Movement Genesis

Social Movement Theory And The West German Peace Movement

Steven Breyman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429723384
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

To make sense of the rise and fall, origins and nature, of the 1980s West German peace movement requires work that is part political sociology and part social movement theory building. An analysis of the peace movement's organizations, leadership, strategy, goals, tactics, and mobilization comprises the political sociology part of this study. To un

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Background and Overview

The groundwork for the great social movements of the past was laid through many years of searching, intellectual interchange, social experimentation, collective action, organization, and struggle. The same will be true of the coming stages of social change.

—Noam Chomsky

To make sense of the rise and fall, origins and nature, of the 1980s West German peace movement requires work that is part political sociology and part social movement theory building. An analysis of the peace movement’s organizations, leadership, strategy, goals, tactics, and mobilization comprises the political sociology part of this study. To understand the origins of the West German peace movement, one must take into account the movement’s structure and its constituent organizations. The theory-building part brings together social movement theory with the political context within which the movement arose and developed, and with the movement itself, in some sense as alive and vital as the people who built it. The study centers on the years 1979–1983, the period of movement mass mobilization. I explain where the movement came from and why it arose when it did. My main aim is to interrogate, criticize and extend the theoretical literature on the etiology of social movements.

I introduce the socioeconomic context of the book, and briefly outline my approach to its research questions in the next section. I follow the book’s outline with a discussion of the methods and sources of the study.

I conclude with some thoughts about the purpose and justification for this study.

The Sociopolitical Context of the Movement

Postindustrialism

In a rare example of intellectual convergence, most observers concurred by the late seventies that the Atlantic community had passed from one historical moment to another; they agreed we had witnessed the dawn of “postindustrial society.” To say that postindustrial society has replaced industrial society is an exaggeration; rather, the new forces and relations of production overlie those of the previous epoch in the manner of industrialism’s missionary coupling with agrarian society. Or, to switch metaphors, the relationship of postindustrialism to industrialism is like that of layers of sediment in a river bed that have been disturbed, and thus mixed up, by the wader-clad feet of the angler.

Western societies and economies experienced dizzying changes in the past three decades. Perhaps most important among the changes was the shift from economies based on manufacturing to economies based on services.¹ The heavy manufacturing and mining sectors such as steel and coal—the very soul of industrial capitalism—which once belched smoke across skies from Pittsburgh to Düsseldorf, and from Manchester to Turin, were reduced by the 1970s and 1980s to rump industries. Unionized work forces shrank significantly, especially in the United States, and comparative advantage in crude manufactures shifted from the West to newly industrializing countries like Brazil and South Korea.

The origins of industrial malaise and decline are varied, controversial and complex, but an odd if imperfect consensus arose—ranging from neoclassical economists to neo-Marxist social theorists—about two main roots. The first is disruptions in the energy supply caused by the 1970s oil shocks. The second is the paradoxically harmful effects on economic growth of the modern welfare state, originally designed to sustain effective consumer demand during business downturns. Outside the consensus, Piore and Sabel located contemporary advanced capitalism’s difficulties in “the limits of the model of industrial development that is founded on mass production: the use of special-purpose (product specific) machines and of semiskilled workers to produce standardized goods.”² Complementing these sometimes contradictory economic explanations were political and sociological analyses that blamed welfare bureaucrats and political entrepreneurs for exacerbating the crisis. The former put the state at the service of politically powerful constituencies; the larger the transfer payment program, and the greater the number of beneficiaries, the easier it was to coerce the state into further expansions. The latter subverted the state from without; huckstering candidates successfully bought votes with pledges of benefits that cost more to make good on than the state could afford given its primary mission of facilitating capital accumulation.³

Sociological analyses led to conclusions about “ungovernability” and the “crisis of democracy.”⁴ Some liberals lost faith in broad political participation, state regulation of the economy, and redistributive policies; they consequently transformed themselves into neoliberals, or more commonly, neoconservatives. Capitalism and democracy need each other, according to those formerly in favor of both equity and efficiency, yet are incompatible. The neoconservative solution: democracy for the elite and welfare for the destitute. Neo-Marxists saw the welfare state as a stalemate between labor and capital.⁵ Workers were unable to bring about socialism, and capital proved unable to fully defend the market. The imposition of proto-socialist forms of exchange on capitalist economies, at the behest of subordinate classes, led to “stagflation” (recession plus inflation). Once again, democracy was a threat to capitalism. The schools naturally diverged on remedies for the predicament; the disintegration of capitalism will (hopefully) clear the way for socialism for the one, the collapse of pseudo-socialist experiments will pave the road to a less fettered capitalism for the other.

Rising, albeit unevenly, from the ruins of once mighty factories, are the fruit of the “third industrial revolution,” “high technology” and new and old services of various stripes. Services as economic phenomena are, of course, not new to contemporary Western economies. The preindustrial household and domestic class was the largest in England until the latter third of the nineteenth century. The industrial service sector—transportation, utilities, finance, insurance, real estate, and personal services—remains large and crucial for the production of goods. What is new about postindustrial services is their character: they are directed at both ordinary citizens (health, education, and welfare), and experts (professionals and technicians in research and development, evaluation, computers, and systems analysis). Rather than contribute to equitable and productive growth, these new services act as a drag on the economy, fuel speculation, and contribute mightily to inflation.

Paralleling the change in the economic base of advanced capitalism, was a shift in the class structure of Western societies. Displaced from the center of economic life by the decline of manufacturing sectors, the traditional working class was overshadowed by a new middle class of college-educated service professionals.⁶ This knowledge class is still primarily populated by baby boomers, children sired by veterans returning from World War II, and includes those bom as late as the early sixties. These are people who work neither against nature as in preindustrial society, nor against fabricated nature as in industrial society, but with other people. A portion of this generation—distinctive politically, economically and culturally—constitutes the bulk of new social movement members.⁷ These people, socialized during the relative peace and prosperity of the postwar period, have the requisite political skills, leisure time, and values to be movement activists.

The intense levels of political participation characteristic of the affluent and educated part of the postwar generation posed a challenge to the representative institutions—political parties and parliaments—of Western democracies.⁸ Alienated and stymied by impersonal and ever larger governmental and corporate bureaucracies, significant sectors of the first postwar generation called for participatory democracy and engaged in the “new politics.”⁹ While no single definition of the new politics emerged, most analysts agreed that the new politics rejects the materialist agenda and seeks to replace it with a postmaterialist set of political, economic and social priorities; uses new vehicles of interest aggregation and representation such as citizen initiatives and single-issue movements; poses a radical challenge to the status quo of conventional politics; and is rooted in the postmaterialist new middle class.¹⁰ Peace movement activists of the 1980s were quintessential practitioners of the new politics.¹¹

The political cultures of Western democracies have undergone a “silent revolution” in the past several decades.¹² This incomplete revolution—marked by demographic, value, and lifestyle changes—affected primarily college-educated baby boomers and culminated in a new value system: postmaterialism. Postmaterialist priorities include intellectual and social freedom and a deep concern for aesthetics and the quality of life. Postmaterialists are in conflict with materialists, of the same and other generations, who prize economic stability, are hawkish on defense, and are worried about law and order.¹³ Postmaterialists were more numerous and the new politics more prevalent in West Germany than elsewhere.¹⁴

The Missile Controversy

As these social and political-economic changes deepened and spread, the foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) decided in December 1979 that the alliance needed new missiles to counter a Soviet build-up. Since the mid-seventies, the Soviet Union had deployed a new, mobile, three-warhead intermediate-range nuclear missile aimed at Western Europe for which NATO had no comparable system. There was no “good” military justification for the Soviet deployment; the USSR had ample strategic nuclear forces to cover the targets assigned to the new missiles, known in NATO parlance as SS-20s. And NATO, Great Britain, France, and the United States had sufficient strategic nuclear weaponry to counter the threat posed by the SS-20. Nevertheless, and for a variety of political and military reasons, alliance leaders agreed to the “double-track decision.” The first part of the decision was for a deployment track: 464 intermediate range ground-launched nuclear Cruise missiles (GLCMs or Tomahawks), and 108 mobile, intermediaterange Pershing II ballistic nuclear missiles. Collectively, these 572 weapons became known as intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) or Euromissiles. Ninety-six of the Cruise missiles and all of the Pershings were slated for deployment in the Federal Republic at the end of 1983, following the development and testing of the weapons. Other NATO member-states agreed to take the balance of the Tomahawks.

The second part of the decision, the arms control track, offered to negotiate the fate of the missiles with the Soviet Union. This was an unprecedented offer. Prior to this point, both East and West had generally deployed new weapons first, and worried about their consequences for strategic stability and arms control following deployment, if ever. The arms control track ensured that the NATO decision would remain in the forefront of Western European public consciousness for four years. It opened NATO decisionmakers, and the U.S.-USSR INF negotiations in Geneva, to unparalleled public intervention and interference from foes of nuclear deterrence, the arms race, and the Cold War. Angry and frightened West European citizens opposed to new (and old) nuclear weapons mobilized mass movements against the NATO decision. The West German branch of this extraordinary transnational anti-nuclear weapons movement provides the focus for this study.

Movement Novelty, Origins, and Theory

The theories of postindustrialism, postmaterialism and the new politics contribute to our understanding of recent political change, including the rise of new social movements (NSM). Chapter 2 takes off from this point. It wrestles first with the overgrown jungle that is the terminology of social movement definitions. After several slashes with the conceptual machete, we can see clear to a meaning of use throughout this study.

Whether contemporary movements are “new” or not is a question that has spurred stimulating theoretical debates for two decades. Several leading European social theorists made contributions to the debate, including Jürgen Habermas, Claus Offe, and Alain Touraine. A real tug of war over theoretical approaches erupted, and numerous journals devoted special issues to the subject. I examine the various perspectives with an eye both to their applicability to the West German peace movement case, and to what they might add to an understanding of peace movement origins. The review is organized around three main claims regarding NSMs: that they act in new spheres of conflict; that they display new forms of identity and consciousness; and that they employ new group types and new action forms. I return to the question of peace movement novelty in Chapter 9, where following the po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Background and Overview
• 2 Movement Definitions and Novelty
• 3 Movement Origins
• 4 Organizations and Constituencies
• 5 Spectrums
• 6 Strategy and Goals
• 7 Tactics
• 8 Mobilization
• 9 Theory Revisited: Novelty and Origins
• Appendix: The Coordinating Committee of the West German Peace Movement (1983–84)
• Bibliography
• Index