"The Europeanization of Movements? First Results from a Time-Series Analysis of European Collective Action, 1985-1993"

Imig, Doug and Tarrow, Sidney. (1995) "The Europeanization of Movements? First Results from a Time-Series Analysis of European Collective Action, 1985-1993". In: UNSPECIFIED, Charleston, South Carolina. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[From the introduction]. The town of Shoreham is a sleepy ferry port on the south coast of England. But in January 1995, it was the catalyst for a nationwide campaign against the export of live calves to the continent, where they are slaughtered after gruesome journeys and weeks in wooden crates. After an earlier campaign in the early 1990s, the practice of "in-crate feeding" that continental chefs say produces the most tender veal was banned in Britain. But a market is a market, and the response of British cattle breeders was to ship live calves to the continent, where cattle operations and governments are less fastidious than in Britain. In 1994, a campaign of pressure from British animal rights groups aimed to stop the trade and, as a result, most British ferry companies gave up the practice. But Shoreham and other smaller ports continued to ship live calves to the continent, and a few air shipping companies found the trade lucrative enough to justify chartering aircraft to do the same. That was the background of what happened in Shoreham and of the events that followed, which we shall use in the first section of this paper to illustrate what we will call "the Europeanization of social movements." The remainder of the paper will be devoted, first, to outlining some of the dimensions and problems of European collective action; second, to explaining how we propose to examine it through event analysis and, third, to presenting preliminary data that quantitatively indicate its dimensions over the past decade.

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