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This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in particular on the organizations of left-wing immigrant workers. These organizations performed crucial roles for new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s but were isolated and coopted in the 1990s and early 2000s. To explain why this is so, we engage in a dialogue with Jacques Rancière and develop an understanding of cities as strategic sites for both politicization and policing. Cities serve as sites of politicization because they are incubators of the relational conduits that enable activists from different sectors to engage with one another's struggles and look beyond narrow temporal and spatial horizons. However, cities also serve as sites of policing because authorities constantly attempt to reconfigure governmental arrangements in such a way that civil society serves as an extension of the government and comes to fulfill an instrumental role in the development and implementation of policy. Just as politicizing implies the widening of temporal and spatial horizons, policing implies the narrowing of such horizons. The analysis shows the social movements of the 1960s lost steam in two of the major hubs of the new left and reveals some of the more universal mechanisms through which cities generate or quell dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that early modern Calvinism in particular can lay claim to a transnational space in history. It focuses on how a Calvinist transnational network came into existence during the second half of the sixteenth century. It points to the role of repeated persecution, exodus and emigration in shaping both Calvinist theology and culture. Without this transnational experience of repeated emigration and persecution the international solidarity of Calvinists across Europe would not have existed by the early seventeenth century and the pan-European relief work for suffering co-religionists in Germany during the Thirty Years' War would not have been possible. Taking its departure in the exodus of a number of prominent merchant families from Lucca in Italy in the 1560s it follows their history for the next couple of generations, showing first their Huguenot affiliation during their stay in France and their experience of the Wars of Religion. It then follows them via Frankfurt and Nuremberg to Antwerp and Stade in Northern Germany until they finally settled in Amsterdam and London. In this process it emphasises how they intermarried with other Calvinist emigrant families from Flanders (with whom they formed trading companies) and it highlights their active roles within the refugee Calvinist churches which sprang up in the cities where they resided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]