from Finland, 2001).
The making of global protest
The White Overalls' process of transnationalisation gained further impetus with the eruption of the global justice mobilisations. Small delegations of activists went to Seattle in November 1999 (Caccia, 2000; Casarini, 2000), Quebec City in April 2001, Copenhagen in December 2002, and the WSF in Porto Alegre in 2002 and 2003. They took part in direct actions, observed protest repertoires and practices, built networks and established contacts with other movement issues. Some of these protest events offered practices and patterns to emulate and spread. After the ‘Battle of Seattle’, an article with the emphatic title ‘Let's make a Seattle’, published in the political-philosophical magazine ‘Posse’ (Caccia, 2000), made clear their view of these events. The protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Quebec City in April 2001, where groups which were diverse in terms of beliefs and practices agreed on a common objective, offered another example to emulate: ‘in Quebec City there was no idle, useless, annoying controversy on violence and non-violence. As the objective was indicated (the attack on the ‘shaming wall’) a dialectic started on the different ways of carrying it out’ (Beppe, 2001).
On the basis of these experiences, in 2000 the White Overalls organised participation in demonstrations targeting supranational institutions which took place in some Italian towns: in May in Genoa against the fair on Advanced Biotechnology (also called TeBio), which resulted in some minor clashes between demonstrators and the police, in Ancona against the Conference on Development and Security in the Adriatic Sea, and in June against the OECD conference on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Bologna. These protests raised issues including war and peace, the environment, bio-technologies and genetically modified food, and labour rights.
On 23 September 2000 around a thousand White Overalls left Italy on another Global Action Express to reach Prague and protest against the IMF. Despite being stopped by the police on the border with Austria and the suspension of the Schengen Agreements for one day; the White Overalls arrived in the Czech Republic capital on the 25th. They went to Prague to ‘liquidate’ (Chesters and Welsh, 2004) the IMF and participated in the Yellow Block march dressed in white overalls and wearing protection made of rubber foam and cardboard. Their action was both symbolic – in contrast with those in the Blue Block who started to throw stones and molotov cocktails as soon as they came close to the Czech police (ibid) – and confrontational, employing sticks to break through the police cordons. In February 2001, some hundreds of activists travelled to Mexico from Italy on three jets to join the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) and Subcomandante Marcos and crossed Mexico to reach Mexico City by 11 March.
The week of protest against the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 was the main event for the White Overalls in terms of participation and organisational effort. Several thousand activists camped at the ‘Stadio Carlini’, where they organised workshops, meetings and self-defence training sessions, and more than 20,000 turned out on the main day of global action on 20 July. According to the White Overalls, the G8 represented an unelected organisation that contravened democratic principles and was not legitimated by any international norm or deal. This organisation was accused of imposing a new political and economic order ruled by money, profits and the market of commodities. 8 The White Overalls went to Genoa actively to lay siege to the no-go area, the red zone, and eventually invade it. This decision resulted from a process of consultation among activists and sympathisers following the example of the Zapatista movement's deliberative processes. Consultation was based on both face-to-face relations involving meetings, street rallies, party cells and associations, squats and trade unions, and on the use of the Internet. An appeal in different languages was written and circulated worldwide. Activists and sympathisers were asked:
1) Provided that the forms and the tactics of the ‘active siege’ are considered legitimate and right, will you support disobedience to the ban on demonstrations and the enclosure of forbidden areas? 2) Do you think that mass invasion of the forbidden area is a viable common purpose?3) Do you agree that people need collective self-defence in order to keep the police away, to avoid man-to-man (sic) fights, degeneration, beatings and mass arrests?. 9
At the end of the informal consultation some thousands of people had expressed their opinions and therefore civil disobedience with self-defence was the protest strategy chosen in order to violate the no-go area. The purpose of civil disobedience was to break through the barriers that fenced off the area where the G8 meeting was to take place.
Civil disobedience was defined as non-violent but ‘protected, collective and self-organised’. It implied confrontation with the police, but not the use of offensive weapons. However, it did not rely on any absolute approval of non-violence, either as a philosophy or practice, and assumed possible forms of self-defence (della Porta et al., 2006: 134).
In Genoa, in order to lay siege to the no-go area and resist the attacks of the police, the White Overalls prepared protective clothing using a variety of materials and built plexi-glass shields that were carried by dozens of demonstrators to protect themselves and other people. As one journalist wrote:
Massive two-metre high shields of thick semi-transparent plastic were set upon wheels – they were in fact too heavy to be transported – and linked to each other … At least two thousand people, all of them very young, were protected like American football players in films, for example in Rollerball … All of them wore a helmet on their head. Arms and legs, elbows, knees and various joints were covered with thick pieces of foam-rubber. It was a small army of warriors. (Chiesa, 2001: 40)
Indeed, these colourful forms of armour had a symbolic and communicative meaning as well as a protective function. The heterogeneity and variety of colourful; handmade protection symbolised the multitude of peoples and individuals who live this world. In addition, this improbable kind of army made ‘of thousands of brothers and sisters’, poorly protected by pieces of foam-rubber, cardboard and other materials, rising up against the well-equipped army of the G8 dressed in smart black uniforms, mirrored the condition of most of humanity and, at the same time, was the representation of two contrasting worlds.
The Genoa events culminated in two days of harsh street battles, an indiscriminate use of force by the carabinieri and Italian police, and the murder of the young demonstrator Carlo Giuliani. The iron fist deployed by the recently elected, right-wing Berlusconi government marked a radical change in the policing of protests and forced the White Overalls into a change of strategy: the progressive abandonment of international summits as the main arena of action and the return to local territories. In an interview given to the communist newspaper Il Manifesto, Luca Casarini, one of the spokespersons of the White Overalls, said:
Our movement cannot face that military power. We would be crushed within three months. We must find a third way [the emphasis is mine] between those who merely testify to their rejection of globalization and those who choose symbolic gestures, like smashing a bank. 10
The global is in the local
After the traumatic Genoa events the White Overalls decided to dissolve and promote the Disobedient Movement, a broader cluster of activists and regions which included other more radical social centres. In terms of protest tactics, the promotion of the Disobedient Movement was marked by the transition from civil to social disobedience – a new cycle based on localised contentious actions targeting supranational adversaries. 11 The change from White Overalls to the Disobedient Movement and from civil to social disobedience was not simply terminological or symbolic. The escalation in the policing of protest, the 9/11 bombings, and the subsequent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq convinced the movement activists that the global could be fought on a local scale. Instead of direct confrontation with trans-national institutions, the Disobedients leaned towards molecular intervention in their own territories and political exchange with local institutions where possible (Montagna, 2006). Practically, this new tactic had two meanings. First, the movement attempted to develop what it has called ‘welfare from below’: the organisation of structures and the provision of social services. Second, as a consequence of the changes in the international political context and the active involvement of the Italian government in the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Disobedients took part in two campaigns to oppose the ‘global war’:Action for Peace (2001–2002) and Trainstopping (January-February 2003).
Action for Peace was officially organised by the association Ya Basta! in coordination with a number of Italian organisations and unions, alongside Palestinian and Israeli peace groups. This campaign aimed to replace the immobility of the so-called ‘international community’ with a ‘diplomacy from below’, involving transnational public opinion and both Israeli and Palestinian civil societies. The scale of action was both local and international and culminated in two trips that took dozens of Disobedient activists to the Occupied Territories and Jerusalem. Local organisations played a fundamental role and most of the actions were facilitated through contact with local Palestinian groups that had become familiar with the White Overalls and their action strategies through the media:
We knew that there was a group in Palestine that had adopted strategies which were inspired by the White Overalls. We had already overcome the phase of the White Overalls but we thought that if there was a group that mobilised like us it would be right to network with them. Anyway, it was not easy at all. (Interview with Silvia: Ya Basta! Activist based in Padua)
Action for Peace consisted of a number of demonstrative actions carried out in the Occupied Territories over Christmas 2001 and Easter 2002. They organised some protest events trying to bring together Palestinian civil society and Israeli groups who oppose the occupation. The campaign also targeted economic and political relations between Italy and Israel. Consumers were encouraged not to buy Israeli goods and a number of direct actions took place against some Venetian and Tuscan branches of Caterpillar Companies. These actions aimed ‘to condemn the illegal use of bulldozers provided at low cost to the state of Israel in order to devastate Palestinian territories’. 12
Like Action for Peace, Trainstopping 13 also relied on local actions but within a global framework (‘no global war’) targeting dominant states (the coalition involved in the war on Iraq, and the US in particular). The campaign was based on the occupation of stations and the blocking of railway tracks, invasions of military airports and various actions against activities connected with the US army. These took place mainly in Tuscany and the Veneto, where two of the most crucial NATO bases are located – Camp Darby in the province of Pisa and Aviano in the province of Vicenza – and Rome, one of the strongholds of the movement. On 13 February 2003, two days before the global demonstrations in which about 100 million people took part worldwide, organised actions took place in Rome and Padua. In the Italian capital about 100 Disobedients invaded Ciampino airport in an attempt to stop aircraft from landing or taking off. In Padua, a number of activists from the Veneto blocked the market that officially supplies the American aviators based at Aviano.
Global demobilisation and the return to the local
In 2004 and 2005 the movement split into different components. Some wanted more autonomy from the movement, others joined Rifondazione Comunista and stood in local elections with the main left-wing Italian party. Disputes over the legitimate uses of violence triggered a split between the young communist organisation and the Disobedients. According to the former the movement should abandon violent repertoires and embrace non-violence as a strategic choice in the struggle against both war and terrorism and, more generally, oppression (Bertinotti et al., 2004). The Disobedients, on the contrary, argued that disobedience, the repertoires of action adopted so far, overcame the dichotomy between violence and non-violence. 14 According to the Disobedients, Rifondazione Comunista started the dispute in order to distance itself from the movement and prepare its alliance with the centre-left coalition for the 2006 general elections. In this new context the participation of the Giovani Comunisti in the Disobedient movement was no longer possible for either: the movement would become an appendage of a government party, while Rifondazione could not be part of a movement that had often been accused of employing illegal repertoires of action (Raparelli, 2009).
In the meantime, the demobilisation of the GJM and the inability of global protests to stop the war in Iraq forced the movement to return to domestic issues. The GJM, squeezed between terrorism and the war on terrorism, has been unable to influence political and economic global reforms, and the huge worldwide demonstrations did not succeed in stopping the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite 100 million people demonstrating across the planet against the imminent intervention in Iraq and showing that there were ‘two superpowers on the planet – the United States, and worldwide public opinion’, 15 the USA and their allies went on with their plans.
The return to a domestic arena involved four overlapping plans. In terms of scales of action, these were both local and national. Disobedient activists took part in some local campaigns, including the ‘No Dal Molin’ campaign. This campaign, which started in July 2006 and is ongoing, opposes the expansion plans of the American military ‘Dal Molin’, near Vicenza, and involves local residents and associations from different political and religious organizations. It combines local issues, such as the use of local environmental resources, and broader themes, including Italian involvement in regional wars. Simultaneously, Disobedient activists were involved in struggles that assumed a national dimension such as, for example, the university student movement, ‘Onda Anomala’, that protested against the research and university cuts between 2008 and 2009 (Raparelli, 2009).
The return to domestic issues has not meant the abandonment of the global dimension. Rather, this has become internalised as an issue for local and national contention. The ‘No dal Molin’ campaign brought to the forefront issues such as Italian involvement in the Middle East war, environmental exploitation, and the relationship between Italy and the US. In other words, a very localised campaign dealt with global issues. In addition, a network of social centres, squats and associations linked to the Disobedient movement called for a national rally ‘against Bush and the multilateral war of Prodi's government’ in Rome on 9 June 2007 during an official visit by the American president. The ‘no global war’ slogan combined with the right to demonstrate. The rally ended with some minor incidents between activists and the police.
In terms of forms of action the movement has adopted both organisational and conflictual orientations. On the one hand, it continued taking collective action with conflictual orientations and targeting local opponents. In this period the Disobedients organised housing occupations, ‘ticket strikes’ on public transport and ‘discounts on shopping’ consisting of a negotiated reduction of the bill in local supermarkets. The most riotous action occurred on 6 November 2004, before a national demonstration against precariousness, when some dozens of Disobedients entered a supermarket and a bookshop in Rome and took away and distributed to people outside a number of goods ranging from food and clothes to electronic items and books. They called this ‘proletarian shopping’, that is ‘the reappropriation from below of necessity goods enacted by a new social figure: the invisibles, the precarious, the intermittenti (casual workers) (…)A new social class who is at the core of the current mode of production and has no rights’. 16 On the other hand, local action took the form of consensual organisational processes. A number of organisations and associations relying on institutional funding were established while others expanded, delivering welfare services and other public goods in some sensitive areas. In addition, some activists stood as candidates in local elections as independent candidates or linked to local Green parties (Montagna, 2006).
The re-territorialisation of contentious action has not involved any construction of a national agenda. Although national links have been maintained, they have not led to any attempt to build a national organisational structure. The participation of the Disobedients in national mobilisations represented isolated episodes rather than bricks in the construction of a fully-fledged national movement.
Concluding remarks
This article has investigated the White Overalls and Disobedients and their involvement in some cycles of protest with different scales of action. The European cycle of protests was a turning point in making this movement a global actor. It marked the abandonment of the national arena and the transposition of collective contention onto a supranational dimension that assumed the withering of state sovereignty and the shift of power to global forces as an ongoing, though contested and not yet fully accomplished, process. European institutions were thus seen as the ‘new’ site where much of the power was available and welfare rights could be negotiated. The globalization of collective action went further with the surge of the GJM at the turn of the century. Both the White Overalls and the Disobedients defined themselves as a ‘movement among the movement’, thus marking themselves as both part of the GJM and autonomous from it. Their involvement varied according to the scale of action: while only a few activists took part in the counter-summits at Seattle, in 1999, and Quebec City, in 2000, and at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, the numbers of activists who reached Prague, in September 2000, and Genoa, in July 2001, were much higher. Their agenda addressed neo-liberal globalization and its main agents. The scale of action was both continental and global, although the activists' mobility was uneven. This GJM cycle of protest was followed by the ‘no-global war’ campaign. Targets of protest were supranational, but mobilisations returned to local territories, whether they were in Palestine or in Italy. This process went further with the demobilisation of the GJM and the defeat of the peace movement after the war on Iraq in 2003. This article has shown that the demobilisation from the global arena did not mean the dissolution of the movement but rather its re-territorialisation.
Although targets have changed, the first three cycles share similar traits which illustrate continuity and, in some respects, homogeneity between them. First, globalization is considered a fait accompli and social movements must confront this new reality; second, this implies a shift in the locus of power from national to supranational bodies, including coalitions of dominant states and local institutions; third, the space of action and mobility has now become potentially global. As a consequence, although the scales of action and targets have changed over the years, the framing remained global even during the first and second cycle of protest. European institutions were seen as part of a wider multi-level global project involving different actors, while the war was seen as a global issue. Even some domestic issues have been framed as global. In the fourth cycle, the targets and scales of action have been domestic but globalization has still been framed as a major issue.
However, the space for action is only partially global and the global mobility of social movement activists is also fractal and layered. Cross-border travelling has been uneven, involving a small number of White Overalls and Disobedients who circulated national and transnational debates and information, built links between movements and contributed to the diffusion of ideas and protest repertoires. Tarrow (2005) calls these ‘rooted cosmopolitans’ – activists who move physically and cognitively outside their place of origin, maintaining links to them and relying on the resources and networks their places of origin provide for them. The mass cross-border participation has been confined to Italy and some of the more easily accessible European countries such as Holland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and France. Although the development of communication has facilitated people's ability to travel, mobility from one continent to another still belongs to a small minority of activists with more resources.
Finally, this article has also shown that the external political environment is a dynamic process and both movements and their opponents contribute to its transformation (Meyer and Staggenborg, 1996). Particularly, two major changes have been noted with regard to institutions or social movements. First, during these cycles of protest the nation states rediscovered and restored national boundaries, suspending the Schengen agreement in several circumstances in order to deter the White Overalls and the Disobedients from taking part in some transnational protests. These suspensions included the examples given above of the Dutch, Czech and French reimposition of borders to prevent the movement of activists by train.
Secondly, during these mobilisation cycles, the White Overalls and Disobedients changed their targets and engaged in different repertoires and tactics of contention. These were changed and adapted over time in relation to the nature of the movement's adversaries, the policing of protest and changes in the international and national context.
To conclude, the GJM was an unprecedented form of global action that did not replace local and national actors but added another level to forms of action. Although as we have seen, first with the White Overalls and then with the Disobedients, the scale of mobility and circulation was mainly national and macro-regional and only partially global, mobilisations have nonetheless crossed continents, addressed several global issues and, in so doing, targeted different supranational institutions. The relation between the local and the global levels of action has not been one of a linear transition from one scale to another. We have seen that the European and global cycles have overlapped, while the ‘no-global-war campaign’ and the subsequent return to the ‘local’ represented an adaptation to changes in the international political context.
Footnotes
1
The appellation ‘Global Justice Movement’ is now widely accepted in the Anglo-Saxon world and beyond (see, for example, della Porta, 2007).
2
The definition occupied social centres refers to the occupation by activists of empty buildings (former factories, warehouses, shopfloors etc) and the transformation of these into ‘autonomous spaces’ where recreational and political activities are organised. In the 1990s and early 2000s there were around 150 occupied social centres and almost every town had at least one (Montagna, 2006).
3
The youth organisation of Rifondazione Comunista.
4
Workerism (Operaismo) is a theoretical strand which attempted an actualisation of Marxist categories on the basis of a political reading of Marx's ‘Capital’ and the critical use of sociology through workers' enquiry. Its main assumption is that the development of productive forces is in response to molecular, resistant and organised workers' struggles, and that capitalism can be interpreted only through the autonomous struggles of the working class. Its main representatives are Mario Tronti, Toni Negri and Sergio Bologna (for a critical analysis see Wright, 2002).
5
For extended discussion see the following pages.
6
Discussion document: Ya Basta!,‘6–7 Dicembre Nizza: contro la carta dell'impero costruiamo l'Europa dei diritti’, Bologna, 2000.
7
The White Overalls turned into the Disobedient Movement after the Genoa events in July 2001.
8
Casarini, L.(2001),‘Memoriale sui fatti di Genova’, Document presented at the parliamentary commission on the events that occurred in Genoa from 16 to 22 July 2001.
9
Discussion document: Ya Basta! and Movimento delle Tute Bianche, ‘An address to the civil society, and all the people we have met in these months of travel, those who love us and those who despise us, the brothers and sisters who are going to be in Genoa’, 2001.
10
Interview with White Overalls and Disobedient spokeperson, Luca Casarini,‘Senza più la tuta bianca’, in Il Manifesto, Wednesday 3 August 2001
11
See the two discussion documents: ‘Relazione del Primo Laboratorio Disobbedienti Nordest’ (Laboratorio Disobbedienti Nordest, 2001) and ‘Nasce il movimento delle e dei Disobbedienti’ (Movimento delle e dei Disobbedienti, 2002)
13
The name is a play on the generational manifesto Trainspotting.
14
Interview with White Overalls and Disobedient spokeperson Luca Casarini. ‘Luca Casarini al Prc: “Impossibile qualsiasi dialogo”’, in il Gazzettino, ed. di Venezia, Sunday,5 December 2004:
15
See the analysis by Patrick Tyler: ‘Threats and responses. News analysis; A New Power in the Streets’, The New York Times, February 17, 2003.
16
Interview with Disobedient spokesperson Francesco Caruso, ‘Diamo pane e libri ai precari sono loro i nuovi emarginati’ in La Repubblica, Sunday, 7 November 2004.