Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AutPo (“The Emergence of Autonomist Politics: European Radicalism after the Extreme Left, 1976-1985” (AutPo))
Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2024-05-31
This historical research project asked about how to account for a series of transnational political and cultural shifts within the broader crisis of the radical Left in Western Europe at the end of the Seventies and in early Eighties. Such questions can help us to understand the broader transformations of democratic political culture in Europe during a period of significant transformations that followed the 1968 events and in the contexts of the reciprocal influences of the women’s movement, counterculture, and ecological movements on the one hand and the radical Left on the other during the Seventies and early Eighties. This project also looked at how the broader responses of institutional actors (the state, political parties, the police) helped to inform local expressions of political radicalism, and investigated how subcultures of political violence were shaped by state practices and national and local conditions. Specific overall objectives were to evaluate the extent of the transnational convergence of political cultures and practices popularized first in Italy by the Autonomia movement and diffused to neighboring France, West Germany, and Switzerland; to evaluate how institutional actors reacted to these processes and their impacts; to identify agents of transnationalization and identify and explain disparate scales of radical activity; and to revise our historical scholarship on this period.
The researcher was able to identify similar processes of political and cultural negotiation within the radical Left at the end of the Seventies in a multi-national civic space, and the research also underscored the common influence of second-wave feminism on radicals and the decline of the industrial working class as the privileged figure of radical strategy. It showed that there was a large diffusion of similar cultural themes between radical milieus in France, Italy, Switzerland, and West Germany and a common shift away from the factory floor as the main site of political interventions. It showed how the transnationalization of novel themes and motifs was facilitated by left-wing journalists and intellectuals who constructed a network of interconnected publications as well as by international conferences and events that brought together radicals from different national settings. The analysis also demonstrated that the extent of judicial repression and state violence towards radical movements was a highly significant factor in shaping local subcultures, particularly when it came to issues of political violence. Meanwhile, the scale of international diffusion was highly uneven and, confirming previous scholarship, Autonomia remained a largely Italian phenomenon, even if other radical milieus in France, West Germany, and Switzerland proved receptive to similar themes and practices. Both the published and forthcoming work and the researchers’ manuscripts will allow a further revision of our scholarship on the period aligned on recent work on transnational alternative milieus.
The researcher was able to identify similar processes of political and cultural negotiation within the radical Left at the end of the Seventies in a multi-national civic space, and the research also underscored the common influence of second-wave feminism on radicals and the decline of the industrial working class as the privileged figure of radical strategy. It showed that there was a large diffusion of similar cultural themes between radical milieus in France, Italy, Switzerland, and West Germany and a common shift away from the factory floor as the main site of political interventions. It showed how the transnationalization of novel themes and motifs was facilitated by left-wing journalists and intellectuals who constructed a network of interconnected publications as well as by international conferences and events that brought together radicals from different national settings. The analysis also demonstrated that the extent of judicial repression and state violence towards radical movements was a highly significant factor in shaping local subcultures, particularly when it came to issues of political violence. Meanwhile, the scale of international diffusion was highly uneven and, confirming previous scholarship, Autonomia remained a largely Italian phenomenon, even if other radical milieus in France, West Germany, and Switzerland proved receptive to similar themes and practices. Both the published and forthcoming work and the researchers’ manuscripts will allow a further revision of our scholarship on the period aligned on recent work on transnational alternative milieus.
During the grant period, the author engaged in a multi-lingual and multi-national literature review; archival research in both social movement and state archives on movements in France, Italy, West Germany; oral history interviews; and two academic conferences. The researcher successful wrote the winning submission to the 2022 Contemporary European History prize competition and a book chapter that is forthcoming in a collective volume in 2024. In addition to the immediate outputs of this project the author drafted two scholarly article manuscripts for further revision and publication with the aim of writing a full book manuscript later. Throughout the project, the researcher engaged in seminars at the Sciences Po Centre d’histoire, the host institution, as well as a series of stand-alone events to transfer knowledge to the host institution. As part of the training element of this project, the researcher significantly improved on his Italian language skills and also learned how to conduct high-quality oral history interviews using the latest methods. In the summer of 2023, the researcher also took part in a four-month secondment at the German Historical Institute of Rome.
This research project allowed progress beyond the state of the art by looking at how a transnational network of groups, radical intellectuals, and journals participated in the renegotiation of radical political culture in the second half of the Seventies, calling into question many principles that had animated the extreme Left currents that emerged out of the student protests and worker insubordination of the late Sixties. It also demonstrated how the reactions of politicians and state institutions, particularly the police, tended to inform cultures of radicalism, showing that that higher levels of state violence in reaction to social movements throughout the Seventies tended to inflect the degree of diffusion of illegality and political violence among the radical Left. These findings have implications for contemporary understandings of state policy and radicalization, particularly in contexts marked by contentious protest and controversial forms of public order policing.