Transnational social movements JACKIE SMITH Modern social movements, generally thought of as political, emerged in tandem with modern nation states, as groups of people organized to alternately resist new claims being made by national authorities (such as taxes or military conscription) or to advance their own claims that states provide a variety of public goods and services (such as education, health care, and various forms of financial assistance). Ongoing competition between authorities and citizen challengers generated new structures including parliaments, bills of rights, and bureaucratic checks and balances to routinize public participation in national politics and to otherwise enhance the accountability of political leaders to citizenry (see, e.g., Tilly 1984; Markoff 1996; Tarrow 1998). Today, as states increasingly turn to international political arenas to manage their economies and ecologies and other aspects of social life, social movements are becoming increasingly transnational in their structure and focus. The same rapidly advancing technologies that have fostered the expansion of a global economy have aided the rise of transnational social movements. Relatively cheap airline tickets, more widely available telephone and Internet access, expanding use of English as a global working language, and a globalized mass media enable people from more diverse classes and geographic origins to share information and cultivate cooperative relationships across huge distances (Tarrow 2005; Smith 2008). While transnational social movements were active in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, promoting international peace, an end to slavery, and women s suffrage, activists in these movements were by and large from privileged backgrounds (Rupp 1997). Today s transnational activism, which has expanded rapidly since the 1970s and 1980s, involves those of far more modest means. That said, it is still true that many transnational (and other) movements are disproportionately middle class, since people with more and better education as well as time, skills, and resources are the most able to be involved in social movements. But social movement politics by its nature attempts to lower barriers and costs to popular political participation, and many activists seek to confront the inequities they find in their own structures and operations. Transnational social movements are best seen as networks of actors that are organized at local, national, and international levels. Many include formal organizations that have constitutions, staff members, bank accounts, and boards of directors. Others are neighborhood or friendship groups that meet informally and irregularly and who support each other s work to promote social change. Individuals are also key players in all social movements, and in transnational movements, we often find members of government delegations to the United Nations playing key roles in social movements. For instance, governments like Mexico have long been supportive of international disarmament efforts, and its delegates have helped peace movement activists get access to information and to increase their influence on official disarmament negotiations. United Nations officials, such as those in the United Nations Human Rights Commission, are also frequently involved in supporting the work of the transnational human rights movement. Journalists and academics are also part of many movements, helping to popularize debates or to advance new analyses that can assist social movements. Webs of interpersonal and interorganizational connections help expand the flow of information to different actors within movements. Transnational The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, Edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam. 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbespm454
2 transnational social movements events like United Nations conferences or transnational meetings of civil society groups have helped increase the strength and density of these network ties, and the increased frequency of these events in recent decades helps account for the rise of transnational movements. Transnational movements have adopted a number of strategies to promote global change. They can work to advance new international agreements, such as the Convention to Ban Landmines or the International Criminal Court, or to block agreements such as those of the World Trade Organization. They can work to press individual governments to abide by international norms or to ratify treaties. And they can appeal to global institutions or norms in order to strengthen their leverage in national conflicts. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998) refer to the latter of these strategies as the boomerang effect. They argue that when national political systems are repressive or restrictive, appeals to international norms or alliances can bring international pressure to bear on states, thereby altering the balance of power in national political contests. So when Argentine human rights activists mobilized their transnational networks, they introduced an additional cost (US military aid) to the government if it persisted in flouting international law. In short, transnational movements can and do affect both national and international political processes. Moreover, by shaping international treaties and by working with international institutions, they help define the institutional arrangements of our global political system. The major distinction of transnational movements is that they mobilize people across national boundaries around a shared aim. They help people define their interests and identities in ways that go beyond the traditional nation-state borders. By facilitating routine communication between people from vastly different regions and cultures, they help enhance understanding and mutual trust while making international friendships more feasible and likely. A member of Amnesty International (AI), for instance, will share more common interests and perspectives with AI members outside her or his own country than she or he will with many of her compatriots. Organizations generate their own internal cultures and identities. And because they generally oppose predominant cultural systems, social movement organizations have a particular need for creating supportive identities that can bind members together and support collective action even in the face of repression (see, e.g., Rupp 1997). As they attempt to define new activist identities, transnational movements must overcome the considerable influence of the national state in defining people s primary allegiances and motivations. However, just as the processes of global economic integration help generate the technologies and other infrastructures that support transnational organizing, here too global processes help break down the monopolies states have on their citizens loyalties. The globalization of the economy has meant that people s educational backgrounds are more similar, as are their professional lives and working conditions. Moreover, there are increasingly obvious connections between global forces, such as transnational corporations or international trade laws, and one s daily experiences and interests, and these provide important foundations for the creation of shared understandings and meanings outside the framework of traditional state boundaries. Indeed, overcoming differences in national perspectives may be far easier than overcoming other differences within movements (Moody 1997). In other words, we can see important foundations for the globalization of civil society to parallel the globalization of economic and political institutions. Like all movements, transnational social movements seek to enhance their political influence by cultivating alliances with other groups. A long-standing divide exists between social movements organized around issues such as the environment or civil rights and those organized to promote the interests of labor (Waterman 2005). In many contexts,
transnational social movements 3 corporate interests seek to undermine alliance building by framing environmental struggles as contests between jobs or development and environmental conservation. Divisions between richer and poorer activists persist in many movements, as economic class shapes the day-to-day experiences and perspectives of people in important ways. Sometimes, however, transnational movements can help overcome class or caste divisions by providing a broader perspective on the divisions that might exist within a single country. Activists in transnational environmental groups, for instance, are motivated out of a concern for a particular policy, and they will work with any groups they think can help secure their aims. In contrast, within countries we often find that urban rural divisions or even anti-indigenous prejudices can impede alliance formation within nations. The World Social Forum is a contemporary focal point for transnational social movements. It began in 2001 as an effort to mobilize against the global neoliberal capitalist order and around the slogan Another World is Possible. It consists of a biannual global meeting, accompanied by national, regional, and local social forums that are linked through overlapping networks of participants and through internet sites and other forms of communication. Activists refer to it as a process, since it aims to foster ongoing dialogue and learning across time and space. It has mobilized many hundreds of thousands of activists and remains a core site of innovation and activity for the contemporary global justice movement (Santos 2006; Smith et al. 2007). While social movements address any number of different issues, many work more or less self-consciously to affect the formal means by which citizens can both participate in policy debates and hold their elected leaders accountable for policy decisions. So movements for racial equality have generated laws to protect minority voting rights, and demonstrators protesting against military arms races have helped to advance new legal protections for all forms of public speech. In short, in the course of mobilizing around particular issues, movements help shape the laws and institutions of our democracies. This is exactly what has taken place in the international political arena. As groups mobilized to advocate for human rights or to limit the use of military force, they have found themselves involved in the process of helping define the role of citizens in institutions that were established by states. Global political institutions such as the European Union and United Nations were formally organized by governments with little desire to see much in the way of citizen participation. International diplomacy was seen as high politics that needed to be removed from the pressures of what were seen as poorly informed and passionate citizenries. But because a government s participation in any international organization generally required that their national legislature approve of the arrangement, governments were forced to yield some space for citizens involvement in these bodies. And since the establishment of both these institutions, we have seen efforts by movements to further expand citizen participation in global politics. Nevertheless, a substantial democratic deficit remains, and many national delegates to international institutions are unelected and largely unaccountable to citizens. There are no political parties organizing constituencies beyond the national level. Many international negotiations remain secretive, and even national legislators are denied access to official meetings and documents. Because global institutions have an increasing impact on the policy decisions that affect us, this global democratic deficit has undermined the quality of democracy within nations as well. Some analysts speak of a hollowing out of national democracy in recent years as states delegate more of their authority to supranational institutions, privatize more of their services to the corporate sector, and delegate more distributional decisions to local authorities (see Markoff 2004). Thus, after years of growing transnational activism aimed at promoting international agreements for human rights, more equitable
4 transnational social movements development, and environmental protections, more transnational movement groups are demanding global democracy as the twenty-first century unfolds (Smith 2008). Another key emphasis of contemporary transnational movements is a call for a more balanced approach to global integration than policymakers have pursued thus far. Since the late 1970s, key players in global politics have emphasized the development of global markets, and they encouraged all countries to reduce tariffs and other measures that limit the flow of goods and services across national borders. Increased global trade was thought to bring economic growth that would benefit all. Unfortunately (but not unexpectedly), for many reasons this simple economic logic has not proved true, and along with unprecedented increases in global trade we find unprecedented concentrations of wealth amid persistent poverty and environmental degradation. Beginning in the 1990s, many groups began working transnationally to challenge this predominant neoliberal model of economic globalization. They argued that many decisions should not be left to the free market, because markets respond only to those with wealth. And many social goods such as a clean environment or public health are not readily reduced to simple cost benefit calculations. These decisions, activists argue, require informed public debate and consultation. At the World Trade Organization Ministerial in Seattle in 1999, transnational movements came together with national and local organizers to demand more accountable and less market-oriented international policies. Activists demanded a greater say in decisions about how national and local economies (and polities) are organized, as they were finding that global institutions were squeezing out possibilities for citizen input into decisions about what kinds of industries operate in local communities, what protections states can (and more often cannot) enact to preserve their natural environments, and how educational, health, and other services are managed. These protests, coupled with declining economic growth and global financial crisis, which began around 2007, helped slow the progress of trade globalization, and opened space for more critical perspectives on the global economy to emerge. In sum, attention to transnational social movements helps us understand the political processes behind globalization. Because movements are working to connect localized citizens with global political processes, they provide the connective tissue that helps integrate our global polity by mobilizing local communities around global policy debates. They are also part of complex processes of contestation that help define the structure of global institutions and the character of local, national, and global polities. By helping shape institutions, policies, and systems of meaning, they are important actors in the global system. By insisting that the global system be made more open and accountable, transnational movements are essential for the preservation of democracy. Studying transnational movements is difficult. One needs to have expertise in the politics and cultures of different countries, as well as an understanding of the global political system which constitutes a unique area study of its own. Because of these complexities, most studies to date are case studies of how transnational activism affects a particular national context or of particular transnational campaigns or events. The Global Civil Society Yearbook, published annually since 2001, has sought to trace the evolution of globally organized social change efforts, and it provides useful information about trends in global organization and activism. Electronic newspaper records have allowed for largescale, comparative analyses of media coverage of movements. Key questions that emerge from analyses of transnational movements are: How have globalizing trends affected the ways people engage in politics? How do transnational forms of activism compare with national ones? How does participation in transnational activism vary across different countries? And, perhaps most importantly, what impacts do
transnational social movements 5 transnational movements have on global political and cultural change? SEE ALSO: Diffusion and scale shift; Global Justice Movement; Globalization and movements; Social Forum, World; Transnational Zapatism. REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Global Civil Society Programme (annual) Global Civil Society Yearbook. London School of Economics, London. Keck, M., and Sikkink, K. (1998) Activists Beyond Borders. Cornell University Press Ithaca, NY. Markoff, J. (1996) Waves of Democracy: Social Movements and Political Change. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA. Markoff, J. (2004) Who will construct the global order? In Williamson, B. (ed.), Transnational Democracy. Ashgate Press, London. Moody, K. (1997) Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy. Verso, New York. Rupp, L.J. (1997) Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women s Movement. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. de Santos, B.S. (2006) The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forums and Beyond. Zed Books, London. Smith, J. (2008) Social Movements for Global Democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Smith, J., Karides, M., Becker, M., Brunelle, D., Chase-Dunn, C., della Porta, D., Icaza, R., Juris, J., Mosca, L., Reese, E., Smith, P., and Vászuez, R. (2007) Global Democracy and the World Social Forums. Paradigm, Boulder, CO. Tarrow, S. (1998) Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, New York. Tarrow, S. (2005) The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge University Press, New York. Tilly, C. (1984) Social movements and national politics. In: Bright, C., and Harding, S. (eds), Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, pp. 297 317. Waterman, P. (2005) Talking across difference in an interconnected world of labour. In: Bandy, J., and Smith, J. (eds), Coalitions across Borders: Transnational Protest in a Neoliberal Era. Rowman & Littlefield, Boulder, CO, pp. 141 162.