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Social movements exist without protest events. They remain 'latent', and provide, when protest events occur again, the attribution of these events to a social movement. This meaning attributed to protest events requires that we know collectively what a social movement is. We speak of the 'identity' of a social movement. In order to grasp this identity analytically the proposal is made to conceive identity as a 'narrative network', as a network which is identifiable by protesters and their addressees and the observing public as constituted by a story which all understand and share. Identification is knowledge about who is considered to be part of a social movement and who not. This conceptualization takes into account the double structure of social forms, to be a network of social relations among actors in which stories circulate allowing to draw meaningful boundaries around social forms (such as social movements). This theoretical idea is used to look for an explanation for the relative weakness of 'European social movements'. It seems that there is -- in spite of favorable political opportunity structures -- no movement emerging between nationally based movements and global social movements. There are no European movement identities, no meaningful stories which make the particularity of a network of movement actors visible. This is due to the lack of stories which are considered to provide -- beyond the necessary condition of networks of social relations among protest actors -- the sufficient condition for narrative networks. We are dealing with networks without identity. Adapted from the source document

Die Metapher "Rohstoff" entstammt den Materialwissenschaften und stellt die Welt als zusammengesetzt aus Rohstoffen vor, die dann in ein Anderes transformiert werden, in der Regel in ein höherwertiges Gut. Der Beitrag verwendet diese Metapher im Bereich sozialer Bewegungen und geht der Frage nach, welche "Rohstoffe" zur Herstellung und Erhaltung kollektiver Identität verwendet werden. Der Autor unterscheidet drei Rohstoffarten: (1) kognitive Ereignisse (Motive, Interessen, Einstellungen und Wahrnehmungen); (2) Interaktionsereignisse (Begegnungen, Konflikte, Stigmatisierung und Anerkennung); (3) Kontextereignisse (Krieg, Mord usw.). Der Autor beschreibt diese Prozesse und die daraus entstehende Identität und wendet diese theoretische Perspektive auf die Identitätsbildungsprozesse in sozialen Bewegungen an. (ICB2)

This article argues for a robust notion of collective identity which is not reduced to a psychological conception of identity. In the first part, the debate on the concept of identity raised by several authors is taken up critically with the intention of defending a strong sociological conception of identity which by definition is a collective identity. The basic assumption is that collective identities are narrative constructions which permit the control of the boundaries of a network of actors. This theory is then applied to the case of Europe, showing how identity markers are used to control the boundaries of a common space of communication. These markers are bound to stories which those within such a space of communication share. Stories that hold in their narrative structures social relations provide projects of control. National identities are based on strong and exclusive stories. Europeanization (among other parallel processes at the global level) opens this space of boundary constructions and offers opportunities for national as well as sub-national as well as transnational stories competing with each other to shape European identity projects. The EU — this is the hypothesis — provides a case in which different sites offer competing opportunities to continue old stories, to start new stories or to import old stories from other sites, thus creating a narrative network on top of the network of social relations that bind the people in Europe together. European identity is therefore to be conceived as a narrative network embedded in an emerging network of social relations among the people living in Europe.

AbstractThe paper tries to go beyond normative debates on what should count as civil society and who is to be identified as being part of civil society by relating such normative claims to the social sites where they are produced and claimed. It starts with the idea of conceiving civil society as a script which is used by a series of collective actors. This performance is structured first by general background conceptions of what a civil society looks like and which are taken up by all those engaging in claiming to be a civil society actor, and secondly by the public to which such performances are addressed. This second dimension is further explored assuming that the public civilizes civil society in terms of accepting or rejecting the performance of particular actors. Thus civil society is reformulated as a process in which the question of who is a legitimate part of civil society is permanently contested by a public that is addressed by these collective actors.

A pragmatic (communication-discursive) cognitive sociology beyond observationism (Luhmann, Turner, Conein) and individualistic reductionism (Esser, Boudon) as a way to do sociology as a critical theory and as a positive science is proposed, drawing on the Habermasian theory of communicative action and its radical continuation in Luhmann's concept of the (cognitive) autopoiesis of social systems.

Der Verfasser zeigt, dass interkulturelle Kommunikationsgemeinschaften, wie Europa eine ist, das Ergebnis historischer Konstellationen, Ereignisse und "Erzählungen" sind. Dazu gehören die Gesetze des Römischen Reiches, die interethnische Organisation der katholischen Kirche, die Netzwerke unabhängiger Städte, die Versammlungen von freien Familienoberhäuptern, die Ausbildung feudaler Strukturen und die Niederlage des nach Westen expandierten Islam. In diesen Narrationen hatte sich die Idee eines christlichen Europa stark verankert, so dass europäische Identität lange Zeit koextensiv mit Christenheit war. In der Neuzeit traten bei den Eliten und den Stadtbürgern an die Stelle des langsam verblassenden Christentums andere Kommunikationsgehalte. Da die ursprüngliche religiöse Einheit verloren gegangen war, verstärkte sich die Idee einer kulturellen Einheit mit besonderen Außengrenzen. Dieser Prozess erhielt eine weitere Dynamik dadurch, dass nach zwei Weltkriegen auch die nationalen kollektiven Identitäten tiefe Risse erhalten hatten. In dem Maße, wie die narrative Ordnung des Nationalstaats gebrochen wird, entdeckt sich Europa mit seinen traditionellen Ost-West- und Nord-Süd-Teilungen wieder selbst. Während sich letztere jedoch durch Umverteilungen tendenziell zu entschärfen schien, behielt die alte Ost-West-Spannung (Russland, Türkei) ihre ambivalente Faszination. Wenn unter dem Globalisierungsdruck das "soziale Europa" laufend an kollektiven Identifikationsmöglichkeiten verliert, muss es seinen narrativen Schwung anderswo her besorgen. Der Verfasser schlägt vor, dass sich Europa wieder auf die mythischen Elemente einer besonderen Erinnerungs- und Verantwortungsgemeinschaft besinnen muss. (ICG2)

This article argues that the social construction of the borders of Europe is the combined effect of a historical trajectory in which the construction of its outer and its inner boundaries interact. These boundaries make sense to the people because they have a narrative plausibility. On such narrative resonance, real hard borders are grounded. The idea of narrative boundary construction is embedded in a minimalist theory of identity that claims that anything can serve as a boundary within a historically specific situation. The only restriction regarding boundary construction is that a new boundary continues the narrative – either in a continuous or a discontinuous way, either as conservative caring for a tradition or as a revolutionary break with a tradition. This radical break with substantialist notions of Europe's borders and identity implies that such trajectories do not imply any necessity. Whether the European integration process is continuing an old narrative or whether it points towards a specific discontinuity in the further telling of Europe's story, is historically contingent. Europe has just to continue to tell a story about itself that makes narrative sense.

The article situates the issue of the public sphere as a phenomenon that is historically bound and culturally specific. According to this point of view, the Western practices and the Western way of thinking about the public sphere appear as a historically particular way of dealing with the more general phenomenon which is the creation of a social bond beyond the family. Looking at the self-contradictory effects of the 'modern' Western public sphere, the question is asked whether the public association of self-interested or self-governing individuals might have to be theorized as a partial and insufficient solution to the social bond. A comparative perspective shows that it is not individuals but cultural forms that link people in the public sphere. They do so by providing a narrative basis of discourses and/or markets that in the self-understanding of modernity shape social life.