When the Unemployed Challenge the European Union: The European Marches as Externalization of Protest

Abstract

This article examines the conditions for the emergence of a most unexpected movement. It traces how a small number of leaders, in the context of weak support of the institutional representative frameworks, gave collective and political meaning to the dissatisfaction of the unemployed. Sticking to the European agenda, the movement, by means of the "march" format, was able to make itself visible to the media and, more generally, to public opinion, both of which it then used as resources. I identify the strategic orientations that ran through the movement and whose articulation led to a new mode of the Europeanization of action, which I call "the externalization of protest." The article concludes by identifying some of the effects induced by the marches, and suggests the incapacity of the mobilization to survive to the global justice movement, although it was one of its first expressions.