Sectoral Issues and Environmental Causes: The Mobilization of the French Basque Fishermen after the Sinking of the Prest
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Sectoral Issues and Environmental Causes: The Mobilization of the French Basque Fishermen after the Sinking of the Prestige Xabier Itc¸ainaa, Ste´phane Cadioub a
CNRS-SPIRIT, Sciences Po Bordeaux, France. E-mail: [email protected] b ERMES, University of Nice E-mail: [email protected]
This article analyses the mobilization of French Basque fishermen following the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige off the coast of Galicia (Spain) in 2002. This environmental disaster led to intense political action and bottom-up mobilization in the French Basque region, especially within a profession already undergoing structural changes since the 1990s, partly because of the implementation of the EU Common Fisheries Policy. The Basque fishermen’s reactions clearly illustrate the specific stakes and power game at play within the trade. The Prestige disaster occurred at a time of deep changes, if not destabilization, of the sectoral modes of regulation, thus straining relationships between Europe, nations and infra-national bodies. It led to a reorganization of the local institutional order. The management of the crisis also shed light on the paradoxical dimension of a fishing community caught in between solidarity and competitive localism, sectoral interests and environmental issues, unity of the milieu and internal fragmentation. It reopened debate over EU regulations in so far as two competing perceptions of Europeanization were revealed by this crisis — general awareness among professionals of the European dimension in environmental issues vs specific awareness of the EU’s extensive regulatory framework for the fishing industry. French Politics (2007) 5, 315–332. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200129 Keywords: fishing sector; Europe; French Basque Country; environment; collective action
Introduction It is both interesting and innovative to approach professional milieus, a traditional field of research for specialists in economic sociology and industrial relations, from the angle of institutional orders.1 In this respect, the fishing sector can be considered as an institutional order (Carter and Smith, 2004) resulting from a mutual learning process and leading to specific forms of public action and conflict resolution (Lagroye, 1997, 402, 527). The study of the dynamics at work in institutional orders should be analysed chronologically,
Xabier Itc¸aina and Ste´phane Cadiou Sectoral Issues and Environmental Causes
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by focussing on specific time sequences that correspond to periods of stabilization or economic crisis. The institutionalization process ‘constantly takes place both in critical circumstances (y) and in more stable periods’ (Lacroix and Lagroye, 1992, 11). A crisis imposed from the outside may thus serve to explain or illustrate the complex and dynamic evolution within a specific local institutional order. As an illustration, the open crisis triggered by what was to be called the Prestige disaster in late 2002 clearly shows the tensions that emerged between a time-honoured and well-established mod
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