Over the past years, the crisis had challenged significantly the ways through which social movements and political parties have conceptualized the EU institutions and policies. Although some research on Europeanisation of social movements has already been conducted (Tarrow, 1995; della Porta and Caiani, 2009), recent research on Europeanisation of social movements has been limited to austerity measures (Bourne and Chatzopoulou, 2015) wheras the TTIP has been studies more from a trade unions’ perspective (Dierckx, 2015) or an international relations perspective (Novotna, Telò, Ponjaert, 2015). The Europeanisation hypothesis states that there has been an ‘upscaling’ of protest events and that the EU has become a central target. The TTIP seems to be a crucial test case since it concerns a policy area (foreign trade) which is of an exclusive competence of the EU. Furthermore, among other achievements, the Stop-TTIP movement has collected 3 million signatures among EU citizens with the aim to stop the negotiation of the Treaty. The paper will test the Europeanisation hypothesis by a) describing the overall movement strategy; b) collecting media data on country of origin of protest events; c) conducting semi-directive interviews in Brussels with key representatives of the movement.
