Social movements in Western Europe

Abstract

There are many indications that, on the threshold of the year 2,000, humanity has entered upon a synchronie phase in which the planet appears as a unitary reality. What happens in Moscow or South East Asia has immediate repercussions in Washington, Tokyo, Paris, Rome, London, and elsewhere. While the means of mass communica? tion carry no guarantee regarding the nature of information and contact, they do "cover" the whole world with images and messages (Ferrarotti, 1986). The conception of historical development as a diachronic process which began with so-called "primitive" peoples and presumably reaches its highest level with Western Euro American civilization, clearly fails to give credit to the new ecumeni? cal impulse today traversing the world and to the new mass social movements which characterize it. On the other hand, these move? ments are not easily definable. They appear as vast, volcanic move? ments of opinion, nebulous at first but little by little able to provide themselves with an organizational structure and finally to transform themselves into real instruments of cultural and sociopolitical action. Consider, for example, the movements for women's freedom, the humanitarian movement of the last century, the peace movement, and so on. Elsewhere I have distinguished these movements into generic and specific, according to whether or not they had a definite aim and clearly formulated objectives (Ferrarotti, 1976). Here I shall be particu? larly concerned with recent social movements which have emerged since the end of the 1960s, especially in the sociocultural area of Western Europe. In analyzing the new movements, sociology some time ago dis? carded interpretations and heuristic categories derived from func tionalism. The model that rested on imperfect political socialization in investigating extraand noninstitutional collective action has clearly crumbled. As a reading of Smelser reveals (Smelser, 1968), it eventu? ally was led to relate every form of politically oriented mass action to a tendentially deviant phenomenon, or at least to a manifestation of cultural latencies, definable in terms of resistance to the widening