Social movement scholarship has emphasized that progressive ‘Europeanization from below’ may be a breeding ground for major EU reform and democratization. Empirically, however, activists have found it difficult to make gains when targeting the EU. To understand the challenges that activists face in the context of transnational EU mobilization, our article draws from agency-oriented approaches in social movement studies to propose an ‘EU mobilization package’, comprising three recurring strategic dilemmas that activists encounter: (a) the formulation of goals that both address the transnational level and appeal to national or local constituencies, (b) the building of a transnational political organization that is both inclusive and effective, and (c) whether and how to interact with EU institutions, particularly in the context of European Parliament elections. We apply this framework to the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), an organization founded by Yanis Varoufakis in 2016, which is a key example of social movement dissensus to EU politics. Methodologically, we rely on comprehensive interview data, the analysis of a large corpus of DiEM25 online and offline publications, and participant observation of three public events. A discussion of the group’s strategic challenges provides important general lessons for our understanding of social movement mobilization targeting EU politics as well as transnational activism.

European Consortium for Political Research

This article returns to Stuart Hall’s account of Thatcherism to consider the interaction between consent-based hegemonic devices and the structural compulsio...

Immigration and the defense of national borders have played a vital role in European right-wing populist discourses since the European border crisis in 2015....

This paper investigates how state-led and popular nationalism in China construct borders as tools of exclusion, reinforcing national identity amidst global p...

Scholarly work on populism and borders have largely followed separate paths so far. This article aims at bringing together these two strands by means of an e...

The article analyses the situation that arose after the crisis on the Poland-Belarus border in the second half of 2021. The authors use the term 'borderphobi...

European Consortium for Political Research

Far-right parties increasingly mobilize against climate action. While scholarship has initially focused on explicit climate denialism, by now research analyzes the opposition against specific clima...

Click on the article title to read more.

Seminar | May 20, 2025, 15h00 (GMT+1), Online

Im Sommersemester findet im Rahmen des Kolloquiums "Rechtspopulismus, Rechtsextremismus und Klimaschutz. Aktuelle Debatten in Forschung und Praxis“ eine Vortragsreihe statt, die Einblicke aus der Fors...