Mobilization of the Peace Movement

On 12 December 1979, the foreign and defense ministers of the NATO alliance finalized their plans to place 108 Pershing II and 464 cruise missiles in West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, beginning in 1983. Emerging from this meeting, American Secretary of State Cyrus Vance said, "I believe that our governments can be proud of this memorable achievement and that the free people of the alliance will show overwhelming support for the decisions made here today." His expectations were to be disappointed. The two-track decision allowed a lag of four years in order to give the United States and the Soviet Union time to reach a negotiated agreement on medium-range nuclear weapons. As it turned out, these negotiations were not fruitful until after most of the INF missiles were actually deployed. But the time lag between the announcement and the deployment of the new missiles did have the unintended effect of giving the peace movement a chance to organize. The result was a wave of political protest unprecedented in the postwar history of Western Europe. As two peace movement activists remarked, "In a very bizarre way, we can thank the NATO ministers for giving us a challenge and a deadline."

The mass mobilization that took place in opposition to the INF decision was so heterogeneous that it is difficult to characterize it in any one set of terms. What is true of large national peace movement organizations is not true of local organizations or of unaffiliated activists. What may be true of religious groups is not likely to hold for Marxists. The speeches of movement leaders do not tell us much about those on the periphery of the movement or about passive sympathizers. Differences especially of ideology and of preferred tactics loom large both within and between peace movement organizations. With 2,300 local, national and international groups organized within the rubric of the peace movement by 1982, it could hardly be otherwise.

One may go so far as to say that the peace movement itself is only a media label; an organizing concept used to draw a connection between a huge array of independent actions taken by people who have little in common other than their belief that nuclear weapons are a dangerous form of defense. Even the chief actors within the movement tend to be reluctant to speak for the movement as a whole. As a press release from the West German Coordinating Committee (KA), a federation of leading peace movement organizations, put it, "We deny anyone the right to define who or what the peace movement is in this land. Even the Coordinating Committee for the autumn actions can only speak for the organizations represented therein, and not for the peace movement as a whole."

Despite this diversity, it is possible to speak of a single phenomenon that, in the early 1980s at least, characterized the peace movement as a whole. That is the focus on cruise and Pershing II deployment in Western Europe. In some quarters, response to the INF decision was almost immediate. Forty thousand people gathered in Brussels to protest the decision even as it was announced in December 1979. In January 1980, a divisional tank commander in the West German army, General Gert Bastian, publicly criticized the proposed missile deployment and was relieved of his duties. Also in early 1980, two veteran peace campaigners in Great Britain launched the World Disarmament Council to circulate petitions on a global basis for submission to the 1982 United Nations Special Session on Disarmament. In April, E. P. Thompson took the lead in founding European Nuclear Disarmament (END), an organization intended to provide a center for communication and coordination between various national peace groups. A petition campaign was launched that spring in Krefeld to call on the West German government to reverse its support for the new missiles; it had gathered 1.5 million signatures by late 1981.6 In the fall of 1980, the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), all but defunct since the mid-1960s, organized a rally that drew between fifty and eighty thousand people. In the Netherlands a campaign against nuclear weapons begun by the Interchurch Peace Council (IKV) in 1977 gathered momentum in the wake of a heated debate in the Dutch parliament on the cruise missiles.

But these pockets of activism did not coalesce into a continentwide peace movement until Easter 1981, when a rally in Brussels drew over one hundred thousand people. Peace groups from several countries participated in planning the Brussels rally, and they returned home to organize the wave of demonstrations held that autumn throughout the capitals of Western Europe. Many of these demonstrations were the largest seen in their countries in the postwar era: between one hundred and two hundred thousand people marched in the streets of London and Brussels, and over a quarter-million gathered in Bonn. There were a half-million marchers in Rome and Paris in late October, and nearly that many in Amsterdam in November. In each city it took hours for the rows of marchers to pass by a single point, some of them dressed in skeleton costumes or wearing gas masks, others holding aloft banners or chanting "Ban the bomb" (London), "Neither Pershing nor SS-20" (Paris), "Peace without armaments" (Bonn), or "From Sicily to Scandinavia, no to NATO and the Warsaw Pact" (Rome).

October 1981 was only the beginning. When President Reagan visited a number of European cities in June 1982 for the economic summit in Bonn, he was greeted with demonstrations even larger than those of the previous fall. There were over a quarter-million marchers in London and in Rome on 5 and 6 June, and between them Bonn and West Berlin put nearly a half-million people in the streets on 10 June. Although none of these rallies was as large as the gathering of one million people in New York's Central Park on 12 June, each of them was of unprecedented size for countries with populations less than a quarter that of the United States.

The scale of the fall 1981 rallies was not repeated in the autumn of 1982, and by the end of the year political leaders in both the United States and Europe asserted that the movement was finished and that politics would now return to normal. It was wishful thinking. Sixteen months after the June 1982 rallies, as the time approached for the host countries to give final approval to the missiles, the peace movement once again brought even greater numbers of people into the streets. During the month of October 1983, demonstrations around Western Europe attracted more than three million participants. Over one million people demonstrated in major cities across West Germany on a single day: 400,000 each in Bonn and Hamburg, 250,000 in Stuttgart, 150,000 in Neu-Ulm (site of one of the Pershing II missile bases), and 100,000 in West Berlin. A rally that same month...