The EU has recently addressed several policy in areas of contention for activists – such as the role of finance in the banking union - but there is small evidence of the presence of the contentious organisations and movements that were active in the national mobilisation in Southern Europe. Despite the well-known difficulties to articulate collective action in a transnational context it could have been expected that the mechanisms for interaction with civil society included in article 11 TUE would have increased the presence of national groups as they expanded opportunities of interaction. A traditional explanation to this lack of involvement in EU politics has been that participating in EU level consultation required involvement in networks at EU level, although it also appears that the degree of involvement in the national sphere may need to be considered. This paper considers both arguments by analysing the contributions to policy consultations on the Banking Union from civil society organisations from Southern Europe in order to analyse regularities in the co-occurrence of presence of national and European organisations in different consultations that may suggest the existence of emerging networks and what the structure of the network in each consultation says about patterns of cooperation and conflict in the field.
