Social protest and its policing in the “heart of the European crisis regime”: The case of Blockupy in Frankfurt, Germany

Under the name of 'Blockupy' the city of Frankfurt am Main witnessed major social protests between 2012 and 2015 against the European crisis management and its devastating impacts on the livelihoods of people all over Europe. By assuming a Gramscian perspective, with a special focus on struggles over hegemony in the realm of coercion itself, this paper, analyzes the early Blockupy movement from 2012 to 2013, and argues that these protests were able to successfully challenge the neoliberal hegemonic story of EU austerity politics in Germany for two main reasons. First, Blockupy at that time was able to avoid criminalization by practicing a professionalized politics of hegemony that actively sought to intervene in public debates and by establishing a code of conduct shared by all participating groups. Second, Blockupy's geography and its place-based, multi-scalar and networked character were crucial, in that they drew on spatial strategies derived from the traditions and experiences of different social movements. Blockupy was multi-scalar and networked in that it brought together national, local and European movements by networking across scales, and it was placebased in two respects: it used and reignited the urban social movement infrastructure that was in place in Frankfurt after decades of social struggles within and against global city formation; and it strategically used Frankfurt's material and symbolic status as a global city.