Who Are We? Square Politics and the Collective Self-Understanding of the Indignados in Spain and Greece—Reflections and Legacies

Abstract

As occupations of squares in Spain spread across Europe, the Spanish Indignados gave rise to a transnational movement of ordinary citizens united in their anger against the banks, corruption, the electoral system, the global financial system, and the press. In this article, we reflect upon the legacies of the Spanish and Greek Indignados and show how their collective self-understanding—that is, a sense of a “us”—is formed and articulated very differently in Spain and Greece through square politics. We argue that it is the dramaturgy of political protest that fundamentally constructs and shapes the collective self-understanding of the Indignados in Spain and Greece. We will see that while in Spain there is a clearer sense of a shared political project and a shared identity, in Greece social movement actors were divided by their particular agendas and sectarian identities, which resulted in different articulations of their collective identity.