At Homer, Alaska, Cook Inlet meets the Gulf of Alaska. According to its Chamber of Commerce, the town of four thousand people occupies a spectacular site on Kachemak Bay in sight of the Kenai Mountains. Once a coal-mining town, Homer now relies for its livelihood mainly on commercial fisheries—-salmon and halibut in abundance-—and tourists. "With moose, bear, puffins, eagles, porpoises, and kilier whales close at hand, it seems like the antithesis of my own New York City and well worth the visit.
Residents or Homer might be surprised to learn that their weekly routines owe something to the violent victories of a dissolute demagogue in London during the 1760s and to the anti-British agitation of a failed brewer in Boston about the same time. But by now we know that they do. John Wilkes, Samuel Adams, and their collaborators really started something. Citizens of Homer are still using a twenty-first-century version ofthat innovation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The online Homer News posted an intriguing story in April 2003.
Monday has become the day for war supporters and peace activists to stage simultaneous demonstrations on the corner of Pioneer Avenue and Lake Street, prompting a barrage of honks and hollers—and die occasional profanity—from passing motorists. Saturday, meanwhile, has become the day that Anchor Point stakes its claim as the hub of patriotic rallying.
In nearby Anchor Point:
Deanna Chesser said there were no peace acrivists present as roughly 90 people gathered to show their support for military action in Iraq and the efforts of the men and women in the US military. "And we don't have any Women in Black," said Chesser, referring to Homer's contingent of the global network that advocates peace and justice. The organizers of the Anchor Point rally are planning a repeat performance ŕor noon on Saturday, with die addition of music and speak-
144
Futuiei of Social Movcmcnls       145
ers. Chessei, whose bon Davin recently was deployed to Kuwait, said she: expects an even bigger turnout.
Back in Homer:
While those showing their support for the US-led war in Iraq have Anchor Point all to themselves on Saturdays, they have only begun joining the peace activists on the corner at Pioneer and Lake for the past several weeks. For weeks prior to rhar, passers-by out around noon on a Monday would see a subdued silent vigil taking place on the corner, which is also the site or Homer's Veterans Memorial, The presence of protestors in front of the memorial stirred up resentment among some residents, prompting a call to begin a counter rally at the same time. "We want to take the corner back," said one flag-waving demonstrator. "Why don't you pray for our troops instead of for the Iraqis?" yelled a passing motorist, responding to the Women in Black assertion that their vigil is in observance of those lost in war.
But Sharon Whytal said she believed the choice to stand near the Veterans Memorial symbolizes a concern for all those who are lost in military conflict. "It's true that many of us are there because we're grieving for the loss of veterans," Whyral said, adding that having both groups share the site also provides a powerful symbol-—freedom in action.
While there had been reports of some unpleasant exchanges between the two groups, there was little sign of it on Monday as close to í 00 people stood on the corner, split evenly. The group waving flags srood out front on the sidewalk, lined up at the curb waving flags and cheering as passing motorists honked and waved. Standing 15 yards behind them, a line of Women in Black joined by a number of men, also dressed in black, remained silent for the duration of their vigil. "I don't feel offended that there are two groups there expressing their minds," Whytal said, referring to a sign bearing a slogan popular at many protests around the country: "This is what democracy looks like." (Homer News 2003b; spacing and puncruation edited)
In Homer, the corner of Pioneer Avenue and Lake Street, where the two bands of around fifty people each stood fifteen yards apart, features not only the town's war memorial but also its police and fire departments. These acrivists stage their peaceful confrontations at one of Homer's central locations. Anchor Point, site of the solo prowar celebrations, lies sixteen miles west of Homer on the Sterling Highway, which leads up Kachemak Bay to Anchorage. Having only an el-emenrary school at home, Anchor Point's adolescents bus down the Sterling Highway to Homer for their high school educations. Thus people from the two towns often interact. The same day that the Homer News reported Homer's dual displays of antiwar and prowar sentiment, it also ran a dispatch from Anchor Point. The second article described yellow ribbons tied to trees throughout the smaller rown and invited people out for a new rally along the Sterling Highway. Participants, it
146     Social Movements, 1 768-2004
said, should bring American flags and pictures of family members serving in the Iraq war (Horner Neius 2003c).
No North American who stayed alert to national and international news during the spring of 2003 should have any trouble decoding Aprils events in Homer and Anchor Point. Not only North Americans but also people across the world can easily recognize them as street demonstrations, a standard means of broadcasting support or opposition with regard to political issues. In this case, demonstration and coUnterdemonstration represented opposition to, and support for, U.S. military intervention in Iraq. On the same days when citizens of Anchor Point and Homer took to the street, hundreds of street demonstrations were occurring elsewhere in the world. Some of them likewise concerned the Iraq war, but most of them took up other locally urgent questions, in the early twenty-first century, the street demonstration looks like an all-purpose political tool—perhaps less effective in the short run than buying a legislator or mounting a military coup, but within democratic and semidemocratic regimes a significant alternative to elections, opinion polls, and letter writing as a way of voicing public positions.
Although the news from Homer and Anchor Point does not tell us so, we have seen that the twenty-first-century demonstration actually has two major variants. In the first variant, Homer style, participants gather in a symbolically potent public location, where through speech and action they display their collective attachment to a well-defined cause. In the second, they proceed through public thoroughfares offering similar displays of attachment. Often, of course, the two combine, as activists march to a favored rallying place, or as multiple columns converge from different places on a single symbolically powerful destination.
Occasionally, as in Homer, counterdemonstrators show up to advocate a contrary view and to challenge the demonstrators' claim to the spaces in question. Frequently, police or troops station themselves along the line of march or around the place of assembly. Sometimes police or troops bar demonstrators' access to important spaces, buildings, monuments, or persons. At times, they deliberately separate demonstrators from counterdemonstrators. As in Homer, passersby or spectators often signal their approval or disapproval or the cause that the demonstrators are supporting. Later, they may join the discussion in lunchtime arguments or letters to the editor. David Bitterman of Homer wrote his opinion to the Horner News:
Driving in town recently, I noticed a group of women dressed in black standing along Pioneer Avenue near the fire station. I have been out of town awhile and did not know the story behind the women. When I asked my wife, she told me they were protesting war. 1 remarked that it was ironic that the military protects die right of people to protest against our country and the armed forces.
Bitterman described their son, an army specialist stationed in Germany, who had joined the army to protect his country after the 9/11 attacks. Bitterman argued that war was necessary for the defense of freedom:
Futures of Social Movements     147
Our nation's soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen are already in the field. They serve 24-7-365 to protect us from those who would harm us. Any action that weakens our armed forces personnel only serves to strengthen and embolden our enemies. Am I-saying the Women in Black are unpatriotic? No, just uninformed. [Homer Netus 2003a)
Once his wife provided essential decoding, Mr. Bitterman clearly caught the demonstration's point. The symbolism and choreography of the street demonstration rival those of baseball and debutantes' balls. But its scorecard centers on contested public issues rather than league standing or social reputation.
As earlier chapters have shown, street demonstrations also have some identifiable kin: municipal parades, party conventions, mass meetings, inaugurals, commencements, religious revivals, and electoral rallies. Most citizens of democracies know the difference. Participants in such events sometimes bend them toward the forms and programs of demonstrations, for example by wearing ostentatious symbols or shouting slogans i n support of a cause at a college commencement. Many of the same principles apply; the separation of participants from spectators, the presence of guards to contain the crowd, and so on. Considered as a whole, this array of gatherings exhibits 1) remarkable coherence, 2) systematic internal variation, and 3) type by type, impressive uniformity across places, programs, and participants.
Previous chapters linked street demonstrations firmly to a larger, evolving, two-century-old form of political struggle, the social movement. They documented the distinctive combination of campaigns, repertoire, and WUNC displays in a form of politics that existed nowhere before the mid-eighteenth century, yet became available for popular making of claims across much of the world during the next two centuries. They also documented the marvelous duality of social movements: quite general and recognizable in their broad outlines, yet impressively adaptable to local circumstances and idioms. That duality comes across in the news from Homer and Anchor Point.
As we approach the end of a book overflowing with historical facts, let us indulge a historical fantasy. Suppose that in April 2003 John Wilkes and Samuel Adams, transmuted intact from the 1760s, both traveled up the Gulf of Alaska to Cook Inlet, Homer, and Anchor Point. Suppose that they watched demonstrators in the two towns, and conferred to see if they could figure out what these twenty-first-century people were doing, and why.
Wilkes Adams Wilkes Adams Wilkes Adams
I've never seen anything like it.
You can say that again.
But it's something like a church service . . .
Or a workmen's parade.
Where is the audience? Who are they talking to?
And where are the troops or constables?
148     Social Movements, I 768-2004
Wilkes:    Still one things familiar: they're arguing about a war.
Adams: You know, it reminds me of an elecrion campaign, with people wearing candidates' colors, chanting slogans, gathering in centra! squares, and marching along major thoroughfares.
"Wilkes:    Except that it's so civilized. How do rhese people expect to make any difference?
Adams:    Maybe we should ask them.
The fantastic encounter does not show Wilkes and Adams the fiill apparatus of social movements at work: the combination of multiple performances and WUNC displays in sustained, coordinated malting of program, identity, and/or standing claims. Nor does it tell them about the many other activists outside of Homer and Anchor Point who are likewise joining social movements for and against the American invasion of Iraq, often employing news releases, petitions, and public meetings in addition to street demonstrations. But the imagined con-versarion does raise crucial questions abour the present and future of social movements. Has rhe social movement lost its political effectiveness? Is the internationalization of power, politics, and social movement organization rendering amateur local, regional, or even national efforts obsolete? If the forms of social movements have changed so much over the last two centuries, what further changes might we expect to see during the twenty-first century?
How Can We Kead die Future?
Most likely the right answer to all these questions is the old reliable: it depends. No doubt it depends on which countries, which issues, which claimants, and which objects of claims we have in mind; for the moment, the futures of ail social movements in Zimbabwe and Kazakhstan, for example, look dim, while social movements still seem to be enjoying active lives in Canada and Costa Rica. As I write, movements protesting American military power are making little headway, while movemen ts to curb the WTO's power are at least attracting enetgetic international support. More generally, we must distinguish among a number of possible future trajectories for social movements, on one side, and a number of differ-enr social movement scales, on the other. Figure 7-1 schematizes the distinctions.
The figure builds in two main dimensions, one directions of change from growth to decline, the other scales from local ro global- The diagram's "global" scale represents the possibility voiced by roday's advocates of transnational activism not merely that international actors and international targets will become routine in future social movements but that social movements will regularly coordinate popular claim making across the entire globe. Meanwhile, the diagram follows chapter 5 by insisting that despite some internationalization, local, regional, and national social movements continue to occur during rhe early twenty-first century.
Figure 7.1 flattens into two dimensions a series of likely further changes in social movements we have seen occurring from their earliest days: changes in cam-
L.----------1             ii______1
Futures of Social Movements     149
13
to
3
150     Social Movements, 1768-2004
paigns, repertoires, and WUNC displays. Surely the twenty-first century will bring new program, identity, and standing claims—new issues for campaigns—that the century's first few years leave almost unimaginable; suppose, for example, that animal rights activists mounted campaigns to gain citizenship rights for the great apes. Someone will almost certainly invent new social movement performances and thereby alter the general social movement repertoire; think about the possibility that activists in space capsules will broadcast their messages across all the world's airwaves. WUNC displays will evolve as well, perhaps by adopting technologies that wili broadcast instantly how many people are voicing support or opposition for a given social movement claim—thus giving new expression to the N in WUNC. If social movements survive the twenty-first century, they will surely leave it much transformed with regard to campaigns, repertoires, and WUNC displays.
Despite neglecting such changes in social movement texture, the diagram implies a very wide range of hypothetical possibilities. We might, for example, imagine a future combination of extinction at the local level, institutionalization at the national level, and expansion plus dramatic transformation at the global level; that would conform to predictions by some enthusiastic analysts of electronic linkage in social movements. Or we could imagine that massive declines in state power will simultaneously activate linked regional and international movements, on the model of demands for indigenous rights or regional autonomy that seize power from states but also receive backing and guarantees from international organizations.
An overall shift to the right within the diagram would mean that local, regional, and perhaps even national social movements gave way to international and global movements: extensive internationalization. A general shift to the left— not much expected these days—would mean a decline of larger-scale movements in favor of a new localism. A net shift upward would signify general expansion and transformation of social movement activity. Vertical moves toward the middle would signal widespread institutionalization: the whole world involved in social movements at multiple scales, but with nongovernmental organizations, professional social movement entrepreneurs, and close relations to political authorities dominating the action. Below the midpoint, a general shift downward would represent decline or disappearance ofsociai movements, likewise across the board. More plausible predictions would feature separate trajectories for social movements at different scales, for example expansion and transformation of international social movements at the same time as local social movements contracted and institutionalized.
We must, of course, ground any predictions on whatever knowledge we have gleaned from examining two centuries ofsociai movement history. Remember the book's main arguments:
From their eighteenth-century origins onward, social movements have proceeded not as solo performances but as interactive campaigns. By now, this observation should have become self-evident. It matters, nevertheless, as a reminder that to predict
ř    \     "    \     '     i     '     f     '     t     '    F     ä     f     l    l
Futures of Social Movements      15.1
future social movements involves thinking about changing relations among claimants, objects of claims, audiences, and authorities rather than simply extrapolating the most visible features of social movement performances. Remember the intricate interplay of movements, counter movements, authorities, publics, and external powers across the fast-changing state socialist world of 1989-
Social movements combine three kinds of claims: program, identity, and standing. Program claims involve stated support for or opposition to actual or proposed actions by the objects of movement claims. Identity claims consist of assertions that "we"—the claimants—constitute a unified force to be reckoned with. WUNC (worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment) performances back up identity claims. Standing claims assert ties and similarities to other political actors, for example as excluded minorities, properly constituted citizens' groups, or loyal supporters of the regime. They sometimes concern the standing of other political actors, for example in calls for expulsion of immigrants or their exclusion from citizenship. The nineteenth-century United States showed us a dazzling (and sometimes depressing) array of program, identity, and standing claims with regard to which racial, ethnic, and gender categories deserved citizenship rights. Clearly, program, identity, and standing claims can evolve in partial independence from each other; standing claims, for example, depend sensitively on which political actors already have full standing, and which political procedures change an actot's standing. They thus depend on the rise or fall of democracy.
The relative salience of program, identity, and standing claims varies significantly among social movements, among claimants ivithin movements, and among phases of movements. If institutionalization eclipsed identity and standing claims in favor of programs advocated or opposed by established specialists in social movement claim making, that eclipse would constitute a major change in twenty-first-century social movements, Professionalization ofsociai movement organizations and entrepreneurs sometimes leads to new identity and standing claims; recent worldwide campaigns on behalf of indigenous people's rights illustrate that possibility. But on the whole, professionalization tips the balance away from identity and standing toward programs.
Democratization promotes the formation of social movements. Chapter 6 showed us that this apparently obvious statement hides a surprising degree of complexity. To single out the effects of democratization on social movements, we must separate them from common causes of democratization and social movements as well as from reciprocal influences ofsociai movements on democratization. This done, however, we see that predicting the future of twenty-first-century social movements depends heavily on expectations concerning future democratization or dedemocratization. In the Philippines, for example, we must decide whether the Manila region's partial democracy or Mindanao's warlords mark the future path. Social movements assert popular sovereignty. Over our two centuries of history, the argument holds up well. The rise and fall ofsociai movements in France, for instance, neatly chart fluctuations in claims of popular sovereignty, so much so that France's authoritarian regimes took great care to suppress social movement
152     Social Movements, 1768-2004
campaigns, performances, and WUNC displays. Nevertheless, we have encountered two important qualifications to the general principle. First, professional social movement entrepreneurs and nongovernmental organizations sometimes represent themselves as speaking for "the people" without creating either deep grass roots or means for ordinary people to speak through them. Second, a minority of historical social movements have supported programs that, when realized, actually diminished popular sovereignty by implanting authoritarian leaders, charismatic cults, or programs of widespread exclusion. Any predictions concerning future social movements and their consequences will have to take into the account the possibility that these minority currents could become the majority.
As compared with locally grounded forms of popular politics, social movements depend heavily on political entrepreneurs for their scale, durability, and effectiveness. We have certainly seen political entrepreneurs repeatedly in the midst of social movements. From Great Britain's Reform mobilization of the 1830s to recent mobilizations against the WTO, entrepreneurs and their nongovernmental organizations have figured prominently in campaign after campaign. Indeed, the overall trend has increased the salience and influence of political entrepreneurs. The future depends in part on whether that trend will continue, and which sorts of entrepreneurs will flourish in social movements.
Once social movements establish themselves in one political setting, modeling, communication, and collaboration facilitate their adoption in other connected settings. This observation has taken on new meaning as our analysis has moved on. For connections of existing social movement settings with potential new settings always select radically from among all the new settings with which connections could, in principle, form. We have seen that selectivity most clearly in the connections facilitated by new communications media: generally lowering the cost of communications for people who have access to the sysrem, but excluding others who lack that access. The same holds for interpersonal networks: expansion of social movement activity along existing networks excludes those who do not belong. Despite the engaging image of smart mobs, that play of inclusion and exclusion is likely to continue through the twenty-first century. As a consequence, some of our predictions will rest on estimates of who will connect with whom, and what segments of the world population those connections will exclude.
The forms, personnel, and claims of social movements vary and evolve historically. As our whimsical vignette of Wilkes and Adams in Homer, Alaska, suggests, social movement forms have undergone continuous mutation since the later eighteenth century and are mutating still. We have observed three distinguishable but interacting sources of change and variation in social movements: overall political environments, incremental change in campaigns, repertoires, and WUNC displays within social movements, and diffusion of social movement models among sites of activism. To anticipate the future, we must specify how each of the three will change, not to mention how they will interact. For clues, we should pay special attention to new sites of social movement action such as anti-WTO protests, asking who does what on behalf of which claims.
it           \           M           I           m           i           í          I           i.           I           í._        í           tí          i           b .....   t " "     íl____
Futures oj Socuil Movements      153
The social movement, as an invented institution, could disappear or mutate into some quite different form of politics. We still have no guarantee that the social movement as it has prevailed for two centuries will continue forever. We must take seriously the possibility that the twenty-first century will destroy social movements as vehicles of popular claim making because the conditions fot theit survival have dissolved or because new forms of claim making have supplanted them. One dream of digital democracy, after all, proposes continuous, electronically mediated opinion polling as a cheap, efficient substitute for associating, meeting, marching, petitioning, addressing mass media, and the rest of the social movement repertoire—a frightening prospect for lovers of social movements in something like their recognizable historical form.
Possible Futures
How can we apply these principles to the future? Figure 7.2 ransacks ideas and evidence in previous chapters to speculate about what could happen to social movements during the rest of the twenty-first century. It combines some of the more likely possibilities into four scenarios: internationalization, democratic decline, professional ization, and triumph. Internationalization entails a net shift away from local, regional, and national social movements toward international and global social movement activity. Decline of democracy would depress all sorts of social movements, especially at the large scale, but could leave pockets of local or regional social movement activity where some democratic institutions survived. Professionalization would most likely diminish the relative importance oflocal and regional social movements while shirting the energies of activists and organizers to national or, especially, international and global scales. Triumph, finally, describes the glorious dream of social movements everywhere, serving at all scales from local to global as a means for advancing popular claims. Let us draw on implications of previous chapters to identify circumstances that would cause each of the four scenarios as well as to reflect on likely consequences of each scenario for popular politics.
Internationalization. Many observers and activists of twenty-first-century social movements assume that internationalization is already sweeping the field and will continue to a point at which most social movements will operate internationally or even globally; they project that environmentalists, feminists, human rights advocates, and opponents of global capital will increasingly join forces across countries and continents. Under what conditions might we now expect internationalization to dominate the futures of social movements? Considering the evidence of previous chapters, these are the most likely candidates:
" continued growth and impact by international networks of power and of organizations implementing them: financial networks, trade connections, multinational corporations, international governmental and regulatory institutions, intercontinental criminal enterprises;
Futures oj Social Movements      155
e vulnerability of those networks to shaming, subversion, boycotts, or governmental regulation;
a expansion of connections among widely dispersed populations whose welfare those international networks affect, especially adv&rsely;
6 proliferation of organizations, brokers, and political entrepreneurs specialized in connecting those populations and coordinating their action; and
a formation of at least a modicum of democracy at an international scale: relatively broad, equal, consultative, and protective relations between citizens and agents of international governmental institutions.
Predicting that extensive internationalization of social movements will occur during the twenty-first century depends on implicit predictions that most or all of these conditions will apply.
If the scenario of internationalization prevailed, we might reasonably expect some further consequences for popular politics in the short and medium runs. First, given the minimum requirements of large-scale social movements for information, time, contacts, and resources, the existing elite bias of social movement participation would increase; the lowering of communication costs through Internet and cellular telephone connections surely would not override the increased coordination costs for a very long time. Second, for this reason and because of uneven access to communication channels, inequality between sites of active movement participation and all others would sharpen; relatively speaking, excluded people would suffer even more acutely than today from lack of means to mount effective campaigns, performances, and WUNC displays. Third, brokers, entrepreneurs, and international organizations would become even more crucial to the effective voicing of claims by means of social movements. All these changes point to declines in democratic participation; they would both narrow the range of participants in social movements and make participation more unequal.
Democratic Decline. What if democracy declined, however, as a result of causes outside of the social movement sphere: weakening of barriers between categorical inequality and public politics, segregation of new or existing trust networks from public politics, and so on? Since democracy always operates in connection with particular centers of power, a lot would depend on whether the decline occurred at all scales or only, for example, at the national scale. A plausible version of this scenario would have large-scale democracy—-national, international, and global—suffering more acutely than smaller-scale democracy, simply because it would take a political catastrophe to produce simultaneous dedemocratization across the world's thousands of local, regional, and national regimes. In contrast, escape of a small number of capitalists, military organizations, technologies, or scientific disciplines from collective constraint would immediately threaten such international democratic institutions as now exist. (Imagine rogue networks of bankers, soldiers, communications providers, or medical researchers, for example, who could decide which segments of the world population would—-and would not—have access to their services.) Under most circumstances, democratic collapse at the large scale would still leave surviving democratic enclaves scattered
jBBaimmmir*^mm*'~mimme^^mmmm^^*mmm*-*^mH*-—mpK^mi uui m u i   umu     i i u i                               1/                         i.i
auoss the woild We then might e\_pcct to find mcicasmg differentiation of social movement practices across those suivivmg enclaves, as communication and collaboration among die world's social movements activists diminished and as local or regional activists adapted increasingly to their particular conditions.
Professionalization identifies another possibility. In our scenario, professionalization leads to institutionalization, hence to declining innovation in social movements. Committed populists often worry that social movement activists, already drawn disproportionately from prosperous, well-educated, well-connected segments of the population, will sell out the interests of truly disadvantaged people, establish comfortable relations with authorities, rely increasingly on support from the rich and powerful, and/or become social movement bureaucrats, more interested in forwarding their own organizations and careers than the welfare of their supposed constituencies.
As compared with the early nineteenth century, some professionalization and institutionalization of social movements have unquestionably occurred in relatively democratic regimes: creation of protective legal codes, formation of police forces specializing in contained protection of social movement activity, establishment of less lethai routines for police-demonstrator interaction, creation of reporting conventions for social movements in mass media, multiplication of organizations specializing in social movement campaigns, performances, and WUNC displays. These changes have, in turned, opened up full-time careers in social |                         movement activism. Professionalization and institutionalization have proceeded
hand in hand.
Up to the early twenty-first century, however, new issues, groups, tactics, and targets have repeatedly arisen at the edge of the established social movement sector. Many peripheral claimants failed, some quickly shifted to standard social movement practices, but a few brought their own innovations—sit-ins, occupations of public buildings, puppet shows, cartoonlike costumes, new uses of media—onto the public scene. Predicting general professionalization and institutionalization of social movements, then, implies that opportunities for genuinely new issues, groups, tactics, and targets will diminish significantly. That could occur, in principle, either through declining incentives for popular claim making or through closing out of claimants who are not already part of the social movement establishment. What if the more than nine-tenths of the world population that currently lacks internet access had no chance to form or join social movements?
Triumph. What about across-the-board expansion of social movements at all scales from local to global? Such a surprising future would require democratization of the many world regions currently living under authoritarian regimes, warlords, or petty tyrannies. It would also require a more general division of government and of power such that local authorities stil! had the capacity to affect local lives and respond to local demands even if international authorities gained power within their own spheres. It would, finally, mean that local, regional, and national activist networks, organizations, and entrepreneurs continued to act in partial independence at their own scales instead of subordinating their programs
to those of international 01 global scope Conveisely, if widespread dedemoc-ratization occurred at all scales across the world, if centers or power increased their own protections against popular pressure, and if linking networks, organizations, and brokers either disintegrated or fell under authorities' control, a general decline of social movements would follow,
In the domain of social movements, even if-then statements—if democratization, then social movement expansion, if internationalization, then sharpening inequality, and so on—run enormous risks. Despite the ample documentation of previous chapters and generations or scholarly work, we have nothing like an if-then science of social movements. Flat predictions for the remainder of the twenty-first century involve even greater uncertainties. After all, they depend on a combination of three sorts of reasoning: 1) extrapolation of existing trends into the future; 2) if-then statements about the proximate causes of change in social movements; and 3) speculations about changes in the causes of those causes. To predict that the modest internationalization of social movements since 1990 or so will swell into a great wave, for example, we must assume that we have actually read that trend correctly, that the expansion of connections among dispersed populations affected by international power networks does, indeed, promote coordination of social movement activity among those dispersed populations, and that whatever causes the expansion or connections to occur will continue to operate through the century's many remaining years.
In the face of all this uncertainty, can we place any bets on the likely prevalence of one scenario or another? What combinations of internationalization, democratic decline, professionalization, and/or triumph are more probable? Throwing all if-then prudence to the winds, let me state my own guesses about the twenty-first century:
Internationalization: slower, less extensive, and less complete than technology enthusiasts say, but likely to continue fot decades
Decline of democracy: a split decision, with some democratic decline (and therefore some diminution in the prevalence and efficacy of social movements) in major existing democracies but substantial democratization (hence social movement expansion) in such currently undemocratic countries as China
Professionalization: another split decision, with professional social movement entrepreneurs, nongovernmental organizations, and accommodations with authorities increasingly dominant in large-scale social movements but consequently abandoning those portions of local and regional claim making they cannot co-opt into international activism
Triumph: alas, exceedingly unlikely
I say "alas" because for all the reasons laid out in previous chapters, the triumph of social movements at all scales, despite all the dangers of movements that you or I would oppose, would benefit humanity. The broad availability of social move-
1 58     Social Movements, 1768-2004
merits signals the presence of democratic institutions and usually promotes their functioning. It provides a crucial channel for groups, categories, and issues that currently have no voice in a regime's routine politics to acquire visible places in public politics. We should scan future social movements carefully, in hope of refuting my pessimistic forecast.
Ackerman, Peter, & Jack DuVall (2000): A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Paigrave.
Alapuro, Risto (1988): State and Revolution in Finland. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Alexander, John K. (2002): Samuel Adams: America's Revolutionary Politician. Lanham, Md.: Rowman &C Littlefield.
Aminzade, Ronald (1993): Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830—1871. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Ananova (2001): multiple reports from Manila, Philippines, 19--22 January 2001. ioiuw.ananova.com, viewed 20 August 2003.
Anderson, Benedict (1998): The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. London: Verso.
Anderson, Eugene N., & Pauiine R. Anderson (1967): Political Institutions and Social Change in Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Andrey, Georges (1986): "La quére d'un Etat national." In Jean-Claude Fayez, ed., Nouvelle Histoire de la Suisse et des Suisses. Lausanne: Payot.
Anheier, Helmut IC, Friedhelm Neidhardr, fie Wolfgang Vortkamp (1998): "Movement Cycles and the Nazi Parry: Activation of the Munich NSDAP, 1925-1930." American Behavioral Scientist 41: 1262—81.
Anliefet, Heimut, fič Thomas Ohlemacher (1996): "Aktivisten, Netzwerke und Bewegungservolg: Die 'Einzelmitglieder' der NSDAP, 1925—1930." Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 48: 677—703.
Anheier, Helmut, fic Nuno Themudo (2002): "Organisational Forms of Global Civil Society: Implications of Going Global." In Marlies Glasius, Mary Kaldor, & Helmut Anheier, eds., Global Civil Society 2002. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
d'Anjou, Leo (1996): Social Movements and Cultural Change: The First Abolition Campaign Revisited. New York: Aldine de Gruyrer.
Archer, John E. (1990): By a Flash and a Scare: Incendiarism, Animal Maiming, and Poaching in East Anglia 181.5-1870. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Armstrong, W. W. (1989): "Labour I: Rural Population Growth, Systems of Employment, and Incomes." In Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales. Vol. 6, 1750—1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ash, Roberra (1972): Social Movements in America. Chicago: Markbam.
159