Europeanization as a source of frame resonance. The case of Georgia’s Shame movement and 2019 Gavrilov’s night protests

Abstract

In 2017, 74% of young Georgians supported European integration; additionally, only 1% of them reported participating in a political protest or demonstration, echoing the Georgian scholars’ argument about the low level of youth political activism in this country (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2017, p. 69, p. 55; Kakhishvili & Gogava, 2016, p. 129). In 2019, the Shame movement formed by young people previously not involved in any political group organized the 94 days long protest known as Gavrilov night. Although it primarily did not concern a question of Georgia-EU relations, it employed various references to Europe and these relations (Sharashenidze, 2019; Kincha, 2020; OC Media, 2019b; RFE/RL's Georgian Service, 2019). The present research investigates the link between youth collective action and Europeanization in Georgia, taking the Shame movement and their 2019 protest as a case study. Based on a constructivist approach to Europeanization and Snow and Benford’s Frame theory, it conceptualizes this link as a frame resonance. It centrally asks how Europeanization can contribute to the resonance of collective action frames developed by a youth social movement. The data utilized to address the research question was collected through interviews with two groups of respondents: a social movement entrepreneur (a leader of the 2019 Gavrilov night protest and Shame’s founder) and young Georgian protest participants. Through Theoretical Thematic analysis, Shame’s framing processes during the 2019 protests were analyzed and their collective action frames extracted. Through a combination of inductive and deductive Thematic analysis, six narratives on the Europeanization of the latter group were established. The final analysis conducted according to six indicators of frame resonance revealed that the most significant number of conjunctions (five and four, respectively) between the protesters’ narratives and Shame’s collective action frames was evoked by the narrative on obstacles to Europeanization and Existential threat. Regarding the Europeanization’s contribution to framing processes, the analysis revealed that during the 2019 protest, Europeanization, as constructed by the young Georgia’s protesters, could contribute the most to the resonance of Shame’s prognostic framing, represented by its solutions, tactics, and understanding of constraints. In this case, resonance was designated by four indicators out of six: frame consistency, empirical credibility, centrality, and narrative fidelity. The resonance between the young protesters’ narratives on Europeanization and Shame’s diagnostic frames was designated by two indicators of empirical credibility and narrative fidelity and one indicator (credibility of the frame articulators) for their motivational frames.