This article focuses on a comparison of direct action and its political effects in Italy and Northern Ireland in the period from 1967 to 1992. It traces how these two unstable one-party democracies were profoundly affected by waves of protest with similar origins that began in the late 1960s. The analysis leads to a consideration of some of the positive and negative consequences of protest and direct action. Central to these political outcomes are the structures and processes of interactions between protesters, counterprotesters, and the authorities.
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References
1.
1. See, for example, Sidney Tarrow, Struggle, Politics, and Reform: Collective Action, Social Movements, and Cycles of Protest, Occasional Paper no. 21 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Center for International Studies, Western Societies Program, 1989).
2.
2. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 433.
3.
3. Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965-1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 37.
4.
Paul Bew , Peter Gibbon, and Henry Patterson, The State in Northern Ireland, 1921-72: Political Forces and Social Classes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979).
5.
5. Term used in Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978).
6.
6. For a detailed account of these shifting protest tactics and the response of the Northern Ireland state, see Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland: The Orange State, 2d ed. (London: Pluto, 1980).
7.
7. Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder, p. 48.
8.
Bew, Gibbon , and Patterson, State in Northern Ireland.
9.
For the role of students in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and People's Democracy, see Liam De Paor, Divided Ulster (London: Penguin, 1970), chap. 7.
10.
10. A. De Grand, The Italian Left in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 148.
11.
11. M. Kreile, “The Crisis of Italian Trade Unionism in the 1980s,”West European Politics, 11:54-67 (Jan. 1988).
12.
12. Lange notes that, by 1972, Italy's social expenditure was only 1 percent behind that of West Germany. Peter Lange, “Semiperiphery and Core in the European Context,” in Semiperipheral Development, ed. G. Arrighi (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985), p. 187.
13.
13. For a very interesting study of the Italian women's movement, see Judith Hellman, Journeys among Women: Feminism in Five Italian Cities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
14.
14. Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder, p. 1.
15.
15. Joseph La Palombara, Democracy Italian Style (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
16.
16. Paul Arthur and Keith Jeffrey, Northern Ireland since 1968 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 6.
17.
19. For an example of the latter, see David Boulton, The UVF 1966-73: An Anatomy of Loyalist Rebellion (Dublin: Torc Books, 1973), pp. 173-174.
