Germany’s Different: Protest, Hegemony, and the European Crisis
AbstractThe uprising of the Indignados, Democracia Real Ya! and the Occupy movement have brought back protest all over Europe in 2011. In Germany—despite several tens of thousands of people showing up for the international action day on October 15th, the situation has been different. After some demonstrations in 2009 and 2010 organized on a platform of “We won’t pay for your crisis,” there had been mostly smaller local manifestations not backed by broader alliances. This changed with the Blockupy-Frankfurt protests at the end of May 2012 that called for European action days to shut down the financial district. But attempts to include the big unions into alliances opposing the crisis politics of the government have failed; and the women’s movement has been basically non-existent in Germany for about two decades. I will try to shed some light on how the general weakness of the movement is related to the strategies of integration into neo-liberal governance.