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The West German Peace Movement and the Christian Churches: An Institutional Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Alice Holmes Cooper
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Extract

Protestant participation in postwar West German peace movements has markedly outstripped Catholic participation, suggesting that age is not the only important cleavage separating participants and nonparticipants. It is argued that because churches interpret collective experience, they have helped shape individual attitudes and political protest across generations throughout the postwar period. In West Germany, church interpretations of fascism, World War Two, and postwar developments have offered interpretive frameworks and defined the parameters of defense issues for their members. In doing so, churches have provided or restricted ideological, as well as organizational, resources to peace protest within their midst. Similar processes are at work in institutions like parties and unions as well. Although younger generations have sometimes adopted more radical views than their elders, the interplay between generations has taken place in the context of a previous institutional framing of issues.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , Winter 1988 , pp. 71 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1988

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References

Notes

* I would like to thank Peter Hall, Anthony Messina, and Samuel K. Cohen, Jr., for their criticisms of earlier drafts.

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7. For specific data on the differences in participation according to church affiliation (the only case to receive detailed attention in this article) see below.

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12. The Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) is the official name of the postwar German Protestant church.

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49. In particular in “Gaudium et spes.”

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57. The church, under pressure from the laity, did stand up for the individual's right to C.O. status in the 1950's rearmament debate, but only in cases where the war in question was objectively unjust, and not for conscientious objection in principle. See Manteuffel, , Katholizismus und Wiederbewaffnung, p. 236Google Scholar. The qualified nature of this support was reinforced by the insistence on the part of the Catholic youth organization (BDKJ), one of the groups which pressed most strongly for the right to C.O. status, that C.O.'s should have to justify themselves before a panel, in contrast to the EKD position that the individual conscience cannot be judged by others. See Kubbig, , Kirche und Kriegsdienstverweigerung, p. 92, on this point.Google Scholar

58. Kubbig, , Kirche und Kriegsdienstverweigerung, p. 91.Google Scholar

59. Ibid., 96–99.

60. von Eichborn, Wolfgang, “Politisierung der Kriegsdienstverweigerung,” in Duchrow and Scharffenorth, eds., Konflikte zwischen Wehrdienst und Friedensdiensten, p. 160.Google Scholar

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67. On this point see Sigal, Leon, Nuclear Forces in Europe (Washington, D. C.: The Brookings Institution, 1984), p. 64.Google Scholar