Protest Beyond Borders

Contentious Politics in Europe since 1945

Hara Kouki, Eduardo Romanos, Hara Kouki, Eduardo Romanos

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781845459956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The protest movements that followed the Second World War have recently become the object of study for various disciplines; however, the exchange of ideas between research fields, and comparative research in general, is lacking. An international and interdisciplinary dialogue is vital to not only describe the similarities and differences between the single national movements but also to evaluate how they contributed to the formation and evolution of a transnational civil society in Europe. This volume undertakes this challenge as well as questions some major assumptions of post-1945 protest and social mobilization both in Western and Eastern Europe. Historians, political scientists, sociologists and media studies scholars come together and offer insights into social movement research beyond conventional repertoires of protest and strictly defined periods, borders and paradigms, offering new perspectives on past and present processes of social change of the contemporary world.

Part I

Transnational Dimensions of Protest in Cold War Europe

Chapter 1

Extraparliamentary Entanglements

Framing Peace in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1974

Andrew Oppenheimer

This chapter explores the role played by expressions of solidarity in the ethical and political economies of West German social movements.¹ Despite their prominence in postwar vocabularies of protest, expressions of solidarity have received little scholarly attention. What analysis there has been treats solidarity as a self-evident, stable term of analysis reflecting the common cause of activists internationally in supposedly related campaigns for liberation from structural forms of neocapitalist and neocolonial oppression.² Absent from this is any concern for the internal dynamics of these expressions—the claims they signify at given moments in time; the motivations that underlie them; and the manner in which different forms of expression either unite or divide protest communities.³ By contrast, I attend to the internal, processual negotiation and (re)articulation of the terms of solidarity among West German protesters. My findings, specifically on pacifist expressions of solidarity, encourage an analysis of protest that considers the nature and limits of shared discursive resources and accounts for the relationship of West German protest to broader cultural economies, both within the Federal Republic and beyond its borders.

By tracing the shift from German pacifism’s nationally oriented framework to its engagement with inter- and transnational political concerns, I account for the historical factors that motivated and structured the expressions of solidarity and, ultimately, forced activists to reassess the broad and encompassing definition of pacifism that had been accepted (though not universally) by German peace activists since the late nineteenth century. Paying particular attention to the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (DFG), I argue that the contingencies and ambivalences of expressing solidarity are crucial to the history of Germany’s oldest and most venerable peace association and to West German peace activism in general. Furthermore, I highlight the ways in which expressions of solidarity signify moments of collective identification and the prospect of ethical, political, and cultural overlap between pacifist and non-pacifist protesters within West Germany’s extraparliamentary opposition. Expressions of solidarity thus open a window onto the discursive mechanisms of group identity formation and patterns of cultural transfer within and between communities of protesters.

Specifically, I explain how the Cold War and the threat posed by nuclear weapons destabilized existing pacifist arguments and simultaneously provided a new, supranational language in which pacifists could formulate their cause. Highlighting the influence of Protestant criticisms of modern society, I describe the emergence of globally oriented expressions of anti-nuclear solidarity among pacifists that further enabled their identification with and support for national liberation movements around the world during the 1960s. I then explore the ensuing dilemma for pacifists caught between the conflicting implications of anti-nuclear and political solidarity. Finally, I call for greater attention to the common communicative forms and strategies employed by—indeed, the overlap in intellectual agendas between—protesters from different organizational, ideological, and demographic backgrounds.

(Re)Thinking Peace

While the Nazis dismantled peace associations and suppressed peace work, they did not annihilate the entire interwar community of German pacifists.⁴ A considerable number of activists outlived the Thousand Year Reich, and it was pacifists from the cohorts active during the interwar years that initiated the process of rebuilding peace organizations after the Second World War. The DFG was reestablished in November 1946 under the direction of men from the interwar “Hagen circle,” activists such as Fritz Küster, who had once promoted active struggle against entrenched martial values and interests. Küster and his fellow “radicals” had sought to build a centralized, disciplined movement set in opposition to a government that, in their eyes, furthered Germany’s militarist traditions despite its parliamentary form.⁵ They revived this agenda after the Second World War in a program that criticized the militarist spirit that had permeated—indeed, structured—German social and cultural life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁶ As during the interwar era, DFG leaders approached militarism as a social problem that, in the form of specific material relationships and cultural assumptions, fostered a belief in the German right to dominate other peoples. Political renewal, they argued, first required the disarming of the German mind.⁷

The approach to militarism as a domestic social problem reflects the specific national orientation of peace activists in the immediate postwar years. The accusations of their interwar-era opponents notwithstanding, German pacifism was not (and had never been) a- or anti-national. To the contrary, pacifists had taken the existence and rights of nations for granted, and after the Second World War, they continued to regard militarism as a national problem.⁸ National as sumptions even oriented pacifist visions of world community, which maintained the integrity of member nations. DFG leaders envisioned a collective of discrete nations into which Germany would be integrated as an equal. There were other organizations, such as the West German branch of WOMAN (World Organization of Mothers of All Nations), which sought to transcend national distinctions, in this case through an essentialist vision of mothers as representatives of the human conscience.⁹ And, of course, many pacifists thought wistfully of a future global community and world government.¹⁰ They remind us that peace politics are not intrinsically bound to a national paradigm. Yet, as DFG Chairman Harald Abatz observed, people had not yet come so far as to consider themselves citizens of the world or to look at the earth as their “fatherland.”¹¹

It follows that national assumptions would inform pacifist responses to domestic and international concerns, including the Cold War. DFG leaders did not just advocate an independent middle path or neutral position for Germany between the US and Soviet camps; they conceived of the Cold War as a conflict motivated by the national-militarist interests of US and Soviet political elites. For them, both Truman’s “dollar offensive” and Stalin’s “imperialism” reflected domestic conditions within the United States and Soviet Union akin (though by no means identical) to those found in Germany.¹² In hindsight, the analysis seems quite anachronistic, as more a reflection of interwar concerns than an analysis of a geopolitical conflict premised upon mutually exclusive visions of sociopolitical order.¹³ One thing is certain: with its emphasis on aberrant social structures and the need for cultural and political renewal, DFG rhetoric did not resonate with West Germans. They preferred Konrad Adenauer’s strategy of Westbindung, which reflected popular fears of Soviet expansionism and—as even pacifists acknowledged—delivered substantive political gains that the people on the street could appreciate.¹⁴

It thus became clear that something was amiss with organized pacifism, its methods, and, indeed, its basic presumptions. Emerging threats, such as the Cold War and the deployment of nuclear weapons, demanded that pacifists formulate their positions anew.¹⁵ Capitalizing on public fears of a third, catastrophic world war, pacifists reoriented their rhetoric from anti-nationalist-militarism to supranational themes of war and peace, portraying Germans largely as at the mercy of extranational decision-making. In this way, DFG leaders made its first meaningful inroads into West German public opinion and breathed new life into their organization.¹⁶

The first explicit indications of the new direction came in 1954 in response to US and Soviet tests of hydrogen bombs and the stationing of nuclear and other US weapons systems on West German soil. For pacifists, the hydrogen bomb represented a decisive juncture in human history. With its invention, mankind would live with the knowledge of its ability to end world history through a single act.¹⁷ Heightening fears, the Cold War arms race gave people reason to believe that the prospect of global destruction initially evoked by Hiroshima would be realized sooner rather than later. It was in this context that pacifists turned to a supranational language of human suffering and global annihilation.

Poignant expressions of this turn came in speeches by then DFG President Martin Niemöller at rallies of “Kampf dem Atomtod” (KdA). KdA was the Social Democratic-led campaign against government efforts to establish a nuclear-capable West German army. During 1958, as many as 325,000 West Germans protested under its aegis against nuclear weapons and the estimates of 1.4 billion deaths worldwide (almost 50 million in the two German states) from a nuclear war.¹⁸ Scholars agree that Social Democratic opposition to nuclear weapons was motivated more by power politics than principle.¹⁹ This helps explain official KdA emphasis on nuclear weapons as a national issue threatening the prospects for national reunification and the fate of the German people.²⁰ Yet, the “imploring humanitarian pathos” of campaign speakers reminds us that participants sought to apply moral pressure on the western Allies.²¹ It was in this vein that Niemöller expanded beyond national concerns and spoke of mass death in universal terms. “Atomic clouds,” after all, “do not ask after friend or foe, rich or poor, white or black, western or eastern worldview; they turn against everything that lives, and they threaten everything with death.”²²

While similarly global in its orientation, anti-nuclear pacifism distinguished itself from established internationalist and “One World” arguments for peace by taking worldwide catastrophe as its starting point and, from there, reasoning through sustained social and political criticism toward a logic of renewal that corresponded to the prospect of human annihilation.²³ Like non-pacifist critics of nuclear weapons, such as Karl Jaspers, pacifists drew upon interwar discourses on cultural crisis to convey the disharmony of the nuclear age.²⁴ Nuclear weapons embodied the appropriation of inherently progressive technologies in the name of deviant—or at least incomplete—notions of freedom.²⁵ More than a threat in their own right, nuclear weapons evoked an uncanny sense of dislocation that critics attributed to an aberrant relationship between social values and technological change. Pacifists felt that man, living under these conditions, had been cut loose from his metaphysical moorings. The once clear distinction between the sacred and the profane had been blurred; the fruits of civilization—art and religion, science and technology—now served only to numb him to impending catastrophe.²⁶ Though lacking Jaspers’s erudition, pacifist statements against the bomb conveyed general agreement with the logic of renewal formulated by the philosopher, namely, one that accepts the possibility—indeed, the probability—of catastrophe and on this basis leads toward a “reformation of political existence,” from one premised upon conflict to one premised upon cooperation. If the bomb represented global suicide, its rejection would be the first step toward redressing the disharmony of the age.²⁷

A key element in the global turn of pacifist criticism was the influence of the Protestants associated with the Dahlemite wing of the Confessing Church. Dahlemites were perhaps the staunchest faction within the pastoral movement that protested Nazi interference in ecclesiastical matters during the Third Reich. After 1945, men such as Niemöller and Hans Iwand worked to establish a national church that conformed to the doctrinal revisions laid out in the Barmen Declaration and Dahlem resolutions of 1934. Challenging conservative Lutheran dogma, they called for a church active in public affairs, not in obedience to the state, but as a critic of government polici...