The Peace Movements In Europe And The United States

In the early 1980s the peace movements in most of the Western countries captured public attention as never before. This largely resulted from NATO’s decision in 1979 to deploy new medium range missiles in Europe in 1983 if negotiations with the Soviet Union to limit this type of weapon system failed. The main purpose of the peace movements in Europe was to put pressure on their respective governments to accept Soviet proposals in negotiations and not to deploy new missiles. Many large demonstrations and other ‘happenings’ were organised for this purpose. The Soviet and other Warsaw Pact countries accompanied and supported the activities of the peace movements by propaganda and disinformation campaigns. The national peace movements, despite their common aims, had different historic backgrounds and characteristics. This book, originally published in 1985, presents an authoritative review of the peace movements in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and the United States. The authors discuss not only the history and organisation of each peace movement, but also their international cooperation, media coverage and prospects for the future.

International Social Movement Research

This extraordinary compendium concerns the future of the Western alliance and the development of the peace movements in Europe and in the United States. The peace movement is an old phenomenon given new life by NATO decisions concerning nuclear deployment in Europe and the Soviet responses along the same lines. After a long postwar marriage, Europeans and Americans alike are reexamining the premises of the Western alliance.The contributors provide a variety of scenarios, extending from the maintenance of the status quo to the complete dismantling of the Western alliance, or at least of its NATO component. In a context of rapid change and new challenges to the democratic bloc, the editors and authors argue for higher levels of economic integration and caution that competition might spill over into political collapse.The work deals with thorny security issues in a frank and policy-oriented way. While each contributor expresses a unique standpoint, a surprising consensus emerges: The need for democratic nations to move toward a higher policy ground in order to preserve the fundamental alliance that led to the postwar consensus to begin with. Some contributors feel this is still possible, others that the time has passed, and that national rather than regional interests will once more prevail.The work contains an extraordinary array of talent from both the American and European perspectives. Among the major contributors and their themes are Henry Kissinger on "A Plan to Reshape NATO"; William G. Hyland on "The European Peace Movement and NATO"; Irving Kristol on "What's Wrong with NATO?"; Theodore Draper on "The Western Misalliance"; Niels Haagerup on "The Nordic Peace Movements"; Martin Ceadel on "The British Nuclear Disarmers"; and Jeffrey Herf on "The SPD and the Peace Movement in West Germany." This is a well-integrated text, with no random essays.

There is a long tradition of opposition to war and organized peace campaigns date from 1815. Since 1945, however, modern weapons technology has threatened world wide destruction and has stimulated widespread protests. This book sketches in the background of thinking about peace and resistance to war before 1945, and then examines how public opposition to nuclear weapons and testing grew in the 1950s and early 1960s. Later chapters cover the major ressurgence of nuclear disarmament campaigns in the 1980s. The book also looks at how peace protest has spread from its origins in North America and North West Europe to embrace many parts of the world; opposition to nuclear testing has indeed been particularly strong in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands. The period 1945 to 1990 was dominated by the Cold War between the USA and USSR, and the role of the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Council caused difficulties for indeptendent peace groups in the West. During the 1980s the emergence of autonomous peace activity in a number of East European countries, and even on a very small scale in the USSR itself, transformed the possibilities for East-West co-operation between citizens to urge disarmament and political change. A chapter examines these developments. Opposition to all forms of militarism has spread in the last 30 years. This book charts the struggles to extend the right to conscientious objection to military service, and draft resistance to particular wars - for example in Southern Africa and Israel. It also looks in some detail at the growing opposition to the war in the Vietnam. The recent protests against the Gulf War are surveyed briefly in an epilogue.

This volume offers a wealth of empirical information on peace movements in Western Europe, Japan and the USA in the period from 1945 to 1990, discussing anti-nuclear protests in the USA, West Germany and the UK, but also in often neglected countries such as France, Italy and Japan. The contributors provide fresh analytical perspectives on peace protests and reassess their relevance for a history of the Cold War. Several chapters analyze the symbolic politics of peace protests and demonstrate how they were embedded in the political culture of their respective nation-state. Specific emphasis is placed on attempts by artists and peace activists to make the dangers of nuclear war and the need for peace and disarmament visible. Transnational connections between peace protesters and their attempts to establish links with other social movements are another focus of the volume. Based on comparative research, this volume is an important contribution to the history of the Cold War and of social movements in the post-war period..

The crusade against nuclear weapons in Great Britain, West Germany, France, and the Netherlands in the early 1980s dwarfed all previous protest movements in Western Europe in the postwar period. What produced the demonstrations against NATO's decision in December 1979 to base 572 cruise and Pershing II missiles in five West European countries? What generated the widespread support that the demonstrators enjoyed? Contrary to the frequent claim that such political movements are a symptom of governmental crisis in the advanced industrial democracies, Thomas Rochon develops the idea that they arise from a creative impulse and perform crucial functions of innovative criticism. He concludes that the West European peace movement has ignited a public debate in which reduction or elimination of certain categories of nuclear weapons is taken seriously for the first time. Among the topics examined are the sources of support for the peace movement in public opinion, the types of people who joined or supported the movement, and proposals they offered for a nonnuclear defense policy. The author discusses the organization of the movement and its choice of tactics, its impact on politics, and the links between it and other institutions such as churches, trade unions, and political parties. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.