A Study On The New Peace Movement In Federal Germany From 1979 To 1985

In the early post-World War II period,the Adenauer conservative government judged the situation,accepted the new post-war order,and fully integrated into the Western camp led by the United States.On the issue of diplomacy and defense,it adhered to NATO’s antagonistic principle of hostility to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.The pioneers of socialism successively re-armed the Bundeswehr,joined NATO,and attempted nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s.This move aroused strong dissatisfaction among the peaceful people in the country and launched many peace campaigns in the past two decades.On the whole,the peace movement before 1979 had obvious conservative tendencies,small scale,limited achievements,and lack of ideological weapons that could systematically criticize government security policies.With the help of the scientific and technological revolution,the Federal German economy reshaped its industrial and social structure after the war,and gradually entered a post-industrial society.The tertiary industry’s share of the domestic economy is increasing,and a new,well-educated middle class has quietly formed.The new class has benefited from the era of material abundance,and the post-materialist thoughts that came out of it are completely different from those of the parents,and they are more concerned about the social problems of the new era.During the easing period in the 1970s,the Social Democratic Party vigorously funded peace research to support the "New Oriental Policy," and the idea of peace was widely spread,and voices questioning NATO’s security policy appeared.At the end of the 1970s,US-Soviet relations deteriorated again.The "dual-track resolution" and the outbreak of the "new cold war" made peace the focus of attention of all classes of federal society and even other countries in Europe and the United States.The new peace movement suddenly rose in Europe and the United States.The representative movements of the Federal German peace movement in the new era can be roughly divided into a large-scale anti-"double-track agreement" movement at the federal level and a diversified anti-nuclear movement at the local level.The movements of the two levels overlap each other in time,forming a scene that complements each other.At the federal level,the New Left outside the parliament united with many peaceful people and groups at home and abroad to reach cross-border cooperation,opposed the government’s security policy,and carried out large-scale protests and demonstrations in central cities.Subsequently,the movement established two more independent loose cooperative alliance organizations,namely the coordination committee and the action meeting,in order to better manage and guide the movement.The large-scale campaign reached its apex in the fall of 1983.Although it exerted tremendous pressure on the federal government and the Reagan administration of the United States,it failed to complete the short-term goal of preventing the deployment of missiles.After that,the focus of the movement shifted from the metropolis to the local area,and various organizations started peace movements at the local grassroots.Since 1979,grassroots organizations and groups have implemented multiple alternative security strategies in local areas to oppose the government’s missile policy,which has extremely strong autonomy.In general,although the New Peace Movement in the 1970s and 1980s in the Federal Republic of Germany failed to achieve the short-term goal of preventing NATO from deploying Pershing-II and land-based cruise missiles,it still had a profound impact both at home and abroad.At home,the New Leftist groups openly criticized and questioned the national security policy with an anti-authoritarian and anti-system autonomy spirit,prompting the Social Democratic Party to adjust its policies,promoting citizens’ participation in national governance and accelerating the process of political democratization in the Federal Republic of Germany.Abroad,the Federal German Peace Movement influenced the process of the US-Soviet nuclear arms control negotiations during the movement to varying degrees and the political attitudes of the leaders of the US and the Soviet Union afterwards,accelerating the end of the Cold War.