Jacobsson, Kerstin (ed) Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 591 The book opens with a brief account of Hungarian attitudes to the EU before the country’s accession. Each of the catastrophes is then dealt with before being considered together in two final chapters, one dealing with ‘Neoliberalism, Molecularization, and the Shift to Governance’, and the second with ‘The Materialization of Politics’. Perhaps the EU, with its particular institutions and ways of working, does constitute a new type of political entity, behaving in ways that are different from other organizations or which enable its citizens to do so. Perhaps some right-wing politicians inside Hungary have made mischief by reducing the complexities of the three scandals to simplistic attacks on the EU. Perhaps, as the author avers, ‘each episode provides enough discomfort or exhibits sufficient unruliness to thwart’ the usual types of methodological approach that might have been employed to analyse them. Or, perhaps not. On the evidence presented, there is little reason to believe that the three tell us anything significantly new about human behaviour. But they do illuminate something of the way in which the age-old struggle between producers and customers, interest groups, politicians and regulators is being played out as new members enter the EU. Gille claims that her study ‘identifies a new modality of power […] achieving political goals with the seemingly apolitical tools of tinkering with technology and infrastructure’ (back cover blurb). This is doubtful in so far as such behaviour is as old as society; she does, however, examine it concisely in about 40,000 words within both a wide range of sociological literature and the relatively recent setting of the coming together of Europe in the postCommunist age. Arbroath A. H. Dawson Jacobsson, Kerstin (ed). Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe. Cities and Society Series. Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2015. xi + 309 pp. Notes. Tables. Figures. Bibliographies. Index. £70.00. Urban social movements and other forms of activism in post-socialist Europe havereceivedlittlesustainedacademicattention.Theyhavebeensystematically studied neither in works on the development of ‘civil society’ in the region, nor in the wider literature on urban movements. This important collection will, therefore, start to fill-in these gaps in the existing literatures. The contents of the volume are wide-ranging, with the contributions ‘clustered’ around four themes: the ‘negotiation of urban meanings in the post-socialist context’, the ‘urban as a space for agency and basis for citizenship’, the ‘role and challenges of alliance-building’ and ‘urban movements in urban governance’ (p. 5). The collection, moreover, makes several major contributions to more general SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 592 debates, speaking back to various issues within the field of urban studies, as well as to the literature on post-socialist social activism and civil society. In relation to urban studies, the volume’s aim is ‘to bring the “urban question” closer to social movement studies’ (p. 1). Following on from Pickvance’s observations (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27, March 2003, 1, pp. 102–09) that studies on urban social movements have developed in relative isolation from wider social movement theorizing, the contributors employ various approaches drawn from social movement studies, in order to ‘illustrate the usefulness of social movement theory in the study of urban social movements’(p.1).Theseincludediscussionsongroupidentityconstruction,the role of symbols and meaning-making work, framing and political opportunity structures. Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe also presents a challenge to the prevailing notion of post-socialist civil society as being dominated by professionalized and advocacy-orientated NGO-type organizations, with only the weakest roots in wider society. Counter to this narrative,thestudiescollectedinthisvolumehighlightthe‘richvarietyofforms of urban protest and […] heterogeneous collectives’ engaged in grassrootsbased and -driven activism across the region (p. 3). In line with Jacobsson’s previous contributions, she argues that the ‘weak civil society’ thesis is — at least in part — an artefact of the theoretical and methodological limitations of previous works, which have maintained an overly narrow focus on more formalized movements (especially issue-based advocacy organizations of the NGO-type), and have tended to base assessments of the strength of civil society on measures of ‘the numerical strength or organisational density’ of such associations (pp. 4–5). By contrast, the...