Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy: A Comparison of Germany and the United States

By Christian Joppke

In the past two decades young people, environmentalists, church activists, leftists, and others have mobilized against nuclear energy. Anti-nuclear protest has been especially widespread and vocal in Western Europe and the United States. In this lucid, richly documented book, Christian Joppke compares the rise and fall of these protest movements in Germany and the United States, illuminating the relationship between national political structures and collective action. He analyzes existing approaches to the study of social movements and suggests an insightful new paradigm for research in this area. Joppke proposes a political process perspective that focuses on the interrelationship between the state and social movements, a model that takes into account a variety of forces, including differential state structures, political cultures, movement organizations, and temporal and contextual factors.

This is an invaluable work for anyone studying the dynamics of social movements around the world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
In the past two decades young people, environmentalists, church activists, leftists, and others have mobilized against nuclear energy. Anti-nuclear protest has been especially widespread and vocal in Western Europe and the United States. In this lucid, ri

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520912526

Christian Joppke

Christian Joppke is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California.

Book preview

Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy

Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy

A Comparison of Germany and the United States

Christian Joppke

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • Oxford

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

Copyright © 1993 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Joppke, Christian.

Mobilizing against nuclear energy: a comparison of Germany and the United States / Christian Joppke.

p. cm.

Revision of author’s theses (Ph. D.)—University of California at

Berkeley, 1989.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-07813-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Antinuclear movement—United States. 2. Antinuclear movement—

Germany 3. Social movements—Political aspects. I. Title.

HD9698.U52J67 1992

333.792'4'0943—dc20 92-3249

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 @

To Neil Smelser and Jürgen Habermas, in gratitude

Contents

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

CHAPTER ONE Introduction

PART I The Rise of the

CHAPTER TWO Expert Dissent and Legal Intervention in the United States

CHAPTER THREE Elite Consensus and Citizen

PART II Energy Crisis

CHAPTER FOUR Public-Interest Advocacy and Direct Action in the United States

CHAPTER FIVE Challenging the State in West Germany

PART III The Decline of the

CHAPTER SIX Three Mile Island and the Decline of Nuclear Power in the United States

CHAPTER SEVEN Institutionalization and

CHAPTER EIGHT Conclusion

APPENDIX A. Methodology

APPENDIX B. Tables

APPENDIX C. Informants and Primary Sources

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Jim Jasper, Doug McAdam, Neil Smelser, Jerome Karabel, Harold Wilensky, and Mark Garcelon for their critical readings of previous versions of this manuscript. I also wish to thank the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey; the Graduate Division of the University of California at Berkeley; and the Institute of International Studies at U.C. Berkeley for fellowship support.

Abbreviations

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Political Process and Social Movements

This is a book about social movements in cross-national perspective.¹ It attempts to move the empirical study of social movements closer to political sociology and comparative politics. It also tackles a core problem of social and political theory—the relationship between structure and action.² This book focuses on the relationship between political structures and social movements. Its aim is to develop a dynamic and multifactorial account of this relationship. Political structures shape the mobilization of social movements, but movements in turn refashion and transform the structures in which they occur.

The structural features of nation-states and political systems affect movements by providing opportunities and constraining action. But, as is true everywhere in society, structures are produced and reproduced through action (Giddens 1984). This study seeks to reconstruct the patterns of interaction between states and movements, which evolve over time and grow into conflict trajectories with fixed roles, stabilized expectations, and collective memories. These conflict trajectories recursively influence the perceptions and choices of the involved actors. Instead of a linear and static relationship between structure and action, this study draws a reciprocal and dynamic relationship that changes over time and assumes an inertia in its own right.

Addressing the political context of social movements has become the dominant strategy in an emergent political process paradigm in recent social movement research. This study further develops this paradigm in three directions. First, this book advances a notion of political process that is centered on the interactions between states and social movements. Most previous studies looked at states as passive opportunity structures for collective mobilization, not as actors involved in behavioral exchanges with movements. This study seeks to redress this previous neglect of interactive dynamics. Second, this book develops a tempo- ralized view of the state-movement relationship. Most studies of social movements focus on the structural causes and incipient phases of mobilization and fail to analyze movement trajectories over time and the phase of movement decline (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zaid 1988; 728-729). This study fills the temporal lacuna in social movement research by addressing movement mobilization and state response over time. Third, this book adds the rich texture of national political traditions and cultures to the sterile notion of political process. The very meaning of politics differs across national boundaries, and these different meanings have a profound impact on conflict patterns around otherwise identical issues. Only cross-national comparisons make these broad political presuppositions visible and bring them into perspective. While recent social movement research has recognized the need to move in a cross-national direction (Tarrow 1986, 1988; Klandermans, Kriesi, and Tarrow 1988; Klandermans 1989; Katzenstein and Mueller 1987), empirically grounded and conceptually controlled comparisons have rarely been done. Above all, this study fills the cross-national lacuna in social movement research.³

THE CASES: SAME ISSUES, DIFFERENT RESPONSES

This case study compares the origins, courses, and impacts of the antinuclear energy movements in West Germany and the United States. But why study these particular movements? They are significant because the controversy over nuclear energy heralded the coming of a new line of conflict in Western democracies.⁴ Historically, the master conflict in Western democracies was over the implementation of citizenship rights (Marshall 1977; Lipset and Rokkan 1967). As Ralf Dahrendorf (1988; 37) puts it, The modern social conflict is about attacking inequalities which restrict full civic participation by social, economic or political means, and establishing the entitlements which make up a rich and full status of citizenship. These earlier citizenship conflicts were based on social and political inequalities between well-defined groups and classes. With the nuclear energy and ecology conflicts of the 1970s, a new conflict axis with new forms of political mobilization emerged that cut across conventional group boundaries. If air and water are polluted, everybody is affected. Environmental pollution and nuclear power risks are collective risks that are not confined to limited groups and classes. They entail, not hierarchical relationships of exploitation and power, but disparities between life spheres (Offe 1969) to which potentially every member of society is subjected.

The sweeping diagnosis of an emergent risk society beyond class and citizenship conflicts is certainly premature and ethnocentric, reverberating with the gloomy Central European mood after the Chernobyl disaster (Beck 1986,1987, 1988; Evers and Nowotny 1987). But the mobilization around collective risk exhibits ideological forms and strategic dilemmas that differ significantly from previous citizenship mobilization (Joppke 1991b). These differences are as yet little analyzed. Angst and Betroffenheit (affectedness) have become key words for new forms of social mobilization that lack the clear-cut interest basis of citizenship movements. The ecology, antinuclear, and peace movements have made themselves the advocates of collective, rather than particular, interests, often rejecting conventional forms of political action and relating the most intimate, such as the integrity of body and life, to the most remote, such as the ecosphere and geopolitics (Offe 1985a). The new risks are drawn as immediate and global. Doomsday visions, a sense of utmost urgency, and a fundamentalist advocacy of survival flourish in the new risk movements (Halfmann 1988). This catastrophist ideology (Cotgrove 1982), whose most striking expression may be the doomsday clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reflects the strategic dilemma of being notoriously late. Risk movements respond to policies on the brink of implementation, to large-scale technological projects almost realized, or to air and water already polluted. Given the temporal position of these movements, there is no time to lose because too much time has already been lost. If citizenship movements were proactively oriented toward obtaining new resources and expanding rights, risk movements are reactive to encroachments by large-scale technologies and externalities of industrial modernization—not by accident, these movements have a predilection for the prefix "anti."⁵

While the challenge posed by the implementation of a new high-risk technology has been fairly equal in both countries considered here, the responses differed profoundly. It is these different national responses that are the focus of this book. The West German antinuclear movement became a radical movement against the state and espoused direct, and often violent, forms of protest. The American movement developed along overall more moderate lines but became peculiarly bifurcated between a legalistic public-interest branch and a nonviolent direct-action branch. A detailed descriptive and explanatory unraveling of these different responses is the purpose of this case study.

PARADIGMS IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORY

How can we account for cross-national variations in social movement responses to a similar challenge? An examination of the major paradigms in social movement research yields only partial answers to this question. The U.S.-German comparison is especially attractive in this regard because sociologists and political scientists in both countries have interpreted contemporary protest movements in different theoretical paradigms: resource mobilization in the United States and new social movement in West Germany. The comparative perspective exposes the ethnocentric limitations of both paradigms and suggests an alternative political process approach.

RESOURCE MOBILIZATION

Since the late 1960s, resource mobilization theory (RMT) has become the dominant paradigm in American social movement theory. The previous collective behavior tradition had explained social movements in social-psychological terms as irrational reactions to structural strains.⁶ By contrast, resource mobilization theorists conceive of social movements as rational enterprises in organizational terms, as politics by other means.⁷ Strains and grievances are everywhere; only changes in resources, organization, and opportunities can explain the appearance of collective action and social movements. Such movements are seen here as extensions of institutional action; they seek civic incorporation for groups not previously granted full political or social rights. The movements of the 1960s, such as the civil rights, antiwar, and student movements, are the historical backdrop to resource mobilization theory. In fact, many of its proponents have been actively involved in the politics of the New Left, and the primary focus of RMT on organization and resource procurement (as well as the basic premise of rationality) mirrors the practical interests, and biases, of movement leaders.⁸

In its most typical formulation (McCarthy and Zaid 1977), RMT emphasizes the key role of issue entrepreneurs; the effectiveness of a centralized, professional movement organization; and the necessity of obtaining resources from external sponsors. As the provocative use of notions such as movement organization, industry, and sector indicates, social movements are studied much like economic enterprises or any other formal organization. The rational pursuit of limited interests, based on utilitarian cost-benefit calculations, not the solidarity of members or broad visions of social change, is seen as the driving force of social movements.⁹ This leads RMT to emphasize the importance of external resources. Since movements usually mobilize deprived groups with small resources, they depend on the influx of external resources by conscience constituents (such as the wealthy middle class) or institutional actors (such as reform-minded governments). The emphasis on entrepreneurship, formal organization, and external support and the neglect of solidarity and collective mobilization from below make RMT almost cynical in tone.¹⁰

Organizational rationality is the catchword of RMT. In fact, the conceptual assimilation of collective action to conventional interest- group politics reflects a real key feature of contemporary American movements. John McCarthy and Mayer Zaid (1977) admit that their classic version of RMT is based entirely on the American case. As will be demonstrated, RMT’s emphasis on issue entrepreneurship, professionalism, and the policy process adequately describes the dominant publicinterest branch in the American antinuclear movement. The involvement of formal organizations such as the Sierra Club, the prominence of issue entrepreneurs such as Ralph Nader, and the pursuit of institutional strategies such as litigation and electoral campaigning are directly in line with the rationalist tinge of resource mobilization theory. RMT reflects the latitude and vitality of civil society in the United States. In this view, contemporary social movements are not extraordinary phenomena that emerge only in response to regime crises or change processes; they are everyday phenomena of collective-interest articulation, much like the host of intermediary associations that Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Jacksonian America.

Even if RMT is restricted to the narrow case of the American antinuclear movement, however, the limitations of the theory are obvious. Most notably, it cannot explain the brief but significant appearance of civil disobedience and direct action. As will be demonstrated, the directaction movement stressed the solidarity of members rather than organizational efficiency, it categorically refused institutional strategies, and its egalitarian ideology defied hierarchy and leadership. The resource mobilization approach operates with a narrow notion of means-end rationality in an economic environment of scarce resources. It neglects the role of ideology and of expressive motives in social movements, which filter and constrain the choice of strategies. Moreover, it exaggerates the role of self-interest in processes of mobilization and obscures the importance of solidarity or purposive incentives that tie members to social movement organizations (Fireman and Gamson 1979; Jasper 1990a).

Finally, if we want to explain cross-national variations, RMT fails completely. The very category of public-interest advocacy, which epitomizes the thrust of RMT, is notably absent in the West German antinuclear movement. The model of professional movement organizations led by issue entrepreneurs reflects certain features of contemporary American social movements. It becomes inappropriate if applied to different national contexts. In fact, the West German antinuclear movement has often been described as a new social movement (NSM) (Brand, Büsser, and Rucht 1986), the second major paradigm in contemporary social movement research.

NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENT

The American RMT has emphasized the rational impetus of contemporary reform movements and has focused on intra- and interorganiza- tional processes of resource maximization, activation of members, and strategic decision making. European authors, however, have analyzed the same or similar movements as reflections of some deeper transformations of capitalist democracies. The contemporary student, women’s, environmental, and peace movements are interpreted as new social movements that emerged in response to sweeping changes of the societal macrostructure.¹¹ In this view, new social movements do not so much operate within conventional politics, as RMT presumes, as articulate a fundamental critique of the established social order. In Claus Offe’s (1985c) terms, they engage in metapolitics and challenge the institutional presuppositions of conventional interest politics.¹² Whereas RMT emphasizes the continuity of past and present movements, new social movement theory stresses the discontinuity of contemporary social movements. New social movements are seen as revolving around a new societal cleavage line with essentially new stakes of conflict, modes of action, and values.

Betraying its origins in European Marxism, NSM theory presumes that the old societal master conflict was based on social class. Today, according to NSM, the class cleavage has been institutionalized in formalized procedures of collective bargaining, the welfare state, and political mass parties. The old paradigm (Offe 1985c) of postwar politics fostered a societal consensus based on continual economic growth, the steady expansion of the state, and materialist values. The new paradigm, launched by the new social movements, questions the normative presuppositions of the old paradigm and addresses the costs of statism and economic growth.¹³

Not unlike the collective behavior emphasis on structural strain (Smel- ser 1962), NSM conceives of contemporary movements as responses to a new level of domination in postindustrial society (Touraine 1977) or as defensive struggle against the irrationalities of modernization (Offe 1985c, 857). The costs of economic and political rationality—such as pollution or bureaucratization—are seen here as dispersing in time and space, affecting virtually every member of society beyond conventional group criteria of class, gender, or race. New social movements thus articulate universal, rather than group-specific, interests. At the same time, processes of social control are no longer confined to the workplace (as classic Marxism assumed); they penetrate the realm of culture and social reproduction. New social movements thus operate in the sphere of civil society, and they have a cultural, rather than an economic or a political, orientation. Finally, more and more policy decisions and economic developments become irreversible and undermine the learning capacity of the institutional core of modern society, especially the state.¹⁴ The dominance of the instrumental complex of state and economy (Parsons 1951) can be overcome only from the outside. New social movements are non- or even anti-institutional. In sum, the simultaneous broadening, deepening, and irreversibility of control in postindustrial capitalism appear as the macrostructural backdrop of the new social movements.¹⁵

The resource mobilization and new social movement approaches evidently complement, rather than refute, each other because they are situated on different explanatory levels (Klandermans and Tarrow 1988; Klandermans 1986; Melucci 1984). RMT emphasizes the microlevel of internal movement organization and responds to the question of how social movements procure resources, recruit members, and make decisions. By contrast, NSM theory highlights the meanings and macrostructural causes of contemporary social movements and thus responds to the question of why they rise at all. In short, RMT stresses action, whereas NSM theory stresses structure.¹⁶

Current attempts to reconcile both paradigms are useful, but they also obscure their incompatibilities (Klandermans, Kriesi, and Tarrow 1988). RMT emphasizes the continuity of contemporary social movements with previous movements, their fluid ties to institutional politics, the pragmatic self-limitation of movement goals, and the benefits of formal organization and professional leadership. The world of NSM theory is entirely different. The new movements are discontinuous with past movements, they are antagonistic to the state, they propagate broad visions of societal transformation, and they defy organizational constraints and leadership in favor of radical democracy.

If RMT reflects key features of the American antinuclear movement, NSM theory resembles the parallel West German movement in some regards. As I will demonstrate in detail, the West German antinuclear movement challenged the societal consensus based on economic growth and questioned politics as usual. The movement operated outside the political system and resorted to direct protest. It rejected organizational discipline and hierarchy, which were negatively associated with the politics of the bureaucratized mass parties. The movement was discontinuous with previous movements. Most importantly, the West German antinuclear movement became a radical movement against the state.

If the emphasis of RMT on the continuity, pragmatism, and professionalism of contemporary movements reflects the American experience, the emphasis of NSM theory on the discontinuity, metapolitical orientation, and the non- or even anti-institutional affection of the new movements narrowly reflects the European experience. While each theoretical strategy may adequately describe certain key features of contemporary social movements on both sides of the Atlantic, neither can explain their variations. For a systematic comparison of the West German and the U.S. antinuclear movements we need a model that avoids the ethnocentric limitations of RMT and NSM and that explains, rather than replicates, cross-national variations. Moreover, we need a model that more adequately mediates between the macrolevel of structure and the microlevel of action. As I shall argue, only a political process perspective provides a suitable alternative.

COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR

Before we examine the political process alternative, let us have a fresh look at the collective behavior paradigm. Few contemporary movement analysts have good things to say about collective behavior theory, which dominated American social movement research for almost four decades.

In fact, associating social movements with other forms of elementary collective behavior (Blumer 1939), such as crowds, panics, and crazes, and resorting to psychological explanations of movement participation in terms of irrational generalized beliefs (Smelser 1962) obscure the political dimension of contemporary reform movements.¹⁷ Nevertheless, collective behavior theory generated some indispensable insights into the temporal dynamics and the identity formation of movements.

Today it is often forgotten that for the early Chicago School the study of collective behavior represented one of the core areas of sociology. Collective behavior was identified as the driving force of social change. As Herbert Blumer (1939, 69) puts it, Collective behavior is concerned in studying the ways by which the social order comes into existence, in the sense of the emergence and solidification of new forms of collective behavior.

The emphasis on process and dynamics highlights an important aspect of social movements that is ignored by most other movement theories. Building on Blumer and Symbolic Interactionism (which stresses the role of symbols and of situational encounters in social life) Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian (1987, 237) have further elaborated a process view of social movements:

Like other forms of collective behavior, social movements are continuously in process. Goals, ideologies, strategies, tactics, relations with authority and with other movements, movement structure, systems of adherent control, adherent gratifications, and even constituencies are all subject to change throughout the life of a movement. Because movements are not yet institutionalized and because a movement cannot be fully contained within any organization or stable alliance of organizations, movements are dispropor- tionally subject to rapid change.

We can learn from collective behavior theory that the analysis of social movements must be sensitive to timing and process. Social movements are ever-changing, fluid phenomena that must be studied through the interactive, temporal sequences in which they unfold. Successions of dramatic events (Blumer 1978), such as encounters with authorities, shape the identity and collective memory of a movement and function as screening devices for the perception of opportunities and the choice of strategies. Collective behavior theory reminds us that movements are not always rational decision makers (as RMT would have it) but are bounded by past experiences and the phases of their life cycles.

Moreover, to keep members loyal to the movement, a certain element of exaggeration and monster building seems inevitable and even ra tional. Neil Smelser (1962) has characterized social movements as guided by generalized beliefs, which short-circuit from generalized causes of strain to concrete situational elements. We will see that there is a tendency in the antinuclear movements to demonize nuclear power as an imminent threat and a symbol of a deeper pathology of modern society. While irrational from an external viewpoint, demonization is instrumental for providing group cohesion and a collective identity.

In sum, collective behavior theory certainly misses the political and rational-interest dimension of social movements. But not everything in movements is as rational as the marketplace. Collective behavior theory sensitizes us to the process aspects of movements and to the symbolic sphere of identity formation.

POLITICAL PROCESS

Resource mobilization and new social movement theories jointly obscure the connections between national politics and social movements (Tarrow 1988). Both theories ignore the impact of political structures on social movements. Bringing the state back in, the latest battle cry in American political sociology, is the most promising avenue for avoiding the empty macrogeneralizations of NSM and the blind microempiricism of RMT.¹⁸ State structures shape the strategies, courses, and possible impacts of social movements.

The recent political process approach emerged in response to the rather one-sided emphasis of RMT on organizational and entrepreneurial resources, emphasizing instead the crucial role of political and institutional resources in social movement mobilization. It grew out of a particular concern for movement impacts, an aspect mostly neglected by RMT (Tarrow 1989). The political process approach focuses on political opportunity structures, such as the openness of the polity (Eisinger 1973), the instability of electoral alliances (Piven and Cloward 1977) or the presence of support groups and friendly elites in the political system (Jenkins and Perrow 1977; Gamson 1975), as conditions of social movement success. Charles Tilly (1978) has developed the most daring and systematic political process theory, one that relates the strategic repertory of social movements to processes of political modernization and state building.¹⁹ Important further developments of the political process approach are Doug McAdam’s (1982) analysis of the civil rights movement and Craig Jenkins’s (1985) work on the U.S. farm worker movement. Both stress the roles of collective mobilization and noninstitutional action in social movements, which have been downplayed by McCarthy and Zaid’s classic version of RMT. Moreover, they emphasize the crucial importance of political and institutional opportunities for the rise and success of social movements.

Despite bringing obvious advances in the assessment of the role of politics in social movements, these political process approaches are problematic in several respects. First, the term political opportunity structure connotes widely disparate things, such as elite support, coalition building with other groups, inert state structures, or regime changes. As a result, the notions of political process and opportunity structure lack systematization and clarity.²⁰ Second, there is a conspicuous lack of cross-national comparisons. Even the comparative work of Charles Tilly focuses more on historical changes in collective mobilization processes than on genuinely cross-national variations resulting from differential national state structures. But cross-national comparisons enable us to uncover the impact of politics on collective action and offer an elegant method for untying the complex package of structural, temporal, and contingent factors in social movement mobilization (Tarrow 1986).

An important step in this direction is Herbert Kitschelt’s comparison of antinuclear energy movements in four Western democracies (Kitschelt 1986). Kitschelt argues that variations in strategies and impacts of the analyzed movements are caused by different political regime styles, which he defines as specific configurations of resources, institutional arrangements and historical precedents for social mobilizations, which facilitate the development of protest movements in some instances and constrain them in others (p. 58). Kitschelt equates political regimes with inert state structures that are independent of short-term shifts in policies, governments, and social alliances. The openness of the polity, on the one hand, and the policy implementation capacity of the state, on the other, determine the choice of strategies and the possible impacts of movements. According to Kitschelt, the pluralist and highly fragmented U.S. state favored assimilative and legal antinuclear movement strategies. The combination of neocorporatist closure and federal fragmentation in the West German state favored a mix of confrontational and assimilative movement strategies.

The distinction between the pluralist political regime in the United States and the neocorporatist political regime in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is a powerful conceptual device to explain variations in movement strategies and styles.²¹ In addition, states matter not only as structural conditions but also in their stateness (Netti 1968)—that is, their capacity for action. As the plural in its name betrays, in the United States there is no state as a corporate actor. More government than state, the political center has traditionally functioned as a regulatory instrument (Dahl 1966, 40) and as an arena for whose control societal forces struggle.²² Sovereignty resides not in centralized administrative institutions, as in continental Europe, but in the law and the Constitution— political structures that American protest movements have rarely questioned and that have provided a basic consensus among the respective contestants (Netti 1968, 574).

By contrast, in Germany, as throughout continental Europe, the state has historically functioned as a central mechanism for social and economic progress (Dahl 1966, 40). Because of their feudal tradition, continental European states are first and foremost executive, rather than parliamentary, states. Instead of being a neutral arbiter or arena of interest struggle, the state appears here as a corporate actor. To be sure, the strong state tradition in Germany was diluted by postwar democracy, federalism, and the new dogma of market liberalism. But statism survived in selected policy areas, such as domestic security, and remained a central feature of West German political culture and elite perceptions. In the nuclear energy debate, the state intervened as the corporate defender of the dominant consensus around economic growth. This steered the antinuclear movement into a radical antistatist direction from early on.

TOWARD A CONTEXTUALIZED POLITICAL

PROCESS PERSPECTIVE

The state-centered political process approach, as developed most notably by Kitschelt (1986), overcomes the ethnocentric limitations of the resource mobilization and new social movement paradigms and opens up a level of analysis that allows us to explain cross-national variations of movement strategies and styles. But reference to state structures alone is insufficient to give a full picture of movement variations across time and countries. After all, movements are not just replications of structures; they are also actors with their own predilections and agendas. The state-centered political process approach must give way to a multifactorial political process perspective that also incorporates actor-centered variables.²³ To avoid the functionalist shortcomings of political systems analysis (Easton 1965), we must contextualize and temporalize the ways in which state structures interact with social movements. The static and linear model of inert political regimes that determine movement styles is misleading. It must be replaced by a historical analysis of complex statemovement interactions that work in both directions, the movements altering the conditions in which the political actors operate and the responses by the political actors shaping the environment in which the movements operate.

The following case study will reveal that a political process perspective modified along these lines reaches a more precise understanding of movement variations over time and across nations. A multifactorial, actor-centered political process perspective does not mechanically deduce movement forms from state structures, as Kitschelt (1986) is prone to do. Instead, it looks at the ways in which the actual practices of the major actors involved in the nuclear controversy grow into particular conflict trajectories that gain independent momentum and, to a certain degree, generate the causes of their own perpetuation. As Max Weber ([1921] 1976, 1-30) was the first to point out, structures do not exist unless they are produced and reproduced through social action.²⁴ The course of the nuclear controversies is certainly constrained by the structures of the political systems in which they unfold. But the history of the conflict itself allocates roles, shapes expectations, narrows the range of the contested issues, and produces the motives for its continuance.

This study borrows from collective behavior theory a keen attention to the self-producing, contingent, and time-bound interactive dynamics among the involved actors.²⁵ The study of processes with a low degree of institutionalization, such as social movements and conflict, must be sensitive to timing, uncertainty, and agency. If movements are carriers of change, as the Chicago School emphasized, and if we accept, with Karl Popper (1960), that history is contingent and open-ended, then there must be room for the new and the unexpected to occur.

The contextualized political process perspective maintains the key insight that state structures shape the strategic repertory and condition the possible impacts of movements. But this perspective tries to strike a balance between structure and action by integrating variables that give more room for agency, dynamics, and contingency.

POLITICAL CULTURE

State structures per se do not explain the political preferences that give form and content to collective action. Political preferences are not merely reflections of external opportunities but are culturally determined patterns of perception that select suitable objects and appropriate lines of action. A political process theory that treats preferences and interests as external givens and only considers their ex post facto incorporation into the polity is incomplete. As I shall argue, the reference to political culture can fill the void. Political cultures are the underlying schemes of cognition and operating norms in a polity that define the scope of contested issues and prescribe legitimate forms of interest expression. Political cultures thus conceived have a cognitive and a normative dimension. Cognitively, they select a common frame of reference, or common points of concern (Laitin 1988, 590), and they provide the tool kit (Swidler 1986,273) through which actors define their interests, interpret stakes of conflict, and map out strategies. Normatively, political cultures prescribe acceptable goals and legitimate rules of action.²⁶

Political cultures are certainly rooted in institutional structures and group interests (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Jasper 1990b). But the fit between culture and institutional structure is never a perfect one. As Ann Swidler (1986, 277) notes, culture is usually invoked to explain continuities in action in the face of discontinuities in structure.²⁷ This brings the category of culture dangerously close to being indeterminate and residual. But this ambiguity is a necessary one; it refers to the underlying reality itself. How particular issues become framed and handled in political debate and social struggle often depends on the long-ingrained political traditions of a national collectivity, which may differ from the objective structures of the political arenas.

In the United States, the nuclear policy arena was initially shrouded in secrecy, highly centralized, and cut off from public scrutiny (Green and Rosenthal 1963; Mazutlan and Walker 1985). This violated certain core tenets of American political culture, such as individualism and a notorious distrust of state power.²⁸ The antistatist dimension in the American political tradition, elaborated from Richard Hofstadter (1948) to Samuel Huntington (1981), mobilized a strong nuclear opposition even from within the established polity. In a political culture that consensually distrusts a strong state, the unique centralization of power in the nuclear policy arena had to be perceived as a dangerous aberration. The goals of the emergent nuclear opposition resonated with the core principles of American political culture. This weakened the nuclear project from early on and made the resort to extralegal movement strategies largely unnecessary.

In the West German case, there was no such fortunate overlap be tween movement and political center views. German political culture sharply divides a statist center from an antistatist periphery (Münch 1986, 844). Against the backdrop of a statist political tradition, which sees the state as representing the universal interest against the only particular interests of civil society, opposition movements tend to be anti-institutional and radical (Dyson 1980, 245). Despite significant discontinuities with previous regimes, the young Bonn republic inherited a semiauthoritarian elite culture that associated national identity with economic prosperity (James 1989, 187) and lacked tolerance for civic dissent. In a polarized political culture, the unresponsiveness of statist elites became mirrored in the antistatist disposition of the antinuclear movement.²⁹

Political cultures thus defined are an important factor in explaining cross-national movement and conflict variations. The crucial difference between both countries considered here is the relative congruence or incongruence between political culture and state structure. Because of the historical continuity of American political institutions, there is a high congruence between a fragmented and dispersed state and an antistatist political culture that stresses the autonomous role of civil society in political life. In West Germany, by contrast, the historical discontinuity brought on by two world wars and the Nazi regime caused a high incongruence between state structure and political culture. The constitutional, democratic, and federal state imposed by the victorious Allies was a far cry from the strong state of prewar Germany. But statism remained a central feature of West German political culture, as expressed in the conflict aversion of elites and the reverse readiness of movements to resort to a Totalkritik (total critique) of the institutional order.³⁰

TEMPORAL OPPORTUNITY

State structures affect movements only in conjunction with specific regime and policy constellations, which change over time. Regime changes and policy shifts matter. They form temporal opportunities for movement mobilization. Temporal opportunities are sudden openings, or contractions, that trigger, or constrain, the rhythms and cycles of collective mobilization. The polarization between the antinuclear movement and the state in West Germany occurred against the