Towards 'Local Justice Movement(s)'? Two Paths to Re-Scaling the Austerity Protest in the Czech Republic

Abstract

The paper focuses on the responses of Czech left social movements to the coming of economic crisis to the country. It seeks to answer two questions. The first one is whether the coming of economic crisis has activated two processes of social movement transnationalization that take place on the domestic level: the global framing and externalization. The second question is why this activation has not taken place. In our analysis we distinguish between the “old” left (trade unions, social democrats) and “radical” left (anarchists, Trotskyites) in order to explore paths of different modes of left activism.

First, we focus on the evolution of framing scale and of the target scale of Czech Left activism between 2000 and 2010 and suggest that while the trajectories of both modes of Left activism experienced dramatic shifts both upwards and downwards, there are hardly any signs of real transnationalization after the crisis hit the country (2009). On the contrary, it seems that while the old left shifted the framing upwards onto national level, the radical left shifted the target of their protests downwards onto the local level.

Second, following the analyses of institutional and discursive opportunities, we show that it was the timing and way of interpretation of a financial crisis from the part of national political elites and media that determined the scale and intensity of political contention over its consequences.

The paper builds upon the analysis of protest events organized by left SMOs in the Czech Republic between 2000 and 2010 (N=668). We integrate protest event and frame analysis and code - among other - the scale of framing and targets of the recorded events.

Keywords: economic crisis, austerity, political conflict, labour unions, social movements

JEL Classification: D72, L31