ABSTRACT

Social movement activists know very well that what they are doing relates to what other people, sharing the same willingness to struggle for a common cause, are doing. They also know that what they constantly see about other people struggling for the same or similar causes strongly influences their political activism. In other words, social movement participants implicitly acknowledge the fact that their actions are subject to external influences and that the external environment is subject to their actions. Students of social movements, on the contrary, often seem to have forgotten this apparently simple fact. By neglecting the links among activities that social movements carry out, they have treated them as discrete entities instead of “multipolar action systems” (Melucci 1980). Eventually, proponents of the resource mobilization approach acknowledged the relational nature of social movements. Yet they have done so mainly in terms of networks of organizations or activists to describe the complex exchange system existing within the social movement sector, explaining movement mobilization by means of such a system. Few authors have tried to link the exchange system that one can observe within the social movement sector with the idea of diffusion. As a consequence, we suffer from a lack of studies on the diffusion processes taking place among social movements. Such a theoretical gap sharply contrasts with the suggested empirical evidence on influence patterns among social movements. We all remember the almost simultaneous rise of student unrest in the late sixties, when protest erupted at the Free University of Berlin and soon spread to the rest of Europe, especially France and Italy. Moreover, European student protest came in the wake of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964, which, by all evidence, had been influenced by the civil rights movement in the United States. The numerous influences of the civil rights movement on other social movements have been pointed out by McAdam (1988, 1994), among others. Similarly, Oberschall (1993: 302) mentions several examples of “transnational convergence of collective action”: 1848-49, 1917-19, and 1968. More recent instances include the international antinuclear opposition in Western Europe in the seventies, the concomitant protest by the urban autonomous movement in 1980 and 1981, and the simultaneous mass mobilization against NATO’s cruise missiles at the beginning of the eighties.