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THE PEACE MOVEMENT AND THE "TWO EUROPES" Norman Birnbaum D, 'iscussing the American peace movement a while ago, a very distinguished European leader reportedly declared that he could not take it seriously: After all, he did not recognize the names of any of its leaders. Five hundred years after Luther proclaimed the priesthood ofall believers, our Western elites apparently find it difficult to take democracy seriously enough to suppose that new political movements can arise without their approval and knowledge. The performance of many in the Western political elite in the face of the peace movement has been, in fact, incompetent, when not morally deplorable. Attributing to fellow citizens a maximum of ignorance and bad faith, and sometimes sheer cowardice, our elites have found no argument too crude, no innuendo too derogatory, in a desperate effort to avoid recognizing their own increasing delegitimation. Now that the first of the Euromissiles are arriving in Great Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Italy, now that the U.S. Congress has narrowly voted to proceed with the MX (designated "Peacekeeper," apparently in tribute to the Orwellian year, 1984), now that President Reagan has won a modicum of approval from the American public for having occupied Grenada, it has been suggested that the movement will subside. Norman Birnbaum is University Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. A sociologist who has published on industrial society and the sociology of modern culture, Professor Birnbaum is also active in politics as policy chairman of the New Democratic Coalition. Professor Birnbaum serves as an advisor to a number of senators and congressmen, and as a consultant to several West European political parties. This article originated as a paper presented to the December 1981 conference held by the Friedrich-Naumann Foundation (Bonn) in Rome. 77 78 SAIS REVIEW Of that there is little chance. The cultural and social groups, the sensibilities, the arguments mobilized by what is a rather heterogenous movement have entered daily political life in the Western democracies and will not disappear. The reconsideration by British Labour (and by the Liberals) of nuclear weaponry, the rise of the Green party in Germany and the Social Democrats' search for an alternative to Atlanticism in defense and foreign policy, the emergence of the American Roman Catholic church as a stern critic of American military doctrine, the continuing hesitation of the Benelux and Scandinavian nato members vis-à-vis ostensibly "agreed" nato doctrines and policies, and the conflicts in Italy between Demochristians and Socialists on the latter's version of Atlanticism, are but some of the changes we must address. It will be a long time, if at all, before a new Western consensus can infuse the Atlantic Alliance with new energies. By then the alliance will have changed fundamentally—and much else, as well. The demise of the Atlantic consensus entails large possibilities for solving some of the problems nato was originally supposed to resolve but never did. These possibilities, however, cannot be apprehended and articulated, or concretized in new policies, without the intellectual, moral, and political contribution of the peace movement. I have referred to "the two Europes" in the title ofthis paper because some of the impulses—not the least ofwhich is the demand for autonomy from superpower domination—that animate the peace movement in the West are far from invisible in the other Europe. Indeed, however special the case of the German Democratic Republic may be, the existence of a peace movement there refutes the elegant but propagandistic formula of President François Mitterrand ("the pacifists in the West, the missiles in the East"). The very term "pacifist" obscures more than it illuminates: The peace movement also includes elements seeking to define a new defensive strategy for the West in technical military terms. (The ideas of territorial defense by small combat units, of social defense by an entire population, would receive more respectful attention if they did not call into question the top-heavy apparatus identifiable as the military-industrial complex in the Western societies. These notions of defense rest upon ideas of an autonomous and cohesive citizenry, upon the democratization and decentralization of the armed forces—ideas that may be our epoch's equivalent of...

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