There was no European-wide wave of protest triggered by the Great Recession. Instead, a protest wave swept across southern Europe, which was, however, mainly due to the developments in Greece. In Greece, the crisis gave rise to a sustained wave of protest that covered both the shock- and the Euro-crisis period. But even in the case of Greece, this wave had already been under way once the economic crisis really hit the country. Moreover, while the crisis also gave rise to protest waves in Cyprus, Portugal, and Spain during the Euro-crisis, it did not do so in all southern European countries. There were no waves to speak of in Italy and Malta during any part of the Great Recession. In north-western Europe, with the exception of Iceland and the UK, protest seems to have developed largely independently of the economic crisis, while we have found some country-specific waves in central- and eastern Europe. But the eastern European waves, too, had either already accelerated before the intervention of the Great Recession, which only contributed to their peaks (Latvia, Lithuania), delayed their decline (Czech Republic, Hungary), or was actually unrelated to the protest (Bulgaria, Estonia). A lot of protest during the Great Recession responded to country-specific conditions which were entirely unrelated to the crisis.

This chapter contains a study of diffusion among political protests in Europe. We start from a theoretical perspective that assumes protests as inherently interdependent across countries. Hence, we link geographical proximity to the likelihood of protests and we apply a spatial panel data analysis to study this link at the European, regional and cross-border level as well as for different time periods and forms of protests. The results show that spin-off movements across the continent learn from or emulate initiator movements in many instances, but that this diffusion is largely confined to the cross-border level. As a consequence, we did not find sustained protest waves that capture the majority of European countries at once. Similarly, cross-border diffusion is also only relevant for some regions and during some time periods but not universally. It seems that the grievances and opportunity structures in different European countries are varying too much in order to support widespread and long-ranging waves of protest.