From Tahrir to Puerta del Sol to Wall Street:
Analyzing Social Movement Diffusion
in the New Transnational Wave of Protest
Eduardo Romanos
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
DRAFT
Comments are greatly appreciated.
A Paper for the ECPR General Conference 2013
Bordeaux, 4-7 September
(10.360 words, including footnotes and references)
I wish to thank the organizers of and participants in the conference Streets Politics in
the Age of Austerity (Université de Montréal, February 2013) for their feedback and
criticism of an earlier draft of this paper. I would also like to thank Cristina Flesher
Fominaya and Jack Hammond for their useful and extensive comments. Any
remaining shortcomings are, of course, my own. Last but not least, I am grateful to
Jeffrey Lawrence, David Siddhartha Patel, Ion Bogdan Vasi, Chan S. Suh and Jack
Hammond for sending me their unpublished work and for their permission to cite
them here.
DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 ABSTRACT This paper examines social movement diffusion through a comparison
between two processes within the new transnational wave of protest: diffusion from
the Arab Spring to the Spanish indignados, and from them to the Occupy Wall Street
movement in New York. The comparison shows that the item being transmitted and
the type of links through which diffusion took place differ from one process to the
other. The Spanish indignados received a sense of the efficiency of the digitally
enabled collective action taking place in North Africa and the Middle East through
indirect links while interpersonal communication may have helped to transmit some
more practical knowledge related to novel aspects of organizational inclusiveness and
with the organization and development of the occupation of public space in the
second process. The analysis of this second diffusion devotes particular attention to
the role played by migrants. The results of the comparison serve as a basis on which
to discuss whether a certain type of channel is more likely to facilitate the diffusion of
a certain item. A particular relation is suggested: indirect channels may allow a more
ideational type of diffusion whereas more behavioral diffusion may call for direct
channels.
--It is commonplace in the emerging literature on the new transnational wave of
contention to acknowledge a certain connection amongst the different protests at the
local level. Both observers and participants agree on the fact that certain protest
movements have influenced other protests. Thus, Tunisia and Iceland “have become
reference points for the social movements that shook the political order in the Arab
world and challenged European and American political institutions” (Castells 2012:
37). The Arab Spring in turn had an influence on the Spanish indignados (see, for
example, de la Rubia 2011; Castells 2012; Hughes 2011), while this movement
“prompted the rest of Europe to participate, causing a domino effect throughout the
rest of the continent and of course across the Atlantic, with the Occupy Wall Street
movement” (Voulgarelis 2012: 171-2). Occupy Wall Street drew from all those
sources as well as from other, closer ones, such as the occupations of Madison, which
were in turn boosted, along with countless other occupations in the USA, by the
protests organized in New York City (for example, Castañeda 2012; Kerton 2012;
Gee 2012; Gitlin 2012; Schiffrin and Kircher-Allen 2012; Kroll, 2011; Graeber 2012;
Tarrow 2012a; Hard and Negri 2012; Hammond 2013).
However, while this influence has been acknowledged, empirical analyses enquiring
into the diffusion dynamics amongst protests seem to be lacking. What specific
exchanges took place between activists from different countries? What are the
innovations that were made available, by whom and in what way? How were those
innovations been received, where and what point? This paper aims at helping to
illuminate these questions through a comparison between two particular diffusion
processes within the new wave of contention: from the Arab spring to the Spanish
indignados movement (aka the 15M movement), and from the latter to Occupy Wall
Street (OWS) in the USA. The analysis covers the nine months between the beginning
of the Arab spring (December 2010) and OWS (September 2011), and the beginning
of the indignados movement which occurred between them (May 2011); nine months
of intense mobilization which include the emergence of diverse protest cycles at the
[email protected] 2 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 local level, in this case the MENA region, Spain and the USA, which at the same time
were part of a new transnational wave of contention. Research on protest cycles has
described their initial stages as particularly creative moments in which dissident
groups innovated in terms of identities, tactics and demands, which were then
transmitted to others throughout the cycle (Koopmans 2004; Tarrow 2011: ch. 10).
The data analyzed in this paper includes 30 semi-structured, individual interviews
with key informants from the indignados and OWS movements. The interviews were
carried out in two stages: 10 were conducted in Madrid and Barcelona between
October 2011 and August 2012 and 20 were conducted in New York City between
September and October 2012. Half the interviews in the latter stage were conducted in
Spanish and half in English. All the interviews were face-to-face except for one which
was conducted by telephone. 18 (60%) of the interviewees were men and 12 (40%)
were women. The interviews solicited organizational information and the
interviewee’s interpretation of movement processes and dynamics and other issues as
they arose. Furthermore, I also analyze documents, websites and secondary literature
including accounts written by the activists themselves.
Research question
The concept of diffusion was imported into social science from physics, more
specifically from research into the diffusion of certain types of waves from one
system to another (della Porta and Diani 2006). When social movement scholars
speak of diffusion they mean “some element of a social movement (e.g., tactic, frame,
ideology, protest, repertoire, campaign) is spreading across some set of actors (e.g.,
organizations, networks, groups, people, communities, states) in a social system either
through direct or indirect networks of communication” (Soule 2013). Narrower
definitions focus on the idea that the item to be spread must be an innovation (e.g.,
Rogers 1995; Soule 2004; Givan, Roberts and Soule 2010). Any diffusion process is
composed of four basic elements: a transmitter, an adopter, an item to be diffused, and
a channel along which the item may be transmitted (Soule 2004). This paper focuses
on two of these elements: the items that have been diffused in each process and the
channels along which this has occurred.
The comparison of the two processes (from the Arab world to Spain, and from the
latter to the USA) seeks to find similarities and differences which might help us
achieve a better understanding of social movement diffusion and more specifically,
whether a certain type of channel is more likely to facilitate the diffusion of a certain
item. Sarah A . Soule (2004) posed this research question in her empirical and
theoretical review of social movement diffusion while at the same time as she
encouraged scholars to produce comparisons which would help solve it. As Wood
(2012: 7) has recently noted, there is general consensus that the successful diffusion
of an innovation depends on a number of issues: the transmitting context, the channels
of communication, the context of the innovation’s reception, and the character of the
item itself. Wood also grants that there is less agreement on the relative importance of
each piece of the puzzle, as different studies focus on each one of them. My research
aims at contributing to the debate by comparing two variables: the character of the
item and the channel of communication.
[email protected] 3 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 Diffusion is a question that has received a great deal of attention in the literature on
social movements (for a recent review, see Givan et al. 2010). However, there still
remain important gaps affecting not only particular issues such as the one posed by
Soule but more general problems as well. McAdam and Schaffer Boudet (2012: 1367) note that social movements research has focused on the diffusion of an innovation
within an already established movement while diffusion amongst movements or
geographically separated mobilizations has not been given as much attention. Thus
the new wave of indignation offers a promising scenario for the analysis of the
transnational diffusion of contention by means of different mobilizations which are
located not only in different countries but in different continents.
While empirical analysis of the transcontinental diffusion of protest within the new
wave of contention is still lacking, some researchers have studied diffusion on a
smaller scale, i.e., restricted to one particular region or country. Patel (2013), for
instance, studied the diffusion of the Egyptian protest in the Arab world, and offered
an alternative explanation for the relationship between diffusion and the form of state
governance which suggests that the Arab republics have been more susceptible to
“contagion” than monarchies. His research adds a spatial dimension and notes how
the diffusion of “the Tahrir Square model” –a particular modality of protest according
to Patel and Bounce (2012)- succeeded in countries where the capital city has a focal
space that the public would collectively imagine as a domestic parallel to Tahrir
Square. Vasi and Suh (2012), for their part, offer a quantitative analysis of the role of
the new communication technologies in the diffusion of OWS in the US which shows
how online activism positively affects the spread of offline protest. The contribution
of the Internet was basically twofold: to supply information when media coverage
was still minimal and also to allow for the transfer of information among previously
unconnected movement sympathizers. In this way, the new media acted as a
technological substitute for social movement organizations.
Social movement scholars have long moved away from those lines of analysis which
understood diffusion as a product of either contagion, unreflexive imitation or utilitymaximizing rational choice towards new approaches “that see adopters and rejecters
of innovations as active participants (both individual and groups) engaged in
meaningful social interaction” (Wood 2012: 8). Theoretical refinement has produced
different typologies, entre las que podemos destacar dos. Givan et al. (2010) recently
studied the character of the item to be diffused in order to differentiate behavioral and
ideational types of diffusion with the former involving the transmission of tactics,
forms of organization or collective action repertories, and the latter the transmission
of collective action frames (cf. Romanos 2013b).1 In a highly influential and widely
cited study, Tarrow (2005: ch. 6), distinguishes three types of diffusion according to
the mechanisms that underlie each of them: direct (or relational) diffusion, which
depends on interpersonal ties between initiators and adopters of innovations; indirect
(or nonrelational) diffusion, which relies on impersonal ties through the media or
word-of-mouth; and mediated diffusion, which relies on the intermediation of third
1
This distinction shares certain elements with another recently suggested by Tarrow (2012a) between
thick and thin diffusion, the former meaning the diffusion of slogans, forms of contention and political
opportunities while the latter refers to the diffusion of movement organizations and connected events.
[email protected] 4 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 parties acting as translators or brokers among actors who might otherwise have no
contact with one another or recognize their mutual interests (see also Tarrow 2012b:
174). These typologies and their implications will be discussed in the comparative
analysis of the two particular processes which constitute the case study of this paper.
Context
This paper compares two processes of diffusion among three protest movements in
three different continents: the Arab spring in the MENA region, the indignados in
Spain and the occupiers in the USA. The Arab spring is a paradigmatic example of
the “streams of contention” as defined by Tilly and Tarrow (2007: 211; see also
McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001), in which one of the contenders is the government,
though in this case it was a lengthy series of regimes. What started on December 17,
2010 as an individual protest with the self-immolation of a young Tunisian man,
against the confiscation of his fruit stall and police abuse, led within a few weeks to
the fall of two dictators (Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt) and it also
brought about diverse government changes and the announcing and implementation
of a series of measures by governments in the MENA region. Added to that, there was
repression of dissidents and protesters not only by means of police control but also, in
Libya and Syria, the use of the armed forces in the context of warfare.
Tahrir Square in Cairo is probably the most emblematic of all the key locations in the
Arab spring. Egyptians protesters occupied it on January 25, 2011. The Facebook
group “We are all Khaled Said”, created by Wael Ghonim (2012) in memory of a
young activist beaten to death by the police months before in Alexandria, played an
important role in launching the protest. For days, different groups of people would
reach the square from different parts of the city chanting slogans such as “Bread,
freedom, human dignity” or “The people want the fall of the regime” (Gerbaudo
2012; Clarke 2013). At the same time, the center of Tahrir Square became a tent city
whose citizens, “defied the exclusionary logic that had governed their urban space for
years. What they created was an anti-city of sorts” (Shokr 2011: 43). Inside people
discussed political, social and religious issues. Tahrir also witnessed fierce clashes
between opponents of the regime and its defenders and the police. The government
ordered the intervention of the army but the latter took an ambiguous stance and
eventually decided to support the opponents of the government, the final blow to
president Mubarak, who resigned after 18 days of protests and almost 30 years in
power.
A few months later, on the other side of the Mediterranean, protest marches were
called by the Democracia Real Ya [Real Democracy Now] digital platform with the
slogan “We are not products in the hands of politicians and bankers” managed to
draw tens of thousands of people all over Spain.2 Demonstrations took place on May
15, 2011, a week before the holding of municipal and autonomous region elections. In
Madrid some of the protesters decided to continue the march with a “reclaim the
streets” type activity, blocking traffic in the centre of the city with a sit down protest.
2
The number of participants varied according to the source: 20,000 (according to the police), 80,000
(according to El País) or 130,000 (according to the organizers).
[email protected] 5 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 After confrontations with the police, which led to some arrests, a group of about 40
people remained at the Puerta del Sol in order to, among other reasons “support the
detainees and continue with the demonstrations”. From this meeting there arose an
assembly “with the main idea of creating and maintaining a permanent camp”. Thus
was born acampadasol (Romanos 2013a).
Acampadasol in Madrid grew around various committees that worked on the
maintenance of the camp and the logistics of the assembly process as well as various
working groups concerned with generating discourse related to the emerging protest
movement. In the afternoon committees and working groups participated in a general
assembly open to everyone. The support received by the movement grew both on the
internet and at the Puerta de Sol. The #spanishrevolution became a worldwide
trending topic on Twitter. More and more people turned up at the “mini-republic”
established at the Puerta de Sol (Elola 2011a). The website tomalaplaza.net gathered
information relating to what was happening in the square and other locations where
protestors had gathered, including those organized by Spanish emigrants abroad. The
Provincial Electoral Committee of Madrid banned protests one day before election
day, during the so called jornada de reflexión [day for reflection], but some 25.000
people challenged the decision in an act of civil disobedience at Puerta del Sol the
impact and size of which had had no precedents in the recent history of Spain
(Romanos 2013a). The camp broke up on June 12 after long internal discussions and
strong pressure from the authorities. Up to that day, the camp was the epicenter of a
protest movement which has remained active and visible and become a relatively
important actor on the domestic social and political scene.
The origin of the third protest movement is usually associated with the call launched
on July 13, 2011 by Adbusters to fill lower Manhattan with “tents, kitchens, [and]
peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months”. The importance of this
call is unquestionable, but the genealogy of the OWS movement includes other
important highlights. Four days after the indignados dismantled the camp in Madrid, a
group of New Yorkers set up their own across from City Hall to protest against Mayor
Michael Bloomberg’s budget cuts and policies of austerity. The so-called
Bloombergville lasted for three weeks and was dismantled after the city council
approved a modified budget (Writers for the 99% 2011). Some of the campers later
attended a meeting at 16 Beaver Street, an “artivist space” near Wall Street, where
Spaniards, Greeks, Egyptians and other immigrants gathered to talk about the protest
movements in their countries of origin and how to bring the wave to that side of the
Atlantic. Some of those present on August 2 went to Bowling Green Park – the
Charging Bull square- in lower Manhattan, where a traditional protest rally turned
into an assembly meeting which afterwards gathered on Saturday afternoons at
Tompkins Square Park in the East Village (Kroll 2011). The New York City General
Assembly (NYCGA) regularly gathered fifty or sixty people, about half of them from
countries other than the United States (Lawrence 2013).
On September 17, between 1,000 and 5,000 demonstrators marched to the business
district in New York, a protest that ended with some of them setting up camp in
Zucotti Park, near Wall Street. It recalled Tahrir and Puerta del Sol, albeit on a
smaller scale. There a daily “people’s assembly” would gather with the help of those
[email protected] 6 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 who had participated in the NYCGA. Protesters came up with a powerful slogan –We
are the 99 Percent– but in fact they got media attention when the social networks
started to show videos of the brutal and disproportionate activities of the police (see
Greenberg 2012). Meanwhile, occupations spread to other parts of the country
(Tarrow 2012a; Vasi and Suh 2013). On October 15, the Occupy movement joined
the massive Global Day of Action originally called by the Spanish indignados (de la
Rubia 2011). One month later the police expelled the Zuccoti Park campers. After
that, the OWS continued its activities in the networks and in the groups that had been
created inside and outside the limits of the square.
First diffusion process: anything is possible (with a smartphone and a tent)
In a brief but spot-on article, William Gamson (2011) discusses the influence of the
Arab spring on the Israeli protest-tent summer of 2011. Beginning on 14 July, protests
for a new social contract in Israel culminated on 3 September with the largest
demonstration in the country’s history (see Alimi 2012; Gordon 2012). Gamson
analyzes the connections between these protest movements based on the concept of
collective action frames: “action oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and
legitimate social movement activities and campaigns” (Snow and Benford 1992, cited
in Gamson 2011). The concept is composed of three elements: the injustice element,
which refers to the moral indignation expressed in the form of political consciousness;
the agency component, which refers to the consciousness that it is possible to alter
conditions or policies through collective action; and the identity component, which
refers to the process of defining some “we” in opposition to some “they” who have
different values or interests. According to Gamson, the influence that the publicity
about collective action in one given country might have in other countries refers
exclusively to the agency component while the identity and injustice components are
almost entirely based on local conditions and actions (2011: 464). In the case of the
Arab spring and the protests in Israel, the sense of injustice was based on different
grievances and the cleavages that the construction of an inclusive “we” aimed at
breaking down were different as well. Nevertheless, the sense of collective efficacy
linked to the campaign of non-violent protest and civil disobedience travelled from
Tunisia to Egypt first and then from Egypt to Israel.
Did the Arab spring influence the Spanish indignados movement in a similar way?
Let us look at the three components of collective action frames one by one. First,
there is the sense of injustice. Among the economic and political grievances
underlying the popular uprisings in the MENA region, poor living conditions, high
levels of unemployment, police brutality, limited freedom of speech, state
arbitrariness and regime corruption were notable (see Dupont and Fassy 2011;
Kurzman 2012). The protest campaign that the Spanish indignados movement
initiated made reference to some of these forms of injustice, e.g., the privileges of the
political class and unemployment, but their problems were for the most part different:
the lack of control of banking entities, access to housing, the deterioration of public
services, taxation, representative democracy and military spending (Toret 2012: 55).
The discussions in the camp that was later set up in Madrid focused around four main
issues which greatly differed from the grievances which sparked the Arab spring:
[email protected] 7 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 reform of the electoral law, the fight against corruption, effective separation of
powers and political accountability.3
Regarding the identity component, Gamson (2011) suggests that at the start of the
Arab spring some sectors of the Islamist movement (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt) made deliberate and conscious efforts to avoid framing the uprising in Islamist
terms, which facilitated mutual understanding with powerless sectors, regardless of
the intensity or nature of their religious convictions. Goldstone (2011) has also noted
the existence of cross-class and cross-regional coalitions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya
(see also Austin-Holmes 2012). In Spain, as happens in general in the early phases of
protest cycles (Tarrow 1989), the choice was made to construct an inclusive “we”,
although here the process was in large measure different: those held responsible for
the situation against which the protest was directed were clearly identified (political
representatives and those with economic power, united in a coalition to protect their
privileges) and the drafting of general demands facilitated the involvement of a large
part of the population. Potential reticence on the part of people with no previous
experience in social movements was countered by a series of elements which
encouraged participation, e.g., open assemblies, the absence of partisan symbols, the
creation of comisiones de respeto [respect committees] and anonymity (on the
Internet and in the square).
While the construction of a sense of injustice and collective identity processes in the
indignados movement were anchored in local conditions, the agency component of
collective action frames seems to have been, as was the case in Israel, strongly
influenced by the Arab spring. Javier Toret (2012: 55), one of the organizers of the
May 15 protest acknowledges this:
The protest aimed at creating links with the emergent movements in Europe…
But what really sparked the call to protest was the “Arab spring”. The
contagious force of those revolts inspired many people who started to believe
that rebellion was possible.
This influence was also clear at the camp sites. When asked what he thought would
happen after the first night at Puerta de Sol, one of those sleeping there replied:
What had happened in Egypt, people out on the streets and occupying the
squares… we believed that could happen [in Spain]. Obviously we didn’t
expect it could reach the same level… but we did think it was possible… To
me, that was really a powerful thought.4
After the fall of Mubarak in Cairo, the Spanish people became aware of the efficacy
of collective action, meaning not just any collective action but a specific one which
made intelligent use of the social networks and at the same time became strong in the
squares and streets. The belief that without Facebook, Twitter and You Tube the Arab
spring could not have happened was commonplace amongst the Spanish indignados.
Regardless of the real part virtual networks played in the protest movement (see, for
3
4
http://madrid.tomalaplaza.net/2011/05/26/acampada-sol-consensua-cuatro-lineas-de-debate/
Author’s interview with Miguel (29, PhD candidate in theoretical physics), 6 March 2012, Madrid.
[email protected] 8 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 example, Diani 2011), the members of Democracia Real Ya saw through Egyptian
twitter users the enormous potential of using technology for political purposes, not so
much for transmitting information but rather as a form of “interactive organization”
(Muñoz 2011: 42). These uses were not new, but their mobilizing capacity did seem
to be novel. Furthermore, the occupation of Tahrir square became a symbol that the
indignados later replicated in their own way at Puerta del Sol. Spaniards were ahead
of Israelis and Americans, they were the first Western people to take to the streets en
masse and set up camps in the main city squares to replicate the non-violent civil
disobedience techniques they had seen in Tahrir.
The Spanish indignados learned about the collective action in Egypt and other
countries of the region through the wide media coverage and especially on the social
networks. The data collected suggests there was no or very little interpersonal contact.
This does not mean that the level of information the Spanish indignados had
regarding the Arab spring was superficial. The organizers of Democracia Real Ya
protest campaign spent four months doing research on Egyptian twitter users and the
way they used new technologies (Muñoz 2011). As previously noted, the social
networks were used precisely to promote a sense of connectivity that potential
activists did not find in conventional media. In this sense, Carolina, hacker and
acampadasol participant notes how
The way they used technology, how they kept Twitter and YouTube accounts
active, somehow made a good impression on me and I said to myself: “they
are speaking directly to the people. This is not mediated, not even by
alternative media but all of a sudden I am seeing something, I don’t know
[exactly] what’s going on but I get it”.5
Gamson (2011: 467) acknowledges that once the sense of collective efficacy is
transmitted, it is heavily influenced by the social control response of authorities. If
social control measures fail, then the sense of agency may increase. That is what
happened in Tahrir, where the army refused to put down the protests. It also happened
at Puerta del Sol: the police dislodged the camp on the second night but were later
unable to cope with the reaction of the public and eventually the authorities decided
against the use of force, which in a certain way boosted the protest. However, not
only the influence from other protest movements and the failure of social control
measures can lead to an increase in the sense of collective agency. The protest
movement in itself also contributes to creating a sense of hope that leads to believing
that maybe not all but many things are possible (Romanos 2011b). In the case of the
Spanish indignados, the early success of the movement in terms of participation and
media impact led some to think that “there would be uprisings in all the squares in the
world during that first week”.6 The sense of collective agency clearly increased, and
the indignados shifted from being “anesthetized” or “paralyzed” into action (Álvarez,
Gallego, Gándara and Rivas 2011). In fact, they put up a sign at Puerta del Sol which
5
Author’s telephone interview with Carolina (8 April 2012).
Stéphane M. Grueso’s interview with M.A. Available at
http://madrid.15m.cc/2011/12/conversaciones-15mcc-miguel-arana.html> (accessed 15 February
2012).
6
[email protected] 9 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 read: “Dormíamos, despertamos. Plaza tomada” [We were asleep but we awoke.
Square occupied]
Second diffusion: how to occupy, and how to give meaning to the occupation
An important difference between the two diffusion processes analyzed here is the role
transnational actors played, immigrant residents in NYC in particular. Recently, the
issue of migrants has proved powerfully attractive for social movement scholars (for a
brief review, see Romanos 2011c). Different studies have noted how in some cases
immigrants have gradually overcome the great obstacles that traditionally hindered
the articulation of their collective action in their host countries (della Porta and Diani,
2006: ch. 2; Klandermans, van der Toorn and van Stekelenburg 2008; della Porta and
Caiani 2009; Morales and Giugni 2011). However, looking beyond immigrants as
“new” protest subjects, there seems to be a gap in the study of their participation in a
process for which they seem to be specially suited a priori: the diffusion of social
movements. Among the studies addressing the topic, those focused on the diffusion of
violence in relation to conflicts in their countries of origin are worth highlighting (see
Anderson 1998; Collier and Hoeffler 2003; Tarrow 2005: ch. 2; Romanos 2013b).
However, as we will now see, emigrants can also facilitate the transmission of other
items.
Spaniards were not the only immigrants involved in the origin and further
development of the OWS movement. As mentioned above, the meeting at 16 Beever
prior to the New York City General Assembly gathered immigrants from different
countries, some Spaniards among them, but also Egyptians and Greeks (see Kroll
2011). These other immigrants must have surely helped in the diffusion of different
elements related to the recent protests in their native countries. However, this paper is
focused on the analysis of the specific contribution of Spaniards and on the extent to
which that contribution was important. In order to find an answer to these questions I
make use of different testimonies from both Spanish and American participants. The
former will help us find out the content of the innovations and the way they were
transmitted, whereas the latter will contribute elements which will help estimate the
level of reception of these innovations.
On May 21, 2011 several dozens of Spaniards residents in NYC protested in
Washington Square and linked their demonstration with those taking place that same
day in Puerta del Sol in Madrid and other Spanish squares. The protest was launched
by a Facebook group under the name Democracia Real Ya - New York created
following the success of the demonstrations on May 15 in Spain. The group rapidly
grew on the Internet and around sixty of their members met in person for the first time
in a room at Columbia University. According to some accounts at that point there
appeared two different lines of thought: some saw the protest movement in Spain
basically in relation to domestic problems that affected the political and social
situation in that country (and thus wanted to protest in solidarity with the
demonstrations in Spain) while others saw the protests in Spanish squares as part of a
wider contentious wave related to global problems (and thus wanted to extend the
protests to their host country and seek the attention of local media and groups).
Apparently, the different stances had to do with a sociological difference between
[email protected] 10 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 those who were in NYC more in passing (pro-solidarity sector) and those who were
more permanent residents (pro-extension sector).
The pro-extension sector became in time an affinity group which participated in the
protests preceding the occupation of Zucotti Park. Before that, some of its members
organized a talk at Bluestockings, a radical bookstore and activist centre on the Lower
East Side, to explain what was going on in Spain. Spanish immigrants followed the
protests through conventional media, social networks and interpersonal
communication with family and friends who took part in them. Some of them also
travelled to Spain where they had a brief chance to join the protests. The talk at
Bluestockings was the first step in the attempt to connect with locals and was
followed by a visit to Bloombergville. On the first night at the camp the Spaniards
talked to the activists, some of whom received the information about the camps in
Spain with a mixture of “incredulity, ignorance and also some degree of enthusiasm”.
Apparently, there was more receptivity at 16 Beever Street. A certain degree of
common ground was established there, especially with New Yorkers Against Budget
Cuts activists. These links later became stronger in the NYCGA, with some Spaniards
joining the outreach working group “with the idea that [this] should be a movement
not just for activists but for everybody”.7
I have previously mentioned the process through which the Spanish indignados
constructed a highly inclusive “we”. Inclusiveness is a fundamental value in this
movement but it is in no way a novel thing in the field of social movements.
Organizational inclusiveness was already typical of post-1968 movements,
particularly the women’s movement (see Mansbridge 1986). Donatella della Porta
(2005) notes that the global justice movement activists adopted this principle even
more strongly by the end of 1990s and the early 2000s, so that it became one the basic
features of the deliberative democracy model that activists practised. This promotes
the inclusion of the enormous diversity of actors who form this network or
“movement of movements” in the decisions they adopt. To this end mechanisms such
as the general assembly are established during which each person can express their
opinions.
The new indignados movement basically adopted the deliberative democracy model
(Romanos 2011a). However, there are two aspects of inclusiveness which are
somewhat new. First, the inclusiveness that the indignados promote is not targeted at
those who are already part of the movement –to establish mechanisms that will ensure
their inclusion in the decision making process– but rather at potential participants.
Here the square plays an important role. One of the novel aspects of the 15M
movement was the way it placed experiments with new forms of democracy in the
centre of public space. In this way the movement brought practices of deliberative
democracy, previously confined to more or less limited spaces such as social forums,
social movement headquarters, peace camps and social centres, out into public
7
Author’s interview with Luis Moreno-Caballud (36 years old, assistant professor of Spanish literature
and cultural studies), 6 October 2012, New York. According to Lawrence (2013), most of the Spanish
participants in the NYCGA had no previous experience in social movements and had postgraduate
academic education. Lawrence also points out the Spaniards often represented between 10% and 20%
of the people at the NYCGA meetings.
[email protected] 11 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 squares where passers-by were invited to join in. This seems to be an important
difference from the practices of previous movements and mobilizations.8 As noted by
Jeff Lawrence (2013), the change of focus implies a change in movement orientation
towards the ordinary people outside the assembly rather than on the activities of those
internal to these gatherings. Lawrence himself (2013) witnessed how Spanish
immigrants promoted this form of inclusiveness in the NYCGA:
During the assemblies in Tompkins Square Park, while much of the debate
focused on the tactical and logistical questions of the occupation, SantaCecilia [a Spanish artist based in Brooklyn] could often be found distributing
flyers to curious onlookers who were passing through the park and talking to
them about the rationale of Occupy. The idea was that the assembly needed to
remain open to the 99% of the population that it considered to be the actual
protagonist of the movement, rather than separating itself as a small
revolutionary vanguard.
The second aspect has to do with a less rational, more affective sense of
inclusiveness, one not so much oriented to the decision making process but rather to
the transformation of public spaces into a space open to empathy as well. In August
2011, some indignados reflected upon the basic features of the movement in Spain,
one of which was “INCLUSIVENES. The power of this movement is in the fact that
we are many and we are different […] The spaces that make us strong, that give us
joy and make us powerful, are those which allow each one of us to feel it as our own
”.9 According to some Spanish immigrants in New York, this concept of
inclusiveness, which we could call empathic inclusiveness, was lacking in the
NYCGA. The assembly was more oriented to strategic issues, which could lead to
problems in terms of opening the movement to people with no previous participation
in social movements,
We didn’t see [in the NYCGA] the affective dimension we found in Spain,
talking to a person who is going through problems, who is feeling bad... So I
decided to mention that in every assembly. If I spoke I would say, “We are not
here just to talk things over, or to make plans, we are people with problems
and our feelings are involved”. I thought that was very important. Moreover,
you always had the typical ego clashes. And I thought, we thought, that if that
cozy feeling the 15M had, if empathy was lacking, then we were not interested
[in the movement].
These are the words of Luis Moreno-Caballud (36, assistant professor of Spanish
literature and cultural studies), who, when asked about the reception of this message,
replied that he was under the impression that those words “were not received with the
ccording to Lawrence (2013), most of the Spanish participants in the NYCGA had no previous
experience in social movements and had postgraduate academic education. Lawrence also points out
the Spaniards often represented between 10% and 20% of the people at the NYCGA meetings.
9
http://madrid.tomalaplaza.net/2011/08/12/
[email protected] 12 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 same incredulity or incomprehension as sometimes was perceived when we talked
about Spain”.10
However, the process of transmission of empathic inclusiveness seems to have
undergone translation problems. The outreach group outlined a message proposal
aimed at attracting participants to attend the September 17 demonstration. The
message used somewhat Habermasian rhetoric and identified a social problem not so
much in “the corporate domination of our economy and government” but rather in the
effects that domination had over “our lives and communities”. When it was read
before the assembly, some activists who had participated in the social movements in
the 1960s, criticized the use of what they regarded as hackneyed terms such as
“empowerment”.11 Eventually the assembly decided that the proposal be
reformulated. The result was a series of speeches that were the basis of the later to be
famous 99% slogan. Jeff Lawrence witnessed the process and explains that in general
the emotional speech of the Spaniards was quite groundbreaking, but it was a
translation from Spanish and hence the criticism. In his view, “[the American
activists] basically rejected the language in that document but a large part of the
message was included”.12 Transmitters and receivers maintained a kind of
communication which modified the form of the message before it was finally adopted
(see Chabot 2010). The structural equivalence between transmitters and adopters who
interacted through weak ties within a decentralized network were relational conditions
which surely facilitated this communication (Wood 2012).
After September 17, the Spaniards continued to promote the opening up of OWS in
the same way as the indignados movement. Two initiatives are worth noting in this
regard. One was the setting up of a series of desks to welcome and inform people
about activity in the square. This idea came from Begoña Santa-Cecilia, who in June
had travelled to Madrid with Luis Moreno-Caballud and had seen the information
stand at the camp in Puerta del Sol,
If it weren’t for that information stand, we would have been clueless… We
wouldn’t have known how we could help, what we could do… There was
plenty of information and there were people there to inform you about what
was going on in the city in relation to [the movement]. That was our idea.
Information is what matters most. “Welcome the people” is the most important
thing in the square.13
Isham Christie (27, Master’s student), activist first in the NYCGA and later in OWS,
noted how important the information stand set up by the Spaniards in Zuccotti Park
was,
10
Author’s interview with Luis Moreno-Caballud, 6 October 2012, New York.
Message proposal said: “Empowerment for all equals justice for all--The corporate domination of
our economy and government is destroying our lives and communities therefore we are calling a
General Assembly on Wall street on September 17th to achieve real democratic participation.”
12
Author’s interview with Jeff Lawrence (28 años, PhD candidate in comparative literature), 16
October 2012, New York.
13
Author’s interview with Begoña Santa-Cecilia, 4 October 2012, New York.
11
[email protected] 13 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 It was right after we got really really popular in the media so we had so many
people coming down. The people didn’t know how to get plugged in. They
[the Spaniards] were really helpful in getting a bunch of tables to like ‘these
are the different working groups’. And that was a huge contribution, but it’s
like not gonna be written in the pages of the history, but the people had a place
to go and participate.14
The second initiative was the open forums: “a discussion event at Liberty Square in
which a volunteer presenter/lecturer gives out a brief presentation that is relevant to
the protest followed by an open discussion”.15 Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek, among
others, were there. Following the example of what they had seen at the indignados
movement, Spanish immigrants wanted to move beyond the occupation and proposed
activities that would make it meaningful: “The emphasis was on occupying but
nobody seemed to understand that the square had to be used for something”.16
According to some accounts, their efforts were not in vain,
The idea of staying active in the occupation, of demanding that people work,
not in a abusive way but rather to promote a collective sense of work, set up
committees, the idea that there was much to be done. That this was not just a
sleepover but a very active occupation. That feeling was brought about by the
Spaniards .17
Later the open forums became the Empowerment and Education group. Together with
other immigrants, some Iranians, Greeks and Egyptians among them, the Spaniards
intended to connect the activity at the square with that of community groups and
activists working at other points of New York City. After the Zuccotti Park
occupation was cleared the group changed its name to Making Worlds and its
members are still mainly Spaniards.
Spanish emigrants in New York also contributed in the transmission of other
innovations through the distribution of documents explicitly created by the activists in
Spain. The most important was Cómo Cocinar una Revolución Noviolenta [How to
Cook Up a Non-Violent Revolution], which explained the internal organization and
decision making at the square. Its authors were members of World Extension Team
(WET), a commission which was set up in the first days of the acampadasol with the
objective of disseminating and coordinating the protest movement at the international
level. The Spaniards distributed it on a massive scale in Tompkins Square and
Zuccotti Park,
We would give it to everyone. I was always talking about it “read this, it’s
really good”. And the people did read those instructions. They translated them
14
Author’s interview with Isham Christie, 11 October 2012, New York.
http://www.nycga.net/groups/education-and-empowerment/docs/minutes-–-empowerment-andeducation-working-group-meeting-–-12211-–-60-wall-st
16
Author’s interview with Vicente Rubio (32, PhD candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literature),
27 September 2012, New York.
17
Author’s interview with Justin Wedes (26, educator), 6 October 2012, New York.
15
[email protected] 14 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 into English… We sent it to the September17 [mailing list]. We printed it in
Spanish and in English. And we would tell everyone about it.18
The document was published on different websites including takethesquare.net,19
originally set up by WET-Madrid to bring the movement’s principles to a global
audience. However, according to the accounts collected, its reception in the USA was
facilitated by the interpersonal contacts created by transnational actors: Spanish
immigrants and also Americans activists who had taken part of the movement in
Spain and who later participated in the creation and development of OWS. Isham
Christie, for instance, mentions that Willie Osterweil, a friend of his who had been at
the camp in Plaza Cataluña in Barcelona told him in Bloombergville about a guide
which was later included in the manual: the Guía Rápida de Dinamización de
Asambleas [Quick Guide for the Energizing of Assemblies] drafted in acampadasol.20
According to Isham, this document had limited influence in Bloombergville but was
relevant in Zuccotti Park, especially in relation to the functioning of the general
assembly and the organization of space in the camp.21
In any case, the documents drafted by the Spaniards were not the only source of
organization of democracy at the square. There were activists with other
horizontalism experiences which were used for inspiration, por ejemplo en relación
con el global justice movement o las movilizaciones argentinas en 2001 (see, e.g.,
Sitrin and Azzellini 2012; Sitrin 2012). The influence of these other experiences
accounts for the fact that the deliberative process in Zucotti Park was in some aspects
different from that in Spanish squares. For instance, the progressive stack designed to
ensure that people from marginalized groups would get a chance to speak was not
formalized to the same extent in Spain, and consensus in Spain had to be total, which
undoubtedly blocked the approval of numerous proposals while a modified consensus
was the practice in New York, i.e., small discrepancies were accepted. Further
differences are related to the political context, and specifically with the policing of
protest. Thus, the prohibition of any kind of sound amplification equipment in
Zuccotti Park left no choice but the use of the so called “human microphone”
technique (aka “people’s microphone” or simply “mic-check”), with all that this
implies: more participation and closeness but at the same time less fluency and
sophistication in argument building.
Apart from the Spanish emigrants and the Americans who travelled to Spain, other
transnational activists seem to have acted as a significant link connecting the
movements in Spain and the United States. It was Spaniards (and residents of Spain)
who made themselves present in the city when Zuccotti Park was occupied on
September 17, 2011. These activists went to New York in an individual capacity and
with no coordination. Their trip was not paid for by the movement because, as
opposed to OWS, the former did not receive donations and did not have funds.
18
Author’s interview with Begoña Santa-Cecilia, 4 October 2012, New York.
http://takethesquare.net/2011/07/15/how-to-cook-a-pacific-revolution/
20
Osterweil’s trip to Spain and its influence on his participation on OWS can be found in Writers for
the 99% (2011: 7-8). The guide in http://madrid.tomalaplaza.net/2011/05/31/guia-rapida-para-ladinamizacion-de-asambleas-populares/
21
Author’s interview with Isham Christie, 11 October 2012, New York. See also Hammond 2013.
19
[email protected] 15 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 According to the accounts of various American activists at OWS, these Spanish
visitors contributed to the growth of the movement through the transmission of a
number of kinds of practical knowledge which were relevant for the emergence and
continuity of the movement, e.g., those related to power supply in the camp and the
design and setting up of the media equipment used, among other things, for live
streaming.
Discussion and conclusions
The comparison of the diffusion of the Arab spring to the Spanish indignados
movement with the diffusion of the latter to the Occupy movement in the USA shows
that the item being transmitted and the type of links through which diffusion took
place differed from one process to the other. The diffusion of the Arab spring to the
Spanish indignados was fundamentaly ideational. In this case, the item transmitted
was the agency component of collective action frames. Spanish activists were aware
of the efficacy of the collective action launched by Arab protesters, especially the
Egyptians; a digitally enabled collective action which succeeded at achieving political
and social changes by making intelligent use of the social networks and by acquiring
strength in the squares, where protesters built alternative mini-cities to challenge
public order. Furthermore, the diffusion of this sense of collective efficacy was
indirect, that is, by means of media coverage and the social networks. Once it was
received, the agency component of collective action frames was influenced by the
relatively permissive control response of authorities and the hope of change boosted
by the scale and the support the movement itself achieved.
Spanish activists also replicated the general form of the Egyptian protest, that is, the
occupation of the main square (or one of the main squares) of the city with the aim of
achieving a certain permanence. This time, the indignados also received this item
mainly through the media (both old and new). However, beyond the general outlines
of this particular modality of protest, the occupation of Tahrir Square and the dozens
of occupations of Spanish squares were to a large degree different. These differences
have to do with local contention and to a great extent with collective learning
processes associated with the experience –both successful and failed- of recent social
protests (Romanos 2013a), to which certain innovations related to specific knowledge
acquired at the camps were added. Some of these innovations are in fact the elements
which Spanish immigrants tried to transfer while taking part in OWS; a diffusion
which achieved a certain degree of success according to the accounts of American
participants.
Unlike the diffusion between the Arab spring and the Spanish indignados, diffusion
from the latter to New York occupiers was fundamentally behavioral and direct in
nature. Activists in New York received a somewhat novel form of organizational
inclusiveness, one targeted at the potential participants in the movement (99% of the
population) and aiming at transforming public space into a space open to empathy.
Other items received by occupiers include a way to underpin and give meaning to
their occupation, that is, a way to organize deliberations, camp space and activity so
that it becomes an operational space capable of attracting potential supporters and of
keeping participants active in the creation of networks and projects. These items were
[email protected] 16 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 diffused fundamentally through Spanish emigrants living in NYC who had
participated in the previous organization and the growth of OWS. To what extent
were the Spanish immigrants also part of the Spanish movement? They generally
stayed in contact with the movement through conventional media, social networks
and person-to-person communication with participants. Some of them went to Spain
and took part in the protests, albeit somewhat peripherally. Everyone identified with
the Spanish protests. In fact, this identification partly explains their participation in
OWS.
The comparison of these two diffusion processes helps advance the understanding of
the transnational diffusion of the protest in different ways. First and most
straightforwardly, the comparison contributes elements which answer the question
posed by Soule (2004): whether or not a certain type of channel is more likely to
facilitate the diffusion of a certain item. The results of this investigation suggest a
relationship between the character of the item to be diffused and the mechanisms that
underlie diffusion: the agency component of collective action frames can be
transmitted when there is no personal contact among those in charge of diffusion, or
when there is no one who can put them in contact, whereas other, more complex items
related for example to the organization of social movements and the development of
collective action repertoires may need precisely those person-to-person links or the
intermediation of third parties. In other words, indirect channels may allow a more
ideational type of diffusion whereas a more behavioral diffusion may call for direct
channels.
The comparative analysis of both processes also allows us to move forward towards
answering other questions more recently collected by Soule herself (2013), for
instance: i) whether the mechanisms and processes of diffusion are the same with both
ideational and behavioral innovations; ii) whether these innovations are transplanted
whole cloth or borrowed with some degree of adaptation; and iii) what the
effectiveness of indirect and direct models is for spreading elements of social
movements. The affinity proposed above between indirect channels and ideational
elements and between direct channels and behavioral elements seems to be related to
the effectiveness of the different channels in the transmission of one of the two types
of elements. One could argue that activists can learn about behavioral elements by
reading about them or watching them on YouTube. That is what happened with the
diffusion of the occupations, which went first from Egypt to Spain and then to the
USA. But in fact this seems to have happened only in terms of the general form of the
occupation. The comparison of the two processes suggests that the specific contents
of the occupation –how to occupy and how to give meaning to the occupation- were
not diffused in the first process but in the second one and precisely through direct
channels. Undoubtedly, the volume of literature and video that became available
almost instantly accounts for part of the transmission but the analysis of the second
diffusion process suggests that direct channels were efficient when it came to
transmitting more specific knowledge and techniques which are certainly more
difficult to grasp without the mediation of activists who explained them in detail and
advocated their use.
[email protected] 17 DRAFT – Comments are greatly appreciated ECPR General Conference 2013 If local experiences were important when occupation was launched in Spain, why
should that not be the case in NYC? It definitely was and hence the importance of
Spanish immigrants; immigrants who had been living in NYC for some time and
therefore were fairly familiar with the social environment. Local contention
influenced the reception of innovations as they were borrowed with some degree of
adaptation. Spanish immigrants had to face problems deriving from the translation
and adaptation of some innovations. But the difference here is the availability and
involvement of the immigrants - Spaniards in this case - in the process of
transmission. The accounts collected in this investigation suggest that the level of
involvement of Egyptian immigrants in the first process was not the same. This fact
helps understand how eventually, and in spite of Adbusters call for the building of an
“America's Tahrir Moment”, for example, Wall Street resembled Puerta del Sol rather
than the Egyptian square.22 At the same time, Spanish immigrants acted in a context
of a level of mobilization which attracted a lot of newcomers who had no previous
experience in social protests and thus were obviously less resistant to proposals from
outside. Therefore, the ever present process of cultural adaptation was relatively less
intense than in other cases (see Wood 2012; Givan et al. 2010).
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