Protest in the EU: A Path toward Democracy?

Abstract

Since the institutional foundations for a political Europe were first laid, with the Congress of the European Unity Movement in The Hague in 1948 and the signing of the Treaty Establishing the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, European integration has offered, in the public sphere, a motive for protest. Farmers’ demonstrations, which have accompanied agricultural negotiations and reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy since the 1960s, are the most familiar and evident examples. More recently, these demonstrations have been complemented by the emergence of Euro-strikes in the industrial sector, the most emblematic of which took place in Vilvorde in 1997 in response to the closure of a Belgian Renault factory. This was not, strictly speaking, a first, since it was preceded by other instances of transnational union mobilization,¹ but it had unprecedented symbolic power due to the media coverage it garnered and its politicization, including an intervention by the European Commission with the company’s management (Lefébure and Lagneau 2002).