Over the past years, the economic crisis has significantly challenged 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; Rootes 2002; della Porta and Caiani, 2009)- finding moderate numbers of europeanized protests and actors - more recent studies on Europeanisation of social movements have been limited to austerity measures (Bourne and Chatzopoulou, 2015), wheras the TTIP has been studied 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 falls under the exclusive competency of the EU, and where political opportunities for civil society actors are ‘closed’. So why and how has this movement ‘europeanized’? And has it had an impact on the policy? 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 protest events in the countries of origin; c) conducting semi-structured interviews in Brussels with key representatives of the movement.
