Defence date: 24 January 2000Examining board: Prof. Christian Joppke ; Prof. João Ferreira de Almeida ; Prof. Klaus Eder ; Prof. Maria KousisFirst made available online on 31 October 2014.The fact that most of the European research on «new» social movements has come from more advanced capitalist democracies of Northern Europe -- Germany, in particular -- does not necessarily prove that «new» movements have been either quantitatively or qualitatively more important than in Southern European countries. This could simply be due to the fact that Southern researchers were too occupied with their own countries' regional problems and party systems. This problem was initially raised by Klandermans and Tarrow (1988: 16-7) as a challenging point to one of the most basic assumptions of the European Tradition of «New» Social Movement Studies, which stresses a causal link between advanced industrialism and «new» social movements