Spanning the Globe: Australian Protest against Uranium Mining and their West-German Supporters, in: Historical Social Research, Vol. 39 (2014), No. 1. pp. 254-273.

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 quantiication 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 deined as all methods which are suiciently 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 scientiic history up to cliometrical research and historical information science. In a broader sense the ield of Historical Social Research can be described as an inter-/ transdisciplinary paradigm. For its quality and relevance for the scientiic 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 classiied the HSR as an international top-journal "with high visibility and inluence among researchers in the various research domains in diferent 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 Oice: 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: hsr@gesis.org Web: http://www.gesis.org/hsr ISSN 0172 - 6404 Historical Social Research Historische Sozialforschung 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 Historical Social Research Historische Sozialforschung 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; astrid.m.kirchhof@hu-berlin.de. Jan-Henrik Meyer, Department for Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Jens-Chr. Skous Vej 5.4, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark; ihojhm@hum.au.dk; jhmeyer@gmx.de. 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. 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Make It a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 190 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; s.milder@duke.edu. 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. Historical Social Research 39 (2014) 1, 191-211 Ň© GESIS 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. References Adams, David. 2002. 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Menke-Glückert, Peter. 1997. Der Umweltpolitiker Genscher. In In der Verantwortung. Hans Dietrich Genscher zum Siebzigsten, ed. Klaus Kinkel, 155-68. Berlin: Siedler. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. 2013. Challenging the Atomic Community: The European Environmental Bureau and the Europeanization of Anti-Nuclear Protest. In Societal Actors in European Integration: Polity-Building and Policy-Making, 19581992, ed. Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. 2014. “Where do we go from Wyhl?” European and International Organizations as Focal Points for Transnational Anti-nuclear Protest in the 1970s. Historical Social Research 39 (1): 212-235. Milder, Stephen. Thinking Globally, Acting (Trans-)Locally: Petra Kelly and the Transnational Roots of West German Green Politics. Central European History 43 (2): 301-26. Morgan, Roger, and David Allen. 1978. The European Parliament: Direct Elections in National and Community Perspective. 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Verhältnis des Bundesverbandes Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz zu den Umweltparteien. In Der Grüne Protest, ed. Rudolf Brun. Frankfurt: Fischer Alternativ. Tittman, Ida. 1976. Keineswegs saßen wir Frauen untätig herum. In Wyhl: Kein Kernkraftwerk in Wyhl und auch sonst Nirgends, ed. Bernd Nössler and Margret de Witt. Freiburg: Dreisam. Tourraine, Alain. 1983. Anti-Nuclear Protest: The Opposition to Nuclear Energy in France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Uekötter, Frank. 2011. Am Ende der Gewissheiten. Die ökologische Frage im 21. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Campus. Varon, Jeremy. 2004. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and revolutionary violence in the sixties and seventies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wehr, Paul. 1986. Nuclear pacifism as collective action. Journal of Peace Research 23: 103-13. Wittner, Lawrence. 2003. Towards Nuclear Abolition: A history of the world nuclear disarmament movement, 1971-present. Stanford: Stanford University Press. HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 211 “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; ihojhm@hum.au.dk; jhmeyer@gmx.de. Historical Social Research 39 (2014) 1, 212-235 Ň© GESIS 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). References 1976a. Aktionen, Bücher. 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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; hughes@wfu.edu. Historical Social Research 39 (2014) 1, 236-253 Ň© GESIS 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. References Aronowitz, Stanley. 1996. The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism. NY: Routledge. Atom Express, ed. 1997. …und auch nicht anderswo! Die Geschichte der AntiAKW Bewegung. Göttingen: Verlag Die Werkstatt. Becker-Schaum, Christoph, et al., eds. 2012. Entrüstet euch: Nuklearkrise, NATODoppelbeschluss und Friedensbewegung. Paderborn: Schöningh. Bell, Inge Powell. 1968. CORE and the Strategy of Nonviolence. NY: Random House. Benedict, Hans-Jürgen. 1981. …den reibungslosen Ablauf der Atomindustrie behindern. Gewaltfreie Aktion 49/50: 53-9. Birchler, Susan, and Jane Miller. 1981. Diablo Blockade. Santa Cruz, CA: Diablo Writing Collective. Butterwege, Christoph, et al., eds. 1985. Kriminalisierung der Friedensbewegung. Abschreckung nach innen? Köln: presseverlag ralf theurer. Chabot, Sean, and Jan Willem Duyvendak. 2002. Globalization and Transnational Diffusion between Social Movements: Reconceptualizing the Dissemination of the Gandhian Repertoire and the ‘Coming Out’ Routine. Theory and Society 31 (6): 697-740. Cooney, Robert, and Helen Michalowski. 1977. The Power of the People. Active Nonviolence in the United States. n.p.: n.p. Daubert, Victoria, and Sue Ellen Moran. 1985. Origins, Goals, and Tactics of the U.S. Anti-Nuclear Protest Movement. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corp. Dokumentation zum Brokdorf-Prozess gegen Michael Duffke + Markus Mohr. 1982. Bremen: n.p. Ebert, Theodor. 1984. Ziviler Ungehorsam. Von der APO zur Friedensbewegung. Waldkirch: Waldkircher Verlagsgesellschaft. Geronimo. 2012. Fire and Flames. A history of the german autonomist movement, trans. Gabriel Kuhn. Oakland: PM Press. Glotz, Peter, ed. 1983. Ziviler Ungehorsam im Rechtsstaat. Frankfurt/M: edition Suhrkamp. Gyorgy, Anna, et al. 1979. No Nukes: everyone’s guide to nuclear power. Boston: South End Press. Jezer, Marty. 1977. Learning from the Past to Meet the Future. WIN magazine June 16 (23): 17-23. Kidder, Tracy. 1978. Nonviolent war against nuclear power. Atlantic Monthly 242 (Sept.): 70-6. King, Jr., Martin Luther. 1958. Stride toward Freedom. The Montgomery Story. NY: Harper & Row Publishers. HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 251 King, Jr., Martin Luther. 1991. The Time for Freedom has Come. In A Testament of Hope. The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington. NY: Harper One. 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. Kleinert, Ulfrid, ed. 1981. Gewaltfrei widerstehen. Brokdorf-Protokoll gegen Schlagstöcke und Steine. Reinbek bei Hamburg: rororo aktuell. Klimke, Martin. 2010. The Other Alliance. Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Koenen, Gerd. 2001. Das rote Jahrzehnt. Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Küchenhoff, Erich. 1983. Ziviler Ungehorsam als aktiver Verfassungsschutz. Deutsche Polizei 9: 27-31. Kühle, Manfred. 1976. Im Talar vor der Mauer von Brokdorf. Gewaltfreie Aktion 28/29/30: 64-6. Lepp, Claudia. 2012. Zwischen Konfrontation und Kooperation: Kirchen und soziale Bewegungen in der Bundesrepublik (1950-1983). Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 7 (3). Markovits, Andrei S., and Philip S. Gorski. 1993. The German Left. Red, Green and Beyond. NY: Oxford Univ. Press. Mayer-Tasch, Peter. 1988. Widerstandsrecht und Widerstandspflicht im Zeichen der Sozioökologische Krise. In Widerstand im Rechtsstaat, ed. Peter Saladin and Beat Sitter, 29-40. Freiburg/Schweiz: Universitätsverlag Freiburg. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. 2011. Appropriating the Environment. How the European Institutions Received the Novel Idea of the Environment and Made it Their Own. Research College “The Transformative Power of Europe”, Free University Berlin <http:// www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/en/v/transformeurope/publications/working_paper/WP_31 _Meyer_neu.pdf> (accessed November 15, 2013). Mossmann, Walter. 1975. ‘Die Bevölkerung ist hellwach!’ Erfahrungen aus dem Kampf der Badisch-Elsässischen Bevölkerung gegen ein Atomkraftwerk in Wyhl und ein Bleiwerk in Marckolsheim. Kursbuch 39: 129-53. Painke, Uwe. 1997. Training für Gewaltfreiheit, ed. Christian Büttner et al. Politik von unten. Sonderband der gewaltfreien Aktion 111 (12): 167-77. Peters, Shawn Francis. 2012. The Catonsville Nine. A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Quint, Peter E. 2008. Civil disobedience and the German Courts: the Pershing missile protests in comparative perspective. London: Routledge Cavendish. Rodenko, Igal. 1979. Pros and Cons – The October 6 Occupation. WIN magazine September 27: 14-6. Rosenblith, Murray. 1977. Surrounded by Acres of Clams. WIN magazine June 16 (23): 4-10. Rucht, Dieter. 1984. Recht auf Widerstand? Aktualität, Legitimität und Grenzen ‘zivilen Ungehorsams’. In An die Grenzen der Mehrheitsdemokratie, ed. Bernd Guggenberger and Claus Offe. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Scalmer, Sean. 2011. Gandhi in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Schüring, Michael. 2012. West German Protestants and the Campaign against Nuclear Technology. Central European History 45 (4): 744-62 HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 252 Seehase, Gerhard. 1976. Den Talar brauchten sie nicht zu verbergen. Die Zeit 52 (17 Dec.). Smith, Kenneth, and Ira G. Zepp, Jr. 1986. Search for the Beloved Community. Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America. Sommer, Theo. 1977. Die Kernkraft spaltet unser Land. Die Zeit 10 (4 Mar.). Spörl, Gerhard. 1982. Bürgerkriegsjustiz. Die Zeit 21 (21 May). Sternstein, Wolfgang. 1981a. Blockade in Brokdorf – ein Aktionsbericht. Gewaltfreie Aktion 47/48. Sternstein, Wolfgang. 1981b. Gewaltfreier Volksaufstand. Gewaltfreie ‘Guerilla’ Aktion. graswurzel revolution 55 (June): 25-7. Sternstein, Wolfgang. 1982. Brokdorf Blockade Diskussion. graswurzel revolution 61: 34-35. Varon, Jeremy. 2004. Bringing the War Home. The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. Wasserman, Harvey. 1977. Clamshell Alliance: getting it together. Progressive 41 (Sept. 1977): 14-8. Wasserman, Harvey. 1978. Seabrook Occupation 1978. WIN magazine June 22. Weber-Zucht, Helga. 1977. Atomkraft? Nein Danke! WIN magazine XIII 24: 8-9. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 2010. “Transnationale Geschichte – der neue Königsweg historischer Forschung?” In Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, ed. Gunilla Budde et al., 161-74. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. 2004. Introduction. De la Comparaison à L’Histoire Croisée. Paris: Seuil. Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. 2006. Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity. History and Theory 45: 30-50. Wüstenhagen, Hans Helmut. 1975. Bürger gegen Kernkraftwerke. Wyhl der Anfang? Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch. Zinn, Howard. 1968. Disobedience and Democracy. Nine Fallacies on Law and Order. NY: Random House. Zint, Günter, et al. 1980. Republik Freies Wendland. Eine Dokumentation: Frankfurt/M: Zweitausendeins. Zunes, Stephen. Sept. 1978. ‘Seabrook’ a turning point. Progressive 42: 28-30. HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 253 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; astrid.m.kirchhof@hu-berlin.de. Historical Social Research 39 (2014) 1, 254-273 Ň© GESIS 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). Wise Bulletin. 1978 (3). 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 Wise Bulletin. 1979 (4). 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. 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HSR 39 (2014) 1 Ň 273 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. 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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 scientiic 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 • Archiving and registering: Longterm permanent archiving and registration of data and publications www.gesis.org Quadrat B2, 1 68159 Mannheim Phone +49 (0)621 1246-0 Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8 50667 Köln Phone +49 (0)221 476 94-0 Schifbauerdamm 19 10117 Berlin Phone +49 (0)30 233611-0 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