From Politicization to Policing: The Rise and Decline of New Social Movements in Amsterdam and Paris

Abstract

This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in particular on the organizations of left-wing immigrant workers. These organizations performed crucial roles for new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s but were isolated and coopted in the 1990s and early 2000s. To explain why this is so, we engage in a dialogue with Jacques Rancière and develop an understanding of cities as strategic sites for both politicization and policing. Cities serve as sites of politicization because they are incubators of the relational conduits that enable activists from different sectors to engage with one another's struggles and look beyond narrow temporal and spatial horizons. However, cities also serve as sites of policing because authorities constantly attempt to reconfigure governmental arrangements in such a way that civil society serves as an extension of the government and comes to fulfill an instrumental role in the development and implementation of policy. Just as politicizing implies the widening of temporal and spatial horizons, policing implies the narrowing of such horizons. The analysis shows the social movements of the 1960s lost steam in two of the major hubs of the new left and reveals some of the more universal mechanisms through which cities generate or quell dissent.

Alternatives to Resistance? Comparing Depoliticization in Two British Environmental Movement Scenes

“…Some groups like Transition Towns may be motivated by political ideas (Urry, 2011), but their insistence that social change will emerge from collaboration and consensus around a broadly agreed notion of sustainability and that oppositional strategies are counterproductive, makes their theory of change post-political (Chatterton and Cutler, 2008;Kenis and Lievens, 2014;Kenis, 2016). By extension, the third dimension of the political/post-political distinction covers whether an embrace of agonism will lead to strategies that emphasize the use of contentious forms of action or resistance, including political protest, civil disobedience and direct action (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2013;Kenis, 2016). By extension, the third dimension of the political/post-political distinction covers whether an embrace of agonism will lead to strategies that emphasize the use of contentious forms of action or resistance, including political protest, civil disobedience and direct action (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2013;Kenis, 2016).…”

“…In many recent studies the two have been depicted as closely related to each other (Kenis, 2016), or even as synonyms (Mayer, 2013;Uitermark and Nicholls, 2013). In many recent studies the two have been depicted as closely related to each other (Kenis, 2016), or even as synonyms (Mayer, 2013;Uitermark and Nicholls, 2013).…”

“…They show that cities can act as incubators with an abundance of mobilization resources and networks where dense interactions between diverse groups of people foster the recognition of injustices and the imagination of change (Nicholls, 2008;Uitermark and Nicholls, 2013;Nicholls and Uitermark, 2016). Yet recognizing the importance and complexity of this relation, authors have recently started to analyse it in more depth.…”

The production of squatters as folk devils

“…Some of these activists were squatting, for example the Committee for Moroccan Workers occupied a canal house in 1975 (Uitermark and Nicholls 2013).…”

Theorizing the Politicizing City

“…Our aim is to contribute to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to articulate radical political theory with urban politicizing processes and urban revolutionary change (see e.g. Lefebvre ; Ross, ; Kukral, ; Nicholls and Beaumont, ; Purcell, ; Harvey, ; Purcell, ; Uitermark and Nicholls, ; Konak and Dönmez, ; Ross, ).…”