Historical Social Research Historische Sozialforschung

Transcription

Historical Social Research
Historische Sozialforschung
The Official Journal
of QUANTUM and
INTERQUANT
Der Stuck- und Glocken-Giesser
Focus I:
Historical Research
on Cultural Life Scripts
Focus II:
Global Protest
against Nuclear Power
HSR Vol. 39
2014
No. 1
The Journal: Scope & Imprint
«Formalization means a variety of procedures that match descriptions of events,
structures, and processes with explicit models of those events, structures, and processes. Formal methods do not necessarily involve quantification or computing; analyses of linguistic, spatial, or temporal structure, for example, often proceed quite
formally without computers and without any direct intervention of mathematics.»
Charles Tilly (1929-2008)
«Historical Social Research – Historische Sozialforschung» (HSR) is a peer-reviewed international journal for the application of formal methods to history. Formal methods
can be defined as all methods which are sufficiently intersubjective to be realized as an
information science algorithm. The applications of formal methods to history extend from
quantitative and computer-assisted qualitative social research, historical sociology and
social scientific history up to cliometrical research and historical information science.
In a broader sense the field of Historical Social Research can be described as an inter-/
transdisciplinary paradigm.
For its quality and relevance for the scientific community, the journal has been selected
for covering and archiving in several databases. Thus, the journal is, among others, to be
found in SocIndex with FULL TEXT, JSTOR, and in the Social Science Citation Index. In 2011,
the European Science Foundation has classified the HSR as an international top-journal
"with high visibility and influence among researchers in the various research domains in
different countries, regularly cited all over the world.“
«Historical Social Research – Historische Sozialforschung» (HSR)
An International Journal for the Application of Formal Methods to History
Editorial Office:
Managing Editor: Prof. Dr. Wilhelm H. Schröder
Assistant Editor:
Dr. Philip J. Janssen
Editorial Assistants: Sandra Schulz M.A.; Elise Kammerer M.A.
Published by:
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Cologne, Germany
Phone: +49 (0)221-47694-141/ -164
E-Mail: [email protected]
Web: http://www.gesis.org/hsr
ISSN 0172 - 6404
Focus I
Onno Boonstra, Hilde Bras & Marjet Derks (Eds.)
Historical Research on Cultural Life Scripts.
An Exploration of Opportunities
and Future Prospects
Focus II
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof & Jan-Henrik Meyer (Eds.)
Global Protest against Nuclear Power.
Transfer and Transnational Exchange
in the 1970s and 1980s
Mixed Issue
Articles
No. 147
HSR Vol. 39 (2014) 1
The Journal: Editorial Board
Main Editors
Heinrich Best (Jena), Wilhelm H. Schröder (Cologne)
Managing Editors
Wilhelm H. Schröder, In-Chief (Cologne), Nina Baur (Berlin), Rainer Diaz-Bone (Lucerne), Johannes Marx (Bamberg)
Co-operating Editors
Nina Baur (Berlin), Onno Boonstra (Nijmegen), Joanna Bornat (London), Franz Breuer
(Münster), Leen Breure (Utrecht), Christoph Classen (Potsdam), Jürgen Danyel (Potsdam), Bert De Munck (Antwerp), Rainer Diaz-Bone (Lucerne), Claude Didry (Paris),
Claude Diebolt (Strasbourg), Peter Doorn (Amsterdam), Georg Fertig (Halle), Gudrun
Gersmann (Cologne), Karen Hagemann (Chapel Hill, NC), M. Michaela Hampf (Berlin), Rüdiger Hohls (Berlin), Jason Hughes (Leicester), Ralph Jessen (Cologne), Claire
Judde de Larivière (Toulouse), Hans Jørgen Marker (Gothenburg), Johannes Marx
(Bamberg), Rainer Metz (Cologne), Günter Mey (Berlin), Jürgen Mittag (Cologne),
Katja Mruck (Berlin), Dieter Ohr (Berlin), Thomas Rahlf (Cologne), Kai Ruffing (Marburg), Patrick Sahle (Cologne), Kevin Schürer (Leicester), Jürgen Sensch (Cologne),
Manfred Thaller (Cologne), Helmut Thome (Halle), Paul W. Thurner (Munich), Roland
Wenzlhuemer (Heidelberg)
Consulting Editors
Erik W. Austin (Ann Arbor), Francesca Bocchi (Bologna), Leonid Borodkin (Moscow),
Gerhard Botz (Vienna), Christiane Eisenberg (Berlin), Josef Ehmer (Vienna), Richard J.
Evans (Cambridge), Jürgen W. Falter (Mainz), Harvey J. Graff (Columbus, OH), Arthur
E. Imhof (Berlin), Konrad H. Jarausch (Chapel Hill, NC), Eric A. Johnson (Mt. Pleasant,
MI), Hartmut Kaelble (Berlin), Hans Mathias Kepplinger (Mainz), Jürgen Kocka (Berlin), John Komlos (Munich), Jean-Paul Lehners (Luxembourg), Jan Oldervoll (Bergen),
Eva Österberg (Lund), Janice Reiff (Los Angeles), Ernesto A. Ruiz (Florianopolis),
Martin Sabrow (Potsdam), Rick Trainor (Glasgow), Louise Tilly (New York), Jürgen
Wilke (Mainz)
Special Editor
»Cliometrics«: Claude Diebolt (Strasbourg)
CONTENTS
Focus I: Cultural Life Scripts
Introduction
Onno Boonstra, Hilde Bras and Marjet Derks
Historical Research on Cultural Life Scripts. An Exploration of
Opportunities and Future Prospects.
7
Contributions
Angélique Janssens & Ben Pelzer
Lovely Little Angels in Heaven? The Influence of Religiously Determined
Cultural Life Scripts on Infant Survival in the Netherlands, 1880-1920.
19
Peter Rietbergen
Cardinal-Prime Ministers, ca. 1450 - ca. 1750: Careers between Personal
Choices and Cultural Life Scripts.
48
Hilde Bras
The Influence of Popular Beliefs about Childbirth on Fertility Patterns in
Mid-Twentieth-Century Netherlands.
76
Theo Engelen
Life Scripts and Life Realities: Women in Nineteenth-Century Nijmegen.
104
Jan Kok
113
“At age 27, she gets furious”. Scripts on Marriage and Life Course Variation
in The Netherlands, 1850-1970.
Onno Boonstra
The Multidimensionality of Cultural Life Scripts: Results from a 1970s
Survey.
133
Marjet Derks
Sportlife. Medals, Media and Life Courses of Female Dutch Olympic
Champions, 1928-1940.
144
Focus II: Global Anti-Nuclear Protest
Introduction
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof & Jan-Henrik Meyer
165
Global Protest against Nuclear Power. Transfer and Transnational Exchange
in the 1970s and 1980s.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 3
Contributions
Stephen Milder
Between Grassroots Activism and Transnational Aspirations: Anti-Nuclear
Protest from the Rhine Valley to the Bundestag, 1974-1983.
191
Jan-Henrik Meyer
212
“Where do we go from Wyhl?” Transnational Anti-Nuclear Protest Targeting
European and International Organizations in the 1970s.
Michael L. Hughes
236
Civil Disobedience in Transnational Perspective: American and West German
Anti-Nuclear-Power Protesters, 1975-1982.
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof
Spanning the Globe: West-German Support for the Australian Anti-Nuclear
Movement.
254
Mixed Issue: Articles
Nils Freytag, Angelika Epple, Andreas Frings, Dieter Langewiesche &
Thomas Welskopp
277
Mehrfachbesprechung Doris Gerber: Analytische Metaphysik der Geschichte.
Handlungen, Geschichten und ihre Erklärung, Frankfurt/M. 2012.
Reinhard Messerschmidt
“Garbled Demography” or “Demographization of the social”? – A
Foucaultian Discourse Analysis of German Demographic Change at the
Beginning of the 21st Century.
299
Philip O’Regan & Brendan Halpin
Class, Status and the Stratification of Residential Preferences amongst
Accountants
336
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 4
Focus II
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof & Jan-Henrik Meyer (Eds.)
Global Protest against Nuclear Power.
Transfer and Transnational Exchange
in the 1970s and 1980s
No. 147
HSR Vol. 39 (2014) 1
Global Protest against Nuclear Power. Transfer and
Transnational Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof & Jan-Henrik Meyer ∗
Abstract: »Globaler Protest gegen Atomkraft: Transfer und transnationaler
Austausch in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren«. Protest against nuclear power
plants, uranium mining and nuclear testing played a pivotal role in the rise of a
mass environmental movement around the globe in the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, the history of anti-nuclear activism has largely been told from a
strictly national perspective. This HSR Focus approaches the phenomenon from
a transnational perspective for the first time. Against the backdrop of the debate on transnational history, this article develops a framework of analysis, and
contextualizes anti-nuclear protest in a broader postwar perspective. The contributions show that anti-nuclear movements across the globe were transnationally connected. First, scientific expertise and protest practices were transferred between movements, and subsequently adapted to local requirements.
Secondly, transnational cooperation and networks did indeed emerge, playing
an important role in taking protest to the international and European level.
However, as opposed to contemporary rhetoric of grass-roots transnational solidarity, such cooperation was limited to a small, highly skilled and committed
group of mediators – often semi-professional activists – who managed to overcome the obstacles of distance and cultural differences and had access to the
necessary resources.
Keywords: Anti-nuclear movement, transnational history, Europe, Australia,
United States.
1.
Introduction
Nuclear power seems to be a transnational issue per se. Harnessing the power
of the atom for useful purposes has been the vision of a small but highly international group of scientists across borders since the early days of the 20th
century. When it first became possible to split the atom, scientists, military men
and policy makers around the globe quickly realized the uses it could be employed for. Initially, these uses were military ones, with teams of scientists work∗
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, Lehrstuhl für Neueste und Zeitgeschichte, Humboldt Universität zu
Berlin, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, 10117 Berlin, Germany; [email protected].
Jan-Henrik Meyer, Department for Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Jens-Chr. Skous
Vej 5.4, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark; [email protected]; [email protected].
Historical Social Research 39 (2014) 1, 165-190 Ň© GESIS
DOI: 10.12759/hsr.39.2014.1.165-190
ing to develop a nuclear bomb on both sides during World War II (Walker 2002).
While these efforts fortunately came to nothing in Nazi Germany (Schirach
2012), the United States’ “Manhattan project” (Kelly 2007) resulted in the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Notably since Eisenhower’s famous “Atoms for Peace” speech of 1953 various kinds of peaceful purposes – such as sterilizing foods with radiation (Zachmann 2011) – were promoted
on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and subsequently also in what was then called
the developing world. Most important among these was the provision of electricity via nuclear power plants, which, however, only became available for commercial purposes in the late 1960s (Radkau 1983; Radkau and Hahn 2013).1
Nuclear power seems a transnational issue because it transcends and crosses
national boundaries – in at least four respects: Firstly, in terms of expert
knowledge and mediated forms of communication. This includes the transnational diffusion of knowledge and ideas communicated by experts; that is to
say, the processes whereby scientific knowledge is generated and travels across
borders through scientific exchange and cooperation (sometimes by espionage),
and through different media forms, including specialist media like international
scientific journals such as Nuclear Physics and alternative media like the exchange platform World Information Service on Energy (WISE), or the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists (Kirchhof forthcoming spring 2016).
Secondly, nuclear power transcends the nation state due to global trade, industry and banks. While the state held tight control over the arms sector, trying
to prevent proliferation, once nuclear power started to be commercialized, large
multinational or – as they were referred to in the 1970s2 – “transnational” corporations such as Westinghouse, General Electric or Siemens produced and
sold nuclear technology worldwide. Moreover, uranium ore, for the key raw
material and for the nuclear industry and weapons production alike, was mined
by large multinational mining companies like Rio Tinto Zinc, financed by
internationally operating banks such as Bank of America – as contemporary
critics highlighted (Roberts 1978) – and exported across the globe.
Thirdly, the splitting of the atom had undesirable consequences for the natural environment in terms of radiation, which was impossible to contain within
1
2
The arguments outlined in this article were first developed and discussed in the context of a
series of panels on "Anti-nuclear-protest in the 1970s and 1980s in a transnational perspective: Europe and beyond" at the Seventh Biennial Conference of the European Society for Environmental History in Munich in August 2013. We would like to thank Michael Schüring and
Frank Zelko for their helpful comments, and Stephen Milder and Michael L. Hughes for the
thoughtful discussion. Research for this article was funded by a Marie-Curie-Reintegration
Grant of the European Communities, by the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication, by a fellowship of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU
Munich, as well as by a project grant of the German Science Foundation (DFG).
Kelly, Petra to Peter Weish, "in Eile", Brussels, 12 December 1974. Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis
(AGG) Petra Kelly Archiv (PKA) 1933: 1-2.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 166
national borders. Even in the most remote corners of the planet, fallout from
nuclear tests could be found. Radioactive isotopes spread in the atmosphere and
rained down worldwide (McNeill and Engelke 2013, 501). This concern was an
important argument for international political solutions and agreements, such as
the (limited) Test Ban Treaty of 1963 (Fazzi forthcoming 2014). Nuclear accidents, such as Three Mile Island near Harrisburg in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986
(Brüggemeier 1998; Arndt 2010) and more recently Fukushima in 2011,
(Pritchard 2012; Uekötter 2012a, b) demonstrated that nuclear fallout affected
both air and water, and did not stop at borders (Iriye 2013a, 766f.) – even if pronuclear governments occasionally suggested otherwise (Kalmbach 2011). Even
the “normal” day-to-day operation of nuclear power plants, let alone of reprocessing plants, such as the notorious case of the British Windscale/Sellafield plant
(Hamblin 2008; Mauchline and Templeton 1963; McDermott 2008; Nelson
2004) on the coast of the Irish Sea, produced (low-level) nuclear emissions that
impacted on the air, rivers and the sea and on human health, regardless of political borders. In fact, many reactor sites were deliberately placed on the margins
of nation states, facing the sea or neighboring countries. In Western Europe,
such practices – and the cross-border resentment they created – led the European Commission to propose common European rules for the obligatory consultation of the affected neighbors in 1976 and again after Harrisburg. These proposals predictably came to nothing.3 Nuclear tests were undertaken far away
from the home country, as in the case of French tests in the Pacific, which
ultimately triggered off the Australian anti-nuclear movement in 1972/73
(Kirchhof 2014a)4 and contributed to the rise of Greenpeace (Zelko 2013,
110ff).
Fourthly, and finally, protest against the risks of nuclear weapons and nuclear power also crossed borders. Curiously enough, however, the transnational
nature of this protest has hardly been explored to date. To be sure, some researchers mentioned in passing the cooperation of anti-nuclear activists along
the upper Rhine in the 1970s (e.g. Engels 2006, 352). However, most of the
historical and social science research on anti-nuclear protest – against nuclear
weapons, nuclear power and uranium mining – has remained confined to local
and national cases (e.g. Engels 2006, 338-76; Hasenöhrl 2011, 405-71; Schüring
2012). Even the few existing – and very instructive – international comparative
3
4
Europäische Kommission. Entwurf einer Entschließung des Ministerrates über die gemeinschaftliche Abstimmung über Fragen der Standortwahl beim Bau von Kraftwerken und Vorschlag für eine Verordnung des Rates über die Einrichtung eines gemeinschaftlichen Konsultationsverfahrens für Kraftwerke, von denen Auswirkungen auf das Hoheitsgebiet eines
anderen Mitgliedsstaates ausgehen können, KOM (76) 576 endg., 10. Dezember 1976. Historical Archives of the European Commission BAC 35/1980 (2): 129-64.
Kelly, Petra. Atomkolonialismus im Pazifik, Abendzeitung n. d. [1984 or later], AGG, PKA
480. Also: Caldicott, Helen. 1979. At the Crossroads. San Francisco: Abalone Alliance, AGG,
PKA 139: 1-10, here: 2-3.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 167
studies by sociologists (Joppke 1993) and historians (Nehring 2004, 2005) alike
tended to highlight the differences and the separate national paths and tried to
explain these specificities by the embedding of these movements in different
national political systems. This is to some extent the result of the prevalent
opportunity structures approach (Kitschelt 1986; Shawki 2010) as an analytical
tool for the study of social movements. This approach highlighted the crucial
relevance of national (or subnational) political structures for the success of such
movements (Meyer 2004). Such an approach is a clear example of what Ulrich
Beck has criticized as the “methodological nationalism” (Beck 2005, 3-11) of the
social sciences, namely the default treatment of all social and political problems
from a national perspective and within bounded national units. Beck argues that
unquestioned methodological decisions to opt for national units of analysis merely reinforce the apparent importance and centrality of the nation state in social
science analyses. By focusing on transfers and transnational exchange, this HSR
Focus seeks to go beyond national politics as well as the mere focus on similarities and differences between nation states and instead to explore transnational
exchange and the global diffusion of knowledge, ideas and concepts.
In environmental history – which includes the history of environmental and
anti-nuclear protest – there is an emerging trend to internationalize and globalize perspectives and to include cross-border phenomena (Iriye 2008; Uekötter
2011). Actual empirical research in a transnational perspective has only just
started, with case studies on the spread of national parks (Kupper 2012; Lekan
2011; Wakild 2012; Wöbse 2012), on migratory species (Cioc 2009) or transfers of ideas (Kirchhof forthcoming spring 2016). As part of this incipient
trend, the ideological underpinnings and motivations of transnational environmental protest have also been addressed (Nehring 2009, 2012), including the
role of the women’s movement (Kirchhof 2013). However, with regard to antinuclear protest – arguably a central area of environmental and political conflict
in Western societies in the 1970s and 1980s – research on its transnational
aspects is still missing.
The goal of this HSR Focus is to address this apparent mismatch, and begin
to chronicle the as yet untold story of transnational exchange and cooperation
among those anti-nuclear activists in the 1970s and 1980 who opposed nuclear
power and uranium mining. The guiding hypothesis is that the anti-nuclear
movement that emerged during these two decades – roughly between the first
protests against the nuclear power plant at Fessenheim in France in 1971 and
Chernobyl 1986 – was engaged in substantial transnational exchange. Nevertheless, as opposed to what could be called the first generation of transnational
history in the early 2000s, which devoted substantial attention to emphasizing
the existence of transnational connections (Conrad and Osterhammel 2004;
Conze et al. 2004), the shared goal of the contributions assembled in this HSR
Focus is to gauge both the scope and relevance of transnational exchange.
Moreover, the contributions seek to draw out the conditions facilitating or
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 168
hampering transnational interaction. By addressing factors that enabled but also
put obstacles in the way of cooperation and the transfer of ideas across national
boundaries, the contributions will tell a history of the transnational dimension
of anti-nuclear protest without succumbing to what could be called “methodological transnationalism” (Meyer 2014a, 161), i.e. an analytical perspective that
systematically exaggerates the importance of the transnational dimension.
The four articles assembled in this HSR Focus enquire into different aspects
of the transnational dimension of anti-nuclear protest. In his article “Between
Grassroots Activism and Transnational Aspirations: Anti-Nuclear Protest from
the Rhine Valley to the Bundestag, 1974-1983”, Stephen Milder (2014) (Duke
University, USA) explores how the site occupation at Wyhl – involving the
transnational cooperation of French, Swiss and German activists, and relying
on an example from the French side – gained translocal and transnational relevance, and inspired transnationally-minded activists to engage in Green politics. In “’Where do we go from Wyhl?’ Transnational Anti-Nuclear Protest
targeting European and International Organizations in the 1970s”, Jan-Henrik
Meyer (2014b) (Aarhus University, Denmark) examines the emergence of a
transnational network of actors – initially inspired by the events at Wyhl – that
quickly left the local transnational context behind and started targeting those
international organizations they perceived as the most ardent advocates of the
rapid expansion of nuclear power.
Wyhl also inspired activists on the other side of the Atlantic to engage in
site occupation, as outlined by Michael L. Hughes (2014) (Wake Forest University, USA) in his article “Civil Disobedience in Transnational Perspective.
American and West German Anti-Nuclear-Power Protesters, 1975-1982”.
Hughes analyzes mutual transnational transfers of ideas and protest practices
including site occupations as well as civil disobedience and the limitations of
such transfers between the activists of the Clamshell Alliance fighting against
the Seabrook Power Station in New Hampshire and the German protesters of
the Bund Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz (BBU). He emphasizes the importance
of reception and adaptation into local practices. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof’s (2014)
(Humboldt University Berlin, Germany) article “Spanning the Globe: Australian
Protest against Uranium Mining and their West-German Supporters” looks at an
extreme case of transnational exchange and explores the opportunities for and
limitations of transnational cooperation with activists at the other side of the
world in Australia in an age before e-mail, internet, or Twitter.
This introductory article seeks to situate the four contributions of the HSR
Focus within the current state of research and to raise relevant questions. First,
it will outline and explain the common conceptual framework, drawing on the
wider debate on transnational history. Secondly, it will embed the history of the
anti-nuclear protest of the 1970s and 1980s in the broader context of the rise of
environmentalism since the 1960s, drawing on recent discussions in environmental history. A third and concluding part will present the main findings of
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 169
the four case studies and summarize what we can learn about the transnational
dimension of anti-nuclear protest.
2.
Approaching Anti-Nuclear Protest in a Transnational
Perspective: Conceptual Clarifications
The contributions of this HSR Focus systematically approach the history of
anti-nuclear protest in the 1970s and 1980s from a transnational perspective for
the first time. The central questions addressed derive from the recent debate
about transnational history. Transnational history can be described as the study
of “border crossings” (Clavin 2005, 423). It enquires into the interaction and
movement of people – both individuals and groups – across national boundaries. Moreover, it makes visible those (formal or informal) structures that they
establish beyond the nation state and that are rarely covered in traditional historiography. Transnational history seeks to describe both “flows” – i.e. the
movement of people, information, and concepts, of ideas, of money or goods,
and “networks”, i.e. (frequently emergent and informal) structures of recurrent
interaction (Kaelble et al. 2002, 9). This routinely includes cooperation and
conflict (Clavin 2005, 424; Kaelble et al. 2002, 9f.), but at times also the absence of interconnections.
As a relatively new branch of history writing, transnational history emerged
against the backdrop of a rapidly globalizing world after the end of the cold
war. The goal of its proponents was to overcome some important limitations of
conventional social, national comparative and international history (Bayly et al.
2006; Clavin 2005; Gassert 2010; Gehler and Kaiser 2001; Haupt and Kocka
2009; Osterhammel 2001; Patel 2004).
Firstly, most history writing seemed characterized by methodological nationalism (Chernilo 2006). In most histories, the nation was the default unit of
analysis, without any critical reflection about such a choice of object. Not least
because the rise of history as a discipline had coincided with the emergence
and promotion of the nation state in the 19th century, most historians were used
to writing – and teaching – national histories (Berger 2007; Iriye 2013a, 761).
Even the rise of social history as a new and increasingly dominant subdiscipline in the 1970s did not change this trend. The societies social historians
studied were routinely defined as individual nation states (Raphael 1999). In an
age where social science approaches promised innovation, such social science
definitions were rarely questioned. Thus, as critics have argued, comparative
social history tended to treat nation states as distinct and independent units of
analysis and systematically overlooked the fact that national boundaries were
never completely sealed, but porous in many ways, notably in respect of the
exchange of ideas or the movement of people across borders (Conrad 2009, 52f).
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 170
Secondly, nation states were also the primary units of analysis for classical
international historians. Committed to traditions of diplomatic history, international historians (including historians of European integration) were interested
in government action and records (Kaiser 2004, 2005; Kaiser and Starie 2005).
This kind of approach systematically obscured an increasing number of actors
beyond the nation state operating across borders, such as migrants, multinational businesses, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), (Clavin 2010,
629; Saunier 2009). The contributions to this focus issue focus on such nonstate (Kaiser and Meyer 2010), or societal actors (Kaiser and Meyer 2013) and
the transnational exchange in which they are involved.
The term “transnational” that is at the heart of the transnational history approach is ambiguous. However, this ambiguity may actually have strengthened
the attractiveness of the concept. The prefix “trans” may mean both “across”
and “beyond”. The main analytical focus of transnational history is clearly on
the former, namely the study of actions, flows, networks and transfers that
penetrate national borders. At the same time, the second meaning “beyond the
nation” suggests a vision of overcoming the nation state.5 This vision seemed
quite appropriate to a globalizing world and the apparent obliteration of national borders (Meyer 2014a, 145f). To some extent, idea(l)s of this kind seemed to
also have informed one of the most ambitious enterprises in the field, namely
the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Gram-Skjoldager and
Knudsen 2014; Iriye and Saunier 2009). Nevertheless, many transnational
historians do tend to emphasize that the nation state remains a necessary and
relevant category also in the enquiry of all things transnational (Osterhammel
2009, 47; Patel 2003, 629). One of the analytical goals of this focus issue is to
assess the actual importance of transnational connections – while also reflecting on the structural conditions of national cultural and political frameworks.
Thus the label “transnational” as the contributors in this issue understand it
is not an elaborate new way of describing what used to be called international.
While transnational relations cut across nations, the more classical notion of
international relations denotes the interaction “between” clearly bounded and
institutionalized national units. This distinction between transnational and
international relations was first introduced by “Neo-Liberal” theorists of International Relations like political scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in
the 1970s (for a critical view: Graf and Priemel 2011). Just as transnational
historians developed their research interests under the influence of the globalization debate of the 1990s, the theorists of the 1970s were impressed by what
they described as “interdependence” (Keohane and Nye 1977). The postwar era
had seen a growth of cross-border phenomena – such as the growth in trade and
5
This vision is not at all new. Ideas of a Europe beyond the nation state and without borders
notably motivated resistance against National Socialism, and contributed to the rise of
postwar European federalism. E.g. Lipgens 1985; Pagden 2002.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 171
tourism, or the spread of multinational businesses. Such phenomena did not
feature prominently in International Relations theory at the time. Keohane and
Nye emphasized that new kinds of actors were involved in action beyond borders, and distinguished between international and transnational relations. As
opposed to international or “interstate” interaction, the conventional object of
International Relations, “transnational interaction” describes cross-border activities carried out by non-governmental actors, such as businesses or NGOs.
Accordingly, they introduced the notion of “transnational interaction” as “our
term to describe the movement of tangible or intangible items across state
boundaries when at least one actor is not an agent of government or an intergovernmental organization” (Nye and Keohane 1971, 332).
Against the backdrop of these conceptual distinctions, the contributions to
this HSR Focus approach transnational aspects of anti-nuclear movements from
three different analytical angles. Thus, they go beyond simply comparing two
or more countries, but rather analyze transnational transfers of ideas, transnational cooperation and the emergence of networks and the idealistic motivations for transnational cooperation.
2.1
Transnational Transfers
The contributions to this focus issue enquire into what has variously been
called transnational transfers of ideas (primarily, but not exclusively among
historians (Cairney 2009; Lingelbach 2002; Middell 2007; Paulmann 1998;
Werner and Zimmermann 2002)) or transnational diffusion (in the social sciences (Börzel and Risse 2009; Chabot and Duyvendak 2002; Rootes 1999)),
namely the reception, borrowing and integration of ideas. In the specific context debated in this HSR Focus, this relates to ideas about and perceptions of
nuclear power and its societal and political consequences and/or practices of
protest across national boundaries. Transfers of ideas do not necessarily require
direct contact, interaction or cooperation among individual members of the
movements from the sending and the receiving side. Of course, “ideas do not
float freely” (Risse-Kappen 1994), but require media or mediators, which
transmit relevant information. In case of the anti-nuclear movement, books,
pamphlets, and alternative, but also conventional news media helped to inform
activists about what happened elsewhere. Activists or experts who actually
travelled across borders and visited protesters in other countries, acted as mediators and often brought home new information about nuclear power and effective protest. Historical research on transnational networks has highlighted core
characteristics of such mediators. In many cases they acted as “cultural brokers” (Kaiser 2009, 18), familiar not only with the language, but often also with
cultural and political practices on the other side.
Transfers of ideas are not simply transpositions of the same idea into a different context, where they function the same way as before. Rather, such proHSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 172
cesses of transfer require not only media and mediators: the eventual integration of an idea into the receiving group or society is also contingent upon the
willingness of the recipients to actually accept the idea and take it on board.
Research on cultural transfers has stressed the importance of the contexte
d’accueil (the receiving context) for transfer processes to be effective (Espagne
and Werner 1987; Kaelble 2009). What is crucial is that travelling ideas resonated and were compatible with prevalent ideas, structures and discourses in
the receiving context (Espagne 2005; Meyer 2011).
Moreover, transfers of ideas may – indeed may have to – involve an adaptation and transformation of the ideas received to make them compatible in the
new context. In extreme cases, when the ideas are thoroughly reinterpreted and
changed, this may even render the transfer processes invisible (Kaelble 2009;
Werner and Zimmermann 2006). Tracing transnational transfers thus requires
both the study of the actual transfer and the processes of re-appropriation, in
order to assess to what extent the idea in its new context actually fulfilled an
equivalent – or substantively different – function.
The contributions to this HSR Focus will address relevant questions about
transnational transfers: Where and how did transnational transfers take place?
What conditions helped and hindered such transfers – in terms of mediators,
the ideas themselves and the (compatibility with the) receiving context? How
were the ideas adapted and transformed? What were the results and consequences of the transfers?
2.2
Transnational Cooperation and Networks
A number of contributions to this HSR Focus also study actual transnational
cooperation and the (potential) formation of informal network type patterns of
regular cooperation across borders. They enquire into factors that facilitated
transnational cooperation and the formation of networks. Research on networks
in political science (Marsh and Rhodes 1992; Richards and Heard 2005) suggests that networks are usually based on an exchange of crucial resources –
such as money, information and expertise, or access to media or policy makers.
A rationalist perspective of this kind can be distinguished from one that privileges the importance of shared ideas. It suggests that shared problem perceptions and views about possible solutions increasingly integrate actors into a
tight-knit “epistemic community” (Haas 1989) that strengthens commitment
and trust and intensifies cooperation and effectiveness.
Inspired by the evidence of cross-border cooperation on the upper Rhine at
Wyhl (Mossmann 1975) and the incipient research (Meyer 2013; Milder 2010a,
b) on its consequences, some of the contributions enquire into the actual transnational cooperation of anti-nuclear activists. While transfers of ideas do not
necessarily require direct contact between individual members of the different
anti-nuclear groups, transnational cooperation is usually based on the actual
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 173
interaction between (some) members of these groups. How comprehensive
such interaction was and how many members of these groups it included, remain open question for empirical research.
In the past, transnational historical research has been highly interested in
transnational interaction – particularly of societal groups – that has in turn led
to the formation of informal network-type structures of cooperation across
national borders – or transnational networks (Herren 2012). For instance, researchers have studied the transnational networks of Christian democrats advancing West European integration (Kaiser 2007) or of economists promoting a
new international economic and monetary order (Schmelzer 2010). Eventually,
if and where conditions are suitable, transnational cooperation may lead to the
establishment of trans- or international NGOs (Saunier 2009). However, in
most cases transnational cooperation and networks remain informal, not least
since they cut across national borders and the conventional boundaries of decision-making arenas (Kirchhof 2014b).
Previous research on transnational networks among environmentalists also
studied how actors contacted each other across borders. Findings suggest that
sometimes groups did, indeed, venture out to find cooperation partners across
borders. Events – conferences or protest events – were important meeting places. Pre-existing ties via international NGOs facilitated transnational cooperation on specific issues (Meyer 2010).
At the same time, the contributions to this HSR Focus do not take transnational cooperation for granted. They address questions such as: What are the
obstacles to cooperation? These may include practical issues, such as physical
distance, lack of effective communication channels – notably in the age before
the internet – and meeting places, the forbiddingly high cost of travel, the lack
of language skills and intercultural knowledge. As discussed above, even more
than in the case of transnational transfers, transnational cooperation requires
mediators that help to overcome such obstacles. However, drawing on the
opportunity structures approach, we can conclude that the absence of shared
institutions and relevant centers of decision-making is a disincentive and major
obstacle to transnational cooperation. It seems in line with this logic, that transnational activists targeted international organizations.
The contributions to this HSR Focus thus enquire into transnational cooperation among anti-nuclear activists, groups and as well as individual experts
and the potential formation of networks. They explore the emergence of transnational cooperation and try to explain why actors cooperated and potentially
formed networks. They address central questions about the origins of networks,
factors facilitating and obstacles to cooperation among anti-nuclear activists.
What they do not look at, however, is the phenomenon of transnationally operating industries and the involvement of governments.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 174
2.3
Actors‘ Motivations for Transnational Cooperation
Finally, the contributions to this HSR Focus address not only the actual crossborder exchange, but also the ideals and ideas motivating actors to cooperate
across borders and work beyond the national level, on the assumption that such
ideas were central to why activists actually looked and went abroad to interact
and cooperate (Iriye 2013b, 14).
Such ideas have been described as “transnationalism” – i.e. the semantic
construction of spaces beyond the nation and a positive identification with such
spaces (Kaelble et al. 2002, 10; Schriewer et al. 1999, 111). These ideas are
rooted in traditions of internationalism (Friedemann and Hölscher 1982;
Nehring 2005) dating back at least to the 19th century – namely the view that
international cooperation and the formation of a community beyond the nation
state will be a stepping stone to a better world. In its socialist version, working
class internationalism has been an important aspect of Communist and Social
Democratic party politics. European federalism (Burgess 2003; Dedman 2010,
14-29) – the notion that only a united Europe could achieve peace and prosperity was an important idea in post-war Western Europe, and a relevant motivation for activists such as Petra Kelly (Milder 2010a).
Analytically, we can distinguish between two aspects of such transnationalism, namely, the perception of nuclear power as a transnational or global problem – which is in line with modern environmentalist thinking about the environment as a global phenomenon (Engels 2010) – and the self-perception of the
actors as part of a transnational community. From a critical point of view we
may also ask to what extent the rhetorical invocation of international solidarity
mainly served to bolster the legitimacy of the supposedly common cause:
First, to what extent did actors consider nuclear power as a transnational
problem – as a problem of cross-border or even global scope? And – consequently – to what extent did they assume that the problem of nuclear power
needed to be addressed politically at a level beyond national borders?
Secondly, to what extent did actors consider themselves as part of a transnational – European or global – community, and thus prefer action beyond the
national level to national action? Did they consider themselves weak and in need
of external support, e.g. regarding expertise and know-how? Beyond the practical
implications, such appeals for support and the invocation of international (or
European) solidarity may also have served the purpose of trying to raise the legitimacy of their cause (see similarly: Requate and Schulze-Wessel 2002).
3.
The Concern about the Nuke
Our discussion of transnational aspects of anti-nuclear protests focuses on the
1970s and 1980s as the period of probably the most virulent conflicts over this
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 175
issue. Concerns about the consequences of humanity’s newly acquired capacity
to split the atom did begin to emerge immediately after the first nuclear bomb
exploded. Nevertheless, it is important to be aware that perceptions of nuclear
power varied considerably during the postwar period – from great fears about
nuclear destruction to great hopes for a better future facilitated by the new and
supposedly cheap energy resource (Weart 1988). This section seeks to sketch
these developments and tries to describe and explain how and why the 1970s
and 1980s became such a period of protest.
The first nuclear explosions in 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocked the
world and triggered fears and doomsday visions of humanity’s capacity to
destroy itself. Environmental historian Donald Worster even argued that the
first nuclear explosion in New Mexico in 1945 marked the beginning of the
“age of ecology” (Worster 1994, 342f). The newly acquired capacity to destroy
life and materials at an unprecedented scale challenged Enlightenment assumptions about science and progress, and raised doubts about humanity’s ability to
wisely use the new and potentially highly pernicious weapons. The first nuclear
explosions also encouraged a wave of scientific (mostly biological) research, as
knowledge of the effects of radiation on humans and the living environment all
around the world was still very limited (Hamblin 2013, 89-107). Governments
and military authorities hired scientists to study these effects in various ways,
but were secretive about these issues, as they continued to test nuclear devices.
The “Lucky Dragon” incident, when a Japanese fishing vessel and its crew
were contaminated by fallout during an American nuclear test in the Pacific in
1954, first brought this issue to international attention (Higuchi 2008; Hughes
2009, 210). Towards the end of the 1950s, in the context of the International
Geophysical year 1957-58, American scientists started warning against the
dangers of radioactive fallout. Triggered by controversial Japanese research –
they discussed possible genetic effects of radiation for the first time (Hamblin
2013, 95-9; Radkau 2011, 117).
Apart from the fears that nuclear weapons might indeed be used in an all-out
nuclear war that would mean the end of humanity, the concern about the fallout
from nuclear weapons testing triggered the first anti-nuclear movements in the
1950s and 1960s. Well-educated citizens, intellectuals and notably scientists –
and the transnational exchange of scientific knowledge, e.g. of radioactive
Strontium-90 in the milk that children drank – played an important role within
these movements (McNeill and Engelke 2013, 500f; Nehring 2004, 156). These
movements made a clear distinction between nuclear weapons, which they
rejected, and civil uses of nuclear power, which they accepted or supported.
Since Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech of 1953, the vision of using the
atom for apparently cheap, clean and almost limitless energy production led to
a veritable euphoria over this new technology in a new era of mankind, “the
atomic age” (Nehring 2004, 163-5; Radkau 1983, 78-89).
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 176
Visions of this kind flourished in particular because nuclear power remained
an issue for the future for some time. Nuclear technology only reached commercial maturity by the second half of the 1960s, by which time euphoria had
given way to a lack of public interest (Radkau and Hahn 2013, 277). Nevertheless, throughout Western Europe and the United States, utility providers started
to order and build commercial power plants in great numbers. After the oil
price shock of 1973, governments and international organizations such as the
European Community encouraged and supported even more ambitious plans, in
order to ensure energy security (Graf 2010) and make national economies less
dependent on imported crude oil.
By the 1970s, however, nuclear power had become a highly controversial issue across the globe, leading to those protests and movements that the contributions to the HSR Focus take as their point of departure. What are the reasons
for this development? Four factors may be considered particularly relevant:
Firstly, the rise of environmentalism by the early 1970s clearly contributed
to a more critical view of nuclear power. The new environmentalism (Engels
2010) highlighted in particular humanity’s destructive and polluting impact on
the natural world on a global scale and the need to prevent such destruction.
From this perspective, nuclear power, with its potential dangers and the nuclear
waste it produced, was always likely to appear problematic. Initially, however,
conservationists had on occasion welcomed nuclear power as an apparently
clean source of energy that would make dam building superfluous (Hasenöhrl
2011, 231-4). They soon came to realize that nuclear power’s need for cooling
water had equally problematic consequences for wildlife in rivers and streams
(Spiegel 1970). The mobilization and awareness-raising efforts of Earth Day in
the United States in 1970 spread not only environmentalist views but also protest practices across the nation (Rome 2013). The mostly science-related events
during the European Conservation Year 1970 achieved a similar effect by
putting the issue on the agenda of the media and politics in Europe (Schulz
2006). New environmentalist debates about redefining societal aims, such as
opting for quality of life rather than mere quantitative growth, and the warnings
of the Club of Rome about “limits to growth” in 1972 (Meadows et al. 1972),
led to an increasing skepticism about traditional growth-oriented economic
policies. From an environmentalist perspective, anti-nuclear protesters challenged the projections of massively increasing energy needs that governments
and utility companies routinely used to justify the construction of yet more
nuclear power plants. These new environmentalist ideas also helped to reframe
the nuclear issue from a largely technical problem into a societal, economic,
political and environmental one that could be attractive to the young new left in
the wake of 1968 (Hünemörder 2008, 152; Radkau 2011, 227).
Secondly, the heritage of the 1968 student movement thus influenced the anti-nuclear protest, notably in terms of its protagonists, forms of protest and
ideology. 1968 and what contemporary social scientists described as valueHSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 177
change towards post-materialist values in a more affluent society (Inglehart
1971) arguably led to a more politicized younger generation in the 1970s. Even
if protests at Wyhl were supported by a broad alliance of frequently rather
conservative local people, young left-wing activists from Freiburg were attracted to the new cause that seemed to them to represent the resistance of ordinary
citizens to power (Mossmann 1975). 1968 also provided new models of protest
– such as taking the streets and occupying public spaces. Even if, in ideological
terms, anti-nuclear protest was not only a concern of the left, left-wing arguments that went beyond the new environmentalist ideas did play a definite role,
such as the critique of nuclear industry and the alliance between big corporations, the state and elites that seemed unanimously and uncritically committed
to nuclear technology (Radkau 2011, 227; Rootes 2008).
Thirdly, new and more controversial scientific evidence of the dangers of
low-level radiation emerged around 1970, notably in the United States. Researchers John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin – both employed by the American
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) – went public with findings that implied that
– contrary to previous assumptions – there was no safe threshold dosage below
which there were no carcinogenic effects. Gofman and Tamplin did not hesitate
to draw conclusions about what this implied for the plans for the construction of
large numbers of nuclear power plants – plants that would unavoidably release
small amounts of radiation (Gofman and Tamplin 1971; Semendeferi 2008, 262).
While such findings were initially – and quite controversially – discussed in
scientific circles, such warnings were eventually received and used by antinuclear activists. Gofman and Tamplin increasingly came to be seen as expert
witnesses, and were invited to speak worldwide.
Fourthly, as commercial nuclear power plants were increasingly built from
the 1970s onwards, an increasing number of citizens was actually confronted
with the imminent – and lasting – presence of nuclear installations. Concrete
construction sites – such as Fessenheim or Malville in France, Wyhl, Brokdorf
or Gorleben in West Germany or Seabrook in the United States were not only
the sites of anti-nuclear protest that hit the news. They were also the places
where local protest and larger, national and sometimes even transnational protest came together. At Wyhl, famously, students and young activists from Freiburg, protesters from across the Rhine and local farmer and vintners joined in a
common cause, when occupying the construction site. The emblematic appeal
of such unprecedented alliances and insubordination did not go unnoticed – and
Wyhl quickly became the symbolic birthplace of the anti-nuclear movement in
Germany (Rusinek 2001), and a model for protest even in the United States, as
Michael L. Hughes (2014) argues in his contribution to this focus issue. Clearly, construction sites remained important sites of protest – and media attention
– well into the 1980s. Anti-nuclear and environmental protest were advanced
mainly by informal citizens action groups (Bürgerinitiativen) – the new form of
grassroots organization of citizens that emerged in the 1970s (Reichardt and
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 178
Siegfried 2010). These groups soon started organizing beyond the confines of
local protest, e.g. via the Bundesverbund Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz (BBU)
in Germany, and sought to represent their concerns more effectively. It is these
attempts to organize and politicize, and the role that transnational connections
played in this context that the contributions to this HSR issue focus on.6
4.
Conclusions: Anti-Nuclear Protest in a Transnational
Perspective
Anti-nuclear protest in the 1970s and 1980s was a global phenomenon. The
contributions to this HSR Focus provide answers for the first time on how these
movements were also transnationally connected. Of course, we have not been
able to cover the entire world. All of the contributions are connected to actors
from West Germany as one node of the transnational network. Linkages extend
to actors from the United States (Hughes) and Australia (Kirchhof), and Europe
(Milder, Meyer). Thus we were able to cover a broad array of transnational
relations across long- and shorter distances. We have also managed to include
countries and regions with the most active and powerful anti-nuclear movements of the period.
The contributions to this HSR Focus describe different trajectories in the
anti-nuclear movements’ attempt to organize and politicize after Wyhl. Milder’s contribution analyzes the trajectory from anti-nuclear protest into the formation of a European and West German Green Party – and the tensions between European and national commitments – both ideological and practical.
Thus, he highlights a transnational aspect of the Green Party’s history that has
been underplayed so far in the existing literature (e.g. Mende 2011).
Where to go from Wyhl to engage in effective anti-nuclear protest was also
a central question for those who chose the NGO route. The trajectory of transnationally cooperating NGOs went from Wyhl to international organizations
such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the European
Communities (EC). While the social science literature only covers the transnationalization of NGO protest from the 1990s (Rucht 1999), Meyer’s contribution demonstrates that transnationally cooperating anti-nuclear activists already
tried to challenge international organizations in the 1970s.
Kirchhof’s analysis of transnational exchange, transfers and communication
through experts, media and organizations – the obstacles they were facing and
the possibilities they used to make the leap across the globe – covers a most
6
This HSR Focus does not address the mass protests of the peace movement against the
stationing of American nuclear missiles in Western Europe in the 1980s. On this movement
and its connections to environmental and anti-nuclear protest see the contributions in:
Becker-Schaum et al. 2012.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 179
improbable case. The trajectory of European anti-nuclear activists to contact
and interact with the Australian Aborigines fighting for their homeland and
against mining companies in the 1970s and 1980s describes an as yet untold
chapter of a truly global history (Sachsenmaier 2011).
Hughes’ detailed analysis of transatlantic transfers of non-violent protest
practices back and forth across the Atlantic and their re-integration into and
adaptation to the needs of the movements at Seabrook and Brokdorf can be
read as a fine example of an entangled history (Werner and Zimmermann
2006), including both the perspectives of the American and the German side.
Moreover, it connects the history of anti-nuclear protest to a longer lineage of
non-violent protest in the Deep South of the United States and Gandhian India
(Chabot 2000).
What can we learn about transnational transfers of ideas, transnational cooperation and the role of idealistic motivations among anti-nuclear activists in
1970s and 1980?
Firstly, with a view to transnational transfers of ideas, there is ample evidence of transnational transfers of expertise and protest practices. The media –
both in terms of the new attention that general news media devoted to antinuclear protest and the alternative media the protest groups produced themselves – played a crucial role in these transfers and also communicated important information across borders. Expertise on the dangers of low-level radiation in particular travelled from the United States to Europe by means of
publications, but also via travelling experts. Experts from Europe communicated their knowledge across national borders in Europe, while German experts
brought their expertise to Australia. Protest practices – such as site occupation,
but also the practices of non-violent protest more generally – were transferred
across the Atlantic in both directions. Mediators acted as cultural brokers with
the respective language skills. A very limited number of such individual mediators from these movements who had the time and money to travel played an
important role in the transfer. Protest practices, however, could not simply be
transposed, but needed to be carefully adapted to local conditions, traditions of
the movement, and differences in political culture – for instance with a view to
violence and private property. These transfers meant a substantial strengthening
of the anti-nuclear movements, as they were able to draw on important (counter-) expertise – unavailable or underrepresented in their home countries – and
a broader array of protest practices.
Secondly, what do we find in terms of transnational cooperation and the
formation of transnational networks? Within Europe, some anti-nuclear activists ventured out to cooperate with other activists in Europe and other continents, using pre-existing ties via Friends of the Earth and the emerging European Environmental Bureau. They built up informal network structures with
groups from Europe and overseas for protest events they helped organize at the
international level. In order to gain access to crucial scientific expertise, which
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 180
was the hard currency in the debates with the advocates of nuclear energy, they
also got in touch with experts from abroad. Such network ties proved to be very
long-lasting. In the wake of Chernobyl, they were frequently revitalized.7 Cooperation with protesters overseas was more limited because of geographical
distances and missing (technical) communication channels. Effectively, actual
transnational cooperation among anti-nuclear activists was limited to an elite
group within the anti-nuclear movement committed to and skilled in transnational exchange – which acted as mediators. Foreign language skills – which
were much less common at that time than they are today – were a crucial precondition for interacting globally. These mediators played a very central role,
as they were the ones who managed to overcome the massive obstacles of
physical distance and forbiddingly high transportation and communication
costs during this period, often through access to party and public funding. It
was their willingness to invest enormous amounts of (frequently unpaid) time
and energy into communication, which actually made such networking possible. As the anti-nuclear movement matured and developed stronger organizational structures – e.g. by setting up the BBU as a national organization in
Germany – a group of semi-professional activists emerged. It is hardly surprising that activists with strong political ambitions and those who had the time to
invest in these issues were important figures within transnational networks.
Thirdly, apart from potential career motivations, those anti-nuclear activists
who were engaged in transnational cooperation clearly perceived the nuclear
issue to be a global problem. Left-leaning activists tended to stress the role of
global corporations and the government support they received. Anti-nuclear
activists considered themselves part of a movement of transnational, if not even
global reach, eager to learn from each other. An ideal of transnationalism –
opting for political solutions beyond the nation at a European or global scale
for what they perceived to be a European or global problem – was very important to many anti-nuclear activists. In the case of the fledgling Greens, ideals and practice quickly diverged. Despite the professed commitment to Europe
and transnationalism, the necessities (and the opportunity structures) of the
electoral system effectively provided extremely strong incentives to go down
the national route. Anti-nuclear activists engaged in transnational exchange
frequently advanced arguments about the weakness of the movement, the need
for external expertise and transnational solidarity. However, support by experts
from abroad tended to make a much greater impression on their adversaries
than the imaginary of a global movement, thus raising the legitimacy of the
anti-nuclear cause.
All in all, we can conclude that – as opposed to what we find in the academic literature to date – anti-nuclear protest in the 1970s and 1980s was strongly
7
E.g. Gofman, John, Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, to Petra Kelly, San Francisco, 6
July 1986. AGG, PKA 2119.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 181
interconnected through transnational exchange across the globe. Transfers of
ideas – in terms of expertise and protest practices – were highly relevant, even
if they required adaptation to local customs and expectations. Actual transnational cooperation and networks strengthened these movements not only in
terms of expertise, but also with regard to their scope of action – allowing them
to take the protest not only to the local and national, but also the international
level. Transnational exchange thus deserves an important place in the history
of anti-nuclear protest in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, these activities were carried out by a relatively small part of the movement – an elite capable of overcoming language, political and cultural borders. The commonly used
contemporary rhetoric of international (Mausbach 2010) and transnational
solidarity and the concomitant imagination of a global movement seems to
mask a reality of transnational ties that were more limited and more fragile than
the rhetoric suggests.
Special References
Contributions within this HSR Focus:
Global Protest against Nuclear Power. Transfer and
Transnational Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s
Hughes, Michael L. 2014. Civil disobedience in transnational perspective: American and West German anti-nuclear-power protesters, 1975-1982. Historical Social Research 39 (1): 236-253.
Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon. 2014. Spanning the globe: West-German support for the
Australian anti-nuclear movement. Historical Social Research 39 (1): 254-273.
Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon, and Jan-Henrik Meyer. 2014. Global protest against
nuclear power. Transfer and transnational exchange in the 1970s and 1980s. Historical Social Research 39 (1): 165-190.
Meyer, Jan-Henrik. 2014. “Where do we go from Wyhl?” Transnational antinuclear protest targeting European and international organizations in the 1970s.
Historical Social Research 39 (1): 212-235.
Milder, Stephen. 2014. Between grassroots activism and transnational aspirations:
Anti-nuclear protest from the Rhine Valley to the Bundestag, 1974-1983. Historical Social Research 39 (1): 191-211.
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Between Grassroots Activism and Transnational
Aspirations: Anti-Nuclear Protest from the
Rhine Valley to the Bundestag, 1974-1983
Stephen Milder ∗
Abstract: »Zwischen Graswurzel-Aktivismus und transnationalen Bestrebungen: Die Anti-Atombewegung vom Rheintal bis in den Bundestag, 1974-1983«.
In the mid-1970s, French, German, and Swiss protesters jointly occupied the
Wyhl nuclear reactor construction site in the Upper Rhine Valley. Even at the
grassroots level, transnational cooperation allowed reactor opponents to transcend the limits of politics-as-usual and adopt “new” protest strategies. Moreover, though it was minutely local, the Wyhl occupation had significant transnational effects. Activists throughout Europe and even across the Atlantic
considered this protest to influence the situation in their home countries. They
were eager to build on the “example of Wyhl.” Yet, as this article shows, activists beyond the Rhine had a hard time deploying transnationalism in the mass
anti-nuclear protests and political campaigns that followed Wyhl. The West
German Greens’ 1979 European Parliament campaign is perhaps the best example of the way that activists inspired by Rhenish protests continued to emphasize transnationalism. Despite their European outlook, however, the Greens’
first major political success came in Bonn, not Strasbourg. Thus, for the Greens
and many others transnational thinking proved difficult to sustain beyond the
grassroots level. It may have been most effective as a means of reinvigorating
national politics.
Keywords: Anti-nuclear movement, transnationalism, Die Grünen/West German
Greens, environmentalism.
1.
Introduction1
On 18 February 1975, hundreds of rural people streamed onto the reactor construction site at Wyhl in southwestern Germany. They remained on the site
∗
1
Stephen Milder, Department of History, Duke University, Box 90719, Durham, NC 277080719, USA; [email protected].
I would like to thank Jan-Henrik Meyer and Astrid Mignon Kirchhof for their insightful and
extremely helpful comments on several drafts of this article. Thanks are also due to Amy
Vargas-Tonsi and Malachi Hacohen of Duke University’s Center for European Studies, whose
generous support enabled me to participate in this highly productive transatlantic exchange.
DOI: 10.12759/hsr.39.2014.1.191-211
until 20 February, when a brutal police raid forced them to disperse. Three days
after this violent confrontation, 28,000 people from West Germany, France,
and Switzerland pushed their way past police barricades and re-occupied the
site. As the battle over the reactor unfolded, Strasbourg’s long-time Christian
Democratic Mayor, Pierre Pfimlin, speculated that “the entire French nuclear
program rides with Wyhl.” “If the nuclear plant at Wyhl is stopped,” he
quipped, “it would be extremely difficult to put one in the Alsace. If you can’t
do it here, where can you do it in France?”2
Protesters, too, considered this local protest to have transnational significance. At a speech on the occupied site, a Luxembourger exclaimed that, “the
struggle in Wyhl is our struggle, your victory will be our victory!”3 MarieReine Haug, a young Alsatian woman who played a leading role in the Wyhl
occupation, proclaimed prophetically that, “The struggle against nuclear reactors must be a chain reaction. One victory will trigger another.”4 In short, the
remote nuclear reactor construction sites that became centers of transnational
protest across Western Europe during the 1970s seemed to exemplify the environmentalists’ mantra to “think globally, act locally” (Prendiville 1994, 91-3).
Yet scholars have long struggled to understand the way that anti-reactor protests in West Germany shaped politics in France, Luxembourg, or Switzerland.
Far from reflecting connections between these actions, literature on the antinuclear movement tends to describe it as existing within isolated national boxes
(e.g. Tourraine 1983; Radkau 1983; Paul 1997; Kupper 2003; Karapin 2007).
The best known studies of the Wyhl protest, for example, link it solely to the
development of anti-nuclear protest in West Germany (cf. Rucht 1980; Engels
2006). Meanwhile, works that do address anti-nuclear protest in more than one
country tend to compare the anti-nuclear movements of Europe with one another, thus implying that they developed independently. Rather than exploring
the connections between individual protests, such works tend to emphasize the
specific aspects of national character and politics that have defined the movement’s divergent trajectory in each state (cf. Nelkin and Pollack 1981; Joppke
1993; Kitschelt 1983, 1984; Flam 1994; Brand 1985; Dryzek 2002; Aldrich
2008). It was, this line of reasoning suggests, national opportunity structures
that defined the trajectory and relative successes of anti-nuclear activism in
each country.
In one sense, this focus on specific nations and the different opportunities
for anti-nuclear action within each one of them is justified. By the later seventies, as police tacticians implemented new defensive measures, would-be occu2
3
4
Quoted in John Vincourt. 1975. Two Rhine Villages Succeed in Halting Industrial Invasion,
International Herald-Tribune, 5 March 1975.
Helga Weber-Zucht. 1975. Wieder ein Ostermarsch – Wyhl, Infodienst für gewaltfreie
Organisatoren 19 (March/April 1975): 3-5.
Ibid.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 192
piers failed even to get close to reactor construction sites. Reactor opponents
were left searching for a new means to act. Even as occupation became untenable, however, activists were shifting the focus of their attention from individual
reactor projects to nuclear energy itself. Yet, opposing nuclear energy altogether meant working to halt nuclear programs, a project that seemed best suited to
the political parameters of the nation-state. After all, though the European
Communities (EC) played a certain role in the financing of reactors and sought
to carve out its own nuclear policy in the late 1970s, as Jan-Henrik Meyer
(2014) discusses in his article in this HSR Focus, the nuclear programs protesters sought to stop were essentially controlled by national governments.
Re-focusing from individual reactor projects to national nuclear programs
changed anti-nuclear activism’s transnational resonance. While French politicians and protesters from Luxembourg drew consequences from the site occupation in Wyhl, it was harder for foreigners to identify with protests against the
West German nuclear program in Bonn. Instead, the importance of national
discourses became all the more apparent since disparate national contexts and
agendas could not always be linked, as Astrid Mignon Kirchhof (2014) points
out in her article in this HSR Focus. Whereas grassroots site occupations welcomed the participation of “the affected population,” however that population
defined itself and wherever it happened to live, protests and electoral campaigns intended to change national policy relied on people who – as citizens
and voters – held the standing to do so.
Nevertheless, there is another sense in which the story of the anti-nuclear
movement – even within individual countries – must be told transnationally.
After all, anti-nuclear activists remained well aware that the nuclear threat
transcended national borders. Thus, despite their focus on individual national
nuclear programs, they strived to frame their protests transnationally. Perhaps
more importantly, however, activists also continued to work transnationally
because they wanted to participate in the creation of a new, more democratic
Europe. This new Europe was more than just an ideal to be striven towards,
since events like the 1979 direct elections to the European Parliament appeared
as fleeting – but very real – moments of transnational cooperation. In order to
evaluate the significance of such transnationalism for the development of antinuclear movements, this article will explore the ways in which activists in the
Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) continued to think transnationally even
after they moved their protests away from reactor construction sites and targeted their country’s nuclear program. I will focus here on the activist careers of
Petra Kelly and Roland Vogt, who became involved in the anti-reactor protests
of the mid-1970s and then played important roles in the founding of the West
German Green Party. Members of the Young European Federalists since the
early 1970s, Kelly and Vogt were both committed transnationalists even before
they became actively involved in anti-nuclear activism.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 193
The March 1979 founding of the Sonstige Politische Vereinigung: Die Grünen (Alternative Political Organization: The Greens), which was specifically
conceived as the vehicle for an alternative anti-nuclear campaign for seats in
the European Parliament, is perhaps the best evidence of this enduring transnational approach (Mende 2011). Using papers from the SPV Die Grünen’s Federal Board, as well as the correspondence of Kelly, Vogt, and other “founding
Greens” (Mende 2011), I will look closely at this campaign and its effects.
Almost paradoxically, as I will show in this article, what at first sight seemed to
be an unmistakably European political undertaking may have had less resonance across European borders than did many localized grassroots anti-reactor
protests. In fact, from a material perspective, it was precisely the significant
results of SPV Die Grünen’s campaign for the European parliament that focused its protagonists on domestic politics by enabling them to mount successful campaigns for seats in West Germany’s federal and state parliaments. And
yet, activists’ very focus on national electoral campaigns suggests a turn away
from the transnationalism that had long defined anti-nuclear activism, even at
the grassroots level. Thus, anti-nuclear activists’ struggles to think globally and
to act meaningfully raise an important question about whether focused, localized actions may actually have more powerful transnational effects than broad
campaigns engineered with transnationalism in mind.
2.
Local Occupation, Transnational Ramifications
The Wyhl occupation has become by far the best known symbol of grassroots
anti-nuclear protest in the FRG, yet describing it bedeviled its contemporaries
and later scholars alike. Observers’ difficulty in describing “Wyhl” was already
evident on the morning of 18 February 1975, when hundreds of local people,
most of them women (Engels 2002) from nearby winegrowing villages, descended on the reactor construction site and convinced work crews to put down
their tools. Though these protesters had clearly taken over the site, the local
press waffled as to whether or not their action marked the beginning of an
occupation.5 Researchers have since shown that a great number of women were
involved in the anti-nuclear movements in the FRG (Kirchhof 2013) and beyond (Wehr 1985; Adams 2002; Wittner 2003), but in 1975 rural women were
not expected by their contemporaries to be involved in political protest. After
all, middle-aged rural women looked nothing like the young, bearded student
activists associated with public protest since 1968. Moreover, instead of calling
for radical changes to society as a whole, the local people who spearheaded the
protest at Wyhl were concerned about the future of their farms. Thus, this ac5
Demonstranten erzwingen den Abbruch der Arbeit, Badische Zeitung, 19 February 1975.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 194
tion and its protagonists simply did not match preconceived notions of who
protesters were and how they went about their business.
The important transnational dimension of the protest was also difficult for
many observers to understand. French and Germans, who had long been labeled “hereditary enemies” (Lemettre 2009) by their governments, were working together against the reactor. Even if the 1962 Elysée Treaty had officially
ended this longstanding enmity, local border crossings in the Upper Rhine
valley still closed each night at 9pm in 1975, and transnational interaction
remained rare amongst rural people in the region. For French who had survived
the Nazi invasion and Germans who had lived through allied air raids, each trip
across the river brought back shades of “a dark past in which we could not find
a common way to benefit both the neighboring peoples” (Tittman 1976, 201).
Yet at Wyhl, close cooperation across the river had brought protest strategies
from the French Larzac into contact with scientific expertise from the nearby
German university town of Freiburg. More importantly, cooperation allowed
people from both sides of the Rhine to see themselves as a single community
affected by the reactor project.
Though it relied on Franco-German cooperation at the grassroots level, the
occupation was steeped in specific, regional issues that were not particularly
interesting to people away from the Rhine. Local farmers were concerned about
the future of their valuable grape crops beneath the trailing clouds of steam a
reactor would discharge. Yet unlike earlier protests in the region, which had
included tractor parades, petition drives, and disruptions of licensing hearings,
the physically-rooted occupation garnered attention all across Western Europe.
Why did the occupation make what had long been a regional anti-reactor campaign so significant to people so far from Wyhl?
In the “leaden” 1970s,6 when opportunities for popular protest appeared
greatly diminished, the occupation was a notable success. While the end of the
student movement had caused some West German radicals to turn to terrorism,
others to retreat into lifestyle politics, and still others to grudgingly join the
governing SPD, many listless activists took an interest in anti-nuclear activism
after they learned about the Wyhl occupation. Even before Wyhl, a writer for
the anarchist graswurzelrevolution (grassroots revolution) had advocated “an
ecology campaign” as a means of reactivating “unemployed” activists.7 After
the occupation began, the monthly magazine reported constantly on the action
at Wyhl. In the summer of 1977, members of the affiliated graswurzel-groups
6
7
On the idea of the 1970s as a “leaden” decade see Christiane Peitz, Die Bleikappe des
Schweigens. Margarethe von Trotta über ihren Ensslin-Film, das Sympathisantentum und
deutsche Kontinuitäten, Der Tagesspiegel, 28. April 2007.
[Michael Schroeren], „Damit wir auch morgen noch kraftvoll zubeißen können…“ Notizen zu
einer „Ökologie-Kampagne,“ graswurzelrevolution 7 (January 1974): 2.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 195
initiated a short-lived occupation of their own at a reactor construction site in
the German town of Grohnde near Hanover, the capital of Lower Saxony.
The Kommunistische Volkszeitung, the official newspaper of the Communist
League of West Germany (KBW), put the localized Wyhl occupation into
particularly grand and universal terms. This action, the paper reported, “has
inspired the masses throughout the country to take part in the struggle against
the decisions of the state bureaucracy, which are directed against the people’s
will.”8 Another Communist publication described the new grouping that had
emerged at Wyhl as the vanguard of a, “solidary coalition of the millions of
oppressed and exploited in our country,” who were engaged, “in a selfconscious struggle against the capitalists and their state apparatus.”9 As this
soaring prose indicated, Communists attributed a key role in the world proletarian struggle to the fight over a single, small clearing in the Wyhl forest and thus
tried to influence the Green movement early on, hoping to direct it in a clear
Left or rather communist direction (Harney 2013).
There was a grain of truth behind the KBW’s inflated rhetoric. During the
second half of the seventies, anti-nuclear activism became a cause célèbre
throughout Western Europe. Protesters attempted to occupy reactor construction sites all over West Germany and beyond. Wyhl was the initial, catalytic
explosion in what Marie-Reine Haug had described as a chain reaction of protests. Though protesters at Wyhl relied on transnational cooperation at the
grassroots level, and though they quickly amended their slogan from “No Reactor at Wyhl” to “No Reactor at Wyhl… or Anywhere Else,” the occupation’s
translocal salience was largely attributed to it by outside observers. Nor did this
geographic broadening of the Wyhl struggle’s significance stop at the West
German border. Transnationally motivated activists, like the members of the
Brussels-based European socialist network agenor, focused on constructing
Wyhl as a tool for their activist project (Meyer 2013). In their journal, agenor,
they summarized and translated information about the events, strategies and
activist groups at Wyhl.10 They also published grassroots anti-nuclear activists’
contact information and encouraged connections across borders. Distributed
throughout Western Europe, agenor contributed to Wyhl’s growing stature as
an important example of transnational anti-nuclear protest.
The key to the Wyhl occupation’s translocal salience, therefore, lies in the
way it was interpreted by different people and groups. In this sense, the occupation reveals how local action could inspire global change. Outsiders like the
graswurzel-groups and the KBW re-cast the grassroots anti-reactor campaign
8
9
10
Die Kämpfe in Wyhl haben die Volksmasse im ganzen Land ermutigt, Kommunistische
Volkszeitung 3, No. 15/16 (April 1975): 9.
KPD Regional Komitee Baden-Württemberg, “Kein KKW in Wyhl” (23 February 1975). Archiv
Soziale Bewegungen Freiburg (hereafter: ASB), Doc No. 3599.
Nuclear Power Stop. Wyhl, Brokdorf, Malville, agenor.options for the left 65 (May 1977).
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 196
as one small, unique, and authentic part of a larger social movement, comprised
of numerous localized, specific actions. Such actions, outsiders had come to
realize, were effective precisely because of their rootedness and the local population’s deep-seated support for them. It was this efficacy that protesters hoped
to maintain after they left the site. Yet, these outside activists who promoted
the struggle at Wyhl as a new transnational political model were also dedicated
to creating a more widespread activist movement that could affect broad social
change. The tension between grassroots activism and transnational aspirations
dominated their efforts as they sought to build on the “example of Wyhl.”11
3.
The End of the Movement as They Knew It
As the Wyhl occupation became known across Europe and beyond, antinuclear activists elsewhere sought to recreate it – even on the other side of the
Atlantic, as the article by Michael L. Hughes (2014) in this HSR Focus demonstrates. Government officials and police chiefs also learned from Wyhl, however. They developed new strategies to protect reactor sites. The result of these
parallel learning processes was a string of increasingly violent confrontations
between anti-nuclear activists and the police along the perimeters reactor construction sites in late 1976 and 1977. None of these mass protests resulted in a
lasting occupation, and protesters were almost always kept off of fortified
reactor sites altogether by well-armed police. Undeterred by previous failures,
60,000 anti-nuclear activists from all across Western Europe made their way to
the village of Malville in Southern France in July 1977 in an attempt to occupy
the “Super-Phénix” Fast Breeder Reactor construction site. The French government had sent five-thousand troops equipped with grenades, tear gas, helicopters, and amphibious vehicles to defend the prestigious project. In the ensuing battle, one protester was killed and several lost limbs. Hundreds more were
injured (Mossmann 2009, 245).
The bitter violence at Malville did irreparable damage to the image of site
occupation and raised questions about the anti-nuclear movement as a whole
(Kitschelt 1984, 75; Aldrich 2008, 152-3). In the wake of Malville, Dieter
Rucht has written, the French anti-nuclear movement “became disoriented and
lost much of its credibility in the minds of the public” (Rucht 1994, 130). Alain
Touraine considered the battle at Malville to have been even more damning for
the movement. The failed protest, he wrote, “demonstrated the inability of the
anti-nuclear current to organize itself into a political force” (Tourraine 1983,
28). The French government was all too eager to make use of this opportunity
11
Freia Hoffmann, “Was bedeutet das Beispiel Wyhl?” (Freiburg: 21 March 1975). Archiv
Grünes Gedächtnis (hereafter: AGG) Petra Kelly Archiv (hereafter: PKA) 2264.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 197
to attack the anti-nuclear movement. By blaming German radicals for the violence, French officials exonerated French protesters and thus threatened their
transnational cooperation. In short, the epic failure at Malville raised serious
questions about the ability of localized action to foster global change.
In West Germany, activists were already searching for a means of organizing themselves into a more potent, translocal political force by the time of the
Malville debacle. In May 1977, reactor opponents heatedly debated how they
might organize themselves at the first Federal Congress of Reactor Opponents
in Hanover.12 This attempt, unfortunately, fell flat. The agenda was dominated
by theoretical resolutions put forward by representatives of Communist splinter
groups. Delegates of grassroots anti-reactor groups exited the meeting in
droves.13 The magazine Atom-Express, published by an anti-nuclear protest
group from Göttingen, did not even bother “detailing the many resolutions,
since they will have no effect on the further struggle against reactors.” Instead,
the anti-nuclear publication simply concluded that, “this Federal Conference
was no step forward” for the movement (Paul 1997, 57-8).14
Yet, the meeting accomplished more than Atom-Express’ dispirited report
acknowledged. Held shortly after Lower Saxony’s Christian Democratic Premier Ernst Albrecht named rural Gorleben as the future site of a nuclear waste
processing and storage facility, the Federal Conference brought together delegates from more than 256 anti-nuclear initiatives in Lower Saxony’s capital
city. This was no coincidence. Focus on the proposed nuclear waste facility
offered West German activists an opportunity to go beyond localized antireactor struggles and to centralize their movement. Without Gorleben, after all,
each of the Federal Republic’s dozen reactors would have nowhere to send its
radioactive waste and thus, eventually, become inoperable. Moreover, the
debacle at Malville and the pall cast over the FRG by terrorist violence of the
Red Army Faction (RAF) during the “German autumn” (Varon 2004; Aust
2008) only reinforced reactor opponents’ desire to find a means of affecting
change that could not be so readily dismissed as violent. Gorleben offered an
opportunity to give the movement a new direction.
Nevertheless, finding a means of working against the Gorleben facility challenged anti-nuclear activists. Tensions developed at future Federal Conferences
between local people who wanted to protest at the rural site and representatives
of groups from across the Federal Republic who wanted centralized rallies. In
1979, the factions compromised by calling for three separate actions. First, they
organized a week-long farmers’ trek from Gorleben to Hanover for March
1979. By the time the Gorleben farmers reached the state capital, they would be
12
13
14
Bundeskongreß der Bürgerinitiativen, Arbeiterkampf 104 (16 May 1977).
Nach der Bundeskonferenz: Es brodelt in der Gerüchte-Küche, Arbeiterkampf 105 (31 May
1977).
Bundeskonferenz 14. 15. Mai 77, Atom-Express 2 (June/July 1977): 23.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 198
joined by anti-nuclear activists from across the FRG for a mass rally and a
hearing on the Gorleben project. Second, in deference to local people, they
called for a national protest to be held in Gorleben three weeks after preparatory work began on the site. Finally, they planned a mass rally to be held at the
Bonner Hofgarten – a park in front of the elector’s palace in the city center of
the federal capital of Germany – in the fall.
The Hofgarten rally, which took place in October 1979, was the largest protest the Federal Republic had ever seen. The symbolism of both the Gorleben
trek and the Hofgarten rally was clear. In their attempts to organize themselves
into a powerful political force, anti-nuclear activists were – unsurprisingly –
targeting the powerful people who set the FRG’s nuclear policy. Unlike site
occupations, which empowered people at the local level, and were only loosely
linked with national politics, rallies in centers of government called on policy
makers to change nuclear programs in specific ways. Though they were centrally organized and all comers were welcome to participate, such protests
lacked the openness to the transnational imaginary that had made localized site
occupations so transnationally potent.
4.
Off the Site and into the System
Centralized rallies were not reactor opponents’ only response to the delegitimization of site occupation. Even as the Federal Congress of Reactor Opponents
met in Hanover in 1977, a 36-year old state attorney named Carl Beddermann
was discussing his plans for a new political party with other members of the
anti-nuclear citizens’ initiative in nearby Schwarmstedt. Like many other reactor opponents, Beddermann had been deeply frustrated by the violent occupation attempts of 1977. He felt that the movement was “being discredited by the
big police interventions” and was not making any headway towards stopping
the proliferation of nuclear technology (Hallensleben 1984, 50). Concerned that
an occupation attempt would not stop the Gorleben project, and inspired by
French ecologists who had just run candidates in the March 1977 municipal
elections, Beddermann (1978) proposed the creation of an environmental party
that soon became the Green List for Environmental Protection (Grüne Liste
Umweltschutz – GLU).
Even if the idea of a Green party had originated across the border in France,
German reactor opponents’ newfound interest in electoral politics seemed to
suggest a step away from transnationalism and towards national politics. Yet,
proposals for direct elections to the European Parliament, which were initially
expected to be held in May 1978, offered anti-nuclear activists an opportunity
to bring their transnational vision into the electoral arena. Accordingly, the
West German hosts opened an August 1977 international seminar in BergischGladbach by imploring delegates from ten western European countries that:
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 199
It must be our task, indeed our duty, to draft an environmental program for the
elections to the European parliament, to present it to the public, and to debate
these issues with those who will carry out European politics. We must be there
when it is time to build the Europe of the future (Schumacher 1978, 60).
To this end, West Germany’s Federal Association of Citizens’ Initiatives for
Environmental Protection voted in November 1977 to draw up a list of candidates in order to participate in the European elections. The group’s chairman,
Hans Günter Schumacher, viewed the vote as a “decisive contribution to the
solidarization of all environmentalists in Europe” (Schumacher 1978, 61).
According to Schumacher, at least, electoral politics had significant transnational potential.
Yet, the European elections did not come as planned in May 1978. Instead
of running for the European Parliament, therefore, several members of the
BBU’s Federal Board served as candidates the following month in state elections in Hamburg and Lower Saxony. In the Lower Saxony elections, which
were contested by Beddermann’s GLU, environmentalist candidates scored an
impressive 3.9% of the statewide vote and notched particular successes of
between five and six percent near reactor sites. In Gorleben, the new party
received a remarkable 17.8% of the vote (Hallensleben 1984, 98). In both
states, the new Green lists made an impact on the composition of the state
parliaments. Since Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s (1995, 125-38; Mencke-Glückert
1997) liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) had developed an environmental
program in 1971 and presented itself as the party of the environment (Bundesregierung 1973; Uekötter 2011, 92), the Green Lists’ participation in state
elections cost the FDP crucial votes and contributed to its inability to jump the
“5% hurdle,” the minimum threshold of the vote necessary to win seats in
parliament, in Hamburg and Lower Saxony. Electoral politics seemed capable
of both knitting together activism at disparate reactor sites and also enabling
activists to affect the composition of parliaments.
The GLU’s success in Lower Saxony helped launch or invigorate environmental parties in many West German states. In Hesse, four separate Green
parties prepared to compete in the October 1978 state parliament elections. In
an attempt to prevent rival environmental parties from “competing for the
pleasure of the three major parties and preventing each other from making a
political breakthrough,” the “Democratic Movement for the Protection of Life”
(Demokratische Lebenschutzbewegung – DLB) called a “Strategy meeting” in
Darmstadt.15 Intended to bring together these disparate Green factions, the
Darmstadt strategy session led to a larger “German Environmental Meeting,”
which was held in June 1978 at the village of Troisdorf, near Bonn.
15
Gisela Dick (Demokratische Lebenschutzbewegung), “Liebe Freunde!” (28 December 1977).
AGG Kerschgens 6.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 200
The Troisdorf meeting was caught between the Greens’ initial successes at
the state level and their European aspirations. Its organizers explained that they
hoped to bring together enough of “the ecological movements of EUROPE” to
ensure that “they will see us and hear us [ten kilometers away] in Bonn.”16
Only a handful of activists from outside the Federal Republic traveled to
Troisdorf, however. Among them was Petra Kelly. A native Bavarian who had
grown up in the United States, Kelly lived in Brussels and worked as an official
for the Economic and Social Committee of the European Economic Communities (Milder 2010). Her hopes for the meeting were clear. With her European
Federalist colleague Roland Vogt, Kelly had already published an article describing her desire for a transnationally coordinated Green campaign to take
part in the European parliamentary elections. She believed that such an effort
could be made into a “decisive battle against nuclear reactors.”17
In a series of meetings over the following nine months, a Coordinating
Committee elected at Troisdorf worked towards the creation of “uniform institutions in the German federal states and on the European level.”18 Beyond
Kelly and the Viennese Social Democrat Paul Blau, however, the committee
was comprised solely of inhabitants of the Federal Republic. Thus, while state
level Green organizations were being formed across the FRG during the winter
of 1978-1979, the Coordinating Committee was unable to spur the creation of
equivalent groupings abroad. Moreover, Kelly and Blau remained its only
significant contacts to homegrown environmental organizations in other countries. Even Kelly’s ardent transnationalism was not enough to create a truly
European campaign for the European Parliament.
Despite its lack of bona fide connections across West Germany’s borders,
however, the Coordinating Committee continued to think in European terms. In
February 1979, it heard a presentation on “European Currency Policy and the
Political Ecology Movement” before formally voting to convene a founding
conference for a political organization that would run candidates in the elections to the European Parliament, which had finally been scheduled for June
1979.19 The campaign itself appeared to offer broad vistas for international
work. The 81 Germans elected to the Parliament would serve alongside 329
16
17
18
19
Deutsches Umwelttreffen 1978, “Die Stunde ist reif für ein großes Umwelttreffen!” AGG
Kerschgens 6.
Petra Kelly and Roland Vogt, Ökologie und Frieden. Der Kampf gegen Atomkraftwerke aus
der Sicht von Hiroshima, Forum Europa (January/February 1977): 15 – 18.
Koordinierungsausschuß des Deutschen Umwelttreffens, “Ergebnisse der Besprechung vom
9./10. September in Vlotho.” AGG Kerschgens 6.
Koordinierungsausschuß des deutschen Umwelttreffens, “Einladung zum dritten Treffen im
Collegium Humanum, Akademie für Umwelt- und Lebensschutz in Vlotho/Valdorf.” AGG
Kerschgens 6. Kelly and Blau were also invited to address European topics at the meeting.
See: “Protokoll der 2. Sitzung des Bundeskoordinierungsausschusses (BKA) des Deutschen
Umwelttreffens in Troisdorf,”. AGG Kerschgens 6.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 201
members from the eight other EEC member states. Moreover, ecology parties
were also contesting the election in France, Belgium, and the UK. Kelly, Vogt,
and other transnationally-minded campaigners with European contacts envisioned a parliamentary caucus comprised of these ecologists as well as the
Dutch and Italian Radical parties in Strasbourg.
Like the mass rallies in Hanover and Bonn, electoral politics brought new
hope to anti-nuclear activists in the late seventies. The Greens’ initial successes
in state-level elections offered the potential to shape policy at that level, but the
European elections seemed particularly well-suited to anti-nuclear activists’
political outlook and aspirations. Long before the date for the elections had
even been set, environmentalists saw them as a unique opportunity to continue
working in the same transnational manner that local anti-reactor protests had.
The short European campaign, which was to begin in the FRG with the founding of SPV Die Grünen in March 1979 and end with the 10 June election,
would reveal whether West German activists could use such an opportunity to
cooperate across Europe’s many borders and engineer a new transnational
politics.
5.
The Campaign for the European Parliament: Transnationalism in Practice?
Petra Kelly was particularly excited to take up the challenge of creating a new
Europe on the basis of an anti-nuclear campaign for the European Parliament.
In an ebullient March 1979 letter she informed friends and political colleagues
across Europe that she had been elected to the “number one” position on the
German Greens’ list of candidates for the European Parliament. She sought
“help and ideas and financial support” so that she could “speak up for a decentralised, non-nuclear, non-military and gentle Europe – a Europe of the Regions
and of the People.”20 As the Greens’ lead candidate, Kelly appeared to be in the
position to make her transnational dreams for a more-integrated, non-nuclear
Europe the focal point of the campaign.
Like Kelly, members of Hamburg’s Grüne Liste Umweltschutz (GLU), one
of the many small ecological parties that comprised SPV Die Grünen, linked
together anti-nuclear activism and dreams for European integration in order to
describe the transnational potential of Green politics. “For ecological forces,”
wrote Heinz Böhmecke of the Hamburg GLU, “there are no arbitrary boundaries. [Ecologists] feel themselves responsible for all of Europe.” He went on to
compare Gorleben to the French reprocessing center in La Hague and its British counterpart at Windscale. Ecologists could not allow any of these sites –
20
Petra Kelly to Friends and Comrades (24 March 1979). AGG PKA 540,6.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 202
nor “any other place on the planet” – to become “the radioactively poisoned
heart of Europe.”21 Like Kelly, Böhmecke clearly considered environmental
politics and anti-nuclear activism to be inherently transnational. The elections
to the European Parliament seemed a tailor-made opportunity for the nascent
German Green party to move beyond the arbitrary boundaries of national politics and to foster change across the continent.
Not everyone in SPV Die Grünen saw the campaign for the European Parliament as such an exciting opportunity, however. Karl Kerschgens sent a letter
to fellow Greens in Hesse explaining that he understood their unease about the
unusual campaign. “Many of us,” he wrote, “needed to give ourselves a little
push in order to get going despite the general disinclination towards the European elections.” Yet, Kerschgens reasoned, “If we want to have a meaningful
campaign in the next Bundestag election, then we need to get every possible
vote this time around.”22 Other leading Greens echoed the idea that the European campaign was really just a dress rehearsal for the 1980 Bundestag elections.
Helmut Lippelt, for example, described the process of drafting a program for
the European elections as a valuable opportunity to begin hashing out the party’s federal election program a year early.23 The fact that the West German
government would reimburse each political party 1.40 DM per vote received in
the European election reinforced the idea that the campaign was an important
step in the Greens’ preparations for the 1980 Bundestag elections.
The shape that the European campaign took belied these divergent conceptions of it. In early 1979, representatives of the various minor parties and
groupings that comprised the Alternative Political Association got together to
begin the arduous work of drafting an election program that met its disparate
membership’s approval. Kelly, who was in the midst of a campaign swing
through “Kiel, Gorleben, Nijmegen, Nuremburg, Brussels, Deggendorf, Passau,
etc.” and thus could not attend the deliberations, sent a perturbed letter to party
headquarters. She called on the Greens to use a set of points that she and Roland Vogt had developed, and which she had already translated into English, as
the basis for the program. After all, Kelly informed the program’s framers:
At the international level we simply must have platform points that everyone
can accept. The ones Roland and I have worked out are in agreement with
those of the French, the Dutch, and the Italians.24
21
22
23
24
Heinz Böhmecke, “Antrag an die Europaprogramm-Kommission,” 4 March 1979. AGG
Kerschgens 10.
Kerschgens to “Friends in the green and alternative movement” (6 May 1979). AGG Kerschgens 10.
Helmut Lippelt to the Members of the Program Committee (9 January 1979). AGG Kerschgens 10.
Petra Kelly to Vorstand “Der Grünen” (undated). AGG PKA 2552.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 203
Kelly’s perception of which “everyone” had to accept the program was plainly
different from that of other leading German Greens. One of the key decisions
facing SPV Die Grünen, therefore, was whether it was responsible to the diverse spectrum of German environmental groups that comprised it, in a bottomup manner, or whether it ought to be in agreement with the other Green and
Radical parties of Europe, in the spirit of transnational coordination, as Kelly
suggested.
Given the enormous influence of Kelly and Vogt – who together made more
than fifty stump speeches, coordinated the party’s media outreach, and managed its Bonn office alongside numerous other responsibilities – one might
expect that their perception of a transnationally coordinated European campaign won out.25 But matters beyond their control forced the campaign to remain in many ways a specifically West German undertaking. When the European Community’s Council of Ministers eventually mandated that direct
elections to the European Parliament be held in June 1979, it soothed the more
skeptical governments by leaving it up to the member states to set the electoral
rules (Morgan and Allen 1978; Rittberger 2007). Hence, with only a few modifications and exceptions, the Federal Republic’s standard electoral laws governed the Greens’ campaign.
As long as national governments retained their power to set the election’s
rules, transnationalists’ visions for the European election were unlikely to be
implemented. Along with other ardent European Federalists Kelly had long
advocated transnational election districts, for example. Yet, the EC member
states’ governments made no move to organize such districts prior to the 1979
campaign. Thus, in order to win seats in the European parliament, the Greens
would have to solicit votes within the Federal Republic. Though German candidates like Kelly and Vogt could (and did) campaign in support of Green
candidates in France, French voters would not have the option of voting for the
German Green List. Thus, if the German Greens wished to gain seats in Strasbourg – and, importantly, to receive campaign cost reimbursement funds from
the German government, which were apportioned on the basis of votes received
– they would have to organize a more traditional, national campaign.
Thus, although it was aimed at winning seats in Strasbourg, the German
Greens’ campaign for the European Parliament, quickly adapted itself to the
established framework of West German political praxis. It concluded – as the
major parties’ Bundestag campaigns typically did – at party headquarters in
Bonn.26 As he watched the results come in from across the Federal Republic,
Vogt was quick to point out that had the so-called “five percent hurdle” not
been in place, the “formidable” 3.2% of the vote that SPV Die Grünen had
25
26
Roland Vogt, “Bericht zur Bundesgeschäftsstelle” (undated; presumably June/July 1979).
AGG PKA 2553.
Petra Kelly and Dorothea Wieczorek, “Einladung” (6 June 1979). AGG Kerschgens 10.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 204
received would have entitled both Kelly and himself to seats in Strasbourg. Yet
Vogt assessed the campaign’s results beyond West Germany’s borders, too.
Counting ecologically-minded MPs from Italy, Holland, and Denmark, as well
as the three French Ecologists who would have won seats without their own
country’s five percent hurdle, Vogt reckoned that a Green delegation of “certainly more than ten representatives” ought to be on its way to Strasbourg.27 In
reality, of course, no German Greens or French Ecologists would be seated in
the European parliament. Vogt’s imagined transnational Green caucus would
not even begin to materialize until the German Greens won seats in Strasbourg
in 1984.
Despite setbacks imposed by national electoral law and the extent to which
the Green campaign had adapted itself to West German electoral praxis, a
European outlook continued to shape Vogt and Kelly’s responses to the campaign. Together with representatives of Europe’s other ecological parties, the
pair planned a demonstration that would take place as the parliament convened
on 17 July. Five-hundred Greens from across Europe marched through Strasbourg’s streets in a procession that evidenced Petra Kelly’s love of symbolic
action and clearly foreshadowed the German Greens’ triumphant march
through Bonn and into the Bundestag four years later (Richter 2010, 245-7,
253). Prevented from taking seats in parliament, Kelly and Vogt unfurled a
banner protesting the “undemocratic and anti-European five percent hurdle”
from the spectators’ balcony and were promptly ejected from the opening ceremonies. The duo sought a legal remedy next, bringing an unsuccessful challenge to the German constitutional court before investigating their options at
the European Court of Justice.
When SPV Die Grünen’s Federal Board met in Kassel five days after the
election, Kelly and Vogt continued their push for transnationalism. They convinced the Board to use campaign reimbursement funds supplied by the West
German government to bail out the heavily indebted French Ecology party.
They also solicited support for a Greens’ European office in Strasbourg, which
Kelly estimated would require one million DM of funding over the next five
years.28 The next edition of the party newsletter evidenced the success of Kelly
and Vogt’s efforts, trumpeting the German Greens’ support for their French
allies and devoting attention to the transnational protest that environmentalists
had staged as the European Parliament convened.29 Meanwhile, Kelly was
dispatched to Strasbourg with a check for the French Ecologists and orders to
find a suitable site for a European office. By the fall of 1979, office space had
been rented near the European Parliament and Roland Vogt remained on the
27
28
29
Stellungnahme von Roland Vogt zum Wahlergebnis, die tageszeitung (12 June 1979): 1.
Petra K. Kelly, “Vorschlag für ein europäisches Aktions/Informationsbüro in Strassburg oder
Brüssel,” AGG Ba-Wü 109.
Lukas Beckmann and Otto Fanger, “Rundbrief” (August 1979). AGG Kerschgens 10.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 205
German Greens’ payroll as Strasbourg office manager. Kelly was back in Brussels, working at the EEC and organizing European contacts for the party.30 By
dedicating the resources they had received from the West German government
to European ends, the Greens seemed to have found a workable means of maintaining – if not bolstering – their transnationalism.
Yet, Vogt and Kelly were not the only Greens who had ideas for the party’s
next steps. Urgent letters sent to the Federal Board from Bremen requested an
advance on electoral reimbursement funds owed to that state’s Green List. The
upcoming elections in the Hanseatic city-state, leaders of the Bremen Green
List argued, presented an opportunity for the party as a whole.31 Georg Otto, a
co-founder of the GLU, who had been hired by the Greens’ Federal Board to
help prepare the party for the 1980 Bundestag Elections, acknowledged the
“trendsetting function” of the Bremen election and called for “federal solidarity
with the Bremen Green list.”32 Though no one demanded that support for the
Bremen Greens be drawn from funds intended for European work, Otto’s characterization of the Bremen election as a “trendsetter” suggested that the German Greens’ Federal Board saw the opportunity to win seats in Bremen’s state
parliament as a more productive means of pursuing Green political goals than
emphasizing transnational, European work.
From southern Germany came another reason for the Greens to focus on
domestic politics. Activists in both Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria planned to
formally organize state branches of the new party in the fall. The Federal Board
was concerned that “loopholes” in the temporary bylaws of SPV Die Grünen,
which had been specially created to contest the European elections, would
prevent these proposed southern German state chapters from formally joining
the organization. As a result, the Board voted unanimously to disband the
“Special Political Association” and found a new federal party in the fall.33
After the Greens won seats in the state parliaments of Bremen in October
1979 and Baden-Württemberg in March 1980, their focus on campaigning
within the Federal Republic only intensified. Bundestag elections were scheduled for October 1980 and each German state would hold statewide and municipal elections at least once in the five-year interval before the next European
parliamentary election. Even the most transnationally-minded Greens returned
to the FRG in order to participate in domestic elections and party-building. In
1981, Roland Vogt left Strasbourg to take a seat on the Greens’ Federal Board.
Petra Kelly took another leave of absence from the EEC and returned to Ger30
31
32
33
Roland Vogt, “Bericht zur europäischen Geschäftsstelle der Grünen” (October 1979). AGG
PKA 2553.
Bremer Grüne Liste to Bundesvorstand “DIE GRÜNEN” (27 August 1979). AGG PKA 2553.
Georg Otto, “An alle Landes- und Kreisorganisationen der Trägergruppen der Vereinigung
DIE GRÜNEN,” (undated, presumably July or August 1979). AGG PKA 2553.
“Protokoll der Bundesvorstandssitzung der GRÜNEN am 14./15.7.79 in Bonn.” AGG PKA
2553.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 206
many from Brussels in order to serve as the Greens’ lead candidate in the 1980
Bundestag campaign, the 1982 campaign for the Bavarian Parliament, and
finally the successful 1983 Bundestag campaign.
Despite her endless campaigning, Kelly continued to speak of the primacy
of “questions of global survival” that transcended national borders and were
decided outside of parliament by groups like “the armaments lobby.” Nevertheless, she explained that she was firmly committed to domestic electoral campaigns due to her belief that for the Greens, parliament was “a site…where we
can speak, where we can bring our positions in and carry information out.”34
The distinction between national and transnational approaches to anti-nuclear
activism and environmental politics was now clearer than ever. Transnationally-minded Greens like Kelly continued to talk about anti-nuclear activism as a
European project, but emphasizing electoral campaigns pushed the party ever
further from the sort of open-ended transnational connections and global thinking that had excited Greens about the upcoming European elections during the
late 1970s. In fact, the combination of the German Greens’ successes and the
setbacks faced by the French and British Ecologists made it even more difficult
to effectively conduct Green politics across Europe’s borders.
6.
Conclusion
Despite the German Greens’ growing focus on domestic electoral campaigning
after the 1979 European elections, thinking beyond the nation-state remained
important for proponents of Green politics and anti-nuclear activists. The
French and British Greens won their first nationally contested seats in elections
to the European Parliament in 1989 and 1999 respectively. In Britain, the
Green breakthrough finally came only after the law governing elections to the
European parliament was changed to allow for proportional representation.
This targeted reform, which did not apply to elections to the British parliament,
reinforces the idea that Europe could be a site of real democratic experimentation at the same time as it embodied anti-nuclear activists’ most radical aspirations for a new society.
Indeed, the practical significance of Europe for the Greens and for antinuclear activists remained very clear during the 1970s and 1980s. In addition to
the continuing significance of the European Parliament as an electoral stepping
stone, Jan-Henrik Meyer (2013) has shown that non-partisan anti-nuclear activists worked to create effective lobbying organizations in Brussels. Environmentalists also continued to emphasize the transnational effects of environmental
34
Spiegel Gespräch. “Wir sind die Antipartei-Partei.” Petra Kelly über die politische Strategie
der Grünen, Der Spiegel 24 (1982): 47-56.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 207
disasters. The sheer absurdity of the French government’s insistence that fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown stopped at the Rhine (Kalmbach 2011,
chapter 4) only reinforced the obvious fact that the nuclear threat was particularly transnational.
Yet by the mid-1980s, a European perspective no longer seemed to shape
the aspirations of Green politics in the way that leading Greens had argued that
it must in the late 1970s. The sort of popular transnationalism that had captured
Europeans’ imaginations and thus made localized site occupations meaningful
across broad swathes of territory during the 1970s proved elusive after environmental protests were re-directed to capital cities and parliamentary elections. Even the idea that transnationally-framed protests and participation in
elections to the European parliament were a means of shaping a new, more
democratic Europe was fading from view. Instead, the focus was on navigating
each country’s electoral law and gaining influence within each nation-state’s
existing political system.
The more that anti-nuclear activists sought to grow their movement beyond
individual anti-reactor struggles and to shape nuclear policy, therefore, the
more that their work lost its connection to the vision of creating a new and
radically transnational Europe. Significant numbers of Europeans adopted
environmental values, but as Michael Bess (2003) has shown in the case of
France, the “light Green” societies that have emerged in Europe function so
well because they incorporate a less radical form of environmentalism into
everyday life. This normalization of environmental values is a stunning
achievement in and of itself, but it is far short of the sort of the potential for the
global transformation of politics and even humanity that some activists found
in localized anti-reactor protests and linked to the forging of a new, more democratic Europe.
There is no question, however, that anti-nuclear activists’ early transnational
dreams and the headline-grabbing site occupations of the mid-seventies shaped
the changes that took place throughout the continent. The excitement generated
by far-flung and “unprecedented” rural reactor site occupations gives credence
to the idea that localized action can – and frequently does – have global ramifications. Though the nitty-gritty work of changing policy relies on actions that
function within the framework of politics as usual, localized protests can raise
awareness and change the way people think across all sorts of boundaries.
Truly understanding the rise of anti-nuclear politics in Western Europe and the
potential that its proponents attributed to it, therefore, requires scholars to take
very seriously the transnational ramifications of disparate local actions. Though
the anti-nuclear movement later took on unique national trajectories, these
early protests, which relied on transnational cooperation and inspired people
across national borders, made nuclear energy a significant issue across Western
Europe and linked this issue itself to the idea of a new Europe. The anti-nuclear
movement’s development from the local to the transnational to the national
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 208
level, therefore, is not so much a story of politics dictated by “opportunity
structures” as it is an explanation of how anti-nuclear activists’ local actions
and transnational aspirations fell short of forging a new Europe, but created
important new opportunities to reshape national politics.
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“Where do we go from Wyhl?” Transnational AntiNuclear Protest targeting European and International Organizations in the 1970s
Jan-Henrik Meyer ∗
Abstract: »“Wyhl und was nun?“ Transnationaler Protest gegen die Atompolitik
europäischer und internationaler Organisationen in den 1970er Jahren«. While
the site occupation at Wyhl in 1975 is usually considered the symbolic birthplace of the West German anti-nuclear movement, it may also serve as the
starting point for a transnational history of anti-nuclear protest. Local crossborder cooperation among protesters at Wyhl deeply impressed those antinuclear activists in the mid-1970s who considered nuclear power a global
problem and encouraged them to take their protest to the international level.
The central argument of this article is that protest directed against international organizations (IOs) – notably the European Communities (EC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) provided a crucial catalyst for transnational cooperation among anti-nuclear activists. Targeting IOs as the key
promoters of nuclear power on a global scale, anti-nuclear activists cooperated
across borders organizing protest events. Their goal was to challenge the IOs
and win back the public on the issue across borders. Based on multi-archival
research, this article analyzes five transnational protest events between 1975
and 1978 in Western Europe. Findings suggest that continued cooperation led
to the emergence of a transnational anti-nuclear network and facilitated
transnational transfers of scientific expertise and protest practices.
Keywords: Anti-nuclear movement, transnational, International organizations,
European Communities (EC), International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
∗
Jan-Henrik Meyer, Aarhus University, Department for Culture and Society, Jens-Chr. Skous
Vej 5.4, DK-8000 Aarhus C; [email protected]; [email protected].
DOI: 10.12759/hsr.39.2014.1.212-235
1.
Introduction: “Where do we go from Wyhl?”1
The attempts here in Europe to hold a true transnational moratorium [on nuclear power, JHM] are still few – we have many ecology-minded people and
groups – but all isolated from each other and all without direction as to where
to take the protest.2
In a handwritten letter of 2 January 1975, Petra Karin Kelly, at the time an
official with the European Communities’ (EC) Economic and Social Committee (SEC) and an increasingly well-connected transnational activist against
nuclear power, complained to John W. Gofman about what she perceived as the
core deficiencies of the “ecological groups” in Europe at the time. Gofman,
professor of medical physics at Berkeley, had done groundbreaking research on
the carcinogenic effects of low-level radiation. Since 1969/70, he had become
one of the most prominent critics of nuclear energy in the United States (US)
(Semendeferi 2008). He was chairman of the “Committee for Nuclear Responsibility” and “father of the US moratorium”, namely the campaign to stop the
construction of new nuclear power plants, as Kelly’s handwritten note on one
of his letters read.3 Kelly deplored the fact that in Europe, the activists were all
“isolated from each other”. What seemed even more important to her, however,
was the fact they were not even sure about their adversary: which was the relevant level of government, which was the authority in charge that protesters
could address concerning nuclear energy on a continental scale? 4
Kelly suggested two options as to whom to target: the first was her own employer, the EC. The forerunner of the present-day European Union (EU) included the European Economic Community (EEC), the European Coal and
Steel Community (ECSC), but also the European Atomic Energy Community
(Euratom). Since the latter institution had been founded in 1956 specifically to
promote this new form of energy in Western Europe, it was hardly surprising
that Kelly found the Brussels institutions to be entirely committed to “a policy
1
2
3
4
Leinen 1976, 2: “Wyhl und was dann…? (my translation, JHM).“ The arguments outlined in
this article were first developed and discussed in the context of a series of panels on "Antinuclear-protest in the 1970s and 1980s in a transnational perspective: Europe and beyond"
at the Seventh Biennial Conference of the European Society for Environmental History in
Munich in August 2013 that I organized with Astrid M. Kirchhof. I would like to thank
Michael Schüring and Frank Zelko for their helpful comments, and Stephen Milder, Michael L.
Hughes and my co-editor Astrid M. Kirchhof for the thoughtful discussion about these issues.
Research for this article was funded by a Marie-Curie-Reintegration Grant of the European
Community, by the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication and by a fellowship of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich.
Kelly, Petra to John W. Gofman, Brussels, 2 January 1975. Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis (AGG)
Petra Kelly Archiv (PKA) 2119.
Gofman, John to Petra Kelly, 10 July 1975, AGG PKA 2119.
Kelly, Petra to John W. Gofman, Brussels, 2 January 1975. AGG PKA 2119.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 213
of support for the nuclear industry”. The EC simply refused “to discuss in full
and open all the consequences of such a policy”.
Secondly, she proposed taking the protest to the level of international organizations and bodies, including the various international conferences of nuclear
experts and industry, where the advocates of nuclear energy gathered, such as
at the “European Nuclear Energy Maturity” in Paris and the “Reaktortagung”
in Nuremberg in the spring of 1975 (Tansey 1975). Together with former European Commissioner for agriculture Sicco Mansholt, with whom she was in a
private liaison at the time, she was planning to hold “counter conferences
‘against’” these meetings. Impressed by the report of the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972), Mansholt had recently turned environmentalist and nuclear
critic (Mansholt 1972, 1975; Merriënboer 2011; Scichilone 2009). Kelly invited Gofman as “one of those fighting, in the foreground in America” to attend
one of the events she was planning to organize and “to join our discussions and
[…] share their experiences with European comrades”.5
Kelly’s letter illustrates three aspects that are at the core of this article: First,
while anti-nuclear protest in the 1970s and 1980s was mostly a local affair –
including not-in-my-backyard-(NIMBY)-style activities directed at concrete
power plants, at least some anti-nuclear activists perceived the issue of nuclear
power as a European and international problem. Notably since “transnationally
organized nuclear big capital” dominated the “European public sphere”, transnational action and cooperation seemed indispensable. Transferring knowledge
across national borders, learning from experts and experience from elsewhere
and informing the public seemed of crucial importance. The goal was to “politicize” the problem and take it to a higher, international level.6
Secondly, even to those who deemed transnational cooperation necessary, it
was initially far from clear which higher political level should be targeted as
the appropriate and most effective one. Kelly’s employer, the EC, presented
ambitious proposals for the expansion of nuclear energy and seemed totally
committed to nuclear power, and thus seemed a suitable candidate. Experts'
conferences – such as those mentioned in Kelly’s letter – appeared to provide
another potential target group. The International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) – the international organization created in the aftermath of Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for Peace speech to promote civil uses of nuclear power while
precluding the proliferation of nuclear weapons – had initially not even been on
5
6
Ibid. Emphasis in the original.
Kelly, Petra to Peter Weish, Brussels, 12 December 1974, “in Eile”. AGG PKA 1933. Translations here and in the following are mine, JHM.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 214
the activists’ radar. It was only by recommendation from the FAO that Kelly
started to become aware of the IAEA’s pivotal role in this field.7
Thirdly, it was, however, clear to the activists that they were facing an uphill
battle against business, political and technical elites who refused to listen.
Concerns about the security of energy supplies in the wake of the oil crisis
(Graf 2010) and the massive political and economic capital invested in nuclear
power as the energy of the future created a widely shared pro-nuclear elite
consensus throughout the Western world (Joppke 1993, 37-40; Radkau 2011,
228f.).8 Governments, business, power companies and official experts tended to
treat the arguments of the nuclear critics as irrational fear-mongering. Thus, the
main goal of the critics was to create events that could act as a sounding board
to win back the public on this issue. Staging conferences and hearings appeared
to be the way forward to challenge the pro-nuclear elite consensus. Activists
resorted to letter-writing campaigns and demonstrations to voice their dissent
and engage policy makers. The ultimate objective was to eventually induce a
change of policy.9
The goal of this article is to enquire into the history of anti-nuclear protest in
Europe in the 1970s in a transnational perspective. Rather than recounting
national protest events, or comparing local, regional or national cases, this
paper will zoom in on the transnational cooperation between anti-nuclear activists in Europe including their global ties. The central argument of this article is
that international organizations (IOs) – notably the EC and the IAEA – as targets of anti-nuclear protest at the international level provided a crucial catalyst
for transnational cooperation among anti-nuclear activists. As sociological
research on the public sphere has emphasized, public communication requires
an addressee to become politically relevant (Eder 2000, 181). In a rather passive role, simply as addressees of protests, IOs facilitated transnational cooperation and exchange among the anti-nuclear activists. Traditionally, historians of
international relations have ignored and dismissed IOs as powerless talking
shops (Schulz 2012, 211f). It is only very recently that the role of the IOs in
shaping international norms and standards has been recognized more widely
(Iriye 2002; Staples 2006). The cases discussed in this article demonstrate that
IOs also had an important mobilizing effect as targets for transnational protest
of societal actors in the 1970s – long before the boom of transnational activism
7
8
9
Kelly, Petra to International Atomic Energy Agency, Wien, 22 August 1975, Request for list
of all publications and films and books published by IAEA on health hazards of radiation.
AGG PKA 1913.
Recent research (see in-text citation) suggests that this elite consensus was more fragile
than it seemed to the contemporary activists.
Leinen, Josef M. Arbeitskreis Umweltschutz, Bilanz der Arbeit 1975, Rundschreiben an alle
Landesverbände, BA-Verteiler, alle Kreisverbände, 20.1.1976. Archive der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (AdsD), Bonn Fond Junge Europäische Föderalisten (JEF)
(Box 132 Arbeitskreise Frieden Schüler Umwelt), 1-3.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 215
around IOs that is usually associated with the most recent period of globalization after 1989 (Zürn et al. 2012, 77, 91f).
This paper is divided into five sections. In the second part following this introduction, I will briefly explain my transnational approach and outline the
sources on which I am drawing. The third part discusses the state of our
knowledge about anti-nuclear protest beyond national borders. The fourth part
traces the emerging transnational (network of) cooperation among anti-nuclear
activists by analyzing five crucial international protest events where activists
met and engaged in transnational exchange and transfer, but also faced major
obstacles. A final section will summarize the findings and tell us what we can
learn from a transnational perspective.
2.
A Transnational Perspective on Anti-Nuclear Protest
The term “transnational” has gone through a veritable boom in historical research since the beginning of the millennium, while its usage has become ever
more loose and fuzzy (Gassert 2010). Transnational is not a sophisticated new
term that is effectively a synonym for international. While international relations are traditionally defined as interstate relations, i.e. the relations among
governments, transnational relations have been defined by political scientists
since the 1970s as relations involving non-state or societal actors (Kaiser and
Meyer 2010, 2013), at least on one side of the relationship (Nye and Keohane
1971, 332). With its focus on the role of anti-nuclear protest by groups and
organizations that have variously been described as civil society (Hasenöhrl
2011: 25-31; Kocka 2000) or (new) social movement (DellaPorta 1999; Eder
1985; Offe 1985) organizations, this article adopts a transnational perspective
that emphasizes the linkages and the interaction across national societies during
a period that is usually considered the heyday of the nation state.
As outlined in the introduction to this HSR Focus (Kirchhof and Meyer
2014), the contributions analyze anti-nuclear protest in the 1970s and 1980s
from a transnational perspective, focusing on cross-border interaction and
exchange. They enquire into three different aspects. First, they analyze transnational transfers and the diffusion of ideas, including, for example, scientific
knowledge or practical knowledge of protest practices. Such transfers – we
assume – frequently involve the efforts of transnational mediators and media –
including general news media, but also alternative publications – to facilitate
the spreading of ideas. Transnational transfers usually also involve the adaptation and integration of these ideas by the recipients (Kaelble 2009; Meyer
2011; Werner and Zimmermann 2006).
Secondly, the contributions analyze – and this is at the centre of this contribution – the establishment of transnational “networks”, namely, structures of
frequently informal, but recurrent interaction across national boundaries
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 216
(Kaelble et al. 2002; Meyer 2014). Drawing on insights from the analysis of
networks in policy making from political science, I analyze informal cooperation and the emergence of network-type informal structures between groups
and individuals engaging in this exchange (Kaiser et al. 2010). This concept
alerts us to the conditions that facilitate (or hamper) such cooperation, such as
the ability to exchange important resources, or the existence or emergence of
shared ideas.
Thirdly, the contributions enquire into the idealistic or ideological motivations for transnational action. To what extent were transnational activists motivated by “transnationalism” – i.e. a preference for political action beyond the
nation state and transnational cooperation, rooted in traditions of internationalism (Friedemann and Hölscher 1982; Nehring 2005) and European federalist
ideas (Burgess 2003; Dedman 2010: 14-29)?
The article draws on published and unpublished materials from the archives
of the European institutions in Brussels, British, French and German national
archives, as well as interviews with contemporary actors. The archives of the
German party foundations proved an important resource: The social democratic
Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation in Bonn stores the materials of the Young European Federalists (JEF). The Green Memory Archive (Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis)
of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the foundation of the German Green Party, in
Berlin provides access to the Petra Kelly Archive, including the personal papers and materials collected by Petra Kelly. This fund provides an exceptionally rich source for the history of transnational anti-nuclear protest, since Kelly
was involved in a variety of transnational networks of European (Milder 2014)
and global scope (Kirchhof 2014a, b).
3.
“Where do we go from Wyhl?” Beyond the National
Story
In the story of German anti-nuclear protest, Wyhl – the occupation of the building site of the projected power plant in February 1975 – features prominently.
It is considered the birthplace of the German anti-nuclear – if not the entire
Green – movement (Rucht 1980) and has been included among the national
lieux de mémoire (Nora 1989), as a site that reflects the struggle over varying
visions of modernity in (West) Germany in the 1970s (Rusinek 2001). The
nuclear sites at Fessenheim (Cans 2006, 127f), Zwentendorf (Halbrainer et al.
2008), Windscale (McDermott 2008; Wynne 1982), Kaiseraugst (Kupper 2003)
or Seabrook (Hughes 2014) feature similarly prominently in the histories of
anti-nuclear protest of France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Switzerland
or the United States, for example. Not only public memory, but also the historiography of anti-nuclear protest has long been characterized by methodological nationalism (Beck 2005). This is remarkable, since some of these histories
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 217
of such protest do refer to cross-border exchange. Writing about the Swiss case,
Patrick Kupper mentions that the occupiers of the Kaiseraugst building site on
1 April 1975 drew on the example of Wyhl and the French lead foundry at
Marckolsheim in nearby Alsace (Kupper 2003, 147). Moreover, he notes that
they availed of expertise on the impact of low-level radiation provided by
American scientists, including the Gofman, Gofman’s long-time cooperation
partner Arthur R. Tamplin and Ernest R. Sternglass (Kupper 2003, 122).
Only more recently, as a result of the growing interest in international and
global phenomena in environmental history (Iriye 2008; McNeill and Engelke
2013; Worster 2008), some researchers have started to become more interested
in transnational exchange in anti-nuclear protest. As indicated in the introductory chapter to this HSR Focus, which situates the emergence of anti-nuclear
protest more broadly in the history of modern environmentalism (Kirchhof and
Meyer 2014), research so far has largely focused on the Franco-Swiss-German
connection along the upper Rhine in the context of the emerging German Green
party (Milder 2010a, b). My own research has explored the transnational protest directed at the EC institutions, as an example of the activities of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), the umbrella organization and Brussels
representative of Western Europe’s environmental organizations founded in
1974 (Meyer 2013). The goal of this article, however, is to examine the emerging (network of) transnational cooperation among those anti-nuclear activists
who tried to take their protest to the international level. I will present which
groups and individuals cooperated, why and how they did so, which obstacles
they faced and which international bodies they targeted.
4.
Emerging Networks of Transnational Cooperation
Recurrent, network-type transnational cooperation among nuclear activists in
Europe emerged in the context of protest events and conferences these groups
staged in the second half of the 1970s to politicize the nuclear issue. Antinuclear groups tried to confront political authorities at different levels of government with their concerns. These events also facilitated important transnational transfers of knowledge, notably, of scientific evidence of the potential
dangers of nuclear power. Expertise of this kind proved extremely valuable in
the struggle over nuclear energy. In the public controversy, the pro-nuclear side
usually claimed superior scientific expertise, while denigrating the arguments
of the anti-nuclear side as emotional scare-mongering. This section will trace
the emerging network of anti-nuclear activists – and the problems they faced in
establishing ties and staging effective action. Based on the assumption that
events played a key role in transnational cooperation, the analysis focuses on
conferences directed at IOs between 1975 and 1978. In the wake of Wyhl, this
was a formative period of transnational cooperation. Apart from events directed
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 218
at the Brussels European institutions, the analysis also includes a counterconference against the IAEA’s meeting in Salzburg in 1977. While these events
were all organized by different organizations, they involved a core of groups
and individual actors, with network ties and overlapping memberships across
national borders and organizations.
4.1
Counter-Conference to “Nuclear Energy Maturity”, April 1975
On 26-27 April 1975, it was not Petra Kelly, but the Amis de la Terre, who
organized an anti-nuclear conference and demonstration in Paris against the
“Nuclear Energy Maturity” conference in Paris that Kelly had mentioned in her
letter to Gofman.10 After breaking away from the Sierra Club in the United
States in 1969, the newly founded environmental NGO Friends of the Earth
quickly branched out internationally, forming a transnational network committed to the anti-nuclear cause. The French section Amis de la Terre was founded
as one of the first branches in July 1970 (Cans 2006, 122f). Since the pioneering
protests at Fessenheim in the spring of 1971 and a transnational gathering of antinuclear activists in Strasbourg in December 1971 (Radkau 2011, 213), French
activists were considered the vanguard of anti-nuclear protest in Europe.
However, the members of the German section of the Young European Federalists (JEF) who had come to Paris to establish ties with French activists,
found it difficult to bridge cultural and political differences. Despite the presence
of activists from a number of different countries, most French protesters seemed
not to be interested in transnational cooperation, not even in verbal support of
international solidarity. The German visitors were also irritated by the antiAmerican anti-capitalist rhetoric among some of the French protesters.11
Impressed with the events at Fessenheim and Wyhl, where Europeans had
protested together against nuclear power plants, the West German branch of the
JEF, the youth organization of the European Federalist movement, had become
interested in environmental issues, notably the problems of nuclear energy, and
founded a working group on the environment. Committed to the European
Federalist cause and a vision of a borderless Europe, the JEF activists perceived nuclear power as a truly European issue. Nuclear power plants clearly
had cross-border impacts. Moreover, energy policy was an area with important
EC competences. Reaching out to a European public sphere (Meyer 2010), in
10
11
Kelly did write a call for a "Nuclear Energy Insanity Conference" as a "counter-conference"
to "Nuclear Energy Maturity" in Paris. It is however unclear whether this call – illustrated
with a clip from the cover image of Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince – was ever published. Kelly,
Petra. 1975. Action Now! March On Kalkar etc. Toward A European and Global Moratorium
on Nuclear Plants. AGG PKA 2249.
Eiardt, Ulrike. Bericht über die Teilnahme an der Manifestation gegen KKW's am 26. April
1975, sowie am Colloque nucléaire et politique, veranstaltet von 'Amis de la Terre' u.a. vom
26.-27. April 1975 in Paris, Freiburg, 1. Mai 1975. AdsD JEF (Box 132), 1-3; Editorial 1975.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 219
February 1975, their journal Forum E featured a special issue on nuclear power
plants, which sold out so quickly that they reprinted it three months later.12
Two young members of the JEF at the time played a crucial role in the environmentalist turn of the increasingly left-leaning JEF and the establishment of
transnational ties. Petra Kelly, born in Bavaria, but raised and educated in the
United States, and Josef M. “Jo” Leinen, raised in the Franco-German borderland in the Sarre region, president of the JEF (1972-1976), and subsequently
international secretary of the German Young Socialists, were both important
networkers and transnational mediators. Both shared language skills and
knowledge of European integration and international politics due to their educational background: in addition to her BA in political science in Washington
D. C., Kelly held an MA in European Studies from the University of Amsterdam. After obtaining a German law degree, Leinen graduated from the College
of Europe in Brughes, a postgraduate institution founded by ardent European
Federalists in 1949 that came to serve as an elite school for the European civil
service (Poehls 2009). Subsequently, both Leinen and Kelly became leading
members of the Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz (BBU), the
umbrella organization of the German citizen action groups (Leinen 1995, 47-8;
Sattler 1995). However, while Leinen remained faithful to the Social Democrats and became minister of the environment in the Sarre region in the 1980s
and later Member of the European Parliament, Kelly left the Social democrats
and became arguably the most well-known figure-heads of the emerging German (and European) Green Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Mende
2011; Milder 2010b, 2014; Richter 2010).
Kelly had been alerted to the detrimental effects of radiation by personal experience. She attributed her younger sister’s death of cancer to the radiation
Grace’s father had been exposed to in Nagasaki in 1945 (Milder 2010b; Richter
2010, 44, 60f, 251f.). As early as 1974, she set up a foundation in her sister’s
memory, and campaigned to improve cancer research, setting up a European
database on cancer.13 She drew much of her inspiration from debates on the
carcinogenic effects of radiation in the US, where these issues were much more
controversial than in Europe (Joppke 1993, 27-30; Semendeferi 2008). Collecting
materials during her regular trips to the United States to visit her family, she
passed on awareness, expertise and knowledge of protest tactics – such as those
applied by American environmentalist Ralph Nader – across the Atlantic.14
The JEF’s working group had ambitious goals: First, – in line with what
Kelly had indicated to Gofman in the above-mentioned letter – their aim was to
12
13
14
Leinen, Josef M. 20.01.1976. Arbeitskreis Umweltschutz, Bilanz der Arbeit 1975.
Kelly, Petra to Josef Leinen "vertraulich, sehr wichtig", Brussels, 23 October 1974, "tief in der
Nacht". AGG PKA 2249.
Kelly, Petra. Strategie auf europäischer Ebene für Freiburg, JEF-Seminar, Brüssel, 9. Juli
1975. AGG PKA 2249.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 220
take the nuclear issue to the level of IOs. Their objective was to go to Brussels
and convince the European institutions to hold public hearings, and to critically
engage with the issue for the first time. For this purpose, they intended to start
a letter-writing campaign to address leading figures in the EC institutions.
Secondly, transnational action directed at IOs needed to be based on transnational cooperation with partners from across national borders within Europe.
Thus, the JEF sent representatives to the conference in Paris to collect addresses of potential cooperation partners. Thirdly, they planned to cooperate on
“Hearings on Nuclear Power”, which the “transnational socialist” group Agenor intended to hold in Brussels later in 1975. The JEF’s role would be to organize the representation of experts and citizen action groups from Germany.15
4.2
JEF Conference, Freiburg, July 1975
Throughout 1975, the German JEF section and its local groups engaged in
various activities to put their transnational political ambitions into practice,
cooperating with local citizen action groups within West Germany and across
national borders. For instance, they supported the transnational cooperation
between Dutch and West German action groups initiatives protesting against
the Fast Breeder at Kalkar in North-Rhine Westphalia.16
On 11-13 July 1975, the working group on the environment of the JEF went
back to the upper Rhine region near Wyhl. In the university town of Freiburg,
they organized an “international seminar” on “Nuclear Power. Risk or Progress
for European Society”, (Kernkraft – Risiko oder Fortschritt für die Europäische Gesellschaft) with participants from five European countries, to
prepare for their involvement in the Agenor “Hearings”. Effectively, the conference served two purposes: First, it provided an opportunity to bring together
activists and experts and to improve access to information and counterexpertise on the nuclear issue. The JEF invited experts, including natural scientists, from universities and environmental groups to discuss three central issues,
namely 1) the dangers of nuclear energy, 2) economic and political aspects of
nuclear energy, and finally 3) alternative sources of energy.17
In addition, Kelly, who was in charge of a final session on opportunities for
a “Europe-wide campaign”, sought to facilitate access to further information.
She distributed a long list of addresses of nuclear critics, government and scientific institutions across Europe and the United States, from which activists
15
16
17
Leinen, Josef M. Junge Europäische Föderalisten, Protokoll des Arbeitskreises Kernenergie
vom 19.4.75 in Brüssel, Bonn, 23. April 1975. AdsD JEF (Box 132), 1-2.
Leinen, Josef M. 20.01.1976. Arbeitskreis Umweltschutz, Bilanz der Arbeit 1975.
Junge Europäische Föderalisten, Arbeitskreis Kernenergie. Internationales Seminar Kernenergie. Risiko oder Fortschritt für die Europäische Gesellschaft, 11-13 July 1975, Kolpinghaus,
Freiburg. AGG PKA 2249, 1-2.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 221
could obtain information.18 In order to disseminate this information on nuclear
issues beyond the limited group of the participants of the conference, the JEF
made very effective use of its journal Forum Europa,19 publishing a special
issue in 1976 on the social and political implications of nuclear power. This
special issue (1976b) included contributions of experts who had attended the
Freiburg seminar and the Agenor hearings. Furthermore, in the final section of
the issue, the editors listed the addresses of anti-nuclear groups throughout
Western and Northern Europe and the United States, as well as publications
and even records of protest songs (1976a).
Secondly, the conference served to engage in actual political action directed
at both the international and the national levels. In the session she was in
charge of, Kelly made detailed proposals for a transnational letter-writing campaign to address the European (EC) institutions, including a list of the names
and addresses of European Commissioners, leading officials, the Economic and
Social Committee (her employer), the Council of Ministers and the Permanent
Representations of the member states, the European Parliament and the European Investment Bank that helped financing nuclear power plants.20 At the end
of 1975, the JEF counted this letter writing campaign, which had started in
Freiburg, as a major success. The European institutions had actually responded
to these letters.21 Apart from the transnational campaign, the JEF also took their
action to the national level. Taking their protests to Bonn, Jo Leinen and his
fellow protesters managed to get an opportunity to have discussions with the
social-democratic Federal Minister for Research Hans Matthöfer.22 Matthöfer
was willing to engage with the critics, since he attributed the opposition to and
fears about nuclear energy to a lack of comprehensive information and rational
debate about the issues at stake (Matthöfer 1976a). Indeed, in West Germany,
Matthöfer organized a well-publicized series of public hearings (Bürgerdialog
Kernenergie) (Matthöfer 1976b, 1977).
4.3
Agenor Conference, Brussels, November 1975
Named after the father of the young woman “Europa” from Greek mythology,
Agenor was a group and journal that emerged from the movement for the unification of Western Europe, but aimed at a “European political system fundamentally different from the existing Community: a socialist and democratic
Community” (Agenor 1975-76, 2). It arose among the alumni of the College of
Europe. As a result of the “impact of 1968” (Agenor 1975-76, 5) – the group
18
19
20
21
22
Kelly, Petra. Strategie auf europäischer Ebene für Freiburg, JEF-Seminar, 9. Juli 1975.
The JEF's journal Forum E was renamed Forum Europa from 1976 onwards, due to a copyright conflict.
Kelly, Petra. Strategie auf europäischer Ebene für Freiburg, JEF-Seminar, 9. Juli 1975.
Leinen, Josef M. Arbeitskreis Umweltschutz, Bilanz der Arbeit 1975, 20.1.1976.
Ibid.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 222
took a clear political stance on the left, while remaining formally independent
of any political party.
This group aimed at organizing public “hearings” in Brussels, to take the
controversy over nuclear energy to the European institutions in Brussels. The
organizers argued that the European institutions had simply accepted the nuclear option, without addressing the concerns and protests in a “European public
sphere”, such as at “Wyhl” and “Kaiseraugst”.23 Issues such as the effects of
radiation on human health, genetic damage, and the problems relating to reprocessing or nuclear waste, had not adequately been discussed at the European
level, Agenor criticized. Furthermore, the political parties in Europe had failed
to critically engage with, and simply accepted the “propaganda” of the nuclear
lobby.24 The goal of the hearings was thus to open up an opportunity for debate
in Brussels on four central issues:
1) “Radioactivity Risks in the Fuel Cycle”,
2) “Impact on the Environment”,
3) “Energy Economics and Alternatives” and
4) “Political and Ethical Issues”.25
At the hearings, representatives of the advocates and critics of nuclear energy
were to present their views in front of a panel of public figures and an audience
consisting of “journalists, [trade] unionists, MPs, members of citizen action
groups”. Of course, the results of the discussion were to be presented to the
media to insert the nuclear issue in the European public sphere.26
In their commitment to both (a different version of) European integration
and the anti-nuclear cause, JEF and Agenor had a very similar ideological base.
Key members were actually part of both groups. Living and working in Brussels, Kelly was an active member of the Agenor group, attending their
Wednesday meetings.27 Among others, Kelly, Leinen and Agenor’s editor in
Brussels, John Lambert – an English freelance journalist with excellent German language skills – played a central role in organizing this event, notably
inviting the expert “witnesses”. This proved more difficult than anticipated, for
a variety of practical reasons.
23
24
25
26
27
Remarkably, Kelly – committed to transnationalism – did not distinguish between power
plants located in the EC (Wyhl) and in non-EC Switzerland (Kaiseraugst).
Agenor. 1913. Europäische Kernenergie-Hearings, Brüssel, 5.-8. November 1975, organisiert
von dem Agenor Team. "Warum wollen wir Europäische Kernenergie 'Hearings' abhalten".
AGG PKA.
Agenor. 1913. Europäische Hearings und Arbeitsgruppen über Atomenergie, Brüssel, 5.-8.
November 1975, veranstaltet von Agenor. AGG PKA.
Agenor. Europäische Kernenergie-Hearings, Brüssel, 5.-8. November 1975.
See handwritten note on: Junge Europäische Föderalisten, Arbeitskreis Kernenergie. Internationales Seminar Kernenergie. Risiko oder Fortschritt für die Europäische Gesellschaft, vom
11-13 Juli 1975, 7800 Freiburg, Kolpinghaus, Programm. AGG PKA 2249, 1-2.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 223
First, even if Agenor was well-connected – and, notably, Kelly had established a wide range of contacts also across the Atlantic – transnational communication was complicated and cumbersome. Two decades before the arrival of
the fax machine and the internet, international letters and responses took a long
time, and phone calls and telegrams were forbiddingly expensive. The delays in
communication this involved were aggravated by Agenor’s funding problems.
For instance, by the time Agenor had secured an airline ticket for John Gofman
to come to Brussels, he had allocated his time differently.28
Secondly, anti-nuclear groups in Brussels did not necessarily cooperate, but
rather competed for attention. On 23 November, the Belgian anti-nuclear association Survie-Belgique held their First World Antinuclear Conference of Brussels (Premier Congrès Universel Antinucléaire de Bruxelles).29 It was this
event – rather than the Agenor hearings – that Gofman and Tamplin eventually
committed to attend.30 Maurice André, the organizer of the World Antinuclear
Conference, was not willing to work with Agenor. Lambert and Agenor lacked
the necessary track-record of previous anti-nuclear action, André complained in
a letter to the JEF.31
Finally, it proved hard to win participants from the pro-nuclear side.32 In the
event, the European Commissioner responsible for energy, Henri Simonet, did
not show up, even though he had promised to attend. It was only due to the
intervention of Matthöfer’s ministry that Agenor had been able to include experts for the sessions on health risks and energy economics (Agenor 1976, 2).
Despite these problems, the hearings offered an opportunity to present the
anti-nuclear case in Brussels. Experts (or “witnesses”) from nine different
European countries and the United States presented their views – including the
well-known and controversial American nuclear critic Sternglass.33 With its
informal working groups, the event provided plenty of opportunities to establish and strengthen informal transnational ties among a great variety of antinuclear and environmental groups from Western Europe. Participants included
28
29
30
31
32
33
Gofman, John to Petra Kelly, Brussels, 27 September 1975. AGG PKA 2119.
Scampi, Paolo. 2008. History of the AIPRI (Association Internationale pour la Protection
contre les Rayons Ionisants). <http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/07/30/18521026.
php. (accessed 15 December 2013)>.
Tamplin, Arthur R., Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., Washington, to Drs. Petra Karin
Kelly, Wirtschafts- und Sozialausschuss, Brussels, 11 July 1975. AGG PKA 1913; Gofman,
John to Petra Kelly, 27 September 1975.
André, Maurice to Junge Europäische Föderalisten, 22 July 1975. AGG PKA 2249.
Kelly, Petra to John W. Gofman, Confidential, Brussels, 27 August 1975. AGG PKA 2119.
Sternglass, Ernest to Petra Kelly, Pittsburgh, PA, 3 July 1975. AGG PKA 1969. While providing Kelly with Sternglass' address, the UN in New York questioned Sternglass' scientific credentials. Sella, Francesco, Secretary of the Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic
Radiation, United Nations, to Petra Kelly, New York, 11 September 1974. AGG PKA 1969.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 224
– apart from a considerable number of trade unionists34 – representatives of
Friends of the Earth from different countries, and the European Environmental
Bureau (EEB), the umbrella organization of Europe’s environmentalist, which
also included the JEF. Various local citizen action groups, well-connected
individual activists like Konradin Kreuzer from Switzerland, who produced a
newsletter on nuclear issues,35 and the leader of the German federation of citizen action groups (BBU) Hans-Helmuth Wüstenhagen also joined the event.36
A large number of these individuals and groups also attended the various other
events discussed in this article.
4.4
Salzburg Conference on a Non-Nuclear Future, April/May
1977
The “Salzburg Conference on a Non-nuclear Future” (Patterson 1977), held in
the picturesque Austrian city of Salzburg, 29 April-1 May 1977, differed in
various respects from the events discussed above. First, it took place in Austria,
which was not a member state of the EC until after the end of the cold war
(Gehler 2004), and was located on the margins of Western Europe. At the same
time, Austrian activists and experts were very involved in transnational antinuclear networks in Europe. The main local organizer of the conference, biologist Peter Weish from Vienna, for instance, had been one of the experts at the
Agenor Hearings in Brussels. He was regularly invited to speak as an antinuclear expert across Europe.37
Secondly, the Salzburg conference was directed not at the European, but at
the global level. As Austria was a small and neutral country, its capital Vienna
was home to IOs of a global scope, notably the United Nation’s organization
responsible for (the promotion of) nuclear energy, the IAEA. Like the conference organized by the Amis de la Terre in Paris, the Salzburg conference was a
34
35
36
37
As an official of the EC's Economic and Social Committee (ESC), Kelly was regularly in touch
with trade union leaders from all over Europe, who were represented in the ESC, along with
the employers. The trade union movement was divided on the issue of nuclear power. John
Carroll from the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, a member of the panel, was
one of the most pronounced anti-nuclear trade unionists. Kelly, Petra to John W. Gofman,
Brussels, 3 June 1976. AGG PKA 2119.
Kreuzer, Konradin to Petra Kelly, Brussels, Flüh, CH, 7 January 1976, "Thank you note after
Agenor Conference". AGG PKA 1954. Kreuzer, Konradin. Querverbindungen über die Landesgrenzen. Salzburger Konferenz für eine nicht-nukleare Zukunft. nntele. Querverbindung von
Land zu Land zwischen Aufbaukräften einer nicht-nuklearen Zukunft/Gegenwart. Originalausgabe (0-Nummer, August 1977), 1-2. AGG PKA 3176 (emphasis in the original, JHM)“.
Agenor. Europäische Hearings und Arbeitsgruppen über Atomenergie, Brüssel, 5.-8. November 1975, veranstaltet von Agenor. AGG PKA 1913.
Ibid; Interview with Peter Weish, Munich, 22 August 2013.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 225
counter-conference, directed against the IAEA conference on “Nuclear Power
and the Fuel Cycle” in the same city.38
Thirdly, the transnational network of organizations sponsoring this conference was equally of global scope. It included the Austrian Conservation Society (Österreichischer Naturschutzbund), the European Environmental Bureau
(EEB), Friends of the Earth International, Gensuikin (Japan Congress Against
A- and H-Bombs) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) from
the United States. American leadership played an important role in the organization of the event. The initiative for the event came from the NRDC, a highly
professional advocacy group formed by young lawyers in New York in 1970.
Based in Washington, D. C., NRDC activist S. Jacob Scherr was the key organizer on the American side. He cooperated closely with Peter Weish, Freda
Meissner-Blau and Artur Sikora from the Austrian Conservation Society, the
Austrian local organizers.39 In advance of the conference, Scherr travelled to
Europe, visiting activists all across the continent. Despite its global thrust, the
event involved those European groups and individuals who were part of the
anti-nuclear network that had evolved in the meantime, a network in which the
EEB and Friends of the Earth played a central role, but also included JEF and
Agenor. This network was reinforced by multiple and overlapping memberships of key individuals in the different groups. Moreover, Petra Kelly also
tried to use the presence of international experts in Europe to target the EC,
offering to arrange information meetings with officials in Brussels.40
Fourthly, much more so than the previous events, the Salzburg meeting was
a conference of experts. Clearly, the organizers aimed at matching the IAEA’s
conference by assembling counter-expertise (Topcu 2008) at the highest international level, and facilitating transnational transfers of relevant scientific
evidence. By providing a conference package including printed versions of
most of the statements, the conference offered ample material for the participants to take home. Based on statements by the participants, the conference
started out with an overview of the nuclear debate in the different countries.
Expert reports covered issues the same issues as previous events – notably the
economics of nuclear energy, alternative energy futures, and health and environmental risks. In addition, they included issues that had emerged more recently, such as nuclear proliferation and the consequences of the breeder and
reprocessing technologies. Despite the conference’s focus on science and expertise, the organizers also foresaw a session on “Public Participation in Energy
38
39
40
Weish, Peter, et al. 1977. Introduction to The Salzburg Conference for a Non-Nuclear Future, 29 April to 1 May 1977, Cammer der Gewerbliche[n] Wirtschaft, Salzburg, Austria
[schedule and documentation]. AGG PKA 3176.
Interview with Peter Weish.
Kelly, Petra. Possible Visitors on 28 April 1977, Information Note to Mr. Kuby, Mr. McLaughlin, Mr. Vermeylen, Mr. Deasy, Mr. Barry-Braunthal, Brussels, 5 April 1977. AGG PKA 1954.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 226
Decision-Making: NGO Tactics and Strategies”, thus providing an opportunity
to discuss and diffuse information on protest practices.41 Moreover, the conference produced a resolution addressing the IAEA and demanding a change of
policy.42
The extent to which the Salzburg Conference for a Non-Nuclear Future and
this resolution had an impact on the IAEA is difficult to establish. The archival
records of the IAEA show, however, that its director general closely followed
the activities of the anti-nuclear activists in Austria and internationally.43 That
the IAEA considered the anti-nuclear activists a problem can be taken from one
of the papers presented at the IAEA conference.44 Local and international media covered the conference, alongside the IAEA event.45 In any case, the event
facilitated transnational debate among activists and transfers of expertise at a
global scale.
4.5
Open Debates on Nuclear Energy – Brunner Hearings,
November 1977 / January 1978
When the new European Commissioner for energy, the German liberal Guido
Brunner presented his plans to organize the “Open Debate on Nuclear Energy”
on behalf of the Commission at a press conference on 3 February 1977, he not
only fulfilled one of the core demands of the JEF’s letter writing campaigns,
which had called upon the European institutions to open up to the public controversy on the nuclear issue. Brunner also responded to recommendations and
advice that John Lambert provided to him, on the basis of the lessons drawn
from the Agenor Hearings of 1975. Lambert recommended the same set-up,
with experts and a panel, a similar range of issues, and the publication of the
debates, and suggested that the Commission was in a much better position to
win participants from both sides than Agenor had been. Lambert also suggested
leaving the selection of the critics to the EEB.46 These were of course not the
only sources of inspiration for the holding of public hearings. Indeed, Brunner
41
Weish, Peter, et al. The Salzburg Conference for a Non-Nuclear Future, 29 April to 1 May
1977.
42
Declaration of the Salzburg Conference for a Non-Nuclear Future. AGG PKA 3176.
43
I would like to thank Christian Forstner, Jena, for pointing this out to me.
44
Matthews, R. R., and E. F. Ulsher. CEGB (Central Electricity Generating Board) Experience of
Public Communication. IAEA-CN-36/59 (V). Paper presented at the IAEA International Conference on Nuclear Energy and its Fuel Cycle, Salzburg, 1977. National Archive, London AB
48/1565, 1-8.
45
Fonds für abgesprungene Atomgelehrte. Vorschlag Robert Jungks auf der Salzburger Konferenz für Kernenergiefreie Zukunft. Salzburger Nachrichten, 30 April 1977; Tucker, Anthony.
1977. The Salzburg game of nuclear poker (newspaper article). AGG PKA 3176.
46
Lambert, John. For Guido Brunner: Thoughts on Commission Hearings about Energy Policy,
Group Agenor, Brussels, 25 January 1977. Historical Archives of the European Commission
(HAEC) BAC 144/1987 254, 84-6.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 227
transferred to the Brussels level an instrument to defuse the nuclear conflict
that was practiced all over Europe, including Matthöfer’s Bürgerdialog mentioned above.
When presenting his plans to his fellow Commissioners for approval in June
1975, Brunner pointed to three main reasons for holding the hearings: first, to
contribute to informing the public on the problems of nuclear energy, taking
into account the energy needs of the Community; secondly, to ensure the EC’s
participation in the debate on nuclear energy; and finally, to help define priority
areas for research on nuclear energy that might prove necessary.47 This justification may seem very bureaucratic, reflecting a top-down concept of communication, namely, informing the public about what is necessary. The eventual
hearings that took place at the exhibition center at Heysel in Brussels from 29
November to 1 December 1977, and from 24 to 26 January 1978, however
included the main issues of controversy, despite the emphasis on economic
issues that the session titles suggest. The first session addressed “Energy needs
and supplies for the rest of the century. The role of nuclear energy”, the second
one “Economic growth and energy options. Implications for safety, health and
environmental protection.” An originally planned session on ethical issues was
integrated into the second session, apparently for budgetary reasons.48
The so-called Brunner hearings mark a departure from previous protest
events. While the latter had been organized by the activists to challenge the EC,
the Commission itself organized these hearings. Thus, the European Commission apparently took the popular concerns seriously for the first time. This was
a substantial success for the transnational networks of anti-nuclear activists.
First, it implied that the EC was now willing to engage with views from society
and to at least discuss the previously unquestioned pro-nuclear consensus.
Secondly, the Commission also recognized the Brussels-based European environmental umbrella organization EEB – a core member of the transnational
network – as a legitimate representative of the anti-nuclear cause. As Lambert
had suggested, they invited the EEB to select the anti-nuclear voices for the
Commission’s hearings. In their conclusions from the hearing, the Commission
not only took up some of the activists’ criticism, by promising to strengthen
research on alternative sources of energy. They also promised to consult the
47
48
European Commission, Secretariat General. Debats publics sur l'énergie nucléaire au niveau
des Communautés. Communication de M. Brunner, Brussels, 17 June 1977, SEC (77) 2336,
O. J. 435/2 point 22, 1-7, HAEC. The record of the discussion among the Commissioners on
this item is missing from the verbatim records of the Commission meetings at the Historical
Archives of the European Commission in Brussels.
Brunner, Guido, European Commission to Louis-Paul Suetens, President of the EEB, 11
November 1977. HAEC BAC 144 1985 250, 52.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 228
EEB regularly in the future.49 This, of course, did not amount to a change in
policy.
In any case, by providing a meeting place for transnational anti-nuclear activists – many of whom had met before, for instance in Salzburg, the Brunner
hearings contributed to reinforcing and institutionalizing global transnational
cooperation. Meeting in Brussels on 28 November, the day before the hearings
started, activists from different parts of the world agreed on the plans to establish a “World Information Service on Energy (WISE)” to coordinate activities
and to distribute information via a regular newsletter.50 These plans had been
developed by a working group including Agenor’s John Lambert and Nina
Gladitz, a German film-maker, who shot documentaries on Wyhl and uranium
mining in Australia – the latter together with Jo Leinen (Kirchhof 2014a),51 as
well as Siegfried Christiansen from the Danish Organisationen til Oplysning
om Atomkraft (OOA, Organization for Nuclear Information). This organization,
which held the copyright to the anti-nuclear sun symbol “Nuclear energy – no
thanks”, was willing to offer a certain percentage share of their proceeds to
fund the new transnational body.52
5.
Conclusions
What do these episodes of transnational anti-nuclear protest against the pronuclear policy of international organizations in the 1970s tell us about the history of anti-nuclear protest in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s more generally?
What is the added value of taking a transnational perspective?
First, while previous social science and historical research suggests that antinuclear activists in the 1970s and 1980s primarily addressed local and national
authorities, adapting to the opportunities these institutions provided, this article
demonstrates that representatives of a number of key anti-nuclear groups from
49
50
51
52
EEB. 1978. Response to the Communication on the Conclusions drawn by the Commission
from the Public Debates on Nuclear Energy, Brussels, 14 July 1978. HAEC BAC 144 1985 250,
75-7; European Commission. 1978. Conclusions drawn by the Commission from the Public
Debates on Nuclear Energy. Communication from the Commission to the Council. COM (78)
129 final and COM (78) 129 final/2, 31 March 1978. <http://aei.pitt.edu/8942/>. (accessed 3
January 2014).
World Information Service on Energy (WISE). WISE Bulletin No. 1 May 1978. <http://www
10.antenna.nl/wise/b1/b1-1.pdf>. (accessed 20 December 2013).
Leinen, Josef M. 8 June 1978. To Petra Kelly. AGG PKA 2249.
Christiansen, Siegfried, Organisationen til Oplysning om Atomkraft (OOA), to the participants in The Salzburg Conference for a non-nuclear future, 29 April-1 May 1977 and the
World Congress against Nuclear Power, Gothenburg, 13-16 May 1976, Copenhagen, 11 January 1978. AGG PKA 3176; OOA. Transnationaler Energie-Informationsdienst mit Geld von
der lachenden Sonne. An alle Bürgerinitiativen gegen Atomkraftwerke, Copenhagen, 14.
Dezember 1977. AGG PKA 3176.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 229
Europe and overseas directed their protest at the international level. They targeted those IOs involved in the promotion of nuclear power, such as the EC
and the IAEA. This is an interesting finding, since transnational protest against
IOs is usually associated with the advent of globalization in the 1990s.
Secondly, while local transnational protest at Wyhl inspired many of the activists involved in transnational interaction, as it resonated with their transnationalism and European federalist ideas, protest directed at the international
level acted as a catalyst strengthening transnational cooperation. Protest events
against IO’s pro-nuclear policies provided important meeting places for the
groups and activists involved and facilitated the formation of informal transnational networks. In the 1970s, this did not amount to a broad-based transnational social movement. Only a very small minority of the anti-nuclear activists
actually engaged in transnational cooperation. The obstacles to transnational
cooperation were considerable: collaborating across borders usually required
foreign language skills, time and (access to) resources for international travel
and communication, as well as organizational and intercultural skills. A small
number of internationally trained individuals with great political ambitions,
such as Petra Kelly, for instance, played a key role in transnational exchange,
building up network ties with experts and activists across borders and across
continents. As transnational mediators, they also facilitated transnational transfers of scientific (counter-) expertise, such as on the effects of low-level radiation, as well as information on protest tactics, thus strengthening anti-nuclear
movements across borders. Ideological commitments to internationalism and
European federalism, shared by groups such as Agenor and the JEF, seem to
have been a key motivation for some of the groups and individuals most actively involved in transnational cooperation.
Thirdly, recurrent transnational cooperation among a relatively small group
of individuals at a series of protest events in the mid-1970s seems to have created a dynamic of transnational network formation and institutionalization.
Activists quickly realized the limits of informal exchange, and started to establish institutions to facilitate transnational cooperation and transfers of information, such the World Information Service on Energy (WISE). Subsequently
in the early 1980s, these transnational networks not only engaged in protest, but
also attempted to act more constructively, promoting new, alternative sources
of energy.53
Fourthly, we may ask whether transnational interaction actually made a difference. Clearly, transnational protest did not lead to immediate policy change
in the EC or the IAEA. This is hardly surprising, given that both institutions
were legally committed to the promotion of nuclear power. At the same time,
these protests clearly challenged the technocratic consensus, and led these IOs
53
Silva, Mayra, Citizens' Energy Project, to Petra Kelly, BBU [1981]. AGG PKA 1972.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 230
to take the concerns of the critics more seriously, given their resonance in a
transnational public sphere. Furthermore, by exploring the relations between
NGOs and IOs in a transnational perspective, these findings contribute to the
emerging field of research on the role of IOs in the emerging policy area of the
environment (Borowy 2014; Kaiser and Meyer forthcoming 2015; Schulz
2010; Schulz-Walden 2013; Wöbse 2011).
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HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 235
Civil Disobedience in Transnational Perspective:
American and West German Anti-NuclearPower Protesters, 1975-1982
Michael L. Hughes ∗
Abstract: »Ziviler Ungehorsam in transnationaler Perspektive. Amerikanische
und Westdeutsche AKW-Gegner 1975-1982«. Transnational transfers are in practice transnational adaptations. Ideas and practices from one culture can only
be implemented in another in the context of the target culture’s values, institutions, and history. So there is no reason to expect that Germans would or
should have simply adopted the American nonviolent civil disobedience model
– to the contrary. And when Germans did look to that model, they proved more
open to violence against things and even against people than their American
counterparts. And rather than accepting punishment for deliberately breaking
the law as honorable result of a commitment to democratic governance, Germans rejected it as “criminalization” of dissent. Civil disobedience in the US developed amid a powerful religious basis and broad acceptance of the American
system’s legitimacy. It developed in Germany amid a constitutional right to “resistance” and widespread doubts about the existing system’s legitimacy. Hence,
many West German anti-nuclear protesters could find militant, perhaps violent,
activism fully justified and could deny to the state they mistrusted any right to
treat protesters as criminals, apparently no matter what laws they broke.
Keywords: Civil disobedience, transnational, nonviolence, criminalization of
demonstrators.
1.
Introduction
When West German citizens occupied a proposed nuclear-power-plant site at
Wyhl, they followed the model of French protesters who had occupied the site
of a proposed lead factory in Marckolsheim in the Alsace (Mossmann 1975).
The Wyhl site-occupation subsequently inspired American citizens to occupy
the proposed nuclear-plant site at Seabrook, New Hampshire. West Germans
had since the 1960s known of and implemented some civil disobedience tactics
(Klimke 2010, 44, 53-4; Ebert 1984), but forms of civil disobedience used at
Seabrook in turn inspired subsequent West German actions at nuclear-plant and
∗
Michael L. Hughes, Department of History, Wake Forest University, 1834 Wake Forest Rd.,
Winston-Salem, NC 27106-7806, USA; [email protected].
DOI: 10.12759/hsr.39.2014.1.236-253
nuclear-missile sites. Transnational connections existed. Yet the picture proves
complicated when one looks closely at anti-nuclear protests, such as those at
Seabrook and Diablo Canyon in the US and at Brokdorf and Gorleben in West
Germany. In examining publications from and about groups such as the Clamshell and Abalone Alliances in the US and the Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz (BBU) and Bürgerinitiative Umweltschutz Unterelbe
(BUU) in Germany, it is obvious that transnational transfer cannot occur
through simple adoption of foreign models. Rather, those in the target culture
must adapt what they receive, to make it usable in the context of their own
culture, values, traditions, and needs.
Scholars have only begun exploring systematically how such transnational
transfers occur (Chabot and Duyvendak 2002; Werner and Zimmermann 2006;
Meyer 2011). While Martin Klimke (2010) reviews early West German reactions to civil disobedience and Christian Joppke (1993) notes debates in American and West German anti-nuclear movements over nonviolence, scholars of
the transnational have not yet focused on civil disobedience. American antinuclear activists drew primarily on their own history of civil disobedience, so
this article will explore transnational transfer by focusing on the West German
reception of the American civil disobedience model. It will not explore the
direct mechanisms of exchange among anti-nuclear protesters. Rather, it will
explore how West Germans, acting through a broad social movement, actually
applied in their culture strategies of civil disobedience developed in a different
culture.
Simply making ideas and practices from one culture available in another
cannot produce the same effects in both. The members of the target culture
have to adapt those ideas and practices, to incorporate them in a very different
context. As Chabot and Duyvendak (2002, 701-2, 706) point out, discussions
of transnational diffusion often have a misleading essentialist bias, treating
what diffuses as “pre-given, fixed, and coherent entities,” when in fact “diffusion items may be dynamic, ambiguous, and malleable.” Hence, transnational
interactions are not simple transfers but rather complex processes in which
elements do not stay intact but change. (Werner and Zimmermann 2004) Although studies of transnational exchange can speak of “functional equivalents,”
(Wehler 2010) functional substitutes might be a better term. Because diffusion
can be dynamic and malleable, elements that develop out of a transfer to a
target state can be substantively and significantly different from what obtained
in the originating country.
Hence, there is no reason to expect that Germans would or should have
simply adopted the American civil disobedience model – to the contrary. A few
Germans did choose to adopt the US model as normative, as a pre-given, fixed,
and coherent entity. Most West Germans, however, took from that model only
those aspects that they saw as useful and then adapted them in varying ways to
their circumstances. Some elements, such as affinity groups, were easily adaptHSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 237
able. However, the West German anti-nuclear movement could not fully implement the commitment to nonviolence and openness to accepting the legal
consequences of civil disobedience which characterized the American antinuclear movement. On the one hand, it lacked the specific history of nonviolent
civil disobedience, the broad religious belief, and the acceptance of the state’s
legitimacy that characterized the US; on the other hand, it had a deep mistrust
of the state, active militants open to violence, and a rhetoric of resistance that
could justify militant action and a refusal to take the state and its laws completely seriously.
2.
Transnational Adaptations
2.1
Looking Abroad for Models of Direct Action
The first transnational anti-nuclear influence ran from West Germany to the
US. West Germans occupied the site of a planned nuclear-power plant at Wyhl
and forced an eventual end to construction. Two Americans who visited Wyhl
proposed using that occupation as a model to stop construction of a nuclearpower plant at Seabrook (Wasserman 1977). Anna Gyorgy was a major conduit, or transnational mediator, as Kirchhof and Meyer (2014) define it in the
introduction to this special issue, as she introduced Americans to West German
developments, based on her reading and discussions with visiting German
activists. The Seabrook occupations became a model for anti-nuclear-power
groups across the US.1
West German activists explicitly looked to Seabrook as a model for conducting an effective direct action, especially civil disobedience, against the
nuclear-power industry. Germans had occasionally broken laws in pursuit of
political goals (e.g., socialist activities under the Anti-Socialist Laws in the
19th century), and their protest movements had adapted some American civildisobedience techniques, such as the sit-in. Nonetheless, they lacked a selfconscious tradition of civil disobedience as legitimate political action in a democracy (Rucht 1984). The American experience offered theoretical and practical models. Some West Germans drew on the broad theoretical discussions in
the US (Ebert 1984; Glotz 1983); others looked to practice (Sternstein 1981a,
44). BBU leader Jo Leinen was at the 1977 Seabrook occupation, and, Anna
1
Ralph Jimenez, A Beautiful Show of Support on the Green, Granite State Independence 20
(Sept. 1976). University of New Hampshire Archives, Durham, NH, Clamshell Alliance Papers
[hereafter UNH Clamshell], Oversize Box 4; Anna Gyorgy, “Europeans Oppose Nukes,” Clamshell Alliance News III: 3 (Feb.-Mar. 1980), ibid., Oversize Box 1. The Archie Fund and Griffin
Fund financed research for this article. The author thanks the staffs of the archives cited and
Dr. Jan-Henrik Meyer, Dr. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, and, especially, Dr. Gloria J. Fitzgibbon.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 238
Gyorgy wrote, German activists visited Seabrook “specifically to learn ways of
organizing non-violent civil disobedience demonstrations” (Gyorgy 1979, 396).2
2.2
Organization
An explicit borrowing lay in organization. The American anti-nuclear movement’s use of civil disobedience was rooted in the Society of Friends (Quakers), a religious sect committed to social justice (Bell 1968, 9, 33). Leftists
from a rural commune and local Seabrook-area activists met in early 1976 to
form the “Clamshell Alliance,” as an umbrella for groups opposing the planned
Seabrook plant. For advice on organizing a nonviolent mass movement, they
invited to the meeting two Quaker activists (one of whom would head training
for the Clamshell). The Quakers brought the idea of organizing each action
around affinity groups, preferably pre-existing but if necessary ad hoc groups
of individuals who would support one another during an action, provide a decision-making structure, and assist in isolating provocateurs. Absolutely committed, as Quakers, to nonviolence, they established that participation in an intense
training session in nonviolent protest would be a prerequisite for participation
in any Clamshell Alliance direct action (e.g., occupation) (Wasserman 1977,
15; Gyorgy 1979, 397). Affinity groups and training were, hopefully, to ensure
that each individual would act responsibly and nonviolently under the stress of
an action. Quakers also brought a centuries-old tradition of consensus decisionmaking. Other American anti-nuclear alliances emulated these practices.3
West German activists in groups such as the Hamburger Initiative Kirchliche Mitarbeiter und gewaltfreie Aktion and the Republic of the Free Wendland
sought to adopt the model of affinity groups and training – though the movement as a whole did not. Affinity groups made sense as a way to organize a
complex, potentially dangerous action. In promoting affinity groups, West
Germans shared American goals: mutual support under police pressure, easier
decision-making, and isolating provocateurs. Germans who planned blockades
did seek to organize training, but unlike the Americans, Germans in the late
1970s and early 1980s anti-nuclear movement never sought to train every protester who would engage in a site occupation or blockade (Painke 1997). A
particular problem was the appearance at direct actions in West Germany of
relatively large militant groups with their own agendas. The West Germans did
2
3
Göttinger Arbeitskreis gegen Atomenergie an Redaktion, Atomexpress, 14 Sept. 1978, Archiv
Aktiv, Hamburg [hereafter, AA H], Gorleben. Bundesweite Zusammenarbeit von gewaltfreien
Aktionsgruppen, 1976; Gorleben im Herbst, ibid.; Keine Ferienreise, Südwest Presse, 29 Sept.
1979, ibid.; Anna Gyorgy, Europeans Oppose Nukes, Clamshell Alliance News, III: 3 (Feb.Mar. 1980), UNH Clamshell, Oversize Box 1.
R.I. Clam, UNH Clamshell, Series 1, Box 1, f 12; Occupier’s Handbook, ibid., Box 7, f 3; Clamshell Alliance, For immediate release, Nov. 16, 1977, ibid., Box 2, f 2; Diane Clancy, Nonviolence Preparation Committee Minutes to the Coordinating Committee, ibid., Box 5, f 5.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 239
implement an American-style consensus process at a site occupation near
Gorleben (Republic of the Free Wendland). Yet West German groups did not
commit themselves to consensus decision-making, as American anti-nuclear
alliances did. The American anti-nuclear movement could call here on the
Quaker’s and Civil Rights Movement’s histories of training and the Quaker
tradition of consensus to encourage people to acquiesce in these policies, while
the Germans had no such precedent to prompt people to comply.4
2.3
Nonviolence, Violence, and Love
While nonviolence was a central principle for movements in both countries,
debates over defining violence/Gewalt plagued both. Both debated whether
violence against things was acceptable. A few American environmentalists did
engage in vandalism or sabotage, but the movement overwhelmingly rejected
it. Many American activists held that even fence-cutting, as destruction of
property, was not acceptable. The Clamshell Alliance would split over this
issue, as a militant minority argued for cutting fences, but even the militants
rejected broader property destruction (Zunes 1978, 30). Other American antinuclear alliances also explicitly rejected any property destruction or sabotage
(Birchler and Miller 1981, 29). Although the BBU and other groups generally
rejected violence against things, not every German protester agreed (Rucht
1984). And once German nuclear-plant contractors began elaborately fortifying
their sites, widespread support existed, even in the BBU, for piercing those
fortifications however necessary. Moreover, sabotage of construction- and
power-company equipment often accompanied German anti-nuclear actions.
Hence, as West Germans adapted the American model, commitment to private
property proved less constraining in West Germany than in the US – mostly
because in the US anti-nuclear activists broadly agreed that property destruction would too sharply erode popular support.5
4
5
Vorbereitungspapier für die nächsten Blockaden in Brokdorf, [1981], AA H, BrokdorfBlockaden. Gewaltfreie Aktionsgruppen; Gorleben im Herbst, [Nov. 1979], AA H, Gorleben.
Bundesweite Zusammenarbeit von gewaltfreien Aktionsgruppen, 1976; Protokoll des Treffens zur Platzbesetzung der Tiefbohrstelle 1004 in Trebel am 22./23. März 1980, ibid.; Thesen
und Fragen zum dezentral-gewaltfreien Konzept, Anfang Januar 79, ibid.; Autokonvoi nach
Gorleben, Atom Express 13 (Apr. 1979): 11; Einige Getroffene aus der Gewaltfreien Aktion
Göttingen, Das Gespenst der Einheit der Vielfalt, Atom Express 31 (Nov./Dec. 1982): 14;
Bremer Positionspapier für den Fall einer polizeilichen Räumung, Papiertigerarchiv Berlin
[hereafter PAB], Gorleben. Wendland-bewegung, 1982.
Clamshell Alliance Coordinating Committee Meeting Minutes, 19 Feb. 1978, UNH Clamshell,
Series 1, Box 5, f 6; Occupation Contingencies, UNH Clamshell, Series 1, Box 7, f 1; John
Baringer in Guidelines for Strategy and New Program Areas, UNH Clamshell, Series 1, Box 7,
f 10; Wüstenhagen: Den Weg der Gewalt lehnen wir ab, Die Welt 15 Feb. 1977, AA H, Brokdorf Blockaden, Gewaltfreie Aktionsgruppen; “Steuerstreik wird erwogen,“ Frankfurter
Rundschau 16 Feb. 1977, PA Presse 102-18/24, 1; Hamburg, Zum Widerstand gegen WAA
Gorleben, 2 Aug. 1978, AA H, Gorleben. Bundesweite Zusammenarbeit von gewaltfreien Ak-
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 240
Beyond violence against things, some German opponents of nuclear power
were willing to accept violence against persons, which was unacceptable in the
American movement (Daubert and Moran 1985, 12). Facing a racist, often
violent White majority, 1950s African-Americans, who developed the American civil-disobedience tradition in the Deep South, dared not risk violence
against persons. Moreover, for all the violence that has plagued the US on an
individual level and, crucially, in racial politics, by the 1970s resort to violence
against persons by radicals was a marginal phenomenon (Varon 2004; Zunes
1978). So even when relatively militant Americans sought to break through the
fence around Seabrook in the face of a big police and National Guard deployment, they promised to forgo any violence toward individuals (Rodenko 1979).
And they did not resort to stone-throwing or other attacks on law-enforcement
personnel. As a report from the conservative Rand Corporation on anti-nuclear
protest stated, “There are no documented instances of any acts by U. S. groups
that might have constituted violence against persons” (Daubert and Moran
1985, 12).6
Major German proponents of a willingness to resort to violence against persons were members of the K-Gruppen, the competing communist splinter parties, or of the anarchist Autonomen. These groups saw anti-nuclear activism
primarily as a tool to broaden the constituency for their larger political projects
(Markovits and Gorski 1993). In denouncing nuclear plants, though, they asserted that the “terroristic Gewalt” of the bourgeoisie in building nuclear plants
must be met by the “revolutionary Gewalt” of the masses. They argued, correctly, that even nonviolent protesters would face police brutality, so they
might as well defend themselves; they asked what a couple of stones were
compared to the violence of the police, what a stick was compared to Hiroshima. And numerous anti-nuclear demonstrations in West Germany included
extended battles between police and groups of rock-throwing Leftists. American and German anti-nuclear-power movements opposed violence against
persons. However, Germany’s militants were numerous enough that Germans
were unable to enforce nonviolence against the determined minority that embraced violence (Kühle 1976, 66).7
An explicit emphasis on the humanity of one’s opponents strongly influenced American but not German civil disobedience. American Civil Rights
leaders rooted in Christian belief (usually clergymen) had insisted that protest-
6
7
tionsgruppen, 1976-; Gorleben. Bohrloch verstopft, PAB, Gorleben. Wendlandbewegung,
1982; Widerstand gegen Tiefbohrungsbeginn, ibid.
Clamshell Alliance Coordinating Committee Meeting Minutes, Feb. 19, 1977, UNH Clamshell,
Series 1, Box 5, f 6.
KPD/ML, Landesverband Wasserkante, Brokdorf, [late Nov. 1976], PAB, Brokdorf Bewegung,
76/77; Ivan in Walter Moßmann, Mitteleuropa weiträumig umfahren, Tageszeitung 17 Aug.
1982, in PAB, Gorleben. Wendland Bewegung, -1982; Brokdorf. Mit allen Mitteln, Der Spiegel 35 (9), 23 Feb. 1981.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 241
ers must “love” their opponents. Yet the oppressed minority of AfricanAmericans concurred because they sought to minimize violent opposition from
Southerners who had feared race war for centuries and had often engaged in
lynching (Bell 1968, 26, 36-7, 111-4; King 1958, 84-7, 98; Washington 1991,
164-5). The more secular anti-nuclear-power movement, whose members had
often experienced brutal conflicts with police during anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, similarly embraced an explicit commitment to treat one’s opponents
as “human beings,” to avoid renewed conflicts (Kidder 1978, 72) American
protesters had also learned to meet with police and Guard before each protest,
to describe their intentions (Daubert and Moran 1985, 7). And when the Clamshell Alliance held a dance one year after 1,414 of them had been arrested and
held for up to two weeks, they invited the National Guardsmen and State
Troopers who had guarded them to join the fun. German protesters did occasionally say that their enemy was the nuclear power industry and the state, not
the police; but they had not learned to seek meetings with police, and when a
few did, other activists denounced them for betrayal. German Protestant clergy
did seek to mediate between police and demonstrators, but officials and many
demonstrators were dismissive of them (Kühle 1976, 66). And even when
protesters prepared flyers for the police, they could be snarky (“To the
uni(n)formed officials”) (Zint 1980, 55, 102). Hence, the relationship between
demonstrators and law enforcement was much more fraught in Germany than
in the US, in the violence of some militants and in the abusive language often
directed at police. Partly this reflected the greater influence in Germany of
militant groups open to violence, though undoubtedly also the significantly
higher levels of police brutality at German than at American anti-nuclear
demonstrations. Yet it also reflected a singular emphasis in the American
movement on human interconnection, an emphasis rooted in AfricanAmericans’ particular needs in a racist South, in many protesters’ religious
commitments, and in recent experiences.8
2.4
Arrest and Punishment
The American willingness to accept arrest and punishment as part of civil disobedience is an anomaly. This notion, developed as a weapon of the oppressed
in a nominally free society, was rooted in Thoreau and Gandhi but powerfully
reinforced by the Civil Rights movement. Certainly, most American protesters
8
Occupier’s Handbook, UNH Clamshell, Ser. 1, Box 7, f 3; Kathryn Mulhearn and John Fabiani,
To the Editor, Apr. 11, 1978, UNH Clamshell, Series 1, Box 2, f 3; Rita Schnell, Umstrittener
Dialog mit der Polizei, Taz, 29 Aug. 1982, Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis, E.4 Umweltzentrum
Bielefeld – Anti-Atomarchiv, 188; Hans-Jürgen Benedict, Staatsgewalt oder Protest’gewalt‘
in Brokdorf oder: hat die gewaltfreie Aktion noch eine Chance?, Junge Kirche (Beiheft zu
Heft 1/1977).
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 242
preferred to avoid punishment if they could and would argue for acquittal when
tried. A very few American activists did reject any need to accept punishment
in a fight against “immoral” laws (Zinn 1968). Yet the willingness to accept
arrest remained central to the American anti-nuclear movement (Bircheler and
Miller 1981). At American anti-nuclear-power demonstrations, thousands were
arrested. Indeed, when the Clamshell Alliance decided, under pressure from
locals, to replace an illegal site occupation with a legal demonstration, a number of demonstrators complained vociferously that they would miss their
chance to be arrested. Crucially, most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the
American system as self-evident. So even if one saw problems serious enough
that one would disobey the law to call attention to them, one still had to accept
punishment, to acknowledge that legitimacy and to emphasize the sincerity of
one’s objections and one’s willingness to sacrifice (Peters 2012, 5, 29-32, 37-8;
Smith and Zepp 1986, 54-5, 59, 61, 68). Some protesters did hope that mass
arrests would so overburden the system as to move the government to reconsider its support for nuclear power. One would not expect middle- and uppermiddle-class citizens anywhere to risk going to jail. The unusual willingness of
significant numbers of Americans to do so rests on the moral force of the successful American Civil Rights movement and the broad legitimacy of the US
political system.9
In the late 1970s and early 1980s anti-nuclear movement, a small number of
West Germans did embrace being willing to go to jail as a crucial element in
civil disobedience (Glotz 1983). They believed, with activist and student of
nonviolence Wolfgang Sternstein, that their “willingness to accept detrimental
consequences” would help them win over the majority and that “willingly accepting the punishments for infringing the law would show that their resistance was
serious” (Sternstein 1981b, 26). A few demonstrators even voluntarily confessed
to police that they had been at a banned demonstration where some were arrested,
saying that “if you convict others, then you must convict me” (Zint 1980, 140).
And some West Germans did also envision mass arrests gumming up the system,
provoking the government to rethink the nuclear program.10
Americans and Germans reacted very differently to the experience of arrest.
Americans certainly complained about the food, the toilet facilities, and the
9
10
Alden Meyer, Some Thoughts on the June 24th O/R and the Rath Proposal, May 20, 1978,
UNH Clamshell, Series 1, Box 7, f 15; Sue, letter from dover armory, free flowing [Ames, IA]
4 (5), May 1977; Jim Frazer, Proposal. Seabrook Summer 1980 – preliminary sketch for a
coordinated Clamshell Alliance campaign, ibid., Box 1, f 11; Clamshell Alliance Coordinating Committee Minutes, June 4, 1978, ibid., Box 5, f 10.
Bauern-Prozesse: Passiver Widerstand=Gewalt, Atom Express (17), Dec. 1979/Jan. 1980: 16;
Wie soll es weitergehen im Widerstand gegen das Atomprogramm der Bundesregierung?
[mid-1979], AA H, Gorleben. Bundesweite Zusammenarbeit von gewaltfreien Aktionsgruppe,
1976-; Jan Stein, An die Gewaltfreien Aktionsgruppen über den Korat, 4 Dez. 1981, AA H,
Brokdorf Blockaden. Gewaltfreien Aktionsgruppen.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 243
arbitrariness of jail. Yet the predominant tone in their descriptions of arrest is,
curiously enough, almost joyous. Protesters felt that they were engaged in an
admirable act of civil courage and that being arrested proved that their actions
were serious. Mass arrests leading to mass incarceration, sometimes for days,
meant that protesters got to create in jail a community of the honorable (Bircheler
and Miller, 47-57; Rosenblith 1977, 8). Thoreau and the Civil Rights Movement
had convinced American protesters that sometimes the honorable citizen belongs
in jail. The predominant tone among German anti-nuclear-power-plant protesters reporting on being arrested is resentment. Even having to provide fingerprints was repeatedly denounced, described as “the most humiliating moment
of my life.” Again, Germans could not look back to a powerful, honored tradition that legitimated what was, after all, a socially problematic and often painful arrest experience. And the normal pattern in Germany was to take protesters’ personal data and release them within hours, so the extended experience of
communal arrest was not available. Fear that arrest would lead to a Berufsverbot, a ban on any government employment, played some role (though it did not
prevent thousands from risking arrest at anti-nuclear-missile demonstrations a
couple of years later). Moreover, German protesters reported far more brutality
by police in taking even nonviolent demonstrators into custody than did Americans, which certainly made the prospect of arrest less appealing (Kleinert 1981,
32). Reasonably enough, people everywhere normally see arrest as a terrifying,
humiliating experience. One can perhaps find it relatively easy, intellectually, to
identify arrest for a cause as honorable – but it takes unusual historical and social
support to experience it as honorable, support that, for historical reasons, Americans had and Germans, ca. 1980, did not.11
2.5
“Criminalization” and “Solidarity”
While a few West Germans would accept arrest and punishment for civil disobedience, the movement as a whole rejected the notion that protesters should
expect to be arrested and punished if they engaged in civil disobedience. When
Sternstein participated in a blockade, he complained that many of his fellow
protesters were grossly ignorant of the principles of nonviolent action, including the willingness to accept the consequences of, the punishment for, breaking
the law (Sternstein 1982). And while German groups such as the BBU and
BUU embraced nonviolence and civil disobedience, they did not present going to
jail or accepting other punishments as an admirable and necessary outcome of
11
Sue, letter from dover armory, free flowing [Ames, IA] 4, 5 May 1977, UNH Clamshell,
Oversize Box 4; Richard Asinof, No-Nukers Demonstrate Their Strength at Seabrook, Valley
Advocate IV (38), May 11, 1977, UNH Clamshell, Series 1, Box 1, f 3; Ulfrid Kleinert, Blockade
am Haupteingang, Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, 8 March 1981, PA-Presse, 10218/24, 9; LKW für LKW stoppen wir das AKW, Gewaltfreie Blockaden gegen das AKW Brokdorf, [4/81]: 9, AA H, Brokdorf-Blockaden Gewaltfreie Aktionsgruppen.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 244
breaking the law. Instead, their comments on state attempts to punish those who
committed civil disobedience generally dismissed punishment as unacceptable.12
Many anti-nuclear protesters simply rejected the notion that breaking the
law in an effort to stop potentially disastrous nuclear-plant construction could
be a criminal act. Site occupations and blockades clearly broke German law.
Yet German anti-nuclear protesters rejected any attempt to hold people accountable, complaining that doing so was “criminalization of dissent,” implying that in this context, acts of law-breaking were not in fact crimes. Even
while citing “the generally recognized actions of Martin Luther King” (who
had of course proudly gone to jail), a protester who signed himself “Günter
from Marburg” insisted that blockaders must “attack the sanctions against us
morally, theologically, legal-philosophically, and politically” to “defend
against legal sanctions now and in the future.” Protesters often insisted they
should not be held accountable for breaking the law because of their righteous
motives and often demanded amnesty for every anti-nuclear protester accused
of a crime, any crime. The “Osnabrücker” wrote to Atom Express, “What we
did in Brokdorf does not have even a hint of the criminal, but rather was fully
justified resistance to the life-threatening nuclear energy” so that “each and
every legal proceeding against opponents of nuclear plants must be terminated
immediately and without conditions!!! [sic]”13
The rhetoric around the trial of two protesters, Michael Duffke and Markus
Mohr, illuminates the role of fears of “criminalization” and calls for “solidarity” in the way many German anti-nuclear-power protesters addressed lawbreaking. The press published – and republished – a photo from a Brokdorf
demonstration that showed demonstrators beating a police officer. After a
nation-wide manhunt, police identified Duffke and Mohr as among the attackers, and they were convicted of assault. Interestingly, anti-nuclear activists did
not argue that they were innocent. Rather, many argued they should be freed
because the assault took place after police had brutally attacked (other) demonstrators, so that it was a matter of “self-defense.” Or that the authorities had
more or less arbitrarily chosen to make an example of these two, which they
had, so that the accusations against them were really aimed at “criminalizing”
all anti-nuclear protesters. Hence, “solidarity” required that all protesters de12
13
See. e.g., Steuerstreik wird erwogen, Frankfurter Rundschau 16. Feb. 1977, PA Presse, 10218/24, 1; Wo Recht zu Unrecht wird, wird der Widerstand zur Pflicht, Unsere Zeit 27 Feb.
1981, ibid.
Was wir fordern und warum, Easter 1975, in Wüstenhagen, 1975, 85; Bürgerinitiative Umweltschutz Unterelbe/Hamburg, Kommt massenhaft! PAB Brokdorf Bewegung 76/77; Die
Braunschweiger Beschlüsse, graswurzel revolution 40 (Mar./Apr. 1979): 29; M.S. Noch größer als Hannover? radikal. Sozialistische Zeitung für Westberlin (Extrablatt August 1979), in
PAB Gorleben Wendland Bewegung, -1982; Günter, Marburg, Abwehr und Verwertung der
juristischen Repression nach der Blockade vom Juli 8! AA H Brokdorf-Blockaden Gewaltfreie
Aktionsgruppen;. Brief der Osnabrücker, Atom Express 25 (July/Aug. 1981): 14.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 245
mand that the two men be set free, implicitly whether they were guilty or innocent of assault (Dokumentation zum Brokdorf 1982; Spörl 1982; Markovits and
Gorski 1993, 104). When one anti-nuclear activist noted that some demonstrators – whether Duffke and Mohr or not – at a supposedly nonviolent antinuclear demonstration had brutally attacked a police officer, a human being,
she was reviled for breaking solidarity. By focusing on possible “criminalization” of dissent and the primacy of solidarity, German protesters were implicitly – but often vehemently – rejecting a conception of civil disobedience as
accepting, as a matter of conscience, the consequences of the deliberate breaking of valid laws.14
In part, German protesters focused on the threat of criminalization of all protesters because some politicians were acting as though they wanted to suppress,
and perhaps criminalize, demonstrations in the Federal Republic. Some US
officials acted similarly, but they had little impact in the 1970s and 1980s
(Wasserman 1978, 15). In West Germany, police at demonstrations were gratuitously brutal in dealing with demonstrators, but no one was prosecuted for
such brutality; indeed, politicians had only praise for police for dealing with
“disorder.” Authorities imposed blanket, geographically far-reaching bans on
several big demonstrations, which made attending the demonstrations a crime.
And the most massive instances of civil disobedience involved tens of thousands of citizens violating such bans by demonstrating (though they scarcely
expected that police could arrest individuals amid such enormous crowds).
Moreover, the CDU/CSU pushed to reverse the 1970 liberalization of demonstration law, putatively to make it easier to capture the violent few but in ways
that would have limited demonstration rights. And some Land governments
sought to impose on individual protesters the policing costs and damages arising from demonstrations – in ways that seemed designed to so intimidate citizens that they would hesitate to demonstrate. Finally, the anti-nuclear movement developed during West Germany’s battle with terrorism, which included
legislation that threatened civil liberties.15
14
15
Kirsten, “Kommentar zur Öffentlichkeitsausschluß, Atom Express 28 (Mar./Apr. 1982): 12,
and Kommentar zur Öffentlichkeitsausschluß, Atom Express 29 (May/June 1982): 17-27.
Clamshell Alliance, For immediate release, May 6, 1977, UNH Clamshell, Series 1, Box 2, f2;
JF, Attacken auf Grundrechte, Vorwärts (26 Feb. 1981), PA-Presse, 102-18/24, 8; zum Brokdorf-Demonstrationsverbot, Heute Mittag, SWF, 23 Feb. 1981, PA-Presse, 102-18/24, 8;
Presseerklärung Bürgerinitiative Umweltschutz Unterelbe, 14 Feb. 1977, PAB, Brokdorf Bewegung 76/77; Kapituliert die Strafjustiz?, Die Zeit (10), 5 Mar. 1982; Die Liberalisierung hat
sich nicht bewährt, Der Spiegel 35 (46), 9 Nov. 1981; Die Rechnung vor der Polizei, Die Zeit
49 (27 Nov. 1981); Recht. Dank mit Rechnung, Der Spiegel 36 (33), 16 Aug. 1982; Rudolf
Augstein, Atomstaat oder Rechtsstaat, ibid. 31 (10), 28 Feb. 1977.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 246
2.6
Religion and Resistance
The relative weakness of religion as a force in German life played a role as
well. In the Federal Republic, support for nonviolent civil disobedience, with
an acceptance of punishment, often came out of the Lutheran church (Schüring
2012). For example, Theodor Ebert, a layman who held church leadership
roles, played a central role in promoting civil disobedience (Ebert 1984). A
number of Lutheran pastors and church workers actively supported civil disobedience and occasionally participated in it, e.g., blockading the plant-site in
Brokdorf. Yet a German tradition of anti-clericalism meant that people of faith
could be ignored or ridiculed in public discourse in a way that just was not
possible in the United States, where even most radicals know that it is impossible to build a mass movement without support from religious believers and
churches committed to the social gospel (Kühle 1976, 66; Benedict 1981, 53-6;
Seehase 1976). And Germans could not easily appeal to a concept of civil
disobedience as an act of “witness,” independent of its immediate effects,
whereas American protesters did (Birchler and Miller 1981, 70; Jezer 1977, 212). Civil disobedience in the US had some non-religious roots (e.g., sit-ins by
workers in the 1930s (Cooney and Michalowski 1977)), and many anti-nuclear
protesters were not religious. Yet since the successful Civil Rights Movement,
civil disobedience in the US has had a powerful religious thrust that influences
expectations and actions.16
Rather than appeal to religion, Germans appealed to resistance. (Meyer et al.
1984) West Germany’s constitution guaranteed each German the right of resistance against any threat to the constitutional order, if other means were unavailable. Anti-nuclear-power activists referred repeatedly to this constitutional
right as they asserted their right to act, even by breaking laws, against the dire
threat nuclear power posed (Küchenhoff 1980, 27, 29, 31). Indeed, they frequently asserted, “When Recht (justice or law) becomes Unrecht (injustice),
resistance becomes a duty.” Conservatives and supporters of nuclear power
complained that this constitutional right applied only when the constitutional
order was threatened, not when a citizen disliked a policy outcome. Yet opponents of nuclear power were adamant that the constitutional order was in fact at
risk (Meyer-Tasch 1988, 33, 42). They argued that nuclear radiation and waste
threatened everyone’s constitutionally guaranteed “bodily integrity” and that
the state could only protect against nuclear terrorism by suspending the constitution (Atomstaat). Resistance was rhetorically powerful, given widespread
praise for those few who had dared resist, even violently, the Nazi regime – and
16
Brokdorf und die Kirche, Deutsche Zeitung, 10 Dec. 1976, PA Presse, 102-18/24, 1; Atomstrom. Symbol auf Konto, Der Spiegel (34), 21 Aug. 1978; Seabrook Votes Down Nuke, but
Public Service Won’t Abide by Decision, Granite State Independence 15 (Apr 1976), UNH
Clamshell, Oversize Box 4.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 247
condemnation for the many who had not. Moreover, few by the 1970s thought
that anti-Hitler resisters deserved punishment for resistance. Ultimately, German anti-nuclear activists could not give civil disobedience a widely acceptable
face by appealing to religion; they sought to do so by appealing, usually sincerely, to a constitutional right to resistance (cf. Schüring 2012). West Germans
were thereby adapting civil disobedience through a culturally persuasive rhetoric that evoked a quasi-revolutionary situation in which the petty constraints of
legality could seem at best irrelevant, while violence against things, and perhaps even against people, could seem the only legitimate recourse. Thus resistance could serve for many Germans as a morally legitimating functional
substitute for religion – but with very, very different consequences.17
2.7
Attitudes toward the State
Activists in the US and West Germany had very differing attitudes toward the
state, and hence to civil disobedience (Joppke 1993, esp. 79-82, 114-5). In the
1960s and 1970s in both the US and West Germany an often militant New Left
attacked the legitimacy of the prevailing economic, political, and cultural orders. In the US, however, the Left shrank in the 1970s to its traditionally marginal status. Hence, the existing political and economic system retained for
most Americans an indisputable legitimacy as a system (Aronowitz 1996, esp.
49-50, 93-4).
In West Germany, however, many anti-nuclear activists simply did not trust
the state. The K-Gruppen and the Autonomen remained a significant political
force. For them, the Federal Republic was a cabal of a ruling class of capitalists, hostile to the interests of the masses. They operated within a Leftist revolutionary tradition that saw violent overthrow as the only hope for a truly democratic future. Radicals and even moderates in the 1960s had seen the Federal
Republic as fascistic because it failed to purge former Nazis from government,
17
Zehntausende demonstrieren in Bonn gegen die Kernkraft, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
15 Oct. 1979, PA Presse, 102-18/24, 6; Herbert Riehl-Heyse, Mobilmachung in der Wilster
Marsch, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 Feb. 1981, PA Presse, 102-18/24, 8; Wo Recht zu Unrecht
wird, wird Widerstand zur Pflicht, Unsere Zeit, 27 Feb. 1981, PA Presse, 102-18/24, 9; Hamburger Initiative Kirchliche Mitarbeiter und gewaltfreie Aktion et al., Wir müssen unsere
Meinung zeigen, damit morgen die Mehrheit mit uns Widerstand leistet, AA H, BrokdorfBlockaden Gewaltfreie Aktionsgruppen; Bauern bei Albrecht, Atom Express 11 (Dec. 1978):
39; Helmut Ostermeyer, Wehrt euch, leistet Widerstand!, Die Unabhängigen (1 Oct. 1977),
AsD, NL Ewald Gaul, 1EGAE000004; Dr. Stäglich, Offener Brief, Die Bauernschaft (1) 1977,
März, BAK B342/637; BBU, Alternatives Arbeitspapier zur Energiepolitik, 14 Nov. 1977, BAK,
B196/34251; BI Lüchow-Dannenberg, BBU, Freundeskreis der BI Lüchow-Dannenberg, Aufruf zum Widerstand! PAB, Gorleben. Wendland Bewegung, -1982; BI Lüchow-Dannenberg,
Presseerklärung, 26 Oct. 1978, AA H, Gorleben. Bundesweite Zusammenarbeit von gewaltfreien Aktionsgruppen; Ariane et al., Eindrücke vom Anti-AKW Sommercamp‚ 79, radikal.
Sozialistische Ztg. für Westberlin Extrablatt (Aug. 1979): 4.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 248
civil service, and judiciary. (Koenen 2001; Geronimo 2012; Weber-Zucht
1977) Even otherwise moderate opponents of nuclear power, Theo Sommer
wrote, had often lost faith in the state and “because they feel left in the lurch by
the institutions, they take on themselves the right to resist” (Sommer 1977).
Protesters occupying a proposed nuclear-waste storage site briefly established a
consensus-democracy, the Free Republic of the Wendland, as an alternative to
the Federal Republic’s representative democracy. The American anti-nuclear
movement included some who were just as skeptical of the Establishment as
were many West Germans, but their influence was marginal. Because the Federal Republic lacked the American republic’s reservoir of good will, West
Germans were more likely to see violence as acceptable and punishment by the
state as unacceptable.18
2.8
Partial Convergence
West Germans did develop over time a style of civil disobedience somewhat
more similar to American practice. As the anti-nuclear-power movement in
West Germany was declining in the early 1980s, an even broader peace and
anti-nuclear-missile movement adopted nonviolent civil disobedience and
engaged in nonviolent blockades on a massive scale, with frequent arrests. That
movement was much more influenced by the churches (Lepp 2012). It was, as
a “peace” movement, much more able to isolate violent demonstrators. In their
own learning process, police also moved toward a “de-escalation strategy,” so
that police brutality was less than against anti-nuclear-power demonstrators
(Becker-Schaum 2012). However, German movements generally still rejected
any punishment for acts of civil disobedience as “criminalization” and sought
to legalize civil disobedience for people with good motives (Butterwege 1985;
Quint 2008). A renewed anti-nuclear-power movement after Chernobyl still
included violence, as at Wackersdorf and Brokdorf in 1986. Subsequently, a
massive civil disobedience movement developed against the transport of nuclear waste, a movement that relies on nonviolent affinity groups, widespread training, and arrests quite similarly to its American antecedents – albeit, still without
any embrace of arrest and with some sabotage. The decline of the K-Gruppen and
the Autonomen and of CDU/CSU efforts to criminalize dissent, changes in protest
policing, and perhaps time to adjust, have changed the context and made possible
18
BBU Konferenz, Atom Express 6 (Jan./Feb. 1978): 14; Kommentar zum Öffentlichkeitsausschluß, Atom Express 29 (May/June 1982): esp. p.20; Werner Birkenmaier, Brokdorf und das
Recht, Stuttgarter Zeitung 2 Mar. 1981, PA-Presse, 102-18/24, 9; [no title], Kommunistische
Volkszeitung 20 Jan. 1977, PAB, Brokdorf Bewegung 76/77; AStA Info [Hamburg], [Feb.
1977], ibid.; Zäune umlegen, auf den Bauplatz vordringen, Der Spiegel 31 (8), 14 Feb. 1977;
Sabine Rosenbladt, Der Atomstaat schlägt seine Kinder, konkret (July 1980), PA-Presse, 10218/24, 7.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 249
the adaptation of more elements from a foreign tradition, but Germans continue
to have their own conception of civil disobedience.19
3.
Conclusions
Transnational connections are crucial to understanding civil disobedience’s
development. As a mass movement it first blossomed in South Asia. To bring it
to the US, Americans had to adapt it to their context (Scalmer 2011). West
German anti-nuclear-power protesters saw themselves as members of an international movement, so they were quite open to adapting tactics from abroad,
including civil disobedience from the US. Nonetheless, they could only do so
on their own terms.
West Germany was, of course, not the US, so German civil disobedience
would inevitably be different from American. A few West Germans proved
willing to adopt American conceptions of civil disobedience as normative.
Nonetheless, 1970s West Germans were operating within a different historical
context and a different political culture. They sought to engage in civil disobedience against a state many of them deeply mistrusted, a mistrust only
strengthened by police brutality and by the obvious intention of some politicians to severely limit, perhaps to criminalize, dissent. And they sought to
legitimate civil disobedience by appeal to resistance, a powerful concept with a
constitutional basis and historical resonances from Leftist ideology and antiNazi resistance. Hence, many West German anti-nuclear protesters could find
militant, perhaps violent, activism fully justified. The movement sought to
distance itself from violence, but the demands of solidarity made it impossible,
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to do so in ways that satisfied both its own
membership and outside observers. Not all Americans were willing to go to jail
for civil disobedience, and some West Germans were. Nonetheless, the American anti-nuclear movement developed in a context where willingness to go to
jail for civil disobedience was honored by many. Absent any historical memory
of civil disobedience or strong religious belief, very few West Germans could
or would embrace going to jail. West German anti-nuclear protesters, seeing
themselves as resisters, generally denied to the state they mistrusted any right
to treat protesters as criminals, apparently no matter what laws they broke.
The networks that transfer ideas and practices from one nation to another are
important, but they run up against human beings, cultures, and institutions that
inevitably react on their own terms. Understanding historical developments
transnationally hence requires understanding not only how ideas and practices
from one culture are made available within another culture; it also requires
19
Hau weg den Scheiß, Der Spiegel 40 (36), 1 Sept. 1986.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 250
recognizing that a culture or nation will never just adopt ideas and practices
from another society whole. Hence, we must work (hard) to understand how
and why nations come to adapt from others what they do – and what they do
not.
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Spanning the Globe: West-German Support for the
Australian Anti-Nuclear Movement
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof ∗
Abstract: »Um die ganze Welt: Unterstützung aus Westdeutschland für die
australische Anti-Atomkraft-Bewegung«. In the 1970s and 1980s, 70 per cent
of uranium deposits extracted worldwide was situated on the land of indigenous populations whose cultures and physical well-being were threatened by
the mining activities. Nevertheless, bowing to the need for supply security
which had become its primary concern in the wake of the oil crisis, the German
government declared nuclear energy to be safe and secure. Under the motto
“Leave uranium in the ground“, representatives of the West-German Green Party faction gave a voice to representatives of indigenous populations from various countries. In this article, I will discuss the hypothesis that, although international anti-nuclear and disarmament issues in the 1970s offered the basis for
a global and transnational collective activist identity, this identity was more
frequently negotiated in the respective national arenas. Rather than building
on the involvement of movement activists, cross-border exchange was mostly
established by, and often limited to, leading figures, prominent thinkers, institutions and alternative media. Besides these obstacles, a number of channels
for transnational exchange, the transfer of information and ideas did in fact
exist and the level of communication (albeit not so much cooperation) was significant, considering that the internet and other technical means were not yet
available to bring the world more closely together.
Keywords: Anti-nuclear movement, transnationalism, Aborigines, experts and
media, Australia, Germany, Society for Threatened Peoples.
1.
Introduction
In the 1970s and 1980s, bowing to the need for supply security (Graf 2010, 4)
which had become its primary concern in the wake of the oil crisis, the West
German governments declared nuclear energy to be safe and secure. Ensuring
access to crucial uranium deposits was thus an important political goal. To that
end, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM), technically responsible for the market in fissile materials in
its Western European member states, was engaged in negotiations with urani∗
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, Lehrstuhl für Neueste und Zeitgeschichte, Humboldt Universität zu
Berlin, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, 10117 Berlin, Germany; [email protected].
DOI: 10.12759/hsr.39.2014.1.254-273
um-producing countries, notably Australia.1 German enterprises were involved
in global uranium mining, predominantly covering their demand with supplies
from Australian mines. With the Greens entering the Bundestag in 1983, a
political party had arrived on the scene whose members took an entirely different view of this policy. They considered nuclear energy neither safe nor secure,
and refuted the claim that atomic power was needed to keep the lights burning.
Furthermore, they emphasized the collateral damage inherent in uranium mining that was suffered most notably by the indigenous populations in areas with
rich uranium deposits. Within the Green Party, Petra Kelly was the most active
person challenging the Federal Ministry of Economics on subjects such as the
total volume of uranium supplies and the involvement of German companies.
In subsequent years, various green and social-democratic members of parliament came to support her in this matter. Under the motto “Leave uranium in
the ground”, representatives of the Green Party faction submitted a so-called
major interpellation (Große Anfrage) to the German government, giving a
voice to representatives of indigenous populations from Australia, Mali, Namibia, Niger, India, Canada and the USA. According to the submitted interpellation, 70 per cent of uranium deposits extracted worldwide was situated on the
land of indigenous people whose cultures and physical well-being were threatened by the mining activities. The document also stated that the German government obtained 38 per centof its uranium requirement, and thus the largest
individual percentage, from supplies in Australia. The interpellation closed
with the following words: “Uranium mining results in radioactive pollution,
ecological destruction and genocide.” The German government was not impressed and replied tersely that strict regulations had been issued to protect
both the environment and the rights of the indigenous populations and that
uranium mines did not produce any hazardous nuclear waste.2 However, the
1
2
E.g. Relations entre EURATOM et l'Australie sur l'exportation des matières nucléaires, Historical Archives of the European Commission BAC 35/1980 39-42, (1977-1981), files Cabinet
Brunner. I would like to thank Jan-Henrik Meyer for making this document available to me
as well as his, Michael Schüring’s and Frank Zelko’s thoughtful remarks on this article. Research for this article was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG-Project: 5120
3400).
Printed papers 11/5788, Deutscher Bundestag – 11th legislative period, Government’s reply
to the major interpellation submitted by several members of the Bundestag, Archiv Grünes
Gedächtnis, Petra Kelly Archiv (AGG, PKA) 491 (1); Federal Ministry of Economics’ reply to
Petra Kelly’s enquiry of 27 March 1984, AGG, PKA 491 (1); Motion for a resolution regarding
the major interpellation submitted by Bundestag members Lieselotte Wollny, Wolfgang
Daniels, Hans-Joachim Brauer, Dora Flinner, Charlotte Garbe, Karitas Hensel, Wilhelm Knabe,
Matthias Kreuzeder, Petra Kelly, Michael Weiss and the Green Party faction on 14 March
1990, AGG, PKA 491 (1); The Green Party in the German Parliament. Information material
documenting German involvement in international uranium mining, 11 Jan. 1990, AGG, PKA
491 (1); Printed papers 11/6692, Deutscher Bundestag – 11th legislative period. Statement
of reasons by Lieselotte Wollny, Wolfgang Daniels, Willi Hoss, Waltraud Schoppe, Antje
Vollmer and the Green Party faction, AGG, PKA 491 (1).
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 255
Green Party was not the first to state an interest in the plight suffered by indigenous population as a consequence of uranium mining. Already at the beginning of the 1970s, the Society for Threatened Peoples alerted the public to this
issue and disseminated information regarding the Aboriginal population in
Australia. Rather than members of the anti-nuclear power movement, which
had arisen from the ecological movement, it was thus a human rights organisation, whose agenda included the rights of indigenous people and by implication
resistance to mining activities, that spoke out against uranium extraction in
Australia.
In this article, I will discuss the hypothesis that, although international antinuclear and disarmament issues in the 1970s offered the basis for a global and
transnational collective activist identity, this identity was more frequently negotiated in the respective national arenas. Rather than building on the involvement of movement activists, cross-border exchange was mostly established by,
and often limited to, leading figures, prominent thinkers, institutions and alternative media. Thus, in line with what we spelled out in the introduction to this
HSR Focus (Kirchhof and Meyer 2014), this article will shed light on the
transnational effects of expert knowledge, mediated forms of communication
and transnational cooperation and the origins of networks. Moreover, this article will also explore the basis of the new social movement, focusing on the
activists and their motivation for launching joint transnational campaigns as
well as the factors promoting and impeding cooperation among anti-nuclear
activists and their (global) networks. The fact that the movements’ activists
were predominantly operating at the national level can be explained by a number of factors, some of which will be examined in the course of this article.
Firstly, a joint communication basis had to be found for the agendas of the
different movements and the agendas had to be made compatible. This turned
out to be rather challenging as it was often difficult to establish links between
the different national contexts. Holger Nehring, who studied “transnational
communication” between British and West German anti-nuclear movements in
the 1950s and 1960s, came to a similar conclusion. Nehring argues that the two
movements were firmly embedded in their respective political systems, social
and political environments and national political and protest traditions which
would emphasize the continued importance of “decision space” and “identity
space” in Britain and the Federal Republic (Nehring 2005, 560, 582). My example of Australia and Germany, two countries which are geographically far
removed from each other, also demonstrates that cooperation between activists
lacked suitable meeting places and effective communication channels, especially in the pre-internet era, with forbiddingly high travel costs making any interchange a difficult undertaking. It was only in the 1980s that such cooperative
exchange was placed on a more permanent footing. By this time, the number of
joint campaigns and links between individuals and institutions had increased
and information was being exchanged on a more extensive level.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 256
The so called ‘histoire croisée’ (Werner 2002), a multi-perspective historiography, has so far focused on European countries and North America, concentrating for instance on the United Kingdom, Germany and France (Cairney
2009; Espagne 2008), Europe as a political entity (Gehler and Kaiser 2001;
Kaelble 2009) and on comparisons to the USA (Lingelbach 2002). Given that
Australia has always been on the forefront of the environmental movement, it
is surprising that researchers have paid little attention to transnational links
between Europe and Australia. After all, the first green party, the “United Tasmania Group”, was founded in Australia in 1972 in the context of the campaign
against dam construction in Tasmania’s Lake Pedder, long before any such
movement arose in other countries. Two-way exchanges on environmental and
political issues between Australia and Germany or other parts of the world
(Kirchhof 2014, in print; McConville forthcoming spring 2016) also took place
much earlier than the 1970s (Sauter forthcoming spring 2016).
2.
Leading Figures, Institutions and Alternative Media.
German Support for the Australian Movement(s) in the
1970s
The Australian uranium deposits that were discovered in the period before the
1970s constituted almost a quarter of the world’s known uranium reserves at
the time. With uranium mines located primarily on Aboriginal reservations, the
Aborigines began to protest against mining activities. In some cases, the invocation of Aboriginal land titles, which represented permanent rights to the
traditional land, successfully put a stop to mining operations. Although the
hard-won rights finally granted by the Australian government and the courts of
law to the Aboriginal population may appear exemplary and progressive on the
surface, in practice, they turned out to be rather limited and failed to either provide a permanent solution or address the issue of historical injustice (Linhart
2013). In Germany, protests against the civilian use of nuclear power first became an issue in national politics in connection with the site occupation and
clashes at the Wyhl nuclear power plant on the French-German border (Hughes
2014; Milder 2014). These protests heralded the beginning of the anti-nuclear
power movement, with citizen action groups springing up all over West Germany and an unprecedented number of citizens taking to the streets: While
25,000 protesters had turned out for the rallies at Wyhl, by the end of the decade, 100,000 people assembled in Hanover to protest against the Gorleben
nuclear waste dump in 1979 (Rucht 1980). The anti-nuclear power movement
in West Germany, however, did not take much of an interest in the provenance
of the uranium used in German power plants and initially neglected to bring the
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 257
struggle of the Australian Aborigines and the anti-uranium movement into
focus.
2.1
The “humanitarian and human rights imperative”3
In West Germany, it was the Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für
bedrohte Völker, GfbV), a human rights organisation founded by Tilman Zülch
and Klaus Guerke in 1970, that continuously reported on uranium mining in
Australia. The society joined forces with organisations in the UK and the Netherlands and invited a delegation of three Aboriginal rights activists to Germany.
Following the delegation’s visit, the Society for Threatened Peoples launched a
protest campaign that severely criticised uranium mining in Australia and involved a petition to ‘Deutsche Uran GmbH’. Regional GfbV groups independently collected signatures against the activities of German uranium companies. The campaign was to raise public awareness and place sufficient
pressure on corporations to delay any new investments.4 With the aim of reaching a larger audience and triggering a shift in awareness, the GfbV started
publishing a magazine and using the mass media in the early stages of the
campaign. In accordance with Joachim Raschke’s statement (1985, 343): “A
movement that does not make the news is not happening”, from its earliest
days, the GfbV’s ‘Pogrom’ magazine published regular reports on the Aborigines’ fight against uranium mining.5 Towards the end of the 1970s, other alternative and mainstream media eventually began to focus on the situation in
Australia. Various press associations, West Germany’s public service television
stations ARD and ZDF, four broadcasting stations and several daily newspapers, among them Frankfurter Rundschau with a four-column article on the title
page, reported on a press conference in Bonn which had been jointly organised
by the Society for Threatened Peoples and the Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz (the umbrella organisation of environmental action groups,
BBU) “in support of Aboriginal Australians in their fight against uranium
mining and land grabbing.” The organisations called on the government to get
Frankfurt-based Uran GmbH and Uranerzbergbau GmbH in Bonn and Bentheim to suspend their activities in Australia.6 In the same year, 1978, there was
further collaboration with the BBU and alternative media were used when the
GfbV’s ‘Pogrom’ magazine published a documentary entitled “Nach Völkermord: Landraub und Uranabbau. Die Schwarzaustralier (Aborigines) kämpfen
3
4
5
6
Robert Jungk in an interview on the occasion of the Society for Threatened Peoples’ invitation of a delegation of Aboriginal human rights activists to Europe. 1979. Pogrom 10: 3.
Editor’s note. 1979. Pogrom 10 (68): 4.
See one of the early volumes reporting on Aborigines in Australia: Mc Gregor, Adrian. [n.y.
1973]. Stämme reisen in die Vergangenheit. Pogrom 7 (44/45), 29-32.
Greußing, Fritz. 1979. Kampagne für die Schwarzaustralier. GfbV gemeinsam mit dem
Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz. Pogrom 10 (65).
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 258
ums Überleben” (After the genocide: land grabbing and uranium mining. Aborigines fighting for their lives).7
Petra Kelly was a driving force behind the above-mentioned collaboration
that took place between the BBU (Engels 2006, 332f) and the GfbV at the end
of the 1970s, thereby promoting co-operation between human rights and environmental movements. In the 1970s, Kelly, subsequent co-founder of the Green
Party, was one of the few German activists who took an interest in the Australian anti-uranium movement and the Aboriginal’s fight for land rights. Therefore, she was one of the first to establish direct contact with both Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal activists. From 1974 onwards, she was also in contact with
the lawyer Jo Leinen, who was a leading figure within the BBU. Kelly originally approached Leinen in connection with her search for suitable authors for
“Forum E”, the magazine published by the Young European Federalists (JEF).
She herself also published articles in the magazine, using it as a platform to air
her various political concerns.8 Jo Leinen, who had already adopted a transnational outlook, was studying at the College of Europe in Bruges (Richter 2010,
72f) and subsequently became one of the few activists who, like Kelly herself,
sought contact with the Australian anti-nuclear movement and was ideally
suited to contribute to a European magazine.9 He travelled to Australia in the
company of Freiburg-based film director Nina Gladitz who produced a documentary entitled “Das Uran gehört der Regenbogenschlange” (Uranium Belongs to the Rainbow Serpent), which was subsequently shown on ARD. The
documentary describes the clashes between unionists and Aborigines fighting
over Australia’s abundant uranium deposits.10
2.2
Petra Kelly: Leading Figure of the Early Movement
Petra Kelly played a crucial role as pioneering transnational networker. Her
family background, education, language skills and fundamental political orientation, namely her conviction that national borders fail to solve global problems
and should therefore be transcended, virtually predestined Kelly to take on a
networking role. Born in Bavaria in 1947, Kelly lived in the USA for many
years where she also underwent her political socialization. She became part of
the anti-nuclear power movement after her sister Grace died of cancer in 1970,
believing the death to have been caused by radiation therapy, a product of
nuclear research. This traumatic experience inspired Kelly’s commitment to
raising awareness of the dangers of ionizing radiation, taking political action
7
8
9
10
Aborigines gegen Uranabbau. 1979. Pogrom 10 (65) and email of the GfbV to the author
6.8.2013.
Kelly, Petra Karin. 1977. Lasst das Uran in der Erde. Die Anti-Uran-Bewegung in Australien,
in: Forum Europa. Zeitschrift für transnationale Politik 7 (7/8).
See letter from Jo Leinen to Petra Kelly dated 8 June 1978, AGG, PKA 2249.
Aborigines gegen Uranabbau. 1979. Pogrom 10 (65): 4.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 259
against the use of nuclear power and integrating her own political concerns into
the reasoning and actions of the anti-nuclear power and early peace movements. At the beginning of the 1970s, Kelly returned to Europe and worked for
the European Communities where she remained for the next ten years, starting
off in an administrative post at the Economic and Social Committee. Through
her partner Sicco Mansholt, the Commission President at the time, she came
into contact with citizens’ action committees and other groups within the antinuclear power movement. At the end of the 1970s, in parallel to her international activities, she launched her party career as leading candidate of the “Alternative Political Association (SPV) – The Greens” organization which had
just been founded by various alternative lists, citizens’ initiatives and other
groups. One year later, together with August Haußleiter and Norbert Mann, she
became a speaker of the Green Party’s Executive Committee. Until her premature death in 1992, the “Joan of Arc of the nuclear age”11 fought for her vision
of a better world. Thus, Kelly was not focusing exclusively on nuclear policy,
instead extending her activities into the fields of environmental protection,
women’s rights, pacifism, indigenous populations and childhood cancer. Her
political pursuits focused on the global dimension, thus integrating her own
political interests into new social movements and incorporating those local
concerns into her politics with a transnational perspective (Richter 2010, 95f).
Her prominent involvement in the JEF (Milder 2010; Meyer 2013) can be taken
as further evidence of her international outlook at this early stage of her career
(Camp cited in Mende, 270). In her chosen role as networker, Kelly began to
forge ties between anti-nuclear power movements at the global level and became one of the first politicians in Germany to establish direct contact with
activists worldwide.
In the summer of 1977, Petra Kelly visited Australia for the first time. On
this occasion, she gave speeches and met with activists. Various student organisations invited Kelly to speak on their premises. In her speeches, she connected her personal support for disarmament and peace issues with issues of concern to Australian activists, including uranium mining and the impact of
nuclear power on countries outside the Australian continent, thereby construing
nuclear power as a problem of transnational relevance that affected Australians,
Germans and Europeans alike.12 Around this time, Australia was experiencing a
dramatic increase in the use of uranium, both in the civilian nuclear power
11
12
Petra Kelly, in: Planet Wissen, Sendung: Die 80er Jahre – Popper, Punker, Pershings, 11.07.2008,
<http://www.planetwissen.de/politik_geschichte/deutsche_politik/entstehung_der_gruenen/port
raet_petra_kelly.jsp> (accessed October 2, 2013).
Flyer, Nuclear Power: Today and Tomorrow. Petra Kelly speaks at a public meeting, AGG,
PKA 4002 and two-sided flyer: Dr. Petra Kelly speaking on “The Uranium Industry”, Wed.,
3rd Aug. with announcement of the “Stop Uranium Mushrooming Rally” on 2 to 5 August
1977 on the reverse, AGG, PKA 4002.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 260
industry and in nuclear power generation, which had led to a (second) boom13
in the uranium market compounded by the first oil shock in 1973. With oil
prices rising dramatically, pressure to expand uranium mining operations in
Australia increased. However, the initial impetus behind the Australian antinuclear power movement was not the threat that uranium mining was posing to
the livelihood of the Aboriginal population but the debate surrounding French
nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean during 1972 and 1973. Two years later, once
the public debate regarding the French tests had declined, the issue of uranium
mining in Australia finally became the new focus of attention (Martin 1982; Falk
1982; Hutton 1999; Harris 2011). At its 1975 congress, the Australian Council of
Trade Unions voted to ban all uranium mining except for biomedical use and the
Australian Railways Union (ARU) imposed a ban on the transport of uranium ore
(Adamson 1999, 11). The first significant demonstrations took place on Hiroshima Day, 6 and 7 August 1976, with 500 people demonstrating in Adelaide.
Uranium extraction finally became a major political issue when the Ranger
Inquiry, or Fox Report, (O’Faircheallaigh 2002)14 triggered a public debate
about the rights and wrongs of Australia’s uranium mining and exporting activities (Bauer 1995, 173). In 1977, the year Petra Kelly was travelling in Australia, opposition in the country was growing rapidly, bringing together workers,
trade unionists, traditional nature conservationists and activists of the antiuranium movement in one single network. On Hiroshima Day in August 1977,
50,000 people took to the streets and the Movement against Uranium Mining
(MAUM) organized 100 local groups in the state of Victoria alone. The trade
unions played a prominent role in the protests. Ten major unions were represented at a national MAUM consultation, among them the Waterside Workers
Federation whose declared opposition to handling uranium shipments also
extended to current contracts. In a national ballot carried out at major ports,
wharves voted 3,486 to 0 in favour of rejecting uranium shipments. Moreover,
the Australian Railways Union (ARU), the Australian Conservation Fund,
MAUM and Friends of the Earth held a press conference declaring that they
intended to mount a joint campaign. The Metal Workers and Shipwrights Un13
14
The first boom took place in the 1950s when multinational mining companies set up mining
operations after discovering rich deposits of natural resources on the north coast and in
central Australia. Thus, the market was swamped with the raw materials needed by the nuclear weapons manufacturing industry. Demand and prices dropped and Australian mines
successively closed down.
The Fox Report also known as the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry (RUEI) laid the
foundation for the current policy on uranium mining in Australia. In 1975 a commission
was established to conduct an inquiry into the environmental aspects of a mining proposal
by the then Australian Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of the Australian Nuclear
Science and Technology Organization) and Ranger Uranium Mines Pty Ltd. The Inquiry produced two reports, the first dated 28 October 1976 and the second dated 17 May 1977. The
latter included a report under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976
which dealt with a land claim in the Ranger area.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 261
ion (AMWSU), the Australian Railway Union and the Transport Workers
Union (ETU) refused to supply labour for the mining sites and stopped the
manufacture and transport of equipment for the mines. The Electrical Trade
Union announced that it was withdrawing services to members working at the
state’s Mary Kathleen uranium mine and called on them to leave the site
(Adamson 1999, 12-3, 15-6, 20-4). In the 1970s, a tradition of environmental
education, which could have explained why unions across the entire political
spectrum were willing to take up the issue, did not exist within the Australian
union movement. What convinced the unionists was the mass anti-uranium
movement itself. The phenomenon of people joining forces to protest, irrespective of age, gender, educational background or occupation, has been described in
literature as follows: “protests themselves became an important form of communication within the movement context” (Nehring, 562), implying that successful
protest would engender further protest while unsuccessful protest would lead to
marginalization. Reports and self-portrayals have consolidated the view of
Australian unions at the vanguard of the anti-nuclear and anti-uranium debates
(Tully 2004).15 Both the activities described above and the “green bans movement”, which Petra Kelly also established contact with, have contributed to this
interpretation: Years before the anti-atomic movement in Australia took off, the
NSW branch of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), a trade union of
communist-oriented construction workers under the leadership of Jack
Mundey, launched the so called “green bans movement” (Kirchhof 2013;
Burgmann 2000),16 insisting that the environment was as much a workers’
concern as wages and conditions. Mundey asked: “What is the use of higher
wages alone, if we have to live in cities devoid of parks, denuded of trees, in an
atmosphere poisoned by pollution and vibrating with the noise of hundreds of
thousands of units of private transport?” (Mundey 1981, 148). Even though the
movement certainly contributed to environmental conservation and the protection of heritage buildings, it may be assumed that the apparent capitalist interests involved in spending billions of dollars on undesirable development pro15
16
Kelly, Petra and John Baker. 1979. Australien – Der Kampf ums Uran. In Der Atomkonflikt.
Atomindustrie, Atompolitik und Anti-Atom-Bewegung im internationalen Vergleich, ed.
Lutz Mez, 12-28. Berlin: Olle und Wolter.
The background of the green-ban protests is the progressive destruction of Australia's major
cities in the 1960s and early 1970s when vast amounts of money were poured into property
development: giant glass and concrete buildings changed the face of cities and valuable old
buildings were razed in the process. In 1971, a group of middle class women from the fashionable suburb of Hunter's Hill in Sydney, the capital of the Australian state of New South
Wales (NSW), joined forces with the NSW branch of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF)
to save an area of natural bush land in Sydney from destruction. Green bans helped to protect historic nineteenth century buildings in The Rocks – an urban locality, tourist precinct
and historic area of Sydney’s city centre – from making way for office towers and prevented
the Royal Botanical Garden – the most central of the three main botanical gardens in Sydney – from being turned into a car park for the Sydney Opera House, which opened in 1973.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 262
jects and luxury housing developments also played a role in raising the ire of
the communist unionists. Whether the Australian unionist’s commitment to the
environmental cause was indeed the result of a new and broader definition of
the political interests of their constituency or just a strategic vehicle is a question that would require further research on this issue.
2.3
Support from the Alternative Media
The alternative media also stepped up their efforts to establish transnational
networks and, at the same time, sought to establish themselve at the national
level, notably in West Germany. The role of the media in activating people and
bringing them together in the fight for a common goal (Rucht 1994, 337f), was
crucial for the mobilisation of movements. Founded in 1978, the World Information Service on Energy (WISE), which acted as an exchange platform for
anti-nuclear and alternative energy organisations operating at the global level,
has played a leading role in this field. Funded by a small share of the proceeds
made by the sale of the anti-nuclear sun logo (Nuclear Power – No thanks),
which was copyrighted by the Danish anti-nuclear information service (OOA)
(Meyer 2014), this transnational platform sought to raise grassroots democratic
involvement in state politics and increase cooperation at the international level.
It was the platforms’ intention to “promote and facilitate direct contacts and
information exchange within the movement, across all barriers”.17 In 1978, the
platform stated that “there is a lack of information in West-Germany concerning the development in other countries […] (because) alternative news is largely ignored by the established media.”18 The German ‘Arbeitskreis politische
Ökologie’ (Political Ecology Research Group) and the ‘Kommunistischer
Bund’ (Communist League) also acted as transnational mediators. Publishing
information on the activities of international anti-nuclear movements in their
journals, the ‘Anti-AKW Telegramm’ and the ‘Arbeitskampf’, they had, however, no particular focus on Australia.19
In contrast, the newly established alternative ‘tageszeitung/taz’, the mouthpiece of the ecological, peace and other alternative and new social movements,
did take up the international uranium mining issue. The concept of a nonmainstream daily newspaper had already been discussed at a meeting of German
alternative newspapers in 1977 and was put into practice in the form of the
above mentioned ‘tageszeitung/taz’ in 1978. The aim was to create a comprehensive, nationwide networking platform for the undogmatic left that would
communicate the general principles of the social movement (Mende 2011,
48ff). In 1980, a supplement to the daily ‘tageszeitung’, the ‘taz-Journal’, was
17
18
19
Wise Bulletin. 1978 (2).
Ibid.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 263
launched. In the journal, the taz combined and published articles on a specific
subject that had appeared in various ‘tageszeitung’ issues. The subject of the
first journal happened to be ecology with a focus, among other issues, on global uranium mining. The network references and options, calls for support and
international address information, as well as the provision of background information on the involvement of German companies in uranium mining operations in Australia, clearly demonstrate that the taz aimed at encouraging cooperation between international movements. Journalist Rita Thiele’s article
“Völkermord durch Uranabbau” (Uranium mining leads to genocide), which
appeared in the journal, presented several courses of action. The political Australian Aboriginal groups, for instance, called on the German public “to submit
protest petitions to the Frankfurt-based Uran GmbH and the German government
with the aim of building up pressure on German companies to suspend all uranium prospecting and mining activities on Aboriginal reservations”20 (Sontheimer
1980, 121).
In 1979, the book “Der Atomkrieg” (Nuclear war) was published by Lutz
Mez, a German political scientist and subsequent co-founder of the environmental Policy Research Unit (FFU) at Freie Universität Berlin. The volume
consisted of 18 articles dedicated to movements in different countries, including socialist states. The concept for the book first emerged at the beginning of
the 1970s during the Wyhl protests when members of a protest research project
expressed the wish to provide information regarding movements in neighbouring countries. Based on country reports, Mez’ publication explained the socioeconomic framework conditions that gave rise to the nuclear industry, nuclear
policies and the anti-nuclear movement. The article on Australia was written by
the Australian unionist John Baker and Petra Kelly, who was considered the
number-one expert on Australia in Germany.21
3.
Finding New Cooperation Partners and Stabilising
Existing Contacts
Following NATO’s double-track decision in 1979, the peace movement, which
established itself in Germany in parallel to the anti-nuclear power movement,
20
21
Sontheimer, Michael and Ute Scheub, eds. 1980. taz-Journal no.1. Ökologie. Berlin: Verlag
die Tageszeitung: 121.
Kelly, Petra and John Baker. 1979. Australien – Der Kampf ums Uran. In Der Atomkonflikt.
Atomindustrie, Atompolitik und Anti-Atom-Bewegung im internationalen Vergleich, ed.
Lutz Mez, 12-28. Berlin: Olle und Wolter. John Baker: *1908-†2001, Trade Union Official and
from 1962 onwards involved with the Federal Council for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advancement –FCAATSI; see catalogue of the national library of Australia <http://
catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2439040> (accessed August 6, 2013).
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 264
focussed predominantly on nuclear weapons (Becker-Schaum et al. 2012). The
majority of those who opposed the use of nuclear power for civilian purposes
were also against it military use (nuclear weapons). Nevertheless, the two
movements remained largely aloof and were based on different organisational
cores. The resistance against the military use of nuclear power was therefore
predominantly rooted in the peace movement as opposed to the anti-nuclear
movement (Rucht 2008). The double-track decision included two clauses. It
was the second one which was considered particularly problematic by the
peace movement: The first clause offered a mutual limitation of Soviet and US
medium-range nuclear missiles to the Warsaw Pact. The second one stated if
the Warsaw Pact was not willing to agree, the US were going to deploy new
nuclear-capable missiles (Pershing II, intermediate-range missiles) and cruise
missiles in Europe. A total of 500,000 people joined the Easter marches in 1983
and the German peace movement became the “biggest extra-parliamentary protest movement in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany” (Mende 2011,
340). Towards the end of the 1970s, the movement’s focus changed and public
concern regarding nuclear warfare gradually took precedence over the nuclear
energy issue. The subsequent shift in public attention led to a (relative) decline
of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s, although protests against nuclear
power plants, nuclear reprocessing plants (such as the envisaged Wackersdorf
plant in Bavaria) and the Gorleben nuclear waste storage site did not subside.
In the case of Wackersdorf, the protests even had a political outcome (Buro
2008; Siegler 1989). The Chernobyl disaster in April 1986 revitalised the protests and gave the German anti-nuclear power movement a new lease of life
(Kirchhof 2013). Its survival was ultimately ensured by the fact that pollution,
excessive growth and technology-related risks remained contentious issues in
Germany (Uekötter 2011; 91-136).
In Australia, the re-emergence of the Cold War had also extended the antinuclear agenda to include nuclear weapons and the country experienced a phenomenal rise in nuclear disarmament activism. Professional anti-nuclear organisations sprang up and hundreds of small, local anti-nuclear groups were established. The new key issues included the suspension of all uranium mining and
export activities, the abolishment of nuclear weapons, the removal of foreign
military bases from Australian soil and the conversion of the Pacific into a nuclear-free zone (McLeod 1995; Martin 2007; Wittner 2009; Harris 2011).22 On
Hiroshima Day 1983, 26,000 demonstrators called for an end to uranium mining,
the removal of US bases and the diversion of military spending to jobs programmes. On Palm Sunday of the following year, 150,000 protestors took to the
streets in Sydney, 100,000 in Melbourne, 25,000 in Perth, 10,000 in Brisbane
22
Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker/BUND, ed. 1988. Australien. Naturerbe und Aborigines im
Würgegriff des Uranabbaus, n.p. See also, Martin, Brian. 1982. The Australian anti-uranium
movement. Alternatives: Perspectives on Society and Environment 10 (4): 26-35.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 265
and Adelaide and 5,000 in Canberra and Hobart (Adamson 1999; 26-9). In May
and June 1984, Kelly – who had been active in both the anti-nuclear and the
peace movement – made her second visit to Australia, this time accompanied
by her new partner Gert Bastian. On the occasion of their visit, Kelly and Bastian met with representatives of various Aboriginal groups, took part in demonstrations, visited US military facilities and were introduced to unionists as well
as representatives of the peace and women’s movements.23
3.1
Bridging Political Differences
Even though the use of nuclear power for civilian and military purposes
prompted massive protests both in Germany and in Australia, the differences
between the two countries’ nuclear policies and the protest movements they
triggered were considerable. Firstly, in contrast to Germany, though mining
and exporting uranium, Australia never built any nuclear power stations, a
factor that played a significant role in shaping the arguments of the respective
movements. Secondly, the Australian anti-uranium and disarmament movement had been linked to the Aborigines’ struggle against uranium mining from
an early stage, resulting in a powerful civil rights and land rights movement in
Australia. Aside from land rights and mining issues, urban poverty, drugrelated problems as well as racial and ethnic discrimination were further critical
concerns notably regarding the Aboriginal population in Australia. Given the
large number of new social movements, it was sometimes difficult to find and
especially uphold a common denominator that allowed the movements to take
effective action. Even though they were all rooted in the alternative spectrum,
each movement had a different focus and their disparity discouraged attempts
at coalition-forming. This difficulty was often compounded at the international
level. The Italian historian Renato Moro put it as follows: “An exponent of the
British CND declared: Nobody who thinks thinks ‘Ban the Bomb’ is enough,
but no two people seem to agree on anything more” (Moro 2011, 143).
A further glance at the Society for Threatened Peoples illustrates the abovementioned political and practical alignment problems: It was not before the late
1980s that the GfbV planned to establish closer links between the Australian
civil and land rights movement and the German environmental and anti-nuclear
movement by initiating a joint campaign with the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland e.V. (League for Environment and Nature Protection,
BUND). The dual aim of the campaign was to raise awareness for the crucial
role played by international cooperation and to highlight the difficulties arising
from the plethora of issues pursued by different movements. In the context of
their joint campaign, the two organisations emphasised the benefits of linking
23
Petra Kelly, brief report on her journey to Australia and New Zealand, 13 May to 6 June
1984, AGG, PKA 480.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 266
agendas: “Ultimately, the fight of the indigenous people against the destruction
of their land […] also helps us in Germany, and our struggle against nuclear
energy on German soil also benefits the indigenous nations.” However, the
campaign also revealed how far removed the plight of the Australian Aborigines was to German activists. Even well-informed members of the peace and
anti-nuclear power movements apparently rarely wondered where the uranium
for bombs and nuclear power stations was coming from. Nor did they appear to
have given much thought to the fact that the nuclear weapon test sites in Nevada/USA, Maralinga/Australia and Polynesia were having a tragic impact upon
entire populations.24 The example of the Society for Threatened Peoples clearly
illustrates the problems associated with the establishment of transnational cooperation and the challenges involved in linking up national discourses at the
international level (Joppke 1991). Although a number of the issues pursued by
the Society for Threatened Peoples overlapped with concerns relevant to German anti-nuclear power and peace activists, the society never really became
part of the peace and disarmament movement. This was due to its policy of
sanctioning military intervention in special situations – a fact that attracted
severe criticism from the radically pacifist protest groups of the peace movement.25 The Society perceived and continues to perceive itself primarily as a
human rights organisation. Although some German activist groups also pursued
human rights-related issues, such as class, race and gender, their main focus
was always on nuclear power, disarmament and peace. Concern for the plight
of the Australian Aboriginal population arose predominantly in connection
with uranium mining and the global nuclear threat.
3.2
Bridging Geographical Distance
Although the maintenance of contacts and the exchange of information stabilised to some degree from the mid-1980s onwards, the motto of the decade
continued to be “more cooperation”. Aside from Petra Kelly, Undine-Uta
Bloch von Bottnitz was another activist who wanted to bring individuals from
Australia and West Germany together and thus “forge a movement” (Gebauer
2001). In contrast to Kelly, Bottnitz was already 41 when she turned to political
activism and joined the protest against the planned nuclear storage plant in
Gorleben in 1977. Similar to numerous other ‘green’ activists, the qualified
interior designer gradually evolved into a member of the Green Party, which
she co-founded, through her involvement in the anti-nuclear movement, in her
case the ‘Bäuerliche Notgemeinschaft’ (Farmers’ emergency association). The
24
25
Hochbruck, Wolfgang. 1988. “Das Uran muß in der Erde bleiben” I. Kampagne der GfbV und
des Bund Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland. Pogrom 19 (146): 56-8.
Cf. Fischer, Ralf. Deutsche Opfer. Die Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker setzt auf völkische
Ideologie. Sozialistische Positionen. Beiträge zu Politik, Kultur und Gesellschaft 1/2004.
<http://www.sopos.org/aufsaetze/4010525731242/1.phtml> (accessed January 19, 2014).
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 267
group was founded at the end of the 1970s in the region Lüchow-Dannenberg
in Lower Saxony to protest against the nuclear waste disposal site Gorleben.
For 25 years, she participated in sit-ins and demonstrations and called for civil
disobedience against the state, an activity that earned her several court fines.
Towards the end of her life, which was cut short by cancer at age 64, Bottnitz,
just like Kelly, was somewhat disillusioned by her own party. Shortly before her
death, she commented: “Once we finally lose the [citizens’ groups and environmental action groups, A.M.K], we have given away a lot” (Gebauer, 2001).
Bottniz was a Green Party member of the European Parliament (MEP) and travelled to Australia as head of a delegation focussing on relations between Germany and Australia/New Zealand.26 Here, Bloch von Bottnitz was introduced to
David Turbayne, research coordinator for Jo Vallentine, the Western Australian
Senator for Nuclear Disarmament and 1984 co-founder of the Nuclear Disarmament Party. The latter brought together people from numerous different backgrounds who opposed the Hawke government’s plan to export uranium and actively participate in US nuclear war preparations (Adamson 1999, 37-9).
Turbayne frequently emphasised and discussed the importance of personal contacts, which seemed necessary to help overcome the distance.27
The Australian movement was well aware of the fact that, although there
was communication between politicians, leading figures and organisations,
there was no active cooperation among the members of the different movements. One of the main reasons was the physical distance between countries
and continents, especially Australia and Europe. While organising a blockade
of the uranium mine in Roxby Downs in the Australian outback, an Australian
Friends of the Earth action group decided to use a range of different media and
organisational resources to invite as many protesters as possible, not only from
Australia but also from Europe. At some point, they must have lost confidence
in their chances of success and playing on the physical remoteness of Australia
as well as their place protest in the outback: “We realize the difficulties most
people have in getting out to Australia, we have difficulties getting to Roxby
which is in the middle of no-where.”28 On various occasions, the Australian
movement, which was suffering from a sense of isolation, appealed to the
German anti-nuclear power and peace movement: “Remember us. We’re in this
together”.29 The recurrent argument of feeling of isolation was so strong that
the Campaign against Nuclear Energy, “CANE”, started to distribute interna26
27
28
29
Greens dark on yellowcake. The Canberra Times, November 20, 1985, AGG, PKA 2142.
Letter from David Turbayne, Research Coordinator for Jo Vallentine, Western Australian
Senator for Nuclear Disarmament, to Petra Kelly dated November 21, 1985, AGG, PKA 2142.
Letter by the Melbourne Roxby Action Group of the Friends of the Earth distributed via the
World Information Service on Energy (WISE) on July 6, 1984, AGG, PKA 491 (1).
“Vergeßt uns nicht – wir arbeiten zusammen“. Die Anti-Uran-Bewegung in Australien. Petra
Kelly im Gespräch mit Ros Livingston. Umweltmagazin (1979): 29-32, AGG, PKA 4002.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 268
tional information in Australia in order to strengthen the links of solidarity
between Australia and the rest of the world.
In the 1970s and 1980s, communication and cooperation between activists
crucially depended on personal contacts and international travel. The internet,
which was to drastically increase opportunities for cooperation in the subsequent decade, was not yet available to the public.30 Therefore, Australian and
West Germans activists renewed their attempts at improving transnational
cooperation across the globe, e.g. Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian
Greens, wrote to Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian in 1986: “We do need to move
about much more.”31 This underlines the importance of initiators such as Petra
Kelly or Undine-Uta Bloch von Blottnitz who took on the role of distributors
and provided activists, organizations and politicians in various countries with
information on successful campaign methods and strategies (Milder 2010a).32
4.
Conclusion
The multifarious problems described above illustrate the role that geographical
distance and the bridging of distance may have played in the field of international cooperation. Personal contacts and international travel were crucial for
any collaboration at the global level. The cost of such travel was prohibitive
enough to exclude many activists from international involvement and transnational cooperation. Moreover, the identification and preservation of a shared
communication basis among the large number of multifaceted groups within
the new alternative social movements posed an enormous challenge already at
the national level. Finding such a shared basis for communicating the agendas
of these movements, be it uranium mining, disarmament, peace, women or civil
rights, and making them compatible was a crucial task as the lack of such a
common basis discouraged the formation of coalitions, a problem that was
compounded at the international level. Even though the anti-nuclear movements in Germany and Australia fundamentally shared many views on the
nuclear issue, the relevance of the respective national discourses became all the
more apparent as activists found it hard to communicate and make compatible
those national contexts and agendas that structured their approach to the problem. For instance, German environmental, anti-nuclear and peace movements
did not usually include traditional human rights and related poverty, drug and
30
31
32
Letter by Bob Brown, party leader of the Australian Green Party, to Petra Kelly and Gert
Bastian, May 20, 1986, AGG, PKA 2142.
See, for example, Petra Kelly’s letter to the executive board of the Bundesverband Bürgerinitiative Umweltschutz, Greenpeace and others, August 27, 1984, AGG, PKA 2142.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 269
racial issues in their agendas unless these issues had a link to either nuclear
policies, uranium mining or the nuclear threat.
Despite structural obstacles, such as geographical distance, language problems, structural differences with a view to organization and the perception and
definition of the nuclear issue, divergent goals and perhaps also a widespread
but unacknowledged NIMBY33 attitude, the new social movements had a substantial impact at the international level: In western nations, at least, transnational solidarity created a sense of identity and pushed topics on the agenda
which motivated people and affected their collective consciousness, values, rules
and regulations. This, in turn, led to greater awareness of gender relation issues,
friend-enemy perceptions and the concept of legitimate citizenship (Moro 2011,
146f). Moreover, a number of channels for transnational exchange, the transfer of
information and ideas did in fact exist and the level of communication (albeit not
so much cooperation) was significant. Given the lack of technological options,
activists resorted to verbal shows of solidarity in addition to actual transnational communication: “We’re all in it together” underlines the relevance of the
rhetoric of internationalism demonstrated by the various movements that cooperated at the transnational level.
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The Journal: Cooperations, Archiving & Coverage
Cooperating Associations / Networks / Journals
QUANTUM (Association for Quantification and Methods in Historical and Social Research) http://www.gesis.org/en/hsr/profile/quantum/.
INTERQUANT (International Commission of the application of Quantitative Methods in
History) http://www.gesis.org/en/hsr/profile/quantum/.
H-SOZ-U-KULT (Humanities, Sozial und Kulturgeschichte) http://hsozkult.geschichte.huberlin.de.
AFC (Association Française de Cliométrie) http://www.cliometrie.org/.
AGE (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Geschichte und EDV) http://www.age-net.de.
AHC (International Association for History and Computing) http://odur.let.rug.nl/ahc/.
FQS (Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung – Forum Qualitative Social Research;
http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/.
HISTORICUM.NET http://www.historicum.net/.
ZOL (Zeitgeschichte-online) http://www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/.
PERSPECTIVIA.NET http://www.perspectivia.net.
Archiving by Information Services
JSTOR (ITHAKA) http://www.jstor.org/r/histsocres/.
SSOAR (Social Science Open Access Repository / GESIS) http://www.ssoar.info/hsr.
Coverage by Information Services
In recognition of “the high quality and relevance to the scientific community” our journal Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung has been selected for coverage / archiving in the following databases:
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http://scientific.thomson.com/products/ssci/.
SCOPUS (Elsevier) http://www.scopus.com/.
SocINDEX with FULL TEXT (EBSCO) http://www.epnet.com/.
Sociological Abstracts (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts) http://www.csa.com/.
Historical Abstracts (ABC-CLIO) http://www.abc-clio.com/.
International Political Science Abstracts (SAGE) http://www.sagepub.co.uk.
Social Research Methodology Database (SAGE / NIWI) http://www.srmonline.nl/index.htm.
SOLIS (Social Science Literature Information System / GESIS) http://www.gesis.org/en/
services/specialized-information/.
HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 360
The pursuit of excellence in research requires concentration
and focus on the research goal. This guarantees a well developed
infrastructure. GESIS as largest German infrastructure stands
ready to advise researchers at all levels to answer socially relevant
questions on the basis of the newest scientific methods, high
quality data and research information.
Services and support in all phases of research:
• Research: Information on data, literature, research projects,
important institutions and conferences
• Study planning: Consultation and services for planning
and conducting a survey
• Data collection: Consultation and services during the
data collection phase
• Data analysis: Support, consultation and data for secondary
analysis and reference, analyzing tools
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www.gesis.org
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Focus I: Onno Boonstra, Hilde Bras and Marjet Derks (Eds.):
Historical Research on Cultural Life Scripts. An Exploration of
Opportunities and Future Prospects
People live their lives guided by a cultural life script: a set of images
and assumptions based on dominant representations of an idealized
life that are shared with others in the community. Cultural life scripts
provide a conceptual link between individual and society. They are
not fixed but change in the face of new ideas and in response to
changing social en economic structures and conditions. For that reason, research based on cultural life scripts is a challenge for cultural
historians, social historians and historical demographers.
This HSR Focus contains seven contributions of the Nijmegen based
research group “Self, Script and Society”. They have been selected to
show the wide variety of research possibilities of cultural life scripts
within the domain of historical research and to place cultural life
scripts more firmly on the future agenda of historians.
Focus II: Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, Jan-Henrik Meyer (Eds.):
Global Protest against Nuclear Power. Transfer and Transnational
Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s
Protest against nuclear power plants, uranium mining and nuclear
testing was a major mobilizing force in the rise of mass environmental movements in the 1970s and 1980s around the globe. Nevertheless,
the historiography of anti-nuclear protest remains largely limited to
national stories about heroic conflict and the rise of movements. The
contributions to this focus issue explore the so far under-researched
transnational dimension of the conflict in a global perspective. They
make visible for the first time relevant transfers of scientific knowledge and protest practices as well as transnational exchange between activists and experts from Western Europe, the United States
and Australia. Rather than taking transnational interaction for granted, the authors explore the conditions facilitating and hampering
the transfer of ideas. They analyse why only certain activists were
committed and able to cross borders, as well as the obstacles they
were facing. Thus, this focus issue contributes to current academic
debates in environmental history, the history of social movements as
well as global and transnational history.
Furthermore this HSR contains a Mixed Issue.
ISSN
0172-6404

Historical Social Research Historische Sozialforschung

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