Tuesday, June 25, 2013
2.21 (Binnengasthuis)
Outside of the Arab world, Spain’s May 15 and the subsequent July 14 movement in Israel were the prototypical cases of a new mass social justice movement. Youthful activists, aggrieved by dwindling economic opportunities and a radically polarized distribution of wealth, and disgusted by the performance of the institutionalized political system, occupied public space and launched mass demonstrations. Yet unlike in Spain, the Israeli economy was not in crisis and young people were not on the cutting edge of radical retrenchment, and issues of economic policy and class inequality had little political space or ideological traction. Even more than other age groups, the young were locked into social and ideological cleavages deeply embedded in institutionalized politics. Accordingly, it is tempting to ascribe the similarities between the scope, demands and practices of the two movements to the overpowering role of diffusion. This paper argues instead that diffusion primarily played an inspirational role by showing that mass protest was feasible, cognitively and emotionally empowering, and a potent medium for articulating collective identities. The Spanish and Israeli protests were shaped by quite different histories and cultures of both protest politics and parliamentary politics. However, two common denominators underlying their shared success in mobilizing encampment activism and mass demonstrations are the mounting economic frustrations of the children of the middle classes, which reverberated widely throughout society; and the deep sense of political alienation felt by the vast majority of citizens, again especially the middle classes. Multiple empirical sources include fieldwork and survey data.
