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Left-Libertarian Movements in Context: a Comparison of Italy and West Germany, 1965-1990

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Left-Libertarian Movements in Context: a Comparison of Italy and West Germany, 1965-1990 Veröffentlichungsreihe der Abteilung Öffentlichkeit und soziale Bewegung des Forschungsschwerpunkts Sozialer Wandel, Institutionen und Vermittlungsprozesse des Wissenschaftszentrums Berlin für Sozialforschung FS III91-102 Left-Libertarian Movements in Context: A Comparison of Italy and West Germany, 1965-1990 by Donatella della Porta and Dieter Rucht Berlin, March 1991 Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung gGmbH (WZB) Reichpietschufer 50, D-1000 Berlin 30, Telefon (030) 25 49 1-0 Zitierweise: della Porta, Donatella, Rucht, Dieter, 1991 Left-Libertarian Movements in Context: A Comparison of Italy and West Germany, 1965-1990. Discussion Paper FS III 91-102. Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Summary This paper first describes similarities and differences between left-libertarian movement families in Italy and West Germany. Special attention is given to their changes in behavior over time. Following that, an attempt is made to explain these changes with a causal model that identifies the main factors that could account for differential behavior of social movements. Although it is not possible to weigh the relative influence of a broad set of variables on the behavior of the left-libertarian movements, several substantiated hypotheses are developed that relate to the impact of both external and internal factors. Special emphasis is given to the role of the alliance and conflict systems interacting with social movement families. Based on an analysis of several developmental periods of left-libertarian movements, evidence is presented to the effect that one of the most relevant factors for changes of movement behavior is the attitude of the major left-wing party toward the movements, regardless of whether this party is in power. Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag beschreibt zunächst die Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede von links­ libertären Bewegungen in Italien und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer phasenspezifischen Strategien und Verhaltensformen. Zum zweiten wird versucht ein Modell zu entwickeln, das die entscheidenden externen und internen Faktoren für Verhaltensänderungen von Bewegungen benennt. Obgleich es nicht möglich ist, das relative Gewicht der einzelnen Variablenbündel für solche Verhaltensänderungen zu bestimmen, werden doch einige begründete Hypothesen über die vermuteten Kausalzusammenhänge entwickelt. Eine besondere Betonung erfahren dabei die mit den Bewegungen interagierenden Allianz- und Konfliktsysteme. Auf der Grundlage phasenspezifischer Entwicklungen der links-libertären Bewegungen wird argumentiert, daß die Grundposition der dominanten Linksparteien zu den Bewegungen eine der wichtigsten Einflußgrößen für deren Verhaltensänderungen bildet. Dies ist unabhängig davon, ob sich die Linkspartei in der Regierung oder der Opposition befindet. LEFT-LIBERTARIAN MOVEMENTS IN CONTEXT: A COMPARISON OF ITALY AND WEST GERMANY, 1965-19901 by Donatella della Porta and Dieter Rucht INTRODUCTION Several attempts have been made to analyze social movements from a diachronic and/or synchronic perspective. Inspired by Eisinger, who demonstrated a curvilinear relationship between the incidence of protest in US cities and the challengers' access to local political decision-making (Eisinger 1973: 28), increasingly complex models have been elaborated to explain a growing number of dependent variables. Most of this work has refered to a "political opportunity structure" as a set of independent variables (Tarrow 1983; Tarrow 1989a; Brand 1985; Kitschelt 1986; Kriesi 1989 and 1991). The use of this concept in cross-national comparison, however, involves three problems. First, the limited number of investigated cases does not allow for fruitful generalization. Second, the multiplicity of factors makes it virtually impossible to accurately assess the causal relationship between independent and dependent variables. Third, there has been a tendency to static analyses, insofar as several explanatory models attributed general movement characteristics to more or less inert structural conditions, and therefore were unable to explain the relevant conjunctural shifts. In this introduction, we will discuss in some detail the choices we made in order to deal with these three problems. 1. A first version of this paper was presented at the workshop on "Social Movements: Framing Processes and Opportunity Structures" held at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), July 5- 7, 1990. We are grateful to Mario Diani, Doug McAdam, Roland Roth, Sidney Tarrow, and the collegues of our Research Unit at the WZB for useful comments on previous drafts. 2 In response to the first problem, our strategy was not to increase the number of countries and in turn broaden the scope of analysis, but rather to treat a multitude of movements in each country. In research on social movements, the unit of analysis usually has been an individual movement or, more specifically, a particular campaign or conflict involving parts of a social movement. Although it has been emphasized that a social movement should not be seen as isolated from the plethora of co-existing movements, few attempts have been made to refer to a set of movements as the unit of analysis (but see Garner and Zald 1985; Brand 1985; Rriesi 1989 and 1990; Rucht 1991). There may be good reasons for that omission. First, the categories created to deal with such sets of movements are not well elaborated conceptually. Second, it is difficult to delineate a set of movements empirically. Third, given the fact that single movements in themselves are complex phenomena which are hard to grasp, it is even more difficult to reconstruct a configuration of several movements. Notwithstanding these problems, we think that it offers some advantages the focusing on a specific set of movements - what we would call a social movement family, analogous to "party family", "familie de politique", and "familie spiriruelle" in the literature on political parties. A broader view on social movements may reveal general characteristics in a given historical context which otherwise would be ignored. Moreover, such an encompassing view can provide us with information on both the impact of national political contexts on social movements in general and, vice versa, on the role of social movements in the context of broader social change. Choosing such a broad object of analysis, we can hope to make some generalizations on the interplay between unconventional politics and conventional political parties as well as between those and the society as a whole. As for the second problem, we chose to concentrate on only one dependent variable, namely the behavior of a social movement family, and to relate it to a narrow set of independent variables. Social movements have many facets and can be viewed from different perspectives. Ideologies, organizational characteristics, mobilization potentials and impacts of social movements are beyond our immediate interest. Our focus lies instead in the changes in the overall behaviors of a social movement family, as measured on a limited set of dimensions. As for the explanation of this dependent variable, we will concentrate mainly on two intervening variables - the influence of the conflict system and the alliance system. Our central aims are elaborating an explanatory approach, developing a number of hypotheses, and discussing these in the light of our empirical material. As for the third problem, we decided to pinpoint changes over time by looking at the effects of conjunctural opportunities. We see several advantages in focusing on changing opportunities. First of all, we think that such a perspective comes closer to the complex reality. Unlike other authors (Brand 1985; Kitschelt 1986) we assume that 3 social movements in a given country undergo considerable changes in their ideologies, strategies, forms of organization and levels of activities. Therefore, it is difficult to characterize these movements without a specific time reference. Moreover, inert societal and political characteristics, as they have been emphasized by these authors, can hardly explain changes on the part of the movements^. As a consequence, we also needed to take a close look at varying structures and power constellations. Second, our emphasis on changing conditions and effects allowed us to distinguish between various developmental phases and therefore to compensate, at least to some extent, for the disadvantage of comparing only two countries. Making use of this strategy, we multiplied our cases, because each phase in each country could be perceived as a separate case. For pragmatic reasons, we chose to limit our analysis to two countries and a specific family of movements. We chose to compare Italy and Germany for several reasons. These are our respective native countries, and both of us have devoted much scholarship to their contemporary protest movements. This provides us with a solid background. Moreover, we believe that these two countries are an adequate starting point for cross­ national comparison. Broadly speaking, both countries have similar size, degree of modernization, and political institutions, and thus could be expected to produce some simil social movement characteristics. At the same time, however, both countries also exhibit some differences with regard to their party systems, governmental constellations, relevance of the left-right-cleavage and aspects of political culture - characteristics which, among other things, are related to the above mentioned intervening
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