ABSTRACT
Drawing on social movement coalition literature, Chapter 9 considers the GI-groups’ coalition-building process, by exploring its initiation, maintenance, and survival. In terms of Europeanisation, the coalition forms a ‘transnational movement’, as it protests in the transnational space, without approaching the EU directly, and instead focuses on influencing the domestic public. The chapter explains that the three largest GI-groups, GI France, GI Austria, and GI Germany, provided the other GI-groups with the coalition’s ideological output and organisational set-up. Heavily relying on transnational direct and indirect diffusion and coalition leadership, the GI-activists have established rather similar ‘branches’ across Europe, largely sharing the same frames, political strategies, activity types, and protest repertoires. Yet, despite calling itself a ‘European movement’, the transnational exchanges appear to be mainly between the group leaders and the Western European GI-groups are reluctant to refer to the CEE member groups as ‘full’ GI-members, indicating that the ties between the groups are not particularly strong.
