ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the evolution of labor, new social movements, and Global Justice Movements in Western Europe. Additionally, we also consider the more recent mobilization by anti-austerity movements during the economic crisis. We look both at the continuities and discontinuities between the three movement families. However, we put forward an argument according to which Global Justice Movements can be seen as a continuation of the new social movements featuring a scale shift from the local and national levels to the global level. Global Justice Movements, in turn, can be seen as having had a strong spillover effect on anti-austerity movements. In this process, both global justice and anti-austerity movements have helped to bring capitalism and social class back into contentious politics. This, we maintain, has led to a homogenization of protest among old and new movements which is a result of the shared experiences of mobilization within the Global Justice Movement and similarly heterogeneous movements as well as of the common goals and targets of protest participants in these movements.
