Unveiling Extra-Institutional Agency in Nationalist Contention: Transformative Events and Grassroots Mobilizations in Scotland and Catalonia (1980s-2000s)
From Firenze University Press Journal: SocietàMutamentoPolitica
Carla Mannino, Scuola Normale Superiore
When studying nationalist mobilizations in Western democracies, schol-arship has almost exclusively focused on ethno-nationalist parties by attrib-uting to them the key-role of “ethnic entrepreneurs” — i.e., agents of national-ist mobilization (Winter and Türsan 1998). Yet, non-institutional actors such as social movement organizations (SMOs) and grassroots groups1 significant-ly contribute to the evolution of territorial contention. This article focuses on these non-institutional actors in nationalist movements.The recent developments in Scotland and Catalonia — where the referendum campaigns rapidly grew into mass social movements — have effectively drawn academic attention to non-institutional actors (Crameri 2015; Della Porta et al. 2017; Keating 2015; Lynch 2015). By defining these referendums as being “from below”, Della Porta and colleagues (2017) have brilliantly shown that civil society actors and social movement organizations (and not just the traditional political or judicial institutions) have initiated, appropri-ated or subverted the referendum campaigns. However, before these mass movements so manifestly burst upon the scene in the 2010s, social movement organizations and grassroots groups had already been mobilizing to support self-determination over the past decades.The role of these non-institutional actors is hence investigated in the campaigns for self-determination that occurred between the 1980s and the 2000s. The concept of transformative events, turning points in collective action, is chosen to shed light on the agency of non-insti-tutional actors (Bosi and Davis 2017), intended as their capacity to effect structural change2. While attention is usually drawn to the creative manifestations of agency during transformative events, this article emphasizes the role of agency in the production of the events themselves. Non-institutional actors were indeed able to bring about some transformative events and the mobilization around these events catalysed change in the movements’ organi-zational structures and cultural resources. The analy-sis also hints at the fact that these changes prepared the ground for the renewed territorial mobilizations in recent times as they persisted beyond the events themselves, making important differences to resources mobilized in contemporary episodes of contention.The historical analysis of transformative events, based on scholarly work and events’ accounts, shows that the initiatives of non-institutional actors produced momentous turning points in the history of nationalist movements. Their initiatives generated different reac-tions from their institutional interlocutors thus trig-gering new forms of interactions between SMOs and parties. The thematic analysis of original materials pro-duced by SMOs and grassroots groups, instead, explores the transformative capacity of their mobilization, look-ing at the movements’ organizational structures and cul-tural resources.By adopting the concept of transformative events, this study develops a major theoretical argument that challenges overly structural models and emphasizes the processual nature of collective action. Processes of col-lective action are mutually constituted by continuities and transformations in which agency plays an important role. Actors can indeed “produce” transformative events that affect social movements and their trajectories. While events constitute sudden ruptures in a tempo-ral process, at the same time they act on existing struc-tures thus exhibiting both continuity and change. Events bring about new practices, discourses and relations but they are always transformations or rearticulations of preexisting ones. The following section briefly reviews the literature and illustrates how an eventful approach to nationalist mobilization can help fill the identified gap. The methodological framework is then followed by the historical analysis of the selected transformative events taking place in Scotland and Catalonia. Finally, the article pre-sents the analysis of the mobilizations’ effects and dis-cusses the findings in a comparative manner.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-15499
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/smp/article/view/15499
