Less divided after ETA? Green networks in the Basque Country between 2007 and 2017

This thesis investigates how everyday patterns of interactions among civil society organizations are transformed in a relatively short period of time when major changes in the broader political context occur. More precisely, it focuses on civic organizations engaged in environmental activism and advocacy in the Basque Country, examining whether ETA’s decision to abandon the armed struggle on October 20th, 2011 has affected their dynamics of collaboration. Combining diverse theoretical elements from the literature on social movements, together with insights from studies of civil society and peacebuilding, and relying upon the conceptual and methodological toolbox of social network analysis (SNA), I analyze the evolution of interorganizational networks of collective action before and after the end of violence, specifically, between the years 2007 and 2017. The empirical core of the dissertation is comprised by chapters 5, 6 and 7. Chapter 5 examines the varying impact of two main external ideological cleavages (national identity and position towards ETA’s violence) on interorganizational collaboration. The findings confirm that allegiances and conflicts related to these two dimensions used to condition collaborative ties between organizations up to 2011, while during the more recent post-conflict period collaborative patterns seem to be less segmented along ideological lines. Chapter 6 complements the preceding one by adding into the analysis several other non-ideological predictors of interorganizational collaboration. Results show that, with the end of ETA’s armed struggle, pragmatic-instrumental factors and interpersonal bonds seem to play a larger role as drivers of public collaboration. Next, chapter 7 engages in a quite different and more exploratory kind of analysis. Applying Diani’s modes of coordination (MoC) analytical framework, I explore whether the underlying relational logics through which civic actors engage with one another have significantly changed before and after the end of violence. The structural network analyses conducted reveal that social movement patterns of relations have expanded after 2011, becoming dominant vis-à-vis other modes of coordination. At the same time, actors embedded in a social movement mode of coordination are slightly more heterogeneous after the definitive demise of the violent conflict in comparison with the previous phase. Taken as a whole, these findings can be interpreted as positive signs of post-conflict normalization of socio-political life in the Basque Country. The fact that environmental civic networks are now denser and more cross-cutting does not only mirror the lower saliency of the cleavages that used to severely condition Basque politics, but it can also serve as a powerful mechanism through which a more tolerant and vibrant democratic community can progressively be built. Overall, this dissertation provides a more nuanced and complex view of the role played by organized civil society and social movements in deeply divided communities, underlining the need to focus on their relational structure in order to correctly assess their potential impact on social integration and the functioning of democracy. Moreover, by analyzing networks among civic organizations in a longitudinal perspective, this dissertation makes several original contributions to social movement scholarship, especially to the stream of literature focusing on coalition making. Methodologically, the replication or adaptation of the empirical design employed in this research could be instrumental in fostering more longitudinal examinations of collective action fields, which until now remain scarce. From a theoretical standpoint, this investigation underlines the context-dependent nature of even well-established patterns of political interactions, underscoring the need to pay more attention to the complex interplay between historical conjunctures and underlying everyday patterns of sociopolitical behavior.